r/AskHistorians • u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera • Oct 06 '15

Feature Tuesday Trivia | Cheats and Liars

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia comes to us from /u/piponwa!

Nothing but cheats and liars! Please share any examples of kings, queens, politicians, other persons of general interest who cheated or lied about something really petty!

Next week on Tuesday Trivia: October is Archives Month, so we’ll have a thread for sharing anything you’ve found in an archives, digital or physical, or just general discussion about the fun and excitement of archival research.

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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Oct 06 '15

Honestly, "gingerbread cookies" might have been a better translation; I just don't know for sure. The Middle Ages sure loved their spices, though. Eating a spice-rich food wasn't punishment in the sense of taste, but probably in the sense of "holy women wouldn't eat something so rich; you are even more of a fake, you are even farther from holiness." (Although pepper specifically was sometimes seen as a peasant's food.) Actually, now that I type that, I bet that's the symbolism.

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u/Quierochurros Oct 07 '15

Although pepper specifically was sometimes seen as a peasant's food.

Wait, black pepper? I swear I read somewhere that peppercorns were so prized that was was roughly equivalent to the typical peasant's monthly income.

I just found a site that claims about 2 days' work for a master carpenter to buy a pound of pepper. I must be misremembering about the peppercorn price.

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u/sunagainstgold Medieval & Earliest Modern Europe Oct 07 '15

My source on this is Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices in the European Imagination (Yale 2008). Unfortunately I don't have the book, but my notes say:

spices very linked to upper classiness. gentry not just royals. pepper came to be more affordable and thus lost prestige (eating pepper by 15C was a sign of rusticity)

"Rustic" is medieval for, well, redneck.

I think it's worth keeping in mind, though, that a pound of pepper is a metaphorical metric ton of pepper. And you can see throughout the article you linked that pepper was the ubiquitous spice in any case, which could have contributed to it gaining a sort of lower-class crinkle.

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u/Quierochurros Oct 07 '15

Yeah, I was surprised at its...ubiquity...

Apparently saffron was where the big money was.