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Archive: beavers, Lent loopholes and very expensive hats
Our folklore correspondent digs through several centuries of British beaver bureaucracy, including a medieval tax dodge involving the tail.
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Beaver facts
- Medieval church rules restricted meat during Lent, so the beaver's scaly, fish-like tail was argued to be fish — making the rest of the animal conveniently edible.
- Castoreum, the beaver's scent-gland secretion, was prescribed for headaches and fevers and later became a perfume fixative — it contains salicylic acid from the willow they eat.
- The Welsh afanc and the beaver's Welsh name afanc share a root, hinting at how familiar the animal once was in Britain.
- Place names such as Beverley in Yorkshire (from Old English for "beaver lodge clearing") map roughly onto where beavers once lived.
- Beaver-felt top hats were so fashionable in 18th-century London that a single pelt could be worth more than a labourer's weekly wage.
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