Eel Currency: Or, How England Paid Its Bills With Fish
In 1238, the monks of Ramsey Abbey agreed to pay 1,000 eels a year.
Not metaphorically.
Actual eels.
They also owed two pounds of pepper, two pounds of spice, and a pair of scarlet hose.
All of it was part of an agreement concerning a road across low-lying land near St Ives.
It sounds like someone has invented the strangest medieval shopping list imaginable.
They hadn't.
The arrangement was already an old one by this point.
Alice, the widow of Ralph de Trubevile, claimed rights connected with the road, the annual payment and common rights in the abbey wood.
So in 1238, she and the abbot of Ramsey settled the dispute.
And the new deal was even stranger.
She would receive 40 cartloads of underwood every year, 1,000 eels β or half a mark instead β and another 20 cartloads of wood for the rest of her life.
The scarlet hose disappeared.
The eels stayed.
Medieval England really did have eel rent.
Sources
- H. C. Maxwell Lyte (ed.), A Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds in the Public Record Office, Vol. I (1890), A.1194. The entry records the agreement between Ranulph, abbot of Ramsey, and Alice, formerly wife of Ralph de Trubevile, dated 18 May, 22 Henry III (1238). Digitised scan via the Internet Archive.
- Victoria County History: Huntingdonshire, Vol. II, pp. 309β314. The history of Hemingford Grey describes the causeway and the earlier annual payment of 1,000 eels, pepper, ginger and scarlet hose, with the arrangement altered in 1238.
- John Wyatt Greenlee, βSeeing All the Anguilles.β The research calculates 403,760 eels in the Domesday records and 539,785 when additional surviving charters are included.