You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.

Yuess what, well, what's that mango?

Do you know that people in medieval England used to pay their rent with eels?

I don't know why anyone would want multiple eels, much less accept them as a form of payment.

What is this all about?

Well, this was back before coins were widely available, when most people just settle their debts with in kind payments.

They usually traded things like eggs or corn or ale, but one of the most highly prized tender was smoked eels, and the long snakelike fish was super plentiful in British rivers back then, so for a stretch of about five hundred years they were caught and traded as makeshift currency, and in fact, by the end of the eleventh century, more than half a million eels were being paid as rent in England each year, specifically and rent so that you get the first.

Of the month and you could just send your landlord a sack of dead eels and they wouldn't kick you out of your place.

More than that, they would be thrilled about it, because eels were a tasty and nutritious food source, and they were especially nice to have on hand during Lent, which is when practicing Catholics would abstained from eating meat.

But if a landlord didn't want to eat all of their earnings, they could always just use the eels to pay their own debts instead, and the fish were desirable enough that just about anyone would accept them as payment.

I do imagine the turnaround time has to be pretty quick on these, right, Like, I'm not sure what the shelf life is for eel.

I mean that is true, but in most cases the fish would be salted and smoked and dried so that they could be swapped around and stored more easily, and for added portability, they were typically tied together into bundles of sticks or twenty five eels apiece.

You know, this really does feel like one of those that's just too weird to be true.

I mean, Gabe showed me all kinds of written records to back it up.

For example, one of the highest eel rents that we know came from the village of Harmston in Lincolnshire, and according to the town ledger, the residents owed the Earl Hugh of Chester seventy five thousand eels per year for use of his land.

It's a lot of eels where I don't know, maybe not, I don't really have a reference point.

Yeah, it feels like one eel is too many eels to me.

But I love the idea of briefcases full of eels that you're just dropping on your landlord store.

You know, we were trying to figure out the conversion rate for something like this, like how much was a single eel or a stick of eels worth?

There is no way to know for certain, but the lead historian on eel rents his name is doctor John Wyatt Greenley.

He came up with a pretty solid guests and based on the numbers found in medieval ledgers, he worked out that a single eel would be worth about forty three to eighty five cents in today's money.

So if the upper end of that range, then the residents of Harmston were paying about sixty three grand in eel rent per year, which isn't too bad for an entire village.

I guess, I guess until you think about all the work that had to go into harvesting and curing seventy five thousand eels, Like that's a lot of extra labor on top of your actual day job.

Right, Yeah, it's kind of amazing the system held out as long as it did.

Eel rents remained commonplace until the fourteenth century or so.

But it wasn't the hassle of sourcing them that finally killed the practice.

It was the bubonic plague.

So after England's population was decimated in the mid thirteen hundreds, much of the empty farmland was repurposed for raising livestock, and once red meat became more widely available, the demand for eels fell and disappeared almost completely by the year fifteen hundred.

But that's just the first of nine strange stories we're sharing today, all plucked from the debt ledgers of history.

Let's dive in.

Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius.

I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh Ticketter.

And on the other side of that soundproof glass wearing a green visor.

And this is a beautiful green visor.

Cranking away on an antique adding machine.

That's our friend and producer Dylan Fagan.

Now I don't know what kinds of numbers he's crunching over there, but he is crunching them up fast.

Mega, moving so fast.

I think he's just pushing random buttons.

I think so, but he looks like he knows what he's doing.

But all right, Well, since today's episode is all about the history of debt, I thought it'd be fun to trace the concept back to its source and find out where and when the first debt was actually racked up.

I love it, so did you figure it out?

I did not.

So it turns out there's just no way to pinpoint it with any real degree of accuracy.

And that's because debt is as old as history itself.

So as soon as humans began putting pen to paper or wedge to tablet, like, we started keeping track of things like storehouse inventories or bills of sale private loans.

Even in fact, the earliest known examples of writing come from Mesopotamia.

This was about five thousand years ago, and they aren't works of poetry or fiction.

They're actually bookkeeping.

Which is not nearly as romantic as it feels like it.

H It doesn't.

But you know, there is surprisingly a sweet side to this, because these tablets didn't just log the accumulation of debts.

They also tracked its cancelation.

So there's evidence of wide scale debt cancelations in Mesopotamia as far back as twenty four hundred BCE, and the practice continued there periodically for about a thousand years.

So what kind of debt was being canceled?

Like, is this private debt?

Is it national debt?

Well, actually, the concept of national debt or public debt is is really much more of a modern invention than you might think.

So in the ancient.

World, all debt was private debt and this is how it worked.

So in agrarian societies, the state would provide the peasantry with farmland, tools, livestock, and of course water for irrigation, and at harvest time a portion of the food they produced would be paid to the state as rent.

Unfortunately, when a harvest was worse than expected, the peasants had to secure private loans from the upper class in order to feed themselves and pay the state what they owed, which of course led to an accumulation of debt, and if the borrower wasn't able to pay it off in time, then either they or their family members would be enslaved by their creditors.

Now, obviously this wasn't a great system, because over time, more and more people were becoming slaves to their fellow citizens.

Yeah, which is not a great recipe for a healthy society.

Not so much.

And that's why it became customary for the state to wipe the slate clean every few years.

This typically happened during a big public festival in the springtime.

The sitting sovereign would proclaim that everyone's debt was erased, and any peasants who had been enslaved for unpaid bills were restored their full citizenship.

That's pretty amazing, But it sounds like this was a kind of a cyclical process, right, so after a few more lean harvests, a peasant might find themselves right back in bondage again.

That's exactly right.

And it's clear from that on again, off again approach that the rulers of Mesopotamia didn't oppose the practice on moral grounds.

The cancelations were actually away for them to keep the peace and preserve the status quote, you know, so that society wouldn't break down altogether.

And on that count, the debt cancelation system actually worked remarkably well, so well in fact, that it was eventually adopted by neighboring kingdoms, so you're thinking about places like Assyria, Egypt, Jerusalem, and Debt cancelation even became a core component of the Jewish faith as well as early Christianity.

For instance, the Book of Leviticus calls on Christians to hold a quote year of jubilee every half century.

Now.

This occasion is meant to correct any economic inequalities that may have arisen over the years, wiping out long standing debts.

And offering families a fresh dart.

It's wild to think that was like such a common practice in the ancient world, because it it feels like such a difficult thing to push through today, like whenever we talk about canceling college loans or things like that, there's often so much political pushback.

Yeah, no, for sure, And I haven't seen on anybody's calendar a year of jubilee coming up.

But it actually might be the perfect time to try it again, because according to a papal bull instituted by the late Pope Francis, the next jubilee year should.

Be twenty twenty five, which is right now.

I feel like my bank must have missed the memo on this, but I am glad you brought up debt forgiveness because there's at least one person who's taking the Jubilee year to heart, and that is Welsh actor Michael Sheen.

I did not see that one coming.

So he's the guy who plays Tony Blair and all those British docu dramas, right.

Uh huh.

And he's also played the broadcaster David Frost a few times too.

But he's not keeping all that Blair Frost money to himself because earlier this year she used his earnings to write off the debt of nearly nine hundred people in his hometown of Port Talbot, Wales.

And this is actually a story that our good friend Simon Brewe told me about.

But the decline of the city's steel industry had left many residents struggling for years, you know, just to make ends meet, and after learning that many of his former neighbors were deep in debt as a result of this, Sheen decided to lend a hand by buying up a million pounds of their collective debt, which he then canceled.

So the million pounds actually came out of his own pocket.

Yeah, but he definitely used his own money.

That said, he didn't actually have to pay the full million, because by the time she stepped in, many of the residents' debt had been bundled together by creditors and sold off to debt buying companies, and this often happens at the lower price.

So after a lengthy process, the actor was able to set up his own debt buying company, and then he acquired Port Talbot's debt for one tenth of its actual value.

All right, so he paid one hundred thousand pounds for a million pounds worth of debt.

How does that actually work?

So I yues.

The other debt buying companies didn't think there was much of a chance of anyone actually collecting on that debt, so they were willing to sell the rights for a much smaller lump sum.

And in most cases, the residents would have still been on the hook for the full amount they owed, but thanks to Sheen's generosity, now they don't have to pay back a single pound.

That is pretty amazing.

That's really sweet.

And if any listeners want to learn more about Sheen's experience and his motivations for doing this whole thing, Channel four produced a documentary chronicling the whole campaign.

It is called Michael Sheen's Secret Million pound Giveaway, and the show makes the case for reforming the UK's credit industries so low income families won't have to resort to high interest payday loans.

All right, Well, jumping back a bit further in time, the next fact is about a guy who also paid off somebody else's hefty debts, but in this case the tab belonged to the US government.

So this was back in seventeen ninety five, about twelve years after the American Revolution, and despite Alexander Hamilton's best effort, the nation was struggling to pay off loans that it had taken from European allies during the war.

Now, the debt totaled over two million dollars, which is more than fifty one and a half million dollars in today's money.

And even though we owed all that money, the US was actually trying to negotiate new loans along the way, which wasn't going over that well with everybody in Europe.

But that's where a man named James Swan came in.

So in seventeen ninety five, the Scottish American banker used his own money to privately assume the entire two million dollar debt that we owed the French.

This was hailed by many as a patriotic gesture, and Swan was indeed a patriot.

He actually took part in the Boston Tea Party, was wounded not once but twice at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

But taking over the national debt wasn't a completely selfless act on his part.

In fact, he actually managed to turn a tidy profit from it.

So he didn't go full Michael Sheen and cancel everyone's dead.

No, no, no, he definitely didn't do that.

Instead, Swan resold America's debts at a profit to domestic private investors.

This meant that the US still had to pay back the money eventually, but at least we didn't owe it to foreign governments, and so Swan's payoff helped the young nations say face on the world stage, also convinced other countries that it was safe to keep lending the US money.

That's pretty incredible, And it's strange to think about a banker bailing out the US government instead of the other way around, right, right, right, Yeah, it's not typically the way that goes.

But all right, we've got five more debt ridden stories left to share, but first let's take a quick break.

Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're exploring the lighter side of one of humanity's first and worst inventions, financial debt.

Now, before the break, will you mentioned that James Swan had participated in the Boston Tea party raid switch, if you'll recall, didn't result in any debts or serious injuries, But that doesn't mean there weren't victims.

So the British tea merchants whose ships were raided lost a fortune in merchandise, and amazingly, one of those companies, Davison Newman, is still trying to recoup with losses today.

And like, who are.

They trying to recoup this from?

Like are they shaking down the partygoer's descendants or what?

No shakedowns, but they are accepting donations.

So back in seventeen seventy four, sixteen chests of tea belonging to the Davison Newman company were chucked into the water during the Boston Tea Party and while the company's founders petitioned King George to reimburse them for its value, which was four hundred and eighty British pounds.

The Crown actually declined to pay that.

They ended up losing more tea in other raids, and appeals for those claims were also rejected.

And that's how it went on for seven generations of the company until finally, in nineteen sixty one, the residents of Jackson County, Oregon, decided to make amends.

Wait, Oregon.

Last time I checked, it was nowhere near Boston.

So what did they have to do with the Boston Tea Party?

Nothing?

Apparently it still was weighing on their consciences.

This woman named missus Burt Free.

In nineteen sixty one, she spearheaded a local campaign to pay back her county's fair share of the company's losses.

After adjusting for inflation, they determined that the long lost shipment was worth just under five thousand dollars, So they divided that number by the then current population of the United States and calculated the portionate share owed by residents of Jackson County, which was like what five dollars or a dollar ninety six?

So the money was contributed by seventeen residents and was delivered as a check along with the letter of explanation from the mayor of the largest city in Jackson County.

That is such a ridiculous amount.

It actually reminds me of the scene from The Jerk where Steve Martin's having to sign the checks for the class action lawsuit her life four dollars and twelve cents or whatever it was.

But it is such a ridiculous amount, like it almost feels like an insult.

But do we know what Davison Newman thought of all this?

Well, they apparently appreciated the gesture because a spokesman accepted the check in person.

His name was Leslie Simons, and he said the company hoped this would be the first of many SUSH payments.

The last yeah quote, the government never gave us a peep.

Bostonians simply smiled.

But Jackson County, oh they are fine folk.

Now we are waiting to hear from the rest of Oregon's counties and from the other forty nine states, right right, right?

So did actually anything come from all the waiting?

Nope, the company hasn't received another direct payment from the public, and you know, I don't think they're really expecting to write oh.

Wow, which makes that bug ninety from Oregon just so much sweeter.

That's pretty wild, all right.

Okay, speaking of long standing debts, did you know that Finland is the only country to fully pay back its debts.

From World War One?

Did you know that?

Did you have your listen?

Really, most of your borrowed money from the US during the war, but by the time the first payments came due in the nineteen twenties, most of them were actually still too cash strapped to afford it.

Now, this situation only worsened with the onset of the Great Depression.

So finally, in nineteen thirty one, President Hoover granted a moratorium on the collection of war debt.

This postponement was only meant to last a year, but European borrowers treated it like a permanent pardon, so much so that when the repayments were scheduled to resume in nineteen thirty three, only a single country cut the US.

A check, and that was, of course Finland.

Now, the country continued to make regular payments until nineteen seventy six, when its loan was paid in full, and that was right on schedule.

I mean, I guess it's cool that they paid us back, But did Finland just not know that everyone else had stopped paying or what.

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing.

But you know, they didn't do it by accident or even out of a sense of moral obligation.

Instead, it was actually part of an effort to improve Finland's reputation.

As a reliable debtor.

Now the country had earned a bad reputation in the nineteen twenty after borrowing a large sum of gold from France, only to pay it back with devalued Finnish currency.

Now, the French wound up losing money on the deal, and the international markets took notice, so Finland's foreign ministry actually had to go into damage control here.

Now they knew that other European countries had no intention of resuming payments, and since Finland's debt to the US was a fairly small percentage of its annual GDP, they decided it was a good idea to just go ahead and pay up in the hopes of scoring some good press.

And did it work.

It actually worked really, really well, So between nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty six, nearly three thousand stories were published in American newspapers, all of them praising Finland for paying its due when no one else would So one of my favorites is this nineteen thirty five piece from the Indianapolis Times, and it says, quote, on December fifteenth, Finland will pay her semi annual war debt installment of about a quarter of a million dollars.

It's sure nice to think one nation will drop a remembrance in the lean old sock this year.

Now on our best finish, we wish for a merry Christmas housekoo yalua.

I said it just right, Ma, didn't I love it?

Nailed it?

You didn't know I spoke Finnish.

I did not know that.

But I'm guessing after that Finland could borrow money from whoever they wanted, right.

I mean pretty much.

The pr campaign works so well that a fact about Finland's reliability was written into American textbooks, and decades later, many people still refer to Finland as the country that pays its debts.

So the Finish are basically the Lanisters of the EU, that's right.

I mean, I don't think they'll get along quite so well with their siblings, but otherwise sure.

Well, here's another story of a debt repayment, or at least a partial one.

So do you remember the early nineties when Willie Nelson owed the IRS like tens of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes.

And they I think they like raided his house for something too, right, Yeah, it was worse than that.

So the IRS actually seized Nelson's property in six different states on the same day, and the federal agents who raided his primary home in Austin, Texas also stock thousands of his personal belongings, including instruments, master recordings, studio equipment, and the idea was to sell the items at auction to help settle the singer's enormous tax bill, but things didn't quite go as planned.

So Willie had seen the writing on the wall ahead of the raid and made sure he was away golfing in Hawaii when the IRS agents arrived.

Wait, Willie Nelson played golf.

I didn't know that.

That's almost episode.

This episode needs to go in a different direction now.

Yeah.

Anyway, when he was golfing, he also had his daughter remove his favorite guitar from his Texas home and chip it to him and Maui for safekeeping.

And at the time he told the press, as long as I got my guitar, I'll be fine.

But he didn't know how right he was, because not only did he get to keep his beloved guitar, he also got back most of his other stuff.

The IRS held several public auctions in Texas to sell off his property, but they didn't make nearly as much money as expected because most Texans were fused to bid out of respect for Willie Nelson, and although his branch did sell, the bidder turned out to be a fan who gave the property right back to Willie, which I'm sure the IRS just love.

To see, right, Yeah, not so much.

But the agents realized the auctions were getting them nowhere, so they sold off his remaining items as a lot price that just seven thousand dollars.

This meant that the bulk of the debt was still unpaid, so in nineteen ninety one, the IRS worked out an unusual deal.

Nelson agreed to record a two disc compilation album, with part of the proceeds going toward what he still owed, and to keep recording costs as low as possible, he decided to record stripped down acoustic versions of some of his pre existing songs, plus a few new ones.

The album was called Quote the Irs Tapes, Who Will buy My Memories question Mark, and it featured titles like remember the Good Times and what can You Do to Me Now?

Wow?

Okay.

It was released in December of nineteen ninety two and eventually chipped away at about three point six million dollars of Willie's tax debt, which you know, still wasn't anywhere close to what he owed.

His full tab was closer to thirty two million dollars after taxes and penalties.

But I think the IRS was sick of chasing him by that point, because after he made a few more payments, the agency retired his remaining debt in nineteen ninety three.

I mean, Willie Nelson's great in all, but I'm not sure how fair this whole thing feels like you don't hear about the IRS retiring.

The debt of many non Grammy winners.

Yeah, and Willy obviously knew he'd gone off light, because two years later, in an interview with Rolling Stone, he said, quote mentally, it.

Was a breeze.

They didn't bother me.

They didn't come out and confiscate anything other than that first day, and they didn't show up at every gig and demand money.

I appreciated that and then we teamed up and put out a record.

It's nice to know there were no hard feelings in the end.

All right, Well, here's a story about one of the most unjust and contentious debt repayments of all time.

Ango, oh, I'm excited to it's it's pretty much a doozy.

So I'm sure you're aware of that Haiti among the poorest nations in the world.

But did you know that's partly because it was forced to pay an exorbitant independence debt And this was to France.

So I vaguely remember this.

I think the Times did a piece on this a while back, but it had to do with like the revolution.

Right sort of.

So back in eighteen oh four, the enslaved Haitians defeated their French oppressors and claimed independence.

But two decades later, France came back with a fleet of warships and demanded that Haiti pay one hundred and fifty million francs to officially purchase the territory.

Now, they basically forced Haitians to choose between crippling debt or another war, and the price the French king demanded made it crystal clear that he was just doing this out of pure racist spite.

You know.

So Haiti's only about ten thousand square miles, which is roughly the size of the state of Maryland.

Yet France wanted ten times the amount it had charged the US for the entire Louisiana purchase, which if you remember, pretty much doubled the size of the US at that point.

That's really horrible.

So how did the Haitians respet onto this?

I mean, they didn't really have much of a choice here, so they were still finding their footing as an independent nation, didn't have the resources to fight a second revolution.

But that also meant the country couldn't afford to pay France's ridiculous price upfront.

So to add insult to injury, Haiti wound up taking out loans with these sky high interest rates from of course, a French bank, and it took Haiti one hundred and twenty two years to pay off the debt, which at final tally was somewhere between twenty and thirty billion dollars in today's money, so an enormous summer money.

It is incredible and horrible.

Well, here is a bizarre one I just heard about in twenty fourteen, A whole mountain of ancient Roman debt was discovered during the construction of a Bloomberg office building in London.

More than four hundred wooden writing tablets were found at the dig site, and most of them turned out to be contracts and loan notes from the first century CE to.

Like two thousand year old.

IOUs.

I'm actually surprised the wood was even lessible after all that time.

You know that you said they were underground.

Yeah.

It took archaeologists about two years to translate the eighty eight best preserved of these tablets.

The slow process was partly because the text was written in Latin and also incursive, but also because each word had been scratched into a wax coated wood with an iron stylist.

None of this made for the neatest penmanship.

But what is interesting is that debt records can tell you a lot about the people who made them.

So for instance, apparently Titus of London got duped into lending money to some shady characters, and now he is the laughingstock of the marketplace.

So is that from one of those tablets.

But by the way, I do love that you're spreading first century gossip here.

I mean, it's not gossip.

It is all there in wax and wood.

It was plain his day.

But since you introduced this to Eel Rents and the good people of Jackson County, I think you're going to win today's trophy.

Now.

The only thing is I don't have it with me, So if you don't mind, can I can I give this to you later?

Can I just owe you on this one?

Yeah?

Let's say six and a quarter interest the quarterly sire Pretty good?

Right?

Well, that is it for today's episode.

Thank you for the trophy.

We'll be back next week with another brand new episode.

In the meantime, if you enjoy the show, subscribe on your favorite podcast stapp leave us a five star rating and interview, and give us a call if you have a question or just want to say hi.

The number is three ero two four oh five five nine two five.

And actually I just want to play you a message we got because it really made me smile.

Hi.

This is Christina, the Curator of Fun here in Spokane, Washington.

I am the owner of the friendliest store in Spokane, the Plucky Deck.

So I am calling because I am a big fan of part time Genius.

I have been listening to you guys for over five years.

I really do believe it's right when you first began, and each time you come back into my feed, I get so so excited.

I love your show.

Keep up the good work, and if I can ever be of service, just let me know.

All right, I think Christina Win's best job title the curator of Fun at the Plucky Duck.

I mean, there's no topping that.

I know.

Every town should have a curator of fun.

So thank you so much Christina for calling in.

We love hearing from you all, so please keep them coming.

And from Dylan Gade, Mary, Will and myself, thank you so much for listening.

Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.

This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongashtikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy.

Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klan.

The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gate trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shore.

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