Financially as slippery as an eel !

 One of the very few crumbs of comfort in maturing age is that you apparently need less sleep ! This brings a need to try all manner of things to fall back into the land of nod in the wee small hours.

For me it seems that reading is the soporific answer ! In this context I've ended up reading some absolute nonsense in the hope it will tilt me back into sleep.

The latest episode was in a history article written about the method of payment for goods and services in the 11th century in England.

In 1086, when the Normans undertook a study to figure out how people lived in the countryside they had conquered and how much it was worth, known as the Domesday Study, they collected more mentions of rents being paid in eels than any other in-kind tax. When the survey was conducted, the English likely owed some 500,000 eels in taxes to landlords around that time. Eel rents paid between the 10th and 17th centuries, and using the British Archives’ medieval currency conversion to calculate what eel rents could mean in today’s dollars. It is estimated at one point that an Amazon prime membership, for example, would cost between 150-300 eels.

Domesday records show payments in pigs, in fish, in ale, and in many other types of food.  Of these in-kind payments, the one that stands out most to modern viewers is likely the eel-rents.  This is in part because, in Europe and the Americas, we have generally moved away from eating eel on anything like a regular basis. Consequently, the idea of eels having any type of social or economic value appears less normal to us the thought of other animals or commodities having negotiable value.  We still eat pigs and drink ale.  But the eel-rents also stand out for the sometimes excessive numbers of animals at play — the village of Harmston, for example, owed the Earl Hugh 75,000 eels per year, and fishermen in Wisbech needed to pay various local monasteries a combined total of almost 35,000 per year.  In the absence of actual coins could you get an overdraft of "Conger Eels" ?

Jellied Eels being a delicacy in certain areas of London makes you wonder why they (Londoners) turn their nose up at other regional delicacies such as Haggis !

Dear God let me get back to sleep !!!