Thread by @greenleejw

It's 1200, and you're the Abbot of Ramsey (congrats!). At Lent your tenants come calling with their annual rents of preserved eels.

- 60,000 from Welles
- 4,000 from Chatteris
- 125 from Little Bedford
- 5260 from Wisbeck
etc.

So what do you do with all of these eels? /1

Well, you eat some of them. The 60k eels from Welles works out to 164.3 eels per day. In 1200 Ramsey had about 80 monks in residence, and responsibility for several satellite cells. So that comes to about 2 eels per monk per day (about 2 meals worth) for the year. /2

So you eat them. You also store them for special occasions, like when the king visits. But you can also use your eels to buy things!

In the 1250s Ramsey paid 4000 eels per yr. to Peterborough Abbey for the right to quarry stone to build the abbey. /3

And in the early 1200s the Ramsey monks rented part of a local causeway at the yearly rate of 1 pair of scarlet pants, 2 pounds of pepper & ginger, & 1000 eels.

So eels weren't just an in-kind taxation...they sometimes acted as a pseudo currency too. What's in your wallet? /fin

*1050s. Sorry.