# Paying rent in Eels



## Montero (Oct 25, 2020)

Tripped over this interesting article








						Medieval English people used to pay their rent in eels | Boing Boing
					

Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee has his PhD in Medieval Studies from Cornell University, where he specialized in … eels? Which, as I’ve now learned from his eel-dedicated Twitter account, were a majo…




					boingboing.net


----------



## CTRandall (Oct 25, 2020)

All that slithers is not gold...


----------



## Pemry Janes (Oct 25, 2020)

Now that was an interesting read, thanks for sharing.


----------



## sknox (Oct 26, 2020)

I wonder if it's only Americans who read the subject line and thought it was about paying rent in an English town called Eels.


----------



## Ursa major (Oct 26, 2020)

Montero said:


> Tripped over this interesting article
> 
> 
> 
> ...


So this is the (distant) source of the word, payslip....


----------



## Montero (Oct 26, 2020)

There could be a ruder suggestion in there involving petticoats.....


----------



## Dave (Nov 2, 2020)

Domesday Book Eels Rent Project


----------



## Teresa Edgerton (Nov 2, 2020)

sknox said:


> I wonder if it's only Americans who read the subject line and thought it was about paying rent in an English town called Eels.



Yes, that occurred to me, too.  In fact I opened the thread to find out which one it was, _with_ eels or _in_ Eels.

I mean, I know the English eat eels, but it's not a dish served in these parts at all.


----------



## Alex The G and T (Nov 3, 2020)

Either way, a Hovercraft full of eels would be a handy item to have on hand.


----------



## Teresa Edgerton (Nov 3, 2020)

What would you do with them, Alex?  And would they be live eels, smoked eels, jellied eels?


----------



## Alex The G and T (Nov 3, 2020)

I thought I was going to pay the rent.

And the "Hungarian Phrase Book" doesn't distinguish between how the eels are prepared.


----------



## Teresa Edgerton (Nov 3, 2020)

But then for something as mundane as paying the rent, why a hovercraft?

I feel like there must be a joke or tagline here and I am missing it.  (As I so frequently do.)


----------



## Alex The G and T (Nov 3, 2020)

Monty Python references usually fly pretty well, hereabouts.
I guess this one is rather obscure; but it always stuck with me.

I count coup for the bafflement!  My nipples explode with delight!

About 50-couple seconds in:


----------



## Teresa Edgerton (Nov 3, 2020)

I suspected as much.  I can almost always be baffled with a Monty Python reference.


----------



## Montero (Nov 3, 2020)

And I don't remember that one. I am going to treasure my hovercraft is full of eels for some time to come.


----------



## mosaix (Nov 3, 2020)

Teresa Edgerton said:


> Yes, that occurred to me, too.  In fact I opened the thread to find out which one it was, _with_ eels or _in_ Eels.
> 
> I mean, I know the English eat eels, but it's not a dish served in these parts at all.



That’ll be some English, Teresa, in fact very few. 

The only time I’ve eaten eel was in fish soup in Japan - I say ‘eaten’ it was by accident and I certainly didn’t swallow it. Not pleasant.


----------



## Dave (Nov 3, 2020)

Teresa Edgerton said:


> I know the English eat eels, but it's not a dish served in these parts at all.





mosaix said:


> That’ll be some English, Teresa, in fact very few.


That is the point made in the link I provided, that it only stands out to as us as peculiar because we no longer eat eels on a regular basis. 



> One of the peculiar aspects of the Domesday register of 1086 are the range of taxes that the English paid in-kind.  Domesday records payments in pigs, in fish, in ale, and in many other types of food.  Of these in-kind payments, the one that stands out most to modern viewers is likely the eel-rents.  This is in part because, in Europe and the Americas, we have generally moved away from eating eel on anything like a regular basis. Consequently, the idea of eels having any type of social or economic value appears less normal to us the thought of other animals or commodities having negotiable value.  We still eat pigs and drink ale.  But the eel-rents also stand out for the sometimes excessive numbers of animals at play — the village of Harmston, for example, owed the Earl Hugh 75,000 eels per year, and fishermen in Wisbech needed to pay various local monasteries a combined total of almost 35,000 per year.



However, it is also the sheer number of eels involved. I think King William and his wife, Matilda both received hundreds of thousands of eels annually, whereas pigs or barrels of ale would only be in the tens or hundreds. So, the numbers involved stand out from the pages too.


----------



## The Judge (Nov 3, 2020)

We had smoked eel just the other day.  A local fishery sells its trout at our farmers market and one month they had eel, too, so we bought one.  I don't know where they'd sourced the eel, but I suspect they'd only done the smoking bit, as they have their own smokery for their fish.  Anyhow, it was a bit fiddly as you have to rip off the thick skin and remove the long bone.  I don't think I'd have picked it out as eel in a blind tasting -- it just tasted like smoked fish, but perhaps a little firmer -- but it was fine, and even better when we mashed it up with some cream and creme fraiche to make a rough pate.

I suspect it would also be more amenable to drying than other freshwater fish, just as you get dried cod, so it would be invaluable in months when other food wasn't easily available, and, of course, fish was eaten a great deal more in the middle ages, not least thanks to religious dictates.  

By the way, when we bought it, I mentioned to the vendor that we'd heard of jellied eel, but never tried it, and she said not to bother -- "tastes just like snot"!!


----------



## Montero (Nov 3, 2020)

The only time I had oysters - or to be accurate one oyster - chewy and tastes like snot was my reaction.


----------



## Ursa major (Nov 3, 2020)

The Judge said:


> A local fishery sells its trout at our farmers market


Perhaps I ought to point out that Her Honour doesn't live that far away from what used to be one terminal of a hovercraft-based ferry service.

I'll leave others to speculate about any Hungarian connections Her Honour might have (mainly because I don't think it's likely that there are any...).


​


----------



## The Judge (Nov 3, 2020)

No hovercraft operating along the Test just yet, and no Hungarian connections, either, but eels are another matter  Eels


----------



## Pyan (Nov 3, 2020)

The Judge said:


> No hovercraft operating along the Test just yet...



Try the other side of the city, Judge, on the River Itchen - *Griffon Hovercraft*


----------



## Teresa Edgerton (Nov 3, 2020)

mosaix said:


> That’ll be some English, Teresa, in fact very few.
> 
> The only time I’ve eaten eel was in fish soup in Japan - I say ‘eaten’ it was by accident and I certainly didn’t swallow it. Not pleasant.



Clearly I read too much P. G. Wodehouse.


----------



## Pyan (Nov 3, 2020)

I've had jellied eels in a pub in East London. They had a chap who came round every evening, with a basket of different seafoods - mussels, whelks, cockles, prawns, etc, and jellied eels. Tasted OK, but every bit had a central bone in it, which had to be removed to the polystyrene container as discreetly as possible.

Tesco sells them, except not at the moment...*Counter Cooked Jellied Eels*


----------



## Ursa major (Nov 3, 2020)

pyan said:


> Try the other side of the city, Judge, on the River Itchen - *Griffon Hovercraft*
> 
> View attachment 71762


I didn't realise that the service was still running using hovercraft.


----------



## Pyan (Nov 3, 2020)

They don't - that's where the factory is, just above the Itchen Bridge. As far as I know, though, the Portsmouth-Ryde hovercraft ferry uses Griffon machines.
Most of the output these days goes to various militaries.


----------



## Ursa major (Nov 3, 2020)

I meant _any_ hovercraft service to the Isle of Wight. (I looked up Griffon Hovercraft on Wikipedia and, Covid permitting, two of its hovercraft are still in service on Hovertravel's Southsea-Ryde route.)


As an aside, one of my great uncles was a captain on the (non-hovercraft-based) Isle of White Ferry, presumably (I don't know for a fact) based at Southsea, but I do know that he took the Gosport Ferry to get to work. (I met him just the once... in the 1990s, when he himself was in his nineties.)


----------



## Dave (Nov 3, 2020)

I lived in Tooting in 1985 when I was a student (disappointingly I never saw Wolfie Smith there). There was a Jellied Eel and Pie shop on the High Street that had a queue about 1/4 mile long every Friday evening. I always fancied trying them, but I never did. I was even told back then that they tasted of nothing but seawater and looked like snot. I could never understand why the shop was so popular. 

Incidentally, last night I spent an _Evening with Eels_ on Zoom presented by the Institute of Fisheries Management with talks from Environment Agency guys. That was where I got that Domesday Book Rents link from. The talks were recorded so somewhere they can still be watched, if anyone is interested in the history of eels and current work on their conservation.


----------



## Montero (Nov 4, 2020)

There is also of course Diet of Worms - Wikipedia 
(which Terry Pratchett used for his reference to the Diet of Bugs)


----------



## Dave (Nov 4, 2020)

Dave said:


> The talks were recorded so somewhere they can still be watched...


You can view the recording here

The passcode is *Vs%u=BM6*

There were two lectures/talks. Both were about 1 hour long.

I know eating eels sounds funny to some people, but good sources of protein for the poor were hard to come by. Unless poached, meat would be rarely eaten. Fish like Smelt, Eels, and shellfish like Oysters were food for the poor. It is only as Smelt and Oysters numbers declined and their prices rose, that they became a food exclusively for the rich. 

And also what TJ said is important too:


The Judge said:


> I suspect it would also be more amenable to drying than other freshwater fish, just as you get dried cod, so it would be invaluable in months when other food wasn't easily available, and, of course, fish was eaten a great deal more in the middle ages, not least thanks to religious dictates.


----------



## MikeAnderson (Nov 4, 2020)

Eels, huh? Well...

Seems a more viable form of currency than BitCoin, so, why not?


----------



## Danny McG (Nov 4, 2020)

Me and my mates spent many an hour during school holidays in the 1960's constructing eel traps in the woods beside a local pond.

We had a small fire blazing away on the pond edge, the eels were lifted out, beheaded, sliced up while still wiggling and the meat skewered and spit roast over the fire, yummy.

One thing I recall vividly was we all had large sheath knives hanging on our belts, used to slice and then skin the eels.
This in no way encouraged knife crime, we were boys who used the knives as intended - tools.


----------



## Alex The G and T (Nov 4, 2020)

And... country living makes it advisable to always carry a pocket knife. A commonly useful convenience around the homestead.

I almost always remember to take it out of my pocket when I need to go through a security gate.

Rent-a-cops fail to recognize that a silly little 3 inch pocket knife is a tool, not a weapon.


----------



## Dave (Nov 4, 2020)

I feel we are moving off topic somewhat, but even more fascinating than the carrying of a knife (any fisherman needs a knife) are that your mother let you stay out all day, without any idea where you were, or when you would be back, without anyway to contact you, playing near to watercourses, and making fires! You also probably also walked miles way from home, while today kids rarely go, unsupervised, further than their own streets.


----------



## Alex The G and T (Nov 5, 2020)

Yeah, My rural, parental homestead was on the edge of  a huge tract of wilderness.  I remember being age 4 or 5, wandering off into the forest wondering where this old logging road goes.  All alone for hours.  Fortunately, I always, apparently, had a good sense of direction.  Never got lost.

Or Getting on my bicycle and disappearing for hours, all over the mountain.  My parents could bet I'd be back for supper.  No fast-foods, corner markets  or soda shops within 12 miles of that mountain.


----------



## sknox (Nov 5, 2020)

Heck, I lived in cities and ran loose like that. Different times.


----------



## CTRandall (Nov 5, 2020)

I regularly ate eel until I went veggie. Sushi, yum! Freshwater eel was my favourite!


----------

