Abstract
COMMENTING on a suggestion in a recent review of a leechbook in NATUBE (134, 270, Aug. 25, 1934) that certain spices “must have been hard to come, by in fifteenth century England”, Mr. G. M. Meyer, of 38 Manor Park Gardens, Edgware, points out that ginger and pepper must have been usual articles of commerce in the years 1300-1, and presumably in later years, since they were then the subject of specified King's dues and of authorised brokerage charges at the port of Sandwich. The mere fact that a commodity is imported into a country does not necessarily imply that it is not difficult to obtain, at any rate by those not blessed with wealth and influence. The interesting historical account of pepper given by Fluckiger and Hanbury (“Pharmacographia”; London, Macmillan and Co., 1879) shows that it was only after the Portuguese, incited in part thereto by the high price of pepper, had discovered a sea-passage to India in 1498, that the cost of this condiment began to fall, and the following quotations from these authors seem to indicate that pepper was usually too uncertain in supply and too expensive to be regularly obtainable, except by the wealthy. “The price of pepper during the middle ages was always exorbitantly high, for the rulers of Egypt extorted a large revenue from all those who were engaged in the trade in it and other spices. The general prevalence during the middle ages of pepper-rents, which consisted in an obligation imposed upon a tenant to supply his lord with a certain quantity of pepper, generally a pound, at stated times, shows how acceptable was this favourite condiment and how great the desire of the wealthier classes to secure a supply of it when the market was not always certain.” Ginger was apparently not so commonly a subject of comment and controversy in medieval times as pepper, but it is on record that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a pound of ginger cost about the price of a sheep.
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Medieval Spices. Nature 134, 414 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134414b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134414b0