where the record is unclear about the number of eels due

December 12, 2019 10:40 AM

English Eel-Rents: 10th-17th Centuries and So you're a medieval landlord, collecting property rent from your peasants in eels (Surprised Eel Historian on Twitter)
posted by readinghippo (27 comments total)

In before hovercraft reference!

My favorite bit from the second link:

@johnmark77777
Are eels all that tasty or simply abundant?

@ErikBootsma
Abundant. Not tasty.

Those three words say a lot.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:20 AM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

Eels are being hunted to extinction as luxury food.
posted by clew at 11:31 AM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

Eels are very tasty when bbq'd Korean style - but not sure what they are like dried.

in graduate school, I studied some of the places where eels had been paid in rent, including Ely, which is of course, named for the eels. These rents are good sources for fish as a resource, which otherwise was often undocumented.
posted by jb at 11:33 AM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

Surprised Eel Historian

Who studies the mid-eel ages.

*slithers away to read the links*
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:40 AM on December 12, 2019 [13 favorites]

In 1307, the manor at Yalding owed 13 great eels and 24 sticks of small eels to the earl at Tonbridge castle, but at the same time the earl at Tonbridge castle owed 20 great eels and 60 sticks of small eels to the archbishop of Canterbury, who presumably ate none of them himself, because he was in exile at the papal court at Bordeaux until 1308. Or something like that.
posted by pracowity at 11:55 AM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Smoked eel is excellent. Damned expensive and hard to find though.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:02 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

I've wandered onwards from reading about rents to Getting Used to It: Eels, Metaphors, and Winston Churchill
posted by readinghippo at 12:03 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

I'm a bit dense this morning, were they actually paying rent in eels? Dried eels? Or is it an accounting thing? I tried to Google an eel-rent 101 article but didn't see anything.

What recipes would the archbishop of Canterbury eat that involved eels?
posted by muddgirl at 1:08 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

There are four recipes for eel in Luard’s The Old World Kitchen, European peasant recipes collected in the 1960s-1970s; four in a collection of Elizabeth David Classics, published in the 1950s; none in Pleyn Delit but the intro says they chose medieval recipes that they thought their 1970s readers would like.
posted by clew at 1:19 PM on December 12, 2019 [4 favorites]

Also, two Medieval English royal deaths attributed to eel and lamprey dishes.
posted by clew at 1:25 PM on December 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

Man, and we just got eelectronic bill payment this century.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 1:33 PM on December 12, 2019 [6 favorites]

Given the amount of references English culture has to eels, I'm imaging the land overrun by them like squirrels in the US, people getting mad at their neighbors for feeding the eels because the eels get aggressive and tear out my window screens, etc.
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:34 PM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]

This is the best thing I've read all week and my spiritual hovercraft is brimming.
posted by lumpenprole at 1:37 PM on December 12, 2019 [4 favorites]

Thanks for this. Fascinating!

Also, two Medieval English royal deaths attributed to eel and lamprey dishes.

My favourite phrase that I stumbled upon while putting together this post about lamprey (not eels, but endangered in the UK while simultaneously being an invasive species in the Great Lakes of North America) was "surfeit of lampreys."

The main difference to my mind is that eels look like they're smiling while lampreys are most definitely not smiling.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:52 PM on December 12, 2019 [5 favorites]

Yeah, that Eel and I cound have a beer or two...

Not so much the Lamprey. "Enough with the Dracula cosplay... Start acting like an adult FFS."
posted by Windopaene at 2:01 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

Not so much the Lamprey. "Enough with the Dracula cosplay... Start acting like an adult FFS."

Etsy store idea: tiny vampire capes for lamprey.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:21 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

Also, eel pie, a later and working-class dish; some sources say eels were the only edible creature that could survive the polluted Thames, others that nothing could survive the polluted Thames and the eels came in from Holland, or Ireland.

Season your eel pie with a peppercorn rent, I guess.
posted by clew at 2:30 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

One did have to keep an eye on how one's eels were prepared, that's for sure.

"What gat ye to your dinner, Lord Randall my son?
What gat ye to your dinner, my handsome young man?"
"I gat eels boiled in broo: mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain wad lie down."

Ewan MacColl version
posted by Not A Thing at 3:09 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

This was linked in one of the responses to the Twitter thread:

An acoustic camera has captured never-before-seen footage of the endangered fish setting off on its journey from the Gloucestershire wetlands to the Sargasso sea. This success story comes at a time of turning fortunes for the mysterious and fascinating animal.

tl;dr: eels are nifty and sure get around despite the depredations of humans.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:35 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

There's also the Eel Pie Island Hotel on the Thames, infamous for a heavy English R&b music scene in the late 60s, then occupied by anarchists, then burned in a fire, and then gentrified, of course.

Pete Townshend named his temporary recording studio after Eel Pie, and the essay attached to Quadrophenia liner notes also mentions some eels in an unflattering manner.
posted by ovvl at 5:52 PM on December 12, 2019

Eels are delicious, and I hate seafood passionately. When grilled, eel tastes good.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:08 PM on December 12, 2019

So if the American eel is endangered, the Japanese eel is endangered, and the European eel is critically endangered ... dare I ask, what exactly are today's eel-eaters eating?
posted by Not A Thing at 6:24 PM on December 12, 2019

Sin.
posted by clew at 6:32 PM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

Here in Aotearoa eels have been a staple food since Māori got here. (Māori word confusingly is "tuna"). They are an ideal food: high protein and fat, very tasty, and easy to preserve with smoke.

The problem is that fishing has got really efficient here with modern tech, and demand has boomed, but they have a very long breeding cycle -- decades long. So the population will recover slowly if at all at current fishing level. Look up NZ longfin eel if you want to get super-depressed.

I took a closeup of an engaging lady eel demanding to be fed just the other day. Isn't she charming? I know it was a female because only the females get that big. This one was probable > 30 years old, and soon she will want to swim out to sea to the secret grounds off Tonga and spawn.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:12 PM on December 12, 2019 [6 favorites]

Metafilter: mentioning eels in an unflattering manner.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:00 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

About that long breeding cycle. Elvers, tiny glass-like baby eels are fished in the Severn and are a delicacy. Miles away on the Devon coast, Dawlish Water runs through a park in Dawlish town all the way down to the sea and it must be around 30 years ago one summer when the river was full of twisty black rope-like shapes tumbling down to the sea. We've never seen them since, but round about that year Bristol Museum set up a tank in their Natural History section that was full of writhing knots of tiny live transparent elvers. Over the years the number diminished and the eels got larger. It was going for at least 5 years iirc. The most fascinating display to look at. At the end there were only three or four eels in it, about a foot and a half long and as thick as a thin cigar. I think, at that stage, they were still transparent, though memory may not be accurate.

Some links: Gov.uk: Illegal elver fishing and how we tackle it
GloucestershireLive: BBC presenter poses as River Severn fisherman to expose illegal elver trading 'worth £3billion a year'
Severn & Wye Smokery: 2019 may be the year eel slips off the menu
The Portugal News: crack down on multi-million-euro elver trafficking
The Eels Regulations 2009: glass eel fishing trad & contemporary methods and pics
Things to do in Dawlish: 2nd picture is Dawlish Water looking towards the sea and railway bridge.
Looks like there still might be eels in Dawlish: Dawlish Coryton Cove 2018 (somebody's flickr acct)

But if their life cycle is that long maybe a 30-year gap before they appear in the river again is natural.
posted by glasseyes at 6:17 AM on December 13, 2019 [5 favorites]

if their life cycle is that long maybe a 30-year gap before they appear in the river again is natural.

Humans have a relatively long lifespan and years-to-maturity but there are babies born every year. 17-year cicadas are unusual and breed that way to get away from a particular pest attack. Possibly 29 out of 30 eel generations have been wiped out.

(But if we could keep from killing these last ones, variability will fill in the runs. And also they might come upstream in particularly wet or nutritious years, not every year. Though it used to be every year.)
posted by clew at 11:32 AM on December 14, 2019 [2 favorites]