The Book of Eels

Across the Channel, the English yielded nothing in their enthusiasm. Parson Woodforde of Weston Longville in Norfolk recorded in his diary his keen appreciation of the occasional ‘fine string of eels’ from his local miller, and would have them stewed in milk or rolled in seasoned flour and fried in clarified butter. Another clergyman of literary inclination, Richard Barham, author of the Ingoldsby Legends, had firm views:

If you chance to be partial to eels

then – credo experto – trust one who has tried – have them spitch-cock’d or stewed – they’re too oily when fried.

Spitch-cocking (or spatch-cocking) is the Anglo-Saxon method of grilling, in which the eel is split lengthways, and the backbone removed, the two halves then being placed over or under the heat. A more intricate version has long been practised in Japan, where it is known as kabayaki. The classic mode of preparation requires that the eel be pinned through the head – alive – to a wooden board, slit open along the back with one cut, opened out for the backbone and guts to be removed, then cut into twelve-centimetre lengths. Bamboo or metal skewers are threaded through the flesh to restrain it from curling when cooked. Boiling water is poured over the fillet, after which it is lightly steamed, then grilled over charcoal, the grilling being interrupted three times for the meat to be dipped in a soy sauce.

The passion of the Japanese for this delicacy is unbounded. The first written record of kabayaki dates back to the thirteenth century, and the eel occupies a place of enormous importance in the complex relationship between the Japanese and their food. The standard book on the subject, Isao Matsui’s The Eel, published in 1972, runs to 737 pages, of which more than a hundred are devoted to eel dishes, the eel in literature, religion and legend, and other cultural associations. It is reckoned that today more than a hundred thousand tons of eel are consumed annually in Japan – ten times as much as in all the other eel countries of the world put together. The scale of this demand, and the inability of the long-established Japanese eel-farming sector to meet it, has promoted an explosive growth in the international trade in live eels, some aspects of which will be examined later.

The Japanese fascination with the eel continues to extend far beyond the pleasure it provides skewered and grilled. Shohei Imamura’s film The Eel, which was joint winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival in 1997, is a dark, enigmatic reflection on that fascination, in which the feelings of the protagonist for his pet eel act as a counterpoise to other forces leading him to murder and redemption. It is difficult to imagine any European or American director of Imamura’s stature choosing to occupy himself with a celluloid meditation on a creature so lacking in conventional box-office appeal.

THREE By diverse means

The men who caught the eels to satisfy the great and the greedy generally kept quiet about their ways and means. Their traces have to be dug for in the mud left by floods, sifted from ancient and unreliable chronicles, ferreted out from the documentation accumulated in dusty heaps as human society acquired the habit of minuting its mundane transactions. They do not amount to much: a sieve-full of old fish bones, a scattering of flint flakes from prehistoric eel spears, the record of dealings between the monastery’s financial obedientiary and fisherfolk required to pay their dues in scaly form. But they tell some sort of a story.

Several millennia before Aristotle took out his pen of split reed and scratched the first observations and speculations about the lives of eels on his papyrus sheet, men who lived by water had worked out what they needed to know and had fashioned ways to lay hold of an elusive but reliable source of nourishment. They knew that through the summer eels fed and might be caught on bait; that with the coming of autumn they made their way downriver; that in winter they hid in the upper layer of mud where they dozed.

A glimmering of how some of our prehistoric ancestors lived their short, arduous lives has been provided by archaeological finds around the northern end of what, to this day, remains the most abundant wild eel fishery in Europe, Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. These are some of the earliest known human settlements, going back to the time when the sun first rose on something resembling communal life, almost nine thousand years ago. The oldest is at Mount Sandel, situated on the lower Bann, the river that connects Lough Neagh to the sea and acts as a gateway for inward and outward migration.

At Mount Sandel, at Toome Bay – where the Bann leaves the lough – and at one of the river crossing points, Newferry, quantities of fish bones have been unearthed together with flakes from implements of stone, bone and flint surmised to have been fishing spears or parts of fish traps. These fragments were recovered from deposits of ash contained within layers of diatomaceous earth laid down by the seasonal flooding of the areas along the river between 6000 and 1000 BC. In 1951 a worked wooden harpoon was found at Toome and later dated to 5725 BC. More revealing was the discovery, between Newferry and Toome, of a line of wooden stakes connected by wickerwork – unmistakably a four-thousand-year-old precursor of the skeagh, or fishing weirs, still used on the Bann to intercept eels.

It is likely that these Mesolithic hunters moved up and down between the lough and the sea, occupying and deserting camps according to the dictates of the seasons. There is evidence that Mount Sandel was used in autumn and winter, while Newferry would have been uninhabitable in winter because of flooding. Around 3000 BC the first Neolithic farmers arrived in the area and the two groups probably coexisted in passable harmony for some time, the older concentrating on the specialised demands of hunting and fishing, trading their captures for tools of polished stone, pots and other modern conveniences manufactured by the newcomers. Gradually the distinctions between them would have faded anyway. And it is inconceivable that anyone – be they Mesolithic, Neolithic or the Celtic-speaking Iron Age pastoralists who came later – would have neglected the inexhaustible food source represented by the salmon and eels which swarmed up and down the Bann.

In Continental Europe, the exploitation of the eel would have evolved on much the same lines. Remains of prehistoric traps – in the form of stakes and woven fences – have been found on the Danish coast where the silver eels exit into the North Sea. Pieces of spears made of bone and horn have turned up all over Scandinavia and as far east as Poland. In central France, close to the Vézère, one of the main tributaries of the Dordogne, a carved cylinder of stone was found in the cave of La Madeleine, showing a human, two horses, and a creature which looks a lot more like an eel than anything else. Wherever our prognathous forbears found themselves beside still or moving water, they would have worked out that eels were good to eat, plentiful, and ever-present; and would have made nets, pots, traps and hooks to catch them.

In general the interest of the ancient scribes in the eel was biological and culinary. The one authority to show an interest in how the fish was caught, rather than in the mystery of its origins or qualities on the table, was a Roman of Praeneste, Claudius Aelianus, who, in the second century AD, compiled a collection of contemporary curiosities entitled De Natura Animalium. This included an account of a queer method of eel fishing supposedly employed on the river Eretaenus (where they are ‘of very great size and far fatter than those from any other place’):

The fisherman sits upon a rock jutting out …or else upon a tree which a fierce wind has uprooted and thrown down close to the bank …The eel fisherman seats himself and taking the intestines of a freshly slaughtered lamb, he lowers one end into the water and keeps it turning in the eddies; the other end he holds in his hands, and a piece of reed, the length of a sword handle, has been inserted into it. The food does not escape the notice of the eels, for they delight in this intestine. The first eel approaches …and fastening its curved, hook-like teeth, which are hard to disentangle, continues to leap up in its efforts to drag it down. When the fisherman realises from the agitation that the eel is held fast, he puts the reed to his mouth and blows down it with all his might, inflating the intestine very considerably. And the downflow of breath distends and swells it. And so the air descends into the eel, fills its head, fills its windpipe and stops the creature’s breathing. It suffocates …and this is a daily occurrence, and many are the eels caught by many a fisherman.

Aelian was a notoriously credulous soul, but it is worth pointing out that his book also contains a reference to fly fishing for trout, as practised by the Macedonians, which subsequent investigation has shown to be – almost certainly – authentic and reliable. Whether the same can be said of his eccentric and laborious eel-fishing technique is, perhaps, open to doubt.

After Aelian, a literary curtain descends for several centuries. Fishing for eels by more efficient means than suffocating them through a hollow reed certainly continued. For instance, archaeologists digging in the remains of the town of Oldenburg in Schleswig-Holstein – which stood beside a lake – found that more than half the fish bones thrown out by the residents between 650 and 900 AD came from eels. It is a matter of regret that no one troubled to record how the fishermen of Oldenburg – or anywhere else – came by their eels, but the silence is characteristic of the times. It was broken only by that indispensable if erratic illuminator of Anglo-Saxon ways, the monk Bede of Jarrow, who credited Saint Wilfrid (or Wilfrith) – at various times Abbot of Ripon, and Bishop of York, Hexham and Leicester – with having saved the South Saxons from famine in the late seventh century: ‘The people had no skill in fish-catching except only for eels …The Bishop’s men used the eel nets …and with the help of Divine Grace caught 300 fish.’

It is to Bede that we owe the traditional derivation of the name of that ancient centre of virtue and learning situated in the heart of the eel’s watery realm in eastern England: ‘Ely is in the province of the East Angles, a county of about 600 families in the nature of an island enclosed with marshes or with waters, and therefore it takes its name from the great plenty of eels taken in those marshes’.

Anyone who has read Waterland, Graham Swift’s black and tortuous Fenland tale of love, betrayal, incest and madness, will have obtained some idea of the entwining relationship between those who lived beside those still, green, weedy waterways and the slippery creatures hidden within them. The smell of the place, of mud, decomposing reeds and weeds, and fish, which suffuses Swift’s narrative would have been a lot stronger in Bede’s time and over the succeeding centuries, before the marshes were drained and brought to heel; when the lives of the people of the Fens were lived on, in and surrounded by water, and they owed their obeisance to their ecclesiastical overlords in the abbeys and monasteries which had arisen on the few knobs of dry land. There is a roll of their names in one of the early texts, the Coucher Book of Ely: ‘Henry son of Osbert de Walpole, Hugh Wade, Henry Dale, Moyses, Roger Fot, John Gubernator …14,500 eels paid on the first Sunday in Lent.’

They are good, sturdy Fenland names, men adept at spearing, netting and trapping the eels that slithered in such profusion across the soft mud at the bottom of those countless ditches and dykes and meres and infinitely slow-moving rivers. There are more, listed in the Ramsey Cartulary, the foundation charter granted in 970 by King Edgar: Alfgar of Hilgay and Hugh of Wiggenhall, altogether ‘seven fishermen and their seven assistants and seven little ships’. The charter mentions among the properties owing dues, the manor of Welles ‘which was of profit to the abbey solely on account of its render of eels; 20 fishermen gave 60,000 eels every year for the use of the brethren.’ The monks of Thorney Abbey were similarly well provided for, Bishop Aetholwold having endowed them – at a cost of twenty-one pounds – with the fisheries ‘surrounding the villages of Wyllan and Eolum …and 16,000 eels were captured there each year.’

Bishop Aetholwold may well have been alert to the merits of eels, since – as a young man, before his elevation to the see of Winchester – he had been dean at Glastonbury, which was the greatest of all the religious houses and commanded another eel stronghold, the equally flat and damp Somerset Levels. He was a strict and unbending Benedictine, and forcibly imposed Benedictine doctrines – among them a powerful interdict against the eating of meat – on a number of institutions. Such a prohibition would have been less burdensome at Glastonbury than in some other places. As early as 670, the monastery’s abbot, Beorhtwald, was granted by King Genwalh of Wessex the rights to the fishing at Meare on the dark and torpid Brue river. Some time later a building known as the Fish House was built at Meare, whose walls still stand. Glastonbury’s chief fisherman resided there, organising a regular supply of eels, tench, carp, pike and roach for the monks. For seven hundred years and more Glastonbury reigned supreme among the religious institutions of England, until Thomas Cromwell contrived the execution of its last abbot, Richard Whiting – ‘The Abbot of Glastonbury is to be tried at Glastonbury and also executed there with his complycys …see the evidence be well sorted and the indictments well drawn,’ read his directions on the matter – and the noble buildings and their treasures were wrecked and looted and lost for ever. Whiting’s head was placed on the abbey’s walls; and the quarters of his body were displayed over the gates of Wells, Bath, Ilchester and Bridgwater. There would be no more dishes of eels for the monks of Glastonbury, nor for those of neighbouring Muchelney and Athelney, whose charters also referred to marshland fisheries yielding eels by the thousand.

Long before Glastonbury fell victim to a complaisant king and his hatchet man, strict observance of St Benedict’s ban on meat-eating had faltered and faded away. But by then the taste for freshwater fish, and the methods of catching and preparing them, had been thoroughly absorbed into the fabric of life, with the Church – as so often making a virtue of self-interest – providing the organising impetus. However avid those monks of Fenland and Somerset may have been for their portions of eel stewed and boiled, they cannot possibly have consumed them in the numbers recorded in those dusty old scrolls. It follows that they, or – more likely – the officers of the monastery, traded in them.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the technology developed on the Continent for the construction and maintenance of stews and fishponds was greedily embraced by the piscivorous aristocracy and religious orders of England. The principles were laid down in the mid-sixteenth century by the learned Bishop Janus Dubravius of Olmutz, in his De Piscinis et Piscium, but were certainly in circulation much earlier than that. All over England holes were dug in the grounds of princely houses, abbeys and monasteries, filled with water, and stocked with carp, tench, bream, pike and eels. Prior William More of Worcester left a detailed record of his care of monastic stewponds at several locations. Between 1518 and 1524 he put six thousand eels into the ponds – no minor enterprise, given that they had to be caught somewhere and transported live.

In general, however, the eel was so abundant and ubiquitous that it was much less trouble to catch it in its chosen natural habitat than to raise it in captivity. The records of this endeavour are sparse and, in themselves, not enormously exciting. The remains of a Saxon fish weir have been dug up at Colwick, on the Trent in Nottinghamshire, which is assumed to have been used to trap migrating eels, since the Domesday Survey refers to all twenty-two ‘piscaria’ on the Trent being for eels. The Luttrell Psalter, which dates from the fourteenth century, shows basketwork traps of green willow or osier placed in a mill race to catch silver eels. (They were known as kiddles, possibly the origin of the phrase ‘a pretty kettle of fish’.) Evesham Abbey was but one of many monastic institutions which maintained such traps as of right. Its stations, at two mills on the Avon, are said to have yielded two thousand eels a year.

Men used bait to catch eels in the summer and intercepted them with fixed traps in the autumn. They also speared them whenever the opportunity presented itself but mainly in the winter, when fresh fish were hard to come by, and the eels had retired to holes in the mud, where their heads might be spotted by the practised eye and their bodies either impaled on a single prong, or – more often – jammed between two or three serrated prongs arranged like a fork. A late-fifteenth-century manuscript of heraldic bearings, Shirley’s Book, displayed the Harding arms with a chevron gules between three eel spears. John Guillim’s A Display of Heraldrie, which appeared in 1610, described how spears were used:

…for the taking of eeles, which being (for the most part) in the mudde cannot be taken with Net or any other Ginne: which gave occasion to the invention of this Instrument, a long staffe being set in the socket thereof, and so to strike into the depth of the mudde and by means of the Barbes of this Instrument they detain as many as come within the danger of.

In the previous century, the first great English antiquary, John Leland, referred to Langport market in Sedgemoor being full of ‘peckeles, as they call them, because they take them in those waters by pecking an eel speare in them when they lie in their beds.’

The method was employed all over Europe until comparatively recently. Eel spears were still being made in the small Danish town of Skyum within living memory; and Dr Christopher Moriarty records how commercial eel spearing continued on the mudflats at Rosslare, in south-east Ireland, into the 1960s, when tidal changes resulted in the eel grounds being buried by sand. An account of spearing on Ullswater, in north-west England, is contained in James Clarke’s Survey of the Lakes, published in the late eighteenth century:

Two or more persons go in a boat on a summer morning, from three till six o’clock. One gently moves the boat by the margins of the lake, whilst the other looks. He no sooner sees one than he sticks it with an eel spear and by this method great numbers are sometimes caught.

A rather more vivid description is found in a book called The Practice of Angling Particularly as Regards Ireland, which was published in 1845. It was the work of James O’Gorman, a well-known resident of the town of Ennis, of whom the Limerick Chronicle reported on his death that ‘he was the most expert angler in Glare and a devoted admirer of the gentle Izaak Walton.’ O’Gorman saw the locals at work on a nearby lake:

When the rushes grow up there is a regular flotilla of spearmen. A man stands on his bundle, poking before him with his long-handled spear. When he takes an eel he bites his head between his teeth, and then strings it up with a needle on a long cord. Anything so hideous as the appearance of these fellows, their faces begrimed with blood and dirt, can hardly be imagined.

‘These fellows’: that is as close as we get to knowing them. They were Irish bog peasants, marshmen, fenmen, men of the waterside, plying their skills in remote, damp places, at dusk, through the night and at dawn, keeping themselves to themselves, not caring much to share their secrets with outsiders, certainly not the sort to take a pen and write it down. As Andrew Herd has pointed out in his The History of Fly Fishing, we bookish types inevitably view the early development of ‘country pursuits’, whether it be fishing, bee-keeping, wildfowling, hunting or apple-growing, through the distorting lens of books. We are apt to forget that, in a world nine tenths of whose population could not read or write and to whom the printed word meant and mattered nothing, the process of discovering, learning, advancing, and refining was taking place out there in the field, far away from the desks and fireplaces of literary folk.

Thus, men who lived by rivers with trout in them and found they were good to eat, discovered at least two thousand years ago that they might be conveniently caught on a tuft of fur and feather arranged to look like an edible insect, with a hook concealed beneath it. When Aelian described how those Macedonians of old lured their speckled fish, he was not reporting a technological breakthrough but merely dropping in, by accident, on an established tradition. In the succeeding centuries, men – shepherds, woodcutters, herdsmen, pastoralists, poachers, charcoal burners – went on catching trout on artificial flies, all the time refining the technique. They did so, not to amuse themselves, but as one small part of their strategy for survival – a strategy which did not extend to sitting down by the light of a candle at the end of another long, hard day, and taking up pen, ink and parchment to make a record for the enlightenment of generations to come.

They were silent, these fishermen, for centuries. But they fished, cast their flies in the mountain streams of the Balkans, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and on the slower, weedier lowland rivers – anywhere trout thrived and ate insects. As they did so, they made their traditions, their own unwritten folk history. Eventually the first stirrings of a European civilisation were felt, and society began to aspire to something beyond conquest, defending itself and feeding itself, and became alive to the notion that there might be more to life than merely the striving to continue it. Music, painting and literature burst forth. Games, played in one form or another for centuries, were celebrated and codified. And someone, charmed by the way fly fishermen contrived to catch trout, wrote some of it down; and some time later Caxton’s fellow pioneer of the printed book, Wynkyn de Worde, attached the anonymous Treatyse of Fysshynge with the Angle onto the end of a hotchpotch of other texts covering the amusements available in the countryside. From that publication, at the end of the fifteenth century, subsequent writers dated the birth of the ‘history’ of angling.

The humble eel received short shrift in the Treatyse, being labelled as ‘a quasy [i.e. liable to case nausea] fysshe, a ravenour and a devourer of the brode [fry] of fysshe.’ As a consequence of these shortcomings, the eel is bracketed with the pike as ‘behynde all other to angle’, the one method – grudgingly suggested – being to drop a ‘grete angyll twytch or mennow’ [earthworm or minnow] into a hole and await developments. Thus, from the start, the eel was expelled to the ghetto of the piscatory world, as being wholly unworthy of the notice of educated men in search of sport. The eel was left to those who had learned from their fathers, as their fathers had from their fathers, about its usefulness. This extended far beyond its role as food. From its skin they made hinges for doors, membranes for filtering liquids, and flexures for flails. The skin had protective qualities, too. The men and women of the Fens made garters of it and swore that they helped keep off the ague, a constant threat in those dank climes. Strips of skin were dried in the sun, greased with fat, placed in a linen bag stuffed with thyme, lavender and marsh mint, then buried under the peat for the summer, before being dug up, greased again, polished with a smooth stone and declared ready to be tied around Fenland legs.

Thomas Boosey, in his Anecdotes of Fish and Fishing, quotes another, more specialised application for the eel:

If you would make some notorious drunkard to loathe and abhor his beastly vice, and for ever after to hate the drinking of wine, put an eel, alive, into a wide-mouthed bottle with a cover, having in it such a quantity of wine as may suffice to suffocate and strangle the eel; which done, take out the dead eel and let the party whom you would have reclaimed, not knowing hereof, drink of that wine.