Gone Medieval - Eels in the Middle Ages: Meals & Money

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

The European eel is now categorised as a critically endangered species, but 1000 years ago they flourished in abundance, and were an important aspect of Medieval life. In this episode, Cat is joined by Medieval historian Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee, also known to many as the ‘Surprise Eel Historian’. We examine the cultural history and significance of Eels in England. From a delicious meal to being used as a form of currency, just how vital was the presence of Eels in the Middle Ages to Britain? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and welcome to today's episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. Today we're going to talk about something I knew very little about before I started reading about it. The European eel is now a critically endangered species but back in the Middle Ages that was far from the case and while most of us today probably won't encounter to an eel during a normal week. A thousand or so years ago, and certainly here in Britain, but eel would actually be really important to you,

not just for food, but also for things like paying your rent, perhaps. So today I'm really delighted to have the brilliantly named surprised eel historian with me, who normally goes by the name of Dr. John White Greenlee, a historian specialising in European and medieval history. So thank you so much for joining me, John. Thank you for having me. It's really nice to be here with you.

Now, I want to mention here that John started a Twitter account a little while back to document some of the facts he was learning about eels, medieval eels especially. And that account sort of took the world by storm when he ended up even being interviewed in Time magazine, which I suppose you weren't quite expecting when he started the account. No, no, that came as a real surprise to me. I've been researching medieval eels and specifically in England for quite a long time at this point. six or seven years, I guess. And partly it caught my attention because it's a bit of a strange

topic. And as I did research, you sort of run across, as you do with anything, right, you run across bits of trivia or little odd things that stand out. And I started tweeting them just to sort of share them. And it sort of, yeah, it took on a life of its own. It got very popular, very quickly, a couple of years ago. And so it grew as it went. Initially, I started out just doing the odd thing as I found it in the archives. At this point, I do at least one sort of, sort of, significant yield history tweet a day, usually with a meme and puns and things. Well, in a weekdays, I take weekends off. And I've been doing that at this point for several years now. And it's a lot of fun. And it's been a really nice way to engage people who are not specialists, not medievalists,

or not eel people either in what's, I think, a really fascinating sort of niche of history. Yeah, and it's clearly very, very popular. But I do, first of all, have to ask you. And hopefully, by the end of this podcast, become quite clear to our listeners. But if you could summarize to me quite sort of briefly, why should we care about medieval eels? That's a really good question. And I think for a long time, nobody really has very much. There are not that many eel historians in the world, as it turns out. So they're worth caring about because they are, as it turns out, kind of ubiquitous in a lot of European history, and certainly in English history, going back to the Romans, at least and possibly before. Eels have been a really big part of the environment that make up a lot of the sort of fish

biomass in rivers and they have historically. And the English ate a lot of eels for a really long time. And the eels show up in sort of the background of all kinds of literature and art and language use and toponyms. And they're sort of all over the place. Once you start looking for eels in medieval English history. You just can't miss them. They're really everywhere. And this is, I think, true about European history more broadly. Their eels are really important sort of across the board. But England especially has sort of an affinity for eels that I think exceeds what you would find in most other places on the continent. And so they're important to think about, to learn about, because they're really a significant part of the sort of the background of a lot of what's going on

for a thousand plus years of English history. And so, as with anything else, sort of trying to get a hold of those background pieces, gives you sort of rounds out the broader picture and gives us a much better sense for what the actual history really looked like. So in this podcast where you talk about the whole of the medieval period and I'm interested to hear

about in this sort of, well in the Middle Ages especially, what's the actually the earliest evidence we have for the use and importance of eels? That's a great question. We have a lot of evidence from sort of the think of as the high Middle Ages. The earliest in England

and probably comes from Bede is the most sort of significant evidence we have. There's archaeological evidence of quite a lot of eel eating before Bede. Bede's sort of the first bit of literary evidence we have. So eels show up in three distinct places in Bede's ecclesiastical history. They're on basically the first page of the book where he's describing the island, and he talks about all of the sort of the great things that has going for it. And one of the first things he says is that it's really well known for its eels. It's eels and it's salmon.

And sort of more towards the end of the book, he talks about the fact that the island of Ely is named after eels because of all of the eels swimming around in the fins, which linguistically seems he was correct. He's not always right, but he was there. And then the one that I think is most interesting is he tells the story of St. Wilfred converting the South Saxons to Christianity. And Wilfred's this bishop from the north of England who gets exiled. And he goes south on his exile, like you do, I guess, better than going north. And he goes to the South Saxons who are per pagan, but they're experiencing. seeing this tremendous drought, this like epic three-year drought. And this is a real problem for them

because B tells us that the only thing the South Saxons know how to eat are eels. They only fish eels. And so they live on this eel-centric diet. And the drought, as a drought would do, has sort of driven all of their eels away. Eels live in water in low-lying swampy areas, and they're really susceptible to drought. So if you have a three-year drought, your eels are probably going to go somewhere else. So bees tell us that there's this sort of mass starvation among the South Saxons, and they're committing suicide in groups of 40 and 50 by throwing themselves into the water, and it's horrible. And so Wilfred shows up, and he needs to gain their trust, and he gains their trust by taking all of their eel nets and teaching them how to use them to fish for other fish.

And then he gives them some portion of the fish and keeps some for himself, and he gains their trust that way, and then they convert, and once they convert, then the rains come back and everything's all right. And that's a really fascinating story to me. me for a couple of reasons. You know, one, it's partly allegorical. It's a retelling of the miracle of the draughts of fishes from the Bible, where Jesus is helping the apostles sort of haul in a big net of fish. But it tells us something about what's actually going on with these people at this time, right?

We know from archaeological evidence that they didn't only eat eels, that they ate other fish as well. But we also know that they ate a ton of eels. Isotope analysis from skeletal remains from that period. tell us that the English were eating more eels than all other freshwater fish combined and than all other marine fish combined. So they're really eating a lot of them. And Bede sort of latched onto this story about the South Saxons only eating eels, at least partially believable.

Maybe they're not only eating eels, but clearly from the story and the evidence that they're eating enough eels that a three-year drought is really hampering how they live. And so I think that story in Bede is telling it often gets dismissed because, because it seems either just an allegory or sort of illogical based on the fact that they've almost certainly ate other things. But I think it speaks to the importance of eels culturally. And even though it's one of the first pieces of evidence we have, it tells us that that's really a longstanding tradition. I also really like the fact that they get their reign back. They convert to Christianity to the South Saxons. And then they get the rain back. And that means

that they get their eels back. So they get rewarded for their piety with eels. And I really like that. Yeah, I suppose it shows that these eels are a really positive thing to them. I suppose. And I guess also, as you say, this must, this story was written for a contemporary audience. And so if that wasn't a realistic story for them to listen to, then he wouldn't have written it in that way, I suppose. Yeah. It has to have at least had sort of enough truth in it for being to have thought that it would work for what he wanted it to do. And did actually, just because you were saying that they were then converting back to Christianity and so on, did the eel actually have any religious importance or do we not get any suggestion of it? being a sort of religious element to the actual eel itself?

That's an interesting question. So the answer goes in a bunch of different directions. There are places on the continent in France, and some places in Italy you can find evidences where eels get sort of metaphorically conflated with serpents. And so there are some instances of eels being stand in for serpents and Satan and evil. That almost never happens in England.

The English draw a really firm distinction, most of the time between snakes and eels. And snakes are bad. And eels are sometimes metaphorically bad because of their slipperiness or other things, but they're almost never sort of morally suspect in a metaphorical way that snakes often are. They do have a sort of religious component to them in that, especially in the later Middle Ages, there are all these fish days, right, sort of about a third of the year where you're not supposed to eat meat

because it reminds you a sex because it's coming from a carnal animal. and so you're supposed to eat fish or something that reminds you less of the world because you're supposed to be paying attention to sort of pure thoughts at that point during Lent and other days. And so Eels sort of fit into that theological niche kind of nicely because not only are they fish, but there's a really longstanding belief going back to Aristotle that eels reproduce asexually. They don't have anything to do with sex at all. And so the idea that you shouldn't eat fish during Lent or other fish days because it reminds you of sex, well, if, fish doesn't remind you of sex, then eels really don't because they don't have anything to do with sex at all. And that has to do with the really fascinating life cycle that eels have, where they're born out at sea and the Sargast of Sea, and they come to shore as little glass eels and then

elvers, and then they go back to sea to mate and die, but for almost their entire time that they're living sort of inland, they're technically juveniles, and they don't have developed reproductive organs. Those don't develop until basically when they're on their way back to sea to mate and die. And so Aristotle dissected eels, a bunch of them, starting a very long tradition that went all the way up to Freud, who did exactly the same thing, looking for their reproductive organs without success. And Aristotle's decision, he came to the conclusion that they must reproduce asexually. He thought they kind of sprang out of the mud. And that belief carried over into medieval Europe. They believed eels were asexual, didn't have anything to do with sex at all.

And so they were really good fish for Lent or other fish days. So there is a theological component to eels. a weird one, but there certainly is one. Yeah, that was not one I knew about before, but I suppose that makes sense in that sort of world view. Now, the one thing I did really want to talk to you about, because I know your treatise about this, is that eels become a form of payment as well,

and, in fact, to the extent that taxes became collected in eels, can you tell me all about that, please? Yes. One of the things that I found really fascinating is I started to get into this subject, because I didn't know anything at all about in-kind rent payments. but I learned. So it has to do a little bit with the thing I was just talking about about the sort of theological niche that eels fall into. But medieval landlords, especially in the early medieval period, collected a lot of their rent from their tenants in in-kind things. So in grain

or honey or ale or chickens or eggs or eels. And the reason that they do this is largely because there's not a whole lot of coin floating around. It's not much currency. And so your peasants don't have the money to pay you in coin, and so you take your rent in other things. But eels are, in England certainly, eels are the most common of these in-kind rents, the doomsday book and other evidence tell us. They're just sort of eel rents everywhere. At the end of the 11th century, there's more than a half a million eels being paid in England in taxes every single year to different landlords. A lot of them are to monastic landlords, but not all of them. The single largest one, 75,000 eels do every year from the village of Harmston to

the Earl of Chester. So some of them are to monastic landlords, but not all of them. Some of them are to secular landlords as well. What the Earl is doing with 75,000 eels every year, I'm not actually sure, but he's collecting them. So there are a lot of these eel rents in sort of the 10th and 11th centuries and other in-kind rents as well. But over the course of that period, you start to get more minted coins, and a lot of these

in-kind rents start to disappear and get transitioned over into monetary rents. And that happens to a degree with the eels, but not a whole lot. There's still a lot of eel rents on the books, basically up through the Black Deaths, so the mid-14th century, at which point there's a real big drop-off when all kinds of things change, and that's one of the things that changes. But eel rents hang on much longer than most other in-kind rents do, and I think a lot of that has to do with their sort of utility as a fish that you can eat during fish days. The biggest sort of consistent landlords collecting rent were monastic landlords.

So like the cathedral at Ely or the monastery at Ramsey or Peterborough, places like that, we're collecting just tremendous numbers of eels every year in rent. And then these are mostly preserved eels, so dried and salted, and then they're eating them during Lent and then sort of holding onto them throughout the rest of the year as well. So that's really interesting and what they're doing with them. I mean, do we have actual recipes from that sort of period, from the middle age as at all, or how people are eating these eels? Yeah, we do. So in a lot of respects, they're eating eels in the same way that people eat eels now. They're not eating jelly deals. That's like a 19th century invention. But other than that, if they're eating fresh eels, they're eating a lot of sort of fried or roasted eels are really common, usually with some small herbs and just kind of throw them in a pan and cook them that way in rounds often. They're really popular in pies, cooked into breads. It doesn't make it to England very much, but continental recipes often have eel flan for desserts, sort of a savory dessert.

And there's a really, sort of the most complicated one is a French recipe called reversed eel, where you sort of debund the eel and skin it and turn the skin inside out, put the eel back in and sort of stuff it with sort of fruits and spices and things and wrap it up and cook it in red wine. So that's a really complicated one. That sounds amazing. Yeah. Most of the eel recipes are much more simple than that. We do have recipes from sort of monastic cooks as well, a few of them.

Those tend to be much more simple sort of eel stew basically, sort of fish stew with eels. So if they're cooking the smoked eels, if you had smoked eel recently in the last hundred years, it's a sort of really smoky, delicious kind of flavorful fish because it's using a hot smoking process that sort of bind some of the smoke to the eel. The medieval smoking was a cold smoking process that took a lot longer, and you wound up with a much less delicious fish at the end of it. Sort of much chewier and chalkier, I think. But it lasted a really long time, and that sort of, that was its saving grace.

So those eels tend to get put into stews and things that will hide its not wonderful flavor. Okay, so you've got to have quite a few options to go between. But the one thing that did surprise me a lot from reading your blog, actually was that eating eels has actually led to a not inconsiderable number of deaths throughout history. And one very famous example being Henry I, can you explain what happened to him and anybody else who met a sort of untimely eel-related end? Yeah, so Henry I was absolutely the most famous, and he dies in 1135, and Henry of Huntington's Chronicle, which is where we get this story from,

tells us that Henry loved either eels or lampre's, and it's impossible to tell which one, because Henry used the Latin word Mirena, which can mean eel, like we're talking about it can mean lamprey, and it can mean moray eel, so like a marine eel. Almost certainly wasn't mores, because they're mores in the Mediterranean, but not in the North Sea. Anyway, so in this story and in a lot of places in medieval chronicles

where they're talking about Mirena, you have to pick, as a translator, whether you want that to be eels or lampreys. The story often is told with lampreys, but I'm an eel historian, and I'm going to go to bat for eels here. So anyway, the Chronicle tells us that King Henry really loved his eels, and his physicians warned him against him because they gave him indigestion. And they told him he shouldn't need his eels. And, you know, as a king will do, he did.

did what he wanted and he paid the price for it. So he ordered up a delicious dinner of carnes motor norm of eel meat and suffered horrible indigestion and then died from it, which I don't know if he would have appreciated that or not, but it's what the Chronicle tells this happened to him. So he's absolutely the most famous. And you see the died of a surfeit of eels or lampre, you'll often see. But he's not the only one who sort of met an end at the hands of the plate of eels. There's a story that you'll see sometimes that Eustis, who is, King Stephen's eldest son died choking on a plate of eels. Sadly, I can't find actual evidence of that.

That shows up in a set of academic history books in the 1930s, but the citations that the author gives don't actually say what the author says they do. So I think it's probably unlikely that Eustis died that way, which makes me a little sad because if he had, then it would admit that Henry II came to the throne as the result of not one, but two separate eel-related fatalities. So that was Eustis. Pope Martin the 4th who died in 1285 and he shows up in Dante's purgatory and he shows up in

purgatory with the glutton's and he's there Dante tells us as a punishment for having eaten a lot of eels and drunk a lot of wine and the story with martin is that he also died much like Henry that he ordered himself a plate of eels and they gave him horrible indigestion and he died and there was allegedly an epitaph on martin's tomb speaking to this and the epitaph read, the eels rejoice for he that lies dead here was he who skinned them to death for their sins. Oh, for the eel's sins? Yes, yes, for the eel's sins. So, now that epitaph is not, if it ever existed, it doesn't exist anymore. But I love the story. And Alexander III of Scotland has an eel-related fatality. So he died falling off his horse in a rainstorm, but sort of riding off to

see his new wife. But prior to that, he had a sort of a wedding feast with his close friends, and they had a plate of, again, Mirena, so either lamprey or eel, but I'm going to go with eel here. They had a plate of eel, and he shared it with his friends, and then they're joking about the fact that if this is their last day on Earth, at least they're going to die with a tummy full of eels, and they'll be happy about that. And then this is from the Lanarkas Chronicle,

Northern English Chronicle. And then the very next line, basically, the king sort of stands up and rides off into the rain and falls off his horse and dies. So there's an eel-related fatality there. And so it may not be an accident that Robert DeBruce's physician 50 years later or so, it's on the record is warning Robert against eating eels. Unsuccessfully, apparently, Robert the Roos liked his eels as well.

A lot of kings did. His physician warned him against eating them because they might give him indigestion and he might die. It's not what killed Robert, so he seemed to have survived the eels. But there's a threat of sort of royal or very important people dying from overindulgence with eels. And part of that may just be a story about rich people dying from overindulgence, which is a bit of a trope. But the yields matter in the story too, I think. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes

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Is there something that genuinely would? If you eat too much eel, is it actually a dangerous thing? I don't think so. It's a pretty rich food is part of what's going on there. It's really fatty and it's a lot of protein. Part of it also has to do with medieval humors. You know, Henry was fairly old when he died. And so he's sort of hot and dry and eels are cold and slimy.

So he's not supposed to be eating them anyway. The humoral theory tells him that they're bad for him in that respect. But no, generally no, I think if you eat them raw, which you should never do, if you eat them raw, eel blood is toxic. And there are surprisingly few studies on it, but the ones that do exist suggest that it either breaks down in your stomach acid and it's fine or it can be fatal. Ah, okay. So I would avoid eating raw eel if you can. Other than that, and none of these people seem to be doing that. So I think you're probably good to eat as many eels as you want.

Okay, well, that's a relief. That's brilliant. So, okay, so we've talked about the fact that they were valuable people could pay renting eels that they were obviously valued, especially among these kings who like to overeat on them. Do we know of any sort of illegal activities or any crimes relating to eels, especially because they are valuable or, you know, for whatever other reason? Yes. So the eel poaching is definitely a thing.

You know, people are often very protective about their eel rights, right? because either they owe eels and rent or because they own the mill or the bit of stream and they want their eels for it. So we can tell from court records that people show up being prosecuted for eel poaching on a semi-regular basis. One of my favorite examples of this isn't poaching exactly, but there's a fellow in the 13th century, and I'm blanking on this name. But he's brought to court because he's been charging people who come across his land

with carts full of eels. He's been charging them a toll on the road that goes through his property. And he apparently doesn't actually have the right to do that. but he claims that he does and it's a customer right that goes back to before the conquest and the court tells him to knock it off that he needs to stop charging people in the legal toll of eels he's charging them basically 25 eels for every cart that's coming across his property that's quite profitable then presumably yes yeah yeah there are some records of piracy having to do with eels so as the middle ages goes along the english start to import an increasing

number of eels from the continent largely from holland and this goes on for a really long time until the 1930s, actually. But in the late 12th century, early 13th century, I think there are a handful of records of people complaining to the king that pirates, at least in one case, Scottish pirates, have seized cargoes of eels that are being shipped from the Netherlands to places in England. The Scottish pirates grabbed a ship that was going to Northern England, to York, I think. And I don't know that they seized them specifically for the eels, but the eels were a big part of the cargo. York merchants had sent to Amsterdam, I think, for eels. And then were very distressed that they didn't get the eels they ordered.

So they petitioned the king to get their eels back. And I think the king passed it off to his warden of the north who got the ships back, but the cargo was gone, sadly. Ah, I see. So eels had swung away or been eaten, I suppose. Yeah. One of the things that's really useful, though, about records like this and about the poaching records are a lot of times when people, historians in the past, have thought about eels

and their role in English history, they have largely looked at the rents. because it's by far the easiest place where we can see eel consumption. And one of the things that that has meant is that we have missed all of the other places where there are eels. And when you start looking at court records and things like that, you can see that, oh, no way, actually, it's not just that there's eels are being paid in rent. And that's it. Like, you need to think about all of the other eels in the economy. The rent eels are just the kind of the eels off the top, right? If there's half a million eels being paid in rent every year, like how many more are being eaten, just,

sort of in general. And, you know, there's no way to find the answer to that. But the answer is certainly many, many more than we've been thinking. Yeah, those are really substantial quantities, really, aren't they? And that really shows it's a huge part of the economy, I suppose. Yeah, I think so. And that's, again, the rent to the place where it's the easiest to get a hold of that, but they don't give the full picture. There's a lay subsidy role from Huntington Chire from the 1290s that talks about one of the village of Rams. I think where there's 16 fishermen and Ramsey who get taxed for an estimated catch of, I think, 250,000 eels every year. It's just an enormous sum.

And those aren't eels that are being paid in rent or anything. Those are eels that are being caught there. And the lay subsidy rolls sort of almost always undersell the total numbers because they're not including eels or other things that are being used in trade for other places. So there are instances like that where you can see just sort of the tremendous number of eels that are probably. at play in the economy under the surface that we've not really paid attention to before. And Ramsey sits in the middle of the fens. You know, you don't get that many eels in, say, Hertfordshire or someplace like that. But it's telling, I think.

It's telling of what we're missing. Yeah, that's such an important point. And I think this, going back to the start, really, when I was asking you about why we should care about them, I think that sort of, I guess, answer that question quite a lot as well. and the fact that this is a really substantial part of everyday life. And actually you've written about the fact that eels actually start to become a pretty important part of actually English national identity in some ways. And how did that manifest itself?

Yeah, I think they did. And I'll caveat this by saying that anytime we talk about medieval national identity, things, we're really imposing a very modern framework on it, that being said, I think there's a lot of evidence that medieval English people are sort of, they're using eels as personal metaphors and as national metaphors in ways that suggest that they are thinking of themselves as a people who eat a lot of eels and often use eels as sort of stand-in for themselves. There are eels on a surprising number of personal coats of arms throughout the medieval period,

which is particularly interesting because you see this in England and almost nowhere else. There are a very small handful of them in France and Germany. Some of the towns in France and Germany use eels on their sort of civic crests. but very few personal coats of arms use eels. They're a few in Spain, but there are a lot more of them in England and other places. So there are eels on coats of arms. They show up in some interesting personal metaphors. Thomas Bradwardine, who was briefly the Archbishop of Canterbury

and died in the Black Death in 1348, I think. Towards the end of his life, he wrote a very small book on memory practice, on sort of training your mind to use mnemonic memory practices. One of the fascinating things to me about this is in the process of this book, he walks you through how you attach thoughts and pneumonic ideas to different words. And he walks you through the process of learning how to do that and train your mind. And at the end of the book, he gives you this sort of example sentence for you to practice with. And the sentence is about the English king laying siege to the Scottish city of Berwick.

And he walks you through the sentence word by word, and he gives you examples of all of the different ways you could remember these words pneumonically. So he says with the word king. He says, okay, so to remember the word king, you can think about the king, which if you're like me, Thomas Bradrudeen, you know a king and that's easy. or you can think about a guy named king, or you can think about a guy who dressed up as a king at Halloween, or whatever, whatever works for you. And medieval memory practice has to be personalized because mnemonic memory has to work with the things

that you have in your head, the associations that you make. So he gives you a lot of different examples, and he does this for all of the words in the sentence, except eel. For eel, he only gives you one example. He says, to think of the word eel, think of England. That's it. That's all he gives you. So for Brad Reneene, and assumingly for his audience, it made sense that when you thought about England, you would think about eels.

I love that example because it's very clear. He's very sort of upfront about it. Yeah, that's quite powerful, isn't it? That's association because that's certainly not what you would think today, that as you say, that says something about his audience as well, that that would make sense for everyone. That's quite staggering. You know, eels show up in a lot of other really interesting places as well.

There's a set of eels on the Bayou tapestry in the lower frame. And the things in the border of the tapestry, people disagree about whether they anything or not. There are people who think they mean everything and the people who think they mean nothing at all. But they're interesting in any event. So the eels and the biotapestry are under the scene where Harold, he's come to France and he's sort of been captured and then recaptured by the Normans and he's sort of trotting around with them. And the Normans are starting this military campaign in Brittany. And together they have to cross a river and there's sort of, there's a tragedy and people are falling into the river. And Harold jumps into the river and pulls some of the Norman

soldiers out. And this scene is reproduced in the tapestry. You can see Harold sort of pulling one guy out of the river with another on his back. And you know it's Harold A from, from, we've been watching Harold all the way through, but also the text, this written text above it that says Harold pulls people from the sands. And right below that, there are seven eels sort of swimming in the water. And then there's a Saxon fellow in the water with them, and he's reaching out. And you know he's a Saxon both by his, he's got this very Saxon mustache, which is telling him. He's holding a sacks, the dagger. And in one hand, And in this other hand, he's reaching out to grab a hold of one of the eels, and he's grabbing it by its tail. And there's been some argument about what this means, if it means anything at all.

And there's been a couple of sort of interesting pieces of article suggesting that the fellow in the water is Harold. And I think the general reading of this has been previously that Harold, by grabbing an eel, he's sort of the tapestry showing that Harold is sort of a slippery character. Because what happens right after this is Harold in the story is that Harold, they go and they fight. And the next time we see Harold in the tapestry, he's swearing allegiance to William after the battle. He swears allegiance to William and says that, you know, when the current king of England dies, that he'll support Williams' claim to the throne. But he's not actually going to do that. He's sort of doing that under duress. So when he goes home, but England and the king dies, he's going to forswear his oath. And the idea is that, by sort of grabbing the eels, he's sort of the tapestry showing that he's a slippery character, that he's about to break the oath he's going to take.

And that's a possible reading. Eels have a, they're slimy, and they have a really, long metaphorical history, going all the way back to the Greeks, of sort of sliminess and slipperiness of character being associated with eels. I'm not convinced by that reading, actually. I think it's possible, but I think it's also telling that Harold is grabbing the eel by the tail. And I buy that it's Harold in the water. He looks a lot like Harold in earlier places in the tapestry. So eel's slipperiness is axiomatic, but grabbing an eel by the tail is also axiomatic. It's another longstanding saying, to grab an eel by the tail means that you're doing something the wrong way, because if you grab an eel by the tail, it's just going to slip out of your

hand and get away. To get an eel, you have to grab it by the head. And so you have this sort of character in the water grabbing an eel by the tail. The eel is going to get away. And if we read the eel as England, as Thomas Bradwardian suggests that we absolutely should do, then you have Harold in the water trying to grab a hold of England and it's not going to work, right? He's got it the wrong way. And maybe because he's slippery or it's slippery, but it's going to get out of his grasp. And this, of course, is exactly what happens to Harold, right? He grabs onto the throne and he can't hold on to it. He dies at Hastings. So I think if we read the eel there, as being sort of metaphorical for England or the English people,

then I think that opens up an interesting reading of that particular little moment in the border of the tapestry. That sounds very convincing, I think, as an explanation. I'll go for that. Just very briefly, John, at the end, can you just say something about, you know, when did we stop caring so much about eels? Because we don't really care about them much anymore. Was that in the Middle Ages, or did it happen later?

No, much later, actually, much later. It's true. We don't. At this point, people tend to be a little bit nervous about eels, right? They're sort of slimy and weird, and they remind us of snakes. And if people are familiar with eels, often it's because of the shrieking eels in the frances bride or the eels and the horsehead in the tendrum traumatizes a lot of people. But that's a fairly modern phenomenon, actually. So eels are a tremendously important part of the sort of the English economy and English diet and English culture. really up through sort of at all levels of society up through the 17th century, the mid-17th century. And they wind up importing a lot of eels from the Dutch, and then there's a period of about 15 years in the, in the middle of the 17th century where they don't anymore. Part of the Anglo-Dutch wars, they kick all the Dutch eel merchants out of London. And that seems to be where there's a significant break, at least as far as I can tell. Prior to that point, eels, they show up in a lot of plays and metaphors and things. there are more eels in Shakespeare's play than any other fish.

And then after that point, they really don't anymore. They stop being used metaphorically. That's sort of the point where they become a real poor person's food. After that point, there are a food that just about everybody eats. In some degree, they're a bit of a social leveler. Starting in the late 17th century, they really take on this sort of aspect of being a poor person's food. And that holds on, you know, through the next couple of hundred years. The poor in London and 19th century, London makes a big deal about the fact that eels are

sort of the most commonly eaten street food. And there's a moment in the early 20th century where sort of they develop a hot smoking process. And for like a couple of years, hot smoke deals are a thing that everybody eats across sort of cultural borders. But generally speaking, eels are sort of thought of as a poor person's food as a working class food. And I think in London, right, that's probably still the case. Right. Your jelly eels is a real sort of east end kind of thing. And like, as it happens with a lot of things that are sort of classed as a poor person's food as a working class food. in the early 20th century, mid-20th century, as you get sort of greater varieties of food and sort of better transport and better refrigeration, all sorts of things, people can move away from foods that have been traditionally classed that way. And so one of the things this happens with eels, right, is people stop eating eels because they can because the rich people don't eat eels.

And so I want to eat like the rich people do. And so I'm not going to eat eels either. And so there's a real drop-off in the sort of by the 1930s up through the 1930s, the Dutch people. are still importing eels into London in these big ships that they've been doing for 500 years, but the last one leaves London in 1938. And then starting in the 50s, there's some transport of eels through Yarmouth that they come into London in refrigerated trucks, but it's a really small percentage of what the market used to be. So I think sort of the not caring about eels is a pretty modern phenomenon.

It's really colored the way that we have thought about eels historically, right? It's a very modern take on eels to sort of look at eels in the past and think about them in the sort of modern lens of being slightly weird and gross and disgusting. It's colored the way that we think about eel metaphors in history, which fascinates me that there's a modern assumption that eel metaphors in the past have to be bad because that's how we use them now. We don't even have that many of them anymore, but the ones that we do are all negative. And a lot of sort of historical eal metaphors you can look back at that have been. read in a negative light, you can also say, well, hold on a second. If we think about the eel as being a really important part of the culture that these people enjoyed and cared about, then we can read these metaphors in really positive ways. And so thinking about the importance

of eel within the context of the culture makes a really big difference in how we think about the way that the people are describing the world around them. And should we care about them today? I mean, I'd mentioned at the beginning that they are endangered as a species. So should we should we do more to care about eels in the 21st century? We absolutely should do more to care about eels in the 21st century. I mentioned earlier that eels historically made up a big part of the fish biomass, and I wasn't kidding. Historically, eels have made up somewhere between 25 and 50% of the fish biomass

in the downstream sections of rivers in Europe and North America, which is just an enormous amount of eel, right? And so you think about what that means for the ecology all around them, for the things that are predating on them and the places that they're predating on them and the places that they swim through and all that that means. And then you think about the fact that, as you mentioned, they're critically endangered at this point. So they've suffered about a 90% population crash in the last 40 years. And that means that all of those ecologies are missing, sort of a really key part of what has historically been a backbone for them, right?

So eels matter a great deal. Protecting eels and sort of helping to revitalize eels in our waterways is a really good way of protecting other species, right? if you are saving eels, you are also saving a lot of other things. And it's one of the things that I've really enjoyed about my work, right? As medievalists, we don't always get to do work that matters in the modern era. And one of the things I've really enjoyed about this sort of journey I've been on with eels is that as I've told this story about eels in the past and how important they are in the past and sort of tried to make it funny and interesting for people through Twitter and podcasts

and other things, that it's given me a way to get people interested. in saving eels. It's not always easy to get people interested in eels because they're gross and weird and slimy. But I've felt like if I can tell an interesting story about them, if I can get you interested in eels in the past and sort of in thinking about how important they have been to us historically, then maybe I can get you thinking about how important they are to us now and in the future. And so you asked at the very top of our talk why it's important to think about and study and learn about medieval eels or historical eels. And I think that's a real part of the answer is that learning about them in our past is a nice way of sort of thinking about them in our present.

I think that's a fantastic answer. And I think, to me, certainly, John, you've done a great job in saving these eels from oblivion, at least in the terms of medieval history, which is great. John, thank you so much for joining me. It's been brilliant to hear more about your work. Well, thank you very much for having me, Kat. I've really enjoyed it. So this was Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee, and I would absolutely highly recommend that you look up John's Twitter account, the surprised eel historian, and also have a look for his blog where he has a few more longer phases about it. So this has been Gone Medieval. I hope you have enjoyed learning about eels as much as I have today. And thank you so much everyone for listening. Do please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already,

and we will be back again with another episode very soon.