My dad is Professor J.J.N. Palmer, and I worked with him on the Domesday Book data used and cited in this work.

These days we are used to having all kinds of data at our fingertips, but at the time it was a lot of work to take medieval Latin and turn it into computer readable data. We had to invent our own markup language, parsers and search engines.

> "Most of the eel rents were paid in East Anglia"

Incidentally "eel" in Spanish is "anguila" (pronounced very similar), which leads me to strongly believe these two are related.

However a quick search finds out that those are actually unrelated! Spanish "anguila" comes from latin's "anguilla", and this from "anguis" (snake). While the name East Anglia comes from the German region named "Anglia", which comes from the German word "Angeln".

Note: the Caribbean island Anguilla's name does come from "eel" for its shape, but that's a more clear later phenomena.

If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Paul Kingsnorth's 2014 novel The Wake. It's written in a sort of de-latinized English and tells the story of an Anglo-Saxon freeman living through the Norman conquest in the Lincolnshire Fens, where much of the local economy was about catching eels. The initially far-off events of 1066 eventually make their effects felt at home, and he organizes a guerilla-like insurgency against the Normans. It's entertaining historical fiction, but more than that, the writing is truly high art, which left an impression me, not unlike Gene Wolfe.

"One enormous transaction shows that Ely Abbey, now known as Ely Cathedral, paid Thorney Abbey 26,275 eels to rent a fen" -- Ely Abbey/Cathedral are probably named after eels: see section 8 of https://www.historyhit.com/paid-in-fish-strange-uses-for-eel...

There’s an awesome BBC historical farm series where they catch eels and make the pots in one episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series

Just a very enjoyable series to watch

Well, I'm convinced. On June 1, I'll be paying my rent in the form of $2,500 worth of raw fish left on my landlord's doorstep.

I've been making a post-apoc survival adventure game lately [1], so this bit of "eels for cash" history reminds me of it. The game's world has an economy that's been forced to regress to medieval times in many ways. Folks barter, and spend much more personal time doing hunting or gathering for their food. Its a comedy too, so I get to have fun with which particular animal species I cite and make important for their new, more rugged way of life. Some "old" (real) species, some made-up, or their mutant descendants.

Thankfully the eel itself already has a funny name, and looks kinda funny too! Yet no matter how weird, dangerous or hard to catch a creature is, when a society loses modern manufacturing infrastructure and chemical/pharmaceutical techniques and know-how, suddenly an otherwise previously "unimportant" species can become incredibly important for many applications.

That bite, though.

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(1. see my bio: Slartboz)

Look, it's not really on point for the article, but I just want to say that you probably have NO IDEA how fucking WEIRD European eels are. Because of their insanely convoluted life cycle, really smart people thought they spontaneously generated for FAR FAR LONGER than you'd think is reasonable.

There's really great and fairly short book about eels and eel-fishing mixed in with a memoir called THE BOOK OF EELS by Patrik Svensson that I cannot recommend highly enough.