To Pay Hire in Medieval England, Catch Some Eels
John Wyatt Greenlee, a medieval historian specializing in cartography, by no means meant to change into the “Stunned Eel Historian,” as he dubs himself on Twitter. When he first proposed his Ph.D. challenge on eels, it was declined. Greenlee went forward and studied eels anyway, and his ardour for these wormlike, elongated fish has now managed to capture the fascination of others. Greenlee particularly appears on the function eels performed in medieval English financial system and tradition—a job way more vital than many would suppose. In medieval England, eels primarily turned foreign money. Medieval peasants would use the fish to pay their lease and make different financial transactions. Nonetheless, regardless of their former abundance, the European eel has now change into a critically endangered species and is in want of a bit extra love and a focus. Andrew Kerr, chair of the Sustainable Eel Group, says our reference to eels has change into a “misplaced relationship,” one which must be re-established or we could danger dropping these snake-like fish altogether.
“Now we have a very nice and complex historical past with eels,” says Greenlee. Medieval land customers have been required to pay lease to the landowner every year, and in lots of circumstances, these rents have been paid “in sort.” Which means they weren’t paid in cash, however somewhat with items, similar to chickens, eggs, and—Greenlee’s favourite—eels. The primary recorded lease fee made with eels was in 700. By the point of the Domesday E book survey in 1086, an enormous land survey carried out in England after William the Conqueror seized the island, we are able to see “proof for one thing greater than half 1,000,000 eels being paid in lease in England yearly,” says Greenlee.
In terms of their numbers compared to different “in sort” rents, Greenlee emphasizes their reputation: “There are extra rents paid in eels than anything within the Domesday survey.” The query is: why? Paul Freedman, a medieval historian at Yale College, explains that eels have been “someplace in between a delicacy and an on a regular basis merchandise. The truth that folks have been requested to pay lease in eels exhibits that their landlords needed them.” Many of the eel rents have been paid in East Anglia, which is “actually nice eel territory,” says Freedman, due to the quite a few marshes and low-lying areas with plenty of water. Greenlee explains that “lots of mills find yourself paying rents in eels, in all probability as a result of they catch lots of eels close to the mill races.”
Monasteries and non secular establishments additionally carried out a lot of eel transactions. “Within the Catholic world earlier than the Reformation, there have been plenty of days by which you needed to abstain from meat, notably Lent earlier than Easter. Meat markets shut down, and fish was the first product,” says Freedman. He notes that “one cause for his or her reputation, aside from that they’re very plentiful and might be [easily] gathered, was that the demand for fish was a lot larger than it’s now as a result of as much as 120 days a yr the consumption of meat was prohibited.” Since eels have been an applicable Lent meal, monasteries noticed them as a extremely sought-after commodity and picked up them in droves from their tenants. Some monasteries acquired tens of hundreds of eels in rental transactions, stockpiling the eels to then pay for his or her wants.
These eel lease transactions are displayed in Greenlee’s interactive map, which highlights rental funds made with eels all through England from the tenth century up till the top of the seventeenth century. The transactions differ from single digits to the tens of hundreds of eels. One huge transaction exhibits that Ely Abbey, now generally known as Ely Cathedral, paid Thorney Abbey 26,275 eels to lease a fen (just like a wetland), based on uncommon transaction information on parchment fragments held by the British Library.
Over time, the observe of paying lease with eels slowly declined. The explanations for this are unknown. Greenlee explains that “a few of it has to do with availability of cash, a few of it has to do with adjustments in habitat and ecology.” As well as, the start of the Little Ice Age within the 14th century may have brought about water our bodies to change into colder, resulting in a discount in eel populations. Kerr notes that “measuring eel populations is extremely tough,” and that even in the present day eels are tough to rely, research, and perceive: “as with the whole lot with eels, it’s sophisticated.”
Nonetheless, Freedman and Greenlee each emphasize that the Black Death could probably be behind the shift. It was “a watershed second,” mentioned Greenlee. The Black Dying significantly altered the quantity of land per capita, and Freedman explains that “after the Black Dying the market was extra in favor of the laborers, so lords couldn’t get away with asking for in depth rents [paid in kind].” The survivors of the Black Dying merely had a greater life, and with fewer mouths to feed, folks may afford to eat higher-quality meals, similar to lamb. Landlords shifted to sheep farming as an alternative of extra opportunistic food-gathering and searching strategies, because it required “much less labor and [could] be extra worthwhile,” says Freedman. This led to adjustments within the medieval weight loss plan and demand for eels could have declined.
Whether or not the discount in eel rents resulted from social adjustments brought on by the Black Dying or a decline within the eel inhabitants, to date, the reality is unclear. “Some of the enjoyable and typically irritating issues about medieval historical past is that there’s so little that we all know,” says Greenlee.
At the moment eels are a Critically Endangered species, a far cry from their as soon as important function within the medieval financial system. “It has been a protracted historical past of decline,” says Kerr, one which has affected different species as nicely. In line with the World Wildlife Foundation’s Living Planet Index for Migratory Freshwater Fish, “populations of migratory freshwater fish species have plummeted globally by 76% on common since 1970, together with a 93% collapse in Europe.” Nonetheless, eel populations probably began declining even earlier.
The eel inhabitants is monitored with a measurement software generally known as the Glass Eel Index. Glass eels are tiny and multitudinous juveniles often known as elvers, that finally change into silver eels after which full-grown mature adults. The scale of the general European eel inhabitants will be estimated primarily based on the variety of glass eels that arrive in Europe. The European eel initially spawns within the Sargasso Sea after which floats by way of the Atlantic with the currents, finally reaching European shores. By the yr 2000, “alarm bells have been ringing”, because the Glass Eel Index was displaying a “15% decline yr on yr, 1980 to 2010, yearly,” explains Kerr.
Whereas “the whole lot is disputed with eels,” Kerr says, “What we do know is that the eel decline follows human water engineering.” Whereas medieval dams and mill races have been made out of wooden, which eels may wriggle round or over, “a lot of these constructions, notably sea protection constructions, at the moment are concrete.” These sea boundaries forestall eels from migrating into Europe’s rivers, a mandatory course of for his or her progress. With over 1.3 million boundaries in European rivers, eels merely can’t make their manner by way of anymore. Kerr explains that “equally important, is that we’ve been draining wetlands to create farmland, housing, and water entry…In comparison with 2000 years in the past, we’ve solely obtained 25% of [European] wetlands left.” Fortunately, a regulation to help the European eel inhabitants handed in 2007, which has already led to a small however measurable restoration. “The regulation is basically good,” Kerr says, “What now we have to do subsequent is perceive the causes of the decline.”
Greenlee hopes that his ardour for eels and his analysis on their presence in medieval England will assist to get folks all for saving them. He desires to spotlight the methods by which “eels have been part of our previous,” to encourage folks to consider “eels as a part of our current, and perhaps as a part of our future.” Greenlee, Kerr, and others hope that folks would possibly be taught and due to this fact care a bit bit extra about eels, even when they’re sadly not accepted as a solution to pay your lease.