Did you know that the US government once tried to transplant east coast eels to California? Weird but true!

It's a fun story. Train loads of eels! Crashes! Loss! Pyrrhic victory!

So. Settle in, friends, for a thread about some well-trained eels. 1/8 Freshwater eels aren't native to the US Pacific Coast. All the eels in N. America come from the Sargasso Sea, & swim in waters that empty into the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico.

There are lots of lampreys on the W. coast. But no native eels.

But they wanted some. Like you do. 2/8

Do you have a broken down old horse you want to sell? Need to make it seem young again?

Then, friend, you need an eel! In medieval & early modern England, horse sellers practiced feaguing: inserting a live eel into the horse's rectum to get the animal to act more lively. 1/5 John Miton wrote about this in school, in 1628, saying that several of his skinny classmates would be good as horse suppositories. He said they'd make "scraggly horses...livelier and quicker than if they had ten live eels in their bellies.”

Classic stuff, Milton. 2/5

Congrats! You're the King of England! And you love you some eels.

But...there's a problem. But it's the 1660s, & you've banned the import of foreign eels & you can't get enough English eels to satisfy you. So what do you do?

If you're Charles II of England...you cheat! 1/5 Charles & Parliament had banned foreign (mostly Dutch) eels in 1666. But there weren't any English eel merchants in London. If Charles wanted eels, they'd have to come from Holland!

The king was hungry.

So he ordered his fish purchaser, Walter Underhill, to make it happen. 2/5

In 1200 CE, people in England paid 540,000+ eels in rent each year. That's a lot, right? RIGHT?

Yes. But.

Those were *just* the eels for rent. People were catching & eating LOTS more. In 1290, fishermen in the village of Ramsey caught 365,000 eels, above & beyond rent eels. 1/4 "Wait...what?!" you say. "No way."

Yes, way.

The 1290 lay subsidy roll recorded that 9 fishermen in Ramsey caught 115k eels, while the surrounding region was recorded as hauling in an additional 250k.

So...365,000 eels being caught each year in one small town. *At least.* 2/4

I had questions yesterday about eel smuggling. Questions like: "WFT?" & "Why? & "How?" So let's take a look.

Eel smuggling is maybe the biggest wildlife crime going. It's a c. 4 billion a year black market industry. Interpol has called it "Europe's ivory trade." 1/7 Eel is a popular food in Asia. But eels are endangered, & the demand can't be met locally anymore.

There's a legal trade from the US & other places. But that's not enough. The most ready source of eels is Europe, but since 2010 it's been illegal to export eels from the EU. 2/7

It's #piDay2023...so let's talk about eel pie!

Eel pie has been an important English food for a long time. Medieval cookbooks often included eel pie recipes, & everyone from peasants to kings at them.

In 1256, Henry III demanded eel pies from his bailiff at Fetcham! 1/8 Eel pie was so common that not knowing how to cook one was recognized sign of stupidity. In King Lear, there's a cook who was so far gone that she tried to eels in the pie w/o killing them first.

It doesn't mean much to us, but Shakespeare's audience knew better.

Hilarious! 2/8

Did you know that the US government once tried to transplant east coast eels to California? Weird but true!

It's a fun story. Train loads of eels! Crashes! Loss! Pyrrhic victory!

So. Settle in, friends, for a thread about some well-trained eels. 1/8 Freshwater eels aren't native to the US Pacific Coast. All the eels in N. America come from the Sargasso Sea, & swim in waters that empty into the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico.

There are lots of lampreys on the W. coast. But no native eels.

But they wanted some. Like you do. 2/8

The Bayeux Tapestry is cool as hell. A 230 foot-long textile account of the Norman Conquest from the 11th C., with lots of fun details, including 626 people, 190 horses, 35 dogs, 32 ships, & 93 penises.

"Are there eels?" you ask. Of course there are eels!

Let's take a look! 1/8 They're in the border, underneath an early scene about the Norman campaign in Brittany.

Here, we can see the English wannabe king Harold Godwinson rescuing some Normans from drowning in the Couesnon River (Harold is the guy with a man on his back). 2/8

It's Valentine's Day, so let's talk about sex.

Eel sex!

Well...we can't, really.

We don't know exactly where, or how, eels get busy. It's a 2000+ year old puzzle. It's not like we haven't tried. But the sex life of eels is a mystery smothered in secret sauce. 1/5 All the eels in the Americas, Europe, and N. Africa are born at sea They migrate to land, live 10-20 yrs (or more!) and then go back to sea to mate & die.

They *probably* are all born, mate, & die in the Sargasso Sea. But we're not certain. 2/5

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? 1/4 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. 2/4

Folks in medieval England often paid rent using eels. Some eel-rents were small (25-50 eels). But some were quite large.

In the 13th C., the village of Welles paid Ramsey Monastery a yearly rent of 60,000 eels. 60,000!

What in the world did the abbot do with them all? 1/5 Well, you eat some of them.

60k eels 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. 2/5

The holidays are coming up, and I know what you're thinking: how should I cook all these eels? What would medieval people do (WWMPD?)

Well don't fret, friends. I'm here to help! That's right...buckle up for a historic eel cooking thread! #CookingWithEels 1/13 So...one of the most common ways to prepare eels was to salt and smoke them. In the Middle Ages, eels were cold smoked.

Flay them, brine them for a long time, and them smoke them for longer. It took several months to do it right. 2/13

This weekend I'm actually going to have my doctoral graduation. Only 2 yrs late! So this week, I want to revisit some eel history high points. Play the hits, as it were.

First off...in the 11th C., people in England paid more than 500,000 eels per year in rent. Here's a map! 1/4 Some rents called for payments of 10s of thousands of eels. How were they counted? Most often, in units called sticks and binds.

1 stick = 25 eels
1 bind = 10 sticks (250 eels)

The term "stick" likely comes from the number of eels you can smoke on a stick at one time. 2/4

It's Valentine's Day, so let's talk about sex.

Eel sex!

Well...we can't, really.

We don't know exactly where, or how, eels get busy. It's a 2000+ year old puzzle. It's not like we haven't tried. But the sex life of eels is a mystery smothered in secret sauce. 1/5 All the eels in the Americas, Europe, and N. Africa are born at sea They migrate to land, live 10-20 yrs (or more!) and then go back to sea to mate & die.

They *probably* are all born, mate, & die in the Sargasso Sea. But we're not certain. 2/5

It's almost Valentine's Day, so let's talk about sex.

Eel sex!

Well...we can't, really.

We don't know exactly where, or how, eels get busy. It's a 2000+ year old puzzle. It's not like we haven't tried. But the sex life of eels is a mystery smothered in secret sauce. 1/5 All the eels in the Americas, Europe, and N. Africa are born at sea They migrate to land, live 10-20 yrs (or more!) and then go back to sea to mate & die.

They *probably* are all born, mate, & die in the Sargasso Sea. But we're not certain. 2/5

It's Thanksgiving. Are you getting your eels ready? It's traditional!

The 1st Thanksgiving included a big table full of eels. And it's fitting. Tisquantum brought eels to the starving pilgrims that spring to celebrate their new peace treaty w/ the local Wampanoag tribe. 1/6 You may read elsewhere that the indigenous peoples taught the Pilgrims how to fish eels. This is unlikely. The Pilgrims came from England, w/ it's long-established tradition of eel fishing, & they came by way of Europe's other great eel fishing culture in the Netherlands. 2/6

Did you know that eels migrate thousands of miles, or that their bodies change dramatically during their lives? Do you want to know?

That's right, friends...it's eel life cycle time!

Before we start, let's remember that I'm a historian, not a scientist. But I'll do my best. /1 All the eels in Europe and N. America are born (we think) in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic. We've never actually seen eels mate, but this is where the smallest larvae have been found.

Eel larvae are transparent, leaf-shaped things. They look like this! /2

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

Have you been looking, without any luck, for eel testicles? Not sure how to sex an eel? Well don't worry...you're not alone. People from Aristotle onward tried & failed. Sigmund Freud once spent a summer in Italy dissecting 400 eels looking for their testes, without success. /1 Turns out, eel sexual determination is pretty wild. It's largely environmentally determined, & only becomes set years into their life cycle. For most of their lives eels are juveniles, & their sexual organs only develop fully just before they head back to sea to mate & die. /2

The greatest trick maps ever playedt is convincing people that they don't lie. Even when they're not trying to lie, maps are still products of cultural convention. I don't get worked up much, but this editorial is giving me the angers. So let's chat. (1)
nytimes.com/2019/09/08/opi… There are whole books on this subject, not the least of which is Mark Monmonier's aptly-titled "How to Lie with Maps." Brian Harley's work in the later part of the 20th century made clear the degree to which mapping is a subjective activity that inscribes the mapmaker's (2)