I recently discovered Historia Cartarum and a fun article there about paying rent with eels in medieval England. So what does a stick of eels get you? Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee, medieval and cartographic historian, attempts to answer that question. Here's his intro:
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.
Click over for the math. And if you decide to pay your Cornell U tuition in eels this year, he'll give you an idea of how many you'll need to bring to the bursar's office.
8 comments:
I think there's a general problem with trying to convert pre-capitalist 'values' into numbers that would be comparable for us. The Medieval economies weren't fully monetized, and scarcity was of a different order; for both reasons sometimes cash couldn't buy you what you wanted. Relationships could be used to ensure that you had access to things that couldn't be gotten with cash.
(In a way we're almost there now in some small ways. Supply chain disruptions can mean that products are locally unavailable at any price; but if you happen to know a guy, sometimes you can still get it if you and he have the right relationship and there's a good or service he needs that you have.)
So what is an eel worth to a monk in the 14th century? Maybe he likes the eels, and wants to ensure a steady supply of them. If you went to the market you might find eels cheaper, but might not find them at all. This way he gets his eels first, and guaranteed, and that may be worth 'more' than any given eel's market price. (There are fully capitalist versions of that dynamic, too.)
I have a stick for Cornell....
Sadly, too, for my alma mater, Cornell remains the Grinnell of the east.
Eric Hines
I would guess that's not a stick of eels, Eric?
Grim, I agree, and he does talk a bit about that. I wonder if there is a more sophisticated way to understand value in medieval (or other quite different) economies.
I wonder if there is a more sophisticated way to understand value in medieval (or other quite different) economies.
Buying power, normalized for the differing economies. The trick is tech and social normalization. It's easy enough to compare what a day's labor can buy of what's available.What's available a part that's hard. The whole thing also would have to be limited to comparing social strata, too, since what a rich man can buy today is far different from what a rich man/aristocrat could buy and order produced from his serfs/serf equivalents then.
Eric Hines
It's not clear how to normalize these two economies, at least, it's not clear to me. A money economy allows things to be normalized through the medium of exchange, but with an economy that runs only partly via money, partly through barter, and partly through status and status connections (e.g., patronage networks), it's not clear to me that it would all be convertible to one thing.
It's also not clear to me that it wouldn't. I just don't see how. Of course, I haven't focused on economics much beyond reading a few books on the topic, and all of those dealt with the early modern and modern eras.
It's the sort of problem that Aristotle loves: how do you compare the value of apparently incomparable things? His answer from the Rhetoric isn't available, because no one has lived in both a Medieval economy and a modern one.
Value is a hard question even under the best of circumstances. Is an eel more valuable than an orange? Probably, if the standard is money: I don't know what an eel costs, or where I'd have to go to buy one, but I imagine it costs more than the dollar I'd need to pony up for a very nice orange. Yet to me an eel is worth much less than an orange, as I do not wish to eat an eel; and the dollar value oddly reflects that, too, because so many more Americans wish to eat oranges than eels that the supply has grown greater to such a degree that the price has come down.
So perversely, the higher dollar value is evidence for both the proposition that eels are more valuable to Americans than oranges; and also that they are less so.
...no one has lived in both a Medieval economy and a modern one.
Maybe some of us are about to get to.
Is an eel more valuable than an orange?
The currency "value" of either/both is misleading. The true relative value of an eel and of an orange is what a person is willing to give up, that's of value to him, and what the holder is willing to accept, that's of value to him. Currency is simply a more convenient index, and exchange medium, than, say, some fraction of a peck (I assume) of wheat. Or a ride into town on the desire-er's ox or wagon.
We can guess at how much labor goes into producing some amount of wheat, or some number of horseshoes, or some amount of tinkering to repair/produce a tin pan. We can guess at what gets traded for the eel or orange (assuming here, only exchanges between peasants). From that we can get at a guess of the relative values of eels and oranges. And of the pitchforks and torches used for getting after the lord.
Eric Hines
Well, strictly, oranges were probably more valuable in Medieval England; they'd have had to have been imported from Spain. The eels you could pull out of the local river.
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