What does a stick of eels get you?
A question that has come up several times in conversations with people about eel-rents concerns the value of a stick of eels. The records tell us that X mill owed Y abbey Z sticks of eels per year…but what does that really mean? How much value is the abbey actually getting in their taxes? This is, unsurprisingly, a somewhat difficult question to answer.
There are very few handy charts telling us how much a stick of eels is worth, and it is difficult assessing this type of question from monastery records. Part of the problem comes from the fact that there are often several centuries between records of payment types, meaning that it can be difficult to make assessments of eel equity when rents shifted to currency. This is further complicated by the fact that eels had a specific value to monks that went beyond their more general market worth: since they were not considered flesh, they could be eaten during Lent and during other Church celebratory days that banned meat.
However, there are places where the archive lets us make an educated guess, and so here is a back-of-the-napkin attempt at finding the value in a stick of eels. I am presenting three places where I can make the conversions, and am offering what I believe to be a low-end projection and a high-end projection. I am converting medieval monies into modern currency through the British Archive’s currency converter, which figures exchange rates to 2005 British pounds sterling, going as far back 1270. I am then adjusting for inflation to 2017 pounds, before converting to 2017 US dollars.
