The Elver Wars

When I became a commercial eel fisherman there was no apparent risk to eel stocks. The elvers  - tiny transparent ‘glass eels’ - turned up in the Severn Estuary every spring, part of their ancient journey across the Atlantic to the wetlands of Europe, and there seemed no end to them. Local men around the lower Wye and Severn fished elvers with lave nets, as they had done for hundreds of years, though where the elvers had once been food for the poor or a seasonal delicacy for riverside communities, they had now become a serious source of income. Elver merchants with vivier trucks and wads of cash parked up at night along the rivers, and then sold the elvers on to eel farmers in the Far East who fattened them up for sushi and suchlike delicacies.

These kinds of vernacular fisheries, if controlled at all, have usually been regulated in the simplest ways possible. You could only use a draft net for salmon in daylight, for example, on the haphazard assumption that enough fish would get past at night to maintain stocks. The eels swam up the middle of the river as long as the tide ran in, so the elver men on their bankside ‘tumps’ could only catch them when the tide was going out, when they moved to the edge of the river to get out of the current and take advantage of the back-current going up-river near the shore.

At first the excitement of fishing rivers and lakes and learning about eels absorbed me. I loved to be out on the big lakes as the sun rose, watching a young peregrine trying to hunt black-headed gulls, or the big carp spawning among the low-hanging willow branches. But as I fished the big eels in these lakes I began to be concerned that so many elvers were being taken out of the ecosystem, without any apparent monitoring of stocks or responsible concern for them either as a resource or as a species with an important place in freshwater ecology. The elver men were seen as just fishing for beer money, eel men like me were insignificant in the economy, and eels were mostly eaten in east-end pubs and eel-and-pie shops.  There were no vested interests looking to protect eels. And our ecological awareness at that time was not sufficient for the authorities to concern themselves with the importance of eels in ecosystems, where the springtime breeding of fish and water-birds coincided with the arrival of the elvers as a food source for hungry young creatures. Elvers could potentially bring nutrients back from the deep oceans to power freshwater ecosystems, just as the returning salmon eaten by bears brought nutrients back to the Salmon Forests of North-West America,

This uneasiness led me to contact one of the elver buyers, a Severnside fish merchant with a lifetime knowledge of the freshwater fisheries of the river, who had dealt for years in the salmon caught in the putcher ranks and all the other traditional fishing instruments. He shipped elvers half a kilo at a time in polystyrene boxes, sent by air freight to the Far East. He was making a fortune, I supposed, and was perhaps a little guilty, and he got in the habit of calling me whenever he had small quantities of elvers that he said were maybe not worth taking down to Heathrow. He would sell me these elvers at a reduced rate, though that still meant me parting with hundreds of pounds each time, and I would take the elvers to lakes where I had been fishing, or maybe to Llangorse Lake, where I ran the silver eel trap. Each tray contained a couple of thousand almost transparent elvers. They had tiny red hearts and dark threads of nerves running down where their spines would be, and two pinprick eyes.  I would wade out from the shore among the rushes and let each tray slowly fill with lake water and watch them wriggle out and disappear, almost as transparent as the waters of the lakes. I could enjoy the belief that my fishing was not exploitative because I was restocking, while also hoping that at some time in the future I might catch some of the adult eels.

I am glad to be able to say that I stopped making my living from fishing eels before the population was known to be in decline. I had become so fascinated by eels, with a biology still containing unsolved puzzles, that when I started hearing about the eel decline I found it so upsetting that I avoided mention of it whenever possible. More and more often I had to switch off the radio because I couldn’t bear to listen. I became increasingly concerned that the fishery did not seem to have been properly regulated. And I have been intrigued, in the light of the inadequate protection of the eel even as we entered an era of supposed ecological awareness, to discover that elver fishing was regulated and even forbidden at earlier periods of our history.

Eels, elvers and lampreys have always been important on the River Severn. For centuries the city of Gloucester sent the monarch a lamprey pie at Christmas. King John was not alone in his interest in eels and lampreys. Edward I decreed various price controls, which set the value of a ‘stick’ of 25 eels at 2d. Henry VIII banned the taking of elvers for ten years around 1533, and Elizabeth I made this ban permanent, which is quite curious, because she was no protector of wildlife. In her reign the vermin laws were enacted, that required church vestry committees in every parish to make payments to anyone bringing them evidence of having killed almost any living creature that was seen as of no use to man, which in an era before awareness of the interconnectedness of ecological systems, meant pretty much all creatures other than those hunted by the aristocracy.

James Knapp, writing in Gloucestershire in 1829, wrote:

‘We still continue here that very ancient custom of giving parish rewards for the destruction of various creatures in the denomination of vermin. …  An item passed in one of our late churchwarden’s accounts was “for seventeen dozen tomtit heads”. In what evil hour and for what crime this poor little bird could have incurred the anathema of a parish is difficult to conjecture.’

Other monarchs also continued this rather intriguing concern with protecting eels. Charles II, for example, introduced a 5-shilling fine and confiscation of nets for anyone caught fishing elvers. From a modern perspective this royal interest in eels may seem odd. We tend to see eels as part of a working-class tradition and view eating jellied eels in the same light as we view heading from the pub to the kebab shop. But in the past eels were an extraordinarily important fish. In medieval England people ate more eels than all other freshwater and marine species combined. This was partly because eels were once so common, in a much more watery landscape that had not yet been drained for agricultural ‘improvement’, and they were also one of the few palatable freshwater fish. There were always eels nearby, and they were much more available to people than marine fish that do not travel well in a country with poor roads. And in the days when England was a Catholic country, fish were essential as part of the diet on Fridays and during Lent. Meat was thought to enflame carnal appetites, and a cold fishy diet was believed particularly suitable during Lent, a period of abstinence.

In the peasant society of medieval England most people lived outside the cash economy, and often significant payments like rents were paid in eels. Eels could be salted, dried and smoked and would keep for several months. One source states that 540,000 eels were being used as currency every year by the end of the 11th century.  At one stage Wisbech paid its rent to Ely at the rate of 14,000 eels per year. The single largest Domesday rent came from the village of Harmston, in Lincolnshire, whose residents owed the Earl Hugh of Chester 75,000 eels annually. The monks of Ely were paid an annual rent of 27,150 eels by the holders of certain rights on Whittlesey Mere; such evidence suggests that the actual numbers of eels used as currency nationwide must have been huge. The Domesday Book lists hundreds of examples of payments of eel-rents, and like most currencies eels had various denominations, 25 eels making 1 stick, and 10 sticks a bind.

Much of the eel trade was in the fat mature eels, the ‘silver eels’ caught as they migrated to the ocean every autumn, and most of these would have been caught at eel traps incorporated in watermills, which tended to work milling the grain harvest in the autumn, when the waters that drove the corn mills also brought the eels down river. Many a miller would have spent nights watching his mill while also keeping an eye on the eels being caught in his eel trap. Every mill had an eel-trap, and there were mills in series on every river. Rents for watermills were often paid in eels. Domesday lists the rent for Bottisham Mill in Cambridgeshire as 1000 sticks of eels. The rent for Datchet mill in Buckinghamshire was 2000 sticks.

Eels were triply important, as a food source, because of their place in the observances of the Catholic Church, and as a form of currency, which must explain their special protection in a world where most animals were seen either as game or vermin. This protection continued until the rise of the cash economy and of Protestantism made them less important, and in 1778 new legislation permitted the taking of elvers for household consumption but not for sale, and elvers for breakfast with a bit of bacon was now a legal as well as a local delicacy. This continued along the banks of the lower Severn as part of country life until the 1860s, when fishing for elvers was again banned as a result of the Salmon River catchment boards set up under the 1865 Salmon Act, and the 1873 Salmon Fisheries Act.  Section 15 of this act stated ‘That no person between the first day of January and the 24th day of June shall hang, fix or use in any salmon river any basket net or trap whatsoever for catching eels (or the fry of eels) or place in any inland water any device whatsoever to catch or obstruct any fish descending the stream.’   It seems pretty clear that this renewal of the ban on elver fishing was for the benefit of the aristocracy, who were often the owners of commercial salmon fisheries and of sporting salmon-fishing beats on the newly fashionable sporting estates. They were ostensibly interested in protecting the salmon smolts migrating out of the rivers to grow to maturity in the ocean before returning, and in preventing them from getting caught in eel traps. It is also likely that they were keen to discourage working men from lurking around the river banks at night in case they also poached salmon, and the ban on elver fishing may thus have had more to do with protecting salmon than preserving eel stocks.

This new prohibition led to much discontent around the Severn, especially among the dock workers of Gloucester, whose work unloading grain was seasonal and who depended on the elver fishing in spring for food and for income. They were a new class of industrial workers who were not obliged to defer to the aristocracy, and many of them defied the new regulations, resulting in so many incidents and prosecutions that the phrase ‘Elver Wars’ was coined. Eventually, after many hotly contested court cases, an elver fishing season was introduced, which lasted until 1935, when the legislation was repealed and there was no limit to elver fishing, a situation that continued until very recently, until the decline in eel numbers could no longer be ignored.

At last, and too late, in 2007 the EU introduced regulations prohibiting the sale of elvers from the UK to countries outside Europe, and stipulating that elvers can only be fished with hand-held nets between the 15th of February and the 25th of May. Following this legislation the illegal export of elvers from the UK to the Far East became the most serious wildlife crime in the world, in terms of the number of individual animals trafficked, and it is highly likely that this is still the case, though unfortunately the smugglers aren’t providing any statistics or filling in their catch return forms.

The River Severn, because of its position and the funnel shape of its estuary, received a high proportion of the elvers migrating over the Atlantic, and before the general destruction of our biodiversity they provided a richness that literally translated them into a form of currency. Yet once they were no longer part of our currency we showed little regard for this richness even when in catastrophic decline. If we had not been in the EU it is very doubtful whether our politicians would have cared enough about the eel decline to act decisively, or whether the defunded Environment Agency would have been able to take any active control of the situation.  Environmental concerns have been seen, in David Cameron’s words, as so much ‘green crap’, by the very class who as landowners have benefitted most from ‘agricultural improvements’ which have impoverished ecosystems such as those which in the past supported such huge numbers of eels, and all the other wildlife associated with that richness. It has been possible to impoverish whole systems, such as our fens and wetlands, precisely because it was generally the landowners who made money out of changes that impoverished everybody else.