Eels were once the most widely eaten fish in England, eaten in greater quantities than all the other fresh and sea fish combined. Before the drainage of the fens and marshes got going they were ubiquitous, in every stream and pond. In a Catholic country, before the Reformation, fish were needed every Friday and in Lent, and eels didn’t need to be preserved because they could be kept alive. Henry I loved eels, and Henry II gave his otter hunter a piece of property on the condition that he could drop in at any time for a feed of eels. Nobles ordered tens of thousands of eels for their feasts.
Before the drainage of the fens and marshes and wetlands they were ubiquitous, in every stream and pond. Healthy wetlands, where the crustaceans had not been killed by farm chemicals, could sometimes contain quite astonishing quantities of eels. A century ago eels made up 50% of the total fish by weight in European waterways. In a Catholic country, before the Reformation, fish were needed every Friday and throughout Lent, and eels didn’t need to be preserved because they could be kept alive, unlike sea fish which died and quickly spoiled before ice was available. (Eel and pie shops keep eels in a metal chest of shallow drawers, where water running down from the top keeps them alive until needed). Most places could get eels from local rivers and brooks when they wished. From about 1500 London, which outgrew local eel supplies, was served by Dutch eel-ships anchored in the Thames, with holds where eels could be kept alive, though these ships were usually banned whenever we were at war with the Dutch. The demand for eels gradually shrank after the Reformation until it was mainly a London market, selling jellied eels in the pubs and eels in liquor in the eel-and-pie shops.
The importation of eels goes back at least to 1393 when the king cut tariffs on eels being imported to London to encourage merchants to bring eels ‘from over sea, where they are abundant, to London where they are dear’. The last Dutch eel ships anchored in the Thames in 1936, but in my time as an eel fisherman Dutch merchants with vivier trucks were still involved in the eel trade, travelling on regular routes throughout Europe to collect eels. My buyer travelled through England and Ireland one week and France and Spain the next, and it is one of my great regrets that I did take the opportunity to take a camera and ride shotgun with him on one of those trips.
In modern times most of the London market was supplied from Loch Neagh in Northern Ireland, where a very successful fishermen’s co-operative was set up by a local Catholic priest. Gradually eels, which had been important enough almost to rival roast beef as part of the English identity, mentioned by Shakespeare more often than any other fish (though no doubt closely followed by cods), became a Cockney thing and the rest of the country forgot about them, except for a few professional eel men mainly in the Fens and around Sedgemoor and other watery places. The rest of us forgot about them, or took them for granted.
Eels have always been vulnerable, threatened by drainage schemes, and lately by farm chemicals in the countryside and industrial chemicals in ports and estuaries. In the 1980s they suddenly went into a major decline, with populations literally decimated, and we took notice of them once more.
Eels are very singular fish, and there are features of their biology that make conservation anything but easy. The adult ‘silver’ eels swim across the Atlantic to breed in the Sargasso Sea, and the young eels or elvers swim up whatever stream or river they come across when the Gulf Stream brings them fairly randomly across the Atlantic to all the coasts of Europe.
Salmon usually return to the river where they hatched. If you catch the salmon returning to your river to breed, you can strip the eggs and milt, rear the young fish in a hatchery, and when you release them in your river there is every chance that they will try, as adult salmon, to come back to breed there. You can take local action to increase the numbers in your river, regardless of what is happening in other rivers.
You cannot do that with eels, because they breed in the sea. You can try to catch the elvers and support them in some way, such as taking them to a lake where the conditions are favourable, but this will not affect the numbers of elvers coming back to swim up your river every spring. If the elvers fail for some reason there is little you can do. It has not been possible to breed eels in captivity, in spite of the best efforts of the Japanese. While salmon have separate populations unique to their rivers or catchments, eels belong to one homogenous population. Elvers returning to the Severn could be descendants of eels from the Loire or from Lake Balaton. So if the eels fail, it is a European problem and needs a European solution. Nothing else will work, and even that may not.
When the eel population seemed to be in freefall in the 1980s it was very fortunate that the European Union was able to take action. The UK’s laissez-fare attitude to the hyper-exploitation of elvers in the Severn, the Wye and the Perret would surely have led to the near extinction of eels in those rivers many years ago, were it not that elvers from the whole continental population kept being washed into our estuaries, elvers born of eels from regions less thoughtlessly exploited. I doubt if the UK would have responded adequately to the eel decline of the 1980s if we had not been members of the EU at that time.
The cause of the eel decline is not known. Eels face many threats, as do all wild creatures, but eels were particularly damaged in the 1980s by a swim-bladder parasite of the Japanese eel, which arrived in Europe and jumped species because international trade in eels lacked adequate regulation. The Japanese eels had co-evolved with the parasite, and the European eels had not, which made them more vulnerable. They were weakened by the parasites, and it was thought that individuals swimming over the Atlantic to breed would fail if they were weakened by the parasite or their swim bladders were damaged, making depth regulation difficult. Since for some unknown reason silver eels returning to breed in the Sargasso swim near the surface during the day and at a depth of 3000m at night, swim bladder damage seemed like a good explanation for the eel decline, and European fisheries scientists and officials concluded that all we could do was to encourage the small numbers of eels we still had by removing barriers in rivers, and regulating the fisheries for eels and elvers and the trade in elvers to Japan and Korea for the eel farms and the sushi trade. Commercial eel fishing is now severely restricted; there will be a closed season for six months this year, for example. Elver fishing is limited in numbers and their use is restricted; two thirds of them have to be sold for re-stocking, and they may not be sold outside the European Union. The EU brought in comprehensive legislation in 2007 to proactively protect the eel and its habitats, requiring member states to adopt eel management plans, which resulted in the UK regulations enacted in 2009.
We have struggled to understand the biology and life cycle of the eel for centuries, and they are still mysterious. Just as we were convincing ourselves that the parasite was a major problem, it was discovered that the American eel, a separate but very closely related species which also breeds in the Sargasso Sea, had suffered a parallel decline although it had not been infected with the swim-bladder parasite. At the same time quite substantial increases in the numbers of elvers swimming up rivers on both the east and the west coasts of the UK have been reported.
So the decline remains mysterious, the eel continues to perplex, and to be threatened. No matter what we do in the UK the measures taken across Europe will improve the chances of the whole population of which ‘our’ eels are a part; our eels will be protected by the EU even if our eel regulations are binned in the bonfire of European legislation the government of the UK is planning. The UK government may well not be efficient enough to carry out this threat, but if they are they may not be efficient enough to recognise the unique importance of the eel legislation and retain it, or to enact some supposedly ‘sovereign’ UK legislation to replace it. So eels in the UK are potentially uniquely threatened by our exit from the EU and yet, paradoxically, uniquely still protected by the EU even if we ditch the regulations, which would be deeply regrettable.
"Henry II gave his otter hunter a piece of property on the condition that he could drop in at any time for a feed of eels."
This story has a familiar bleakness but I'm grateful for this one sweet thing. I hope it wasn't an awkward occasion when the king dropped by.