[HN Gopher] To Pay Rent in Medieval England, Catch Some Eels
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To Pay Rent in Medieval England, Catch Some Eels
Author : diodorus
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-05-19 04:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I've been making a post-apoc survival adventure game lately [1],
| so this bit of "eels for cash" history reminds me of it. The
| game's world has an economy that's been forced to regress to
| medieval times in many ways. Folks barter, and spend much more
| personal time doing hunting or gathering for their food. Its a
| comedy too, so I get to have fun with _which_ particular animal
| species I cite and make important for their new, more rugged way
| of life. Some "old" (real) species, some made-up, or their
| mutant descendants.
|
| Thankfully the eel itself already has a funny name, and looks
| kinda funny too! Yet no matter how weird, dangerous or hard to
| catch a creature is, when a society loses modern manufacturing
| infrastructure and chemical/pharmaceutical techniques and know-
| how, suddenly an otherwise previously "unimportant" species can
| become incredibly important for many applications.
|
| That bite, though.
|
| ----
|
| (1. see my bio: Slartboz)
| franciscop wrote:
| > "Most of the eel rents were paid in East Anglia"
|
| Incidentally "eel" in Spanish is "anguila" (pronounced very
| similar), which leads me to strongly believe these two are
| related.
|
| However a quick search finds out that those are actually
| unrelated! Spanish "anguila" comes from latin's "anguilla", and
| this from "anguis" (snake). While the name East Anglia comes from
| the German region named "Anglia", which comes from the German
| word "Angeln".
|
| Note: the Caribbean island Anguilla's name _does_ come from
| "eel" for its shape, but that's a more clear later phenomena.
| redeyedtreefrog wrote:
| eels eels eels
| api wrote:
| ... and bring them with your hovercraft?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I see you.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| My dad is Professor J.J.N. Palmer, and I worked with him on the
| Domesday Book data used and cited in this work.
|
| These days we are used to having all kinds of data at our
| fingertips, but at the time it was a lot of work to take medieval
| Latin and turn it into computer readable data. We had to invent
| our own markup language, parsers and search engines.
| andrewem wrote:
| Very cool! I see there are biographical sketches of you, your
| father, and others involved with the project at
| https://www.domesdaybook.net/home/contact
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Yes... Somewhat out of date. I wish I still looked the same!
|
| The amount of technology we had to invent was crazy. It would
| be much easier these days.
| 6502nerdface wrote:
| If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Paul
| Kingsnorth's 2014 novel _The Wake_. It 's written in a sort of
| de-latinized English and tells the story of an Anglo-Saxon
| freeman living through the Norman conquest in the Lincolnshire
| Fens, where much of the local economy was about catching eels.
| The initially far-off events of 1066 eventually make their
| effects felt at home, and he organizes a guerilla-like insurgency
| against the Normans. It's entertaining historical fiction, but
| more than that, the writing is truly high art, which left an
| impression me, not unlike Gene Wolfe.
| b800h wrote:
| He recently converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and writes a
| brilliant newsletter:
|
| https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/
| maptime wrote:
| Where I grew up eel fishing was still a very lucrative activity.
|
| The best locations were a closely guarded secret, apparently
| placing the mesh cages was a real skill and something passed down
| between generations, always kept in the family.
|
| on a good night they were making hundreds if not thousands. Bear
| in mind this was 30 years ago so serious money for one nights
| work.
|
| I don't know if it was true, but the eels were said to all be
| bought up by Asian buyers
| Our_Benefactors wrote:
| > I don't know if it was true, but the eels were said to all be
| bought up by Asian buyers
|
| Anecdotally I recall watching a documentary about an eel fisher
| who catches, smokes, and sells eel. There are a few scenes
| where they show him executing large deals, and yes the buyers
| were all Asian.
| zzbn00 wrote:
| "One enormous transaction shows that Ely Abbey, now known as Ely
| Cathedral, paid Thorney Abbey 26,275 eels to rent a fen" -- Ely
| Abbey/Cathedral are probably named after eels: see section 8 of
| https://www.historyhit.com/paid-in-fish-strange-uses-for-eel...
| fbdab103 wrote:
| It was unclear to me the amount of difficulty in catching an
| eel and the value propositions 26,000 eels represents. From a
| full day of eel trapping, would I expect to bring home 10? 100?
| 1000? How many meals can I expect to make from a single eel?
| jaclaz wrote:
| Only as a reference, an eel (the European species, Anguilla
| Anguilla) is around 80-100 cm long and weights 2 to 3 kg.
|
| So, I would say probably like 10-20 eels per day, and 6-8
| meals per eel.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Episode 4 from this series has a couple of eel catching
| related scenes:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_Monastery_Farm
|
| I'd guess somewhere between 0 and 100, if you had some
| tenants working for you I could image 1000 although idk what
| you'd do with them immediately afterward salt/smoke them?
| zzbn00 wrote:
| I think you can keep them alive after capture for a little
| while at least in water -- I think I remember seeing this
| in the delta of the Neretva river (and I think they used
| old washing machine drums for this purpose!)
| perihelions wrote:
| Also
|
| https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/browse/id/5328736fb47fc40c4f00...
| ( _" Survey of English Place-Names"_)
|
| - _" OE ael -ge , el -ge , 'eel-district,' as already suggested
| by Skeat and Ekwall... Rents of eels were a fruitful source of
| income for the abbots and bishops of Ely."_
| zdw wrote:
| "Do you hear those, your highness? Those are the shrieking things
| I'm going to pay rent with!"
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| There's an awesome BBC historical farm series where they catch
| eels and make the pots in one episode:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series
|
| Just a very enjoyable series to watch
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Look, it's not really on point for the article, but I just want
| to say that you probably have NO IDEA how fucking WEIRD European
| eels are. Because of their insanely convoluted life cycle, really
| smart people thought they spontaneously generated for FAR FAR
| LONGER than you'd think is reasonable.
|
| There's really great and fairly short book about eels and eel-
| fishing mixed in with a memoir called THE BOOK OF EELS by Patrik
| Svensson that I cannot recommend highly enough.
| jna_sh wrote:
| I ended up studying European Eels a lot recently and my mind
| was blown by how prolific they are, and how culturally and
| historically important they are, and yet how little we know
| about them. My favourite one is that we've known they reproduce
| in the Sargasso Sea since the early 20th century, due to
| finding larvae there, but their breeding has never been
| observed in the wild, and up until February THIS YEAR, an adult
| European Eel had never been observed to be arriving at the sea.
| This has now been achieved with satellite tagging
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19248-8
| ericpauley wrote:
| Similar (though not quite as extreme) case:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth
| teruakohatu wrote:
| New Zealand short and long fin eels are also quite interesting.
| They live in rivers and go far inland, able to climb even 20m
| waterfalls, but breed only once right at the end of their life
| cycle somewhere in the sub-tropic Pacific, probably in deep
| trenches, but it is not known where.
|
| The longfin eels are 2m in length, can weight up to 25kg and
| live 40-70 years.
|
| https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/freshwater-fis...
|
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ourchangingworld/a...
| tapland wrote:
| I spoke to Patrik not too long ago about a newly formed stream
| where eels have started showing up. I dint know how they get up
| there from the sea, but spontaneous generation would seem more
| likely than swimming there :D.
|
| Was out looking at them earlier today and this year must be a
| population record in this small stream.
| [deleted]
| epmos wrote:
| Due to that convoluted life cycle, we are not sure why the
| population is declining drastically. The numbers of young eels
| arriving in Europe in recent years is only 10% what it was in
| the 80s.
|
| We don't know how long wild eels live (again, the life cycle)
| but this is much shorter than a single lifetime of captive
| fish.
| bl0rg wrote:
| Isn't impassable dams/hydro stations a huge issue for them?
| jna_sh wrote:
| One of many issues. The European eel gets hit by just about
| every possible thing due to its many and varied life
| cycles. Larval stage is subject to disrupted ocean currents
| due to climate change, juveniles are subject to an enormous
| illegal fishing trade (as the most prolific remaining
| Anguilidae, they are used to supply eel demand in many
| areas where local species aren't doing as hot) as they
| reach European coast, young adults struggle to navigate up
| waterways due to dams and whatnot, adults spend their lives
| being fat in the mud and absorb lots of pollutants, then
| when ready to breed they face the dams again going back out
| to sea. They're also under immense pressure from an
| invasive swim bladder parasite brought over when Japanese
| eels were introduced to Europe sometime in the 20th
| century.
|
| And these are just the headline threats for each stage,
| there's myriad smaller ones. The reason for their decline
| is almost certainly a case of lots of small threats
| overcoming their ability to adapt, rather than one discrete
| cause.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Well, I'm convinced. On June 1, I'll be paying my rent in the
| form of $2,500 worth of raw fish left on my landlord's doorstep.
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(page generated 2023-05-20 23:01 UTC)