Margaret Paston, wife of John Paston, wrote him a letter in
1461 that has since become famous. John
Paston had been a squire of some small amount of family wealth. In the course of his legal practice he became
the close confident of the orders-of-magnitude more wealthy and famous knight
John Fastolf. With the death of the old
knight, late in 1459, Paston was bequeathed nearly all of his estate making him
one of the richest Englishmen of his age.
Margaret was the daughter of another squire of means and
brought Paston a dowry and a partner educated in the management of household
and estate business of the times. At least
once she stood in immediate danger for her life and the property she was
protecting for her husband in those especially brutal and chaotic times and her
judgment prevented the worst. She seems
always to have more than satisfied her husband’s expectations. She was a great resource to him and she knew
it.
But the most famous matter in her letters was a small
thing. It arrived to John who was
attending to business in London in July of 1461. Among common every day information and
requests that he speak with “Waron Herman” about his regular habit of
trespassing on her mother’s fish pond and that he bring back “a gyrdill for yor
dowgter” she asks for one further item:
vowchesaff to send me an oyr sugor loff for my old is do[1]
“Vouchsafe to send me another sugar loaf for my old one is
done.” She makes the first known mention
of sugar being available as a product in England.
Sugar cane is an ancient crop from the Bengali region of
India. The Moslems of Persia transplanted
it to their great intellectual city of Jondisapur to study its medicinal uses. Sometime after that, the plant somehow made
its way to Syria and Palestine. The
Crusaders brought back stories of its wonderful properties. Those stories involved chewing on raw
cane. There was no such thing as processed
sugar at the time.
In the late 10th century, sugar was traded in syrup
or gum form around the eastern Mediterranean for considerable sums. Venice began a regular trade for it with
Egypt in the 13th century. Plantations
sprung up on the island of Cyprus. In
this form, it had the misfortune of being a direct competitor in the kitchen with
the honey that Europe had grown used to for millennia. It presented no advantage and had the
disadvantage of being perishable. The demand
was small. Medicinal uses could not make
for an expanded market.
According to Carlo Antonio Marin’s Storia del Commercio
de Veneziani[2],
a shipment was made to England in 1319.
If true, the product would have been in syrup or gum form as the crystal
form with which we are familiar did not yet exist.
Numerous obstacles prevented trade in sugar to Northern
Europe. They would have to be slowly overcome
before Margaret Paston could have her sugar-loaf.
First, the Venetians would have to sail more outside of the
eastern Mediterranean. More often than
not, Venetian galleys sailed to Turkey and the Levant to pick up their cargo
and completed the transport of merchandise to Northern countries overland from
Venice via passes in the Alps and sold them in the great German fairs.
Upon improvements in navigation, including the invention of
the magnetic compass, Venice could send cargo entirely by water. As luck would have it, however, the mighty Caliphate
at Turkey began soon after to impose huge fees to sail in the Mediterranean. Those who paid the fees stood a strong chance
of being attacked by pirates, nevertheless, and losing all. Venice was forced to continue sending their
goods overland through the Alps.
A very important obstacle was removed in 1420. It was in this year that Venice learned to
process sugar into blocks referred to by all as “sugar-loaves”[3]. The purity level was so high that the whole
idea of sugar was changed. The block
form allowed much easier handling and prevented the common problem of infestation
from insects.
Relief for the Venetians was short lived, however. There are reports that, by 1544, Antwerp had
long had many sugar refineries. The great
trading port of its day already had long acquired the details of the
process. Spain and Portugal were already
furiously at work planting cane fields on islands off the coast of West Africa
as early as 1420. Their raw cane was not
shipped to Venice to be processed but to Antwerp.
Next >>> Walking Back Margaret Paston’s Famous Letter, Already? >>>
[1] Fenn,
Sir John. Original Letters, Written
During the Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III (1789). Volume 4. 16.
[2] Niccol,
Robert. Essay on Sugar (1864),
11. “In Marin's Storia del Commercio de
Veneziani there is an account of a shipment made at Venice for England, in 1319,
of 100,000 lbs. of sugar; and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it
appears to have been imported in small quantities.”
[3]
Pain de sucre, pan di zucchero, etc.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- Shakespeare’s Barnacles. March 3, 2016. “Prospero will wake, he fears, before they can murder him, and will cast a spell on them.”
- A Medieval Hodge-Podge. March 17, 2019. “The hogge pot had already existed for centuries, however. Many who fail to realize this have given spurious derivations to the name.”
- The King's Esnecce. January 13, 2019. “It comes as no surprise, then, that when Maud’s son, Henry Plantagenet, Count or Duke of most of the western territories of France, and, by terms of the treaty, heir to Stephen, next rose to the throne as Henry II, he was quick to arrange for the safest possible means of transit across the channel.”
- Connections: Henry II, Toulouse, 1159. November 27, 2018. “Once he became Chancellor, Becket never looked back. He abandoned his duties as Archdeacon and preaching duties attached to his other positions. He outfitted a lavish household and lived like a secular lord.”
- Check out the Medieval Topics Article Index for many more articles about this fascinating time.
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