Margaret Paston’s Famous Letter.

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 10^th 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 13^th 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.

While Margaret Paston’s sugar-loaf was likely a product brought overland to Antwerp from Venice, it is not possible to be perfectly certain.  It was a good thing that her husband was so wealthy.  The price of refining and shipping had to have been steep.  One hundred years later, sugar, for all the price had come way down, would still be well out of the reach of the common Englishman.

Next >>> Walking Back Margaret Paston’s Famous Letter, Already? >>>

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[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.

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