78 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
“Froissart has the king’s guests led to the “palace, where wine and spices were set before them”. The dowry of a Marseilles girl, in 1224, makes mention of “mace, ginger, cardamom and galangale.”
“When John Ball wished to draw a contrast between the lot of the lords and the peasants, he said, “ They have wines, spices and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of the straw,”. When old Latiner was being bound to the stake he handed nutmegs to his friends as keepsakes.
“Pepper, the most common and at the same time the most valued of these spices, was frequently treated as a gift of payment instead of money. “Matilda de Chaucer is in the gift of the king, and her land is worth £8, 2d., and 1 pound of pepper and 1 pound of cinnamon and 1 ounce of silk”, reads a chance record in an old English survey. The amount of these spices demanded and consumed was astonishing. Venetian galleys Genoese varracks, and other vessels of the Mediterranean brought many a cargo of them westward, and they were sold in fairs and markets every where. “Pepper-sack” was a derisive and yet not unappreciative epithy applied by German robber-barons to the merchants, who they plundered as they passed down the Rhine. For years the Venetians had a contract to buy from the Sultan of Egypt annually 420,000 pounds of pepper. One of the first vessels to make its way to India brought home 210,000 pounds. A fine of
200,000 pounds of pepper was imposed upon one petty prince of India by the Portuguese in 1520. In romances and chronicles, in cook-books, trades-lists, and customs-tarriffs spices are mentioned with a frequency and consideration known in modern times.”
Why were spices so necessary to the European peoples of those days ? One answer is taste. “The monotonous diet, the coarse food, the unskilful cookery of mediaeval Europe had all their deficiencies covered by a charitable mantle of Oriental seasoning.” [1] While it was a matter of taste for all it was a matter of necessity for the poor. The poor needed spices. In ancient times when food was scarce and the productivity of man in the absence of machinery was very low, man could not afford to waste or throw away food as being stale. Whatever was left over or was not necessary for immediate consumption had to be preserved. Spices are the best preservatives. It was because of this as also for reasons of taste that spices were in mediaeval Europe in such universal demand.
1 Cheyney. Ibid, p. 10.