Indonesian Commodities in Fifteenth-Century Norfolk
In this episode in my series on Indonesian spices and perfumes in medieval European texts we’re going to have a look at a letter written in English in the year 1471 — one of the Paston Letters, easily the greatest collection of medieval English correspondence to have come down to us.
The Pastons were an East Anglian family (Figure 1) who grew in wealth and power over the course of the fifteenth century and kept up a lively correspondence throughout the period. Many of their letters survive, preserved by later descendants of the family who took a peculiar and active interest in the records of their ancestors. They have been published in many editions, beginning with a posthumous 1823 publication by John Fenn.
The letter in question, half of which is reproduced here, was sent by Margaret Paston (?-1484) to her son John (conventionally known as John III, 1444–1504) on November 5th, 1471 (‘written in haste on Saint Leonard’s eve’, Saint Leonard’s feast day being the sixth). A number of Indonesian ingredients appear towards the end, namely cloves, mace, and galangal, alongside others (pepper, ginger, cinnamon, almonds, rice, saffron, currants, and grains of paradise) that came from other parts of the medieval world, most of them from the tropics and subtropics. The implication of the letter is that all these things could be found in Norfolk but might have been cheaper in London. Most of them were probably still rather expensive, but the Pastons were proverbially wealthy by this point and in spite of all the intrigues and conflict at the time retained significant local political influence.
1471 was a tumultuous year in England, with the Yorkist King Edward IV returning to the throne in April after having been deposed the year before. Oblique reference is made to this civil strife in Margaret’s letter (‘we live in fear but we don’t know whether to flee’). It seems, though, that even in the midst of such difficulties rich people in England still wanted access to luxuries from the other side of the world.
This letter survives as a draft and a final copy; the draft is in the British Library in London (Additional MS 27445, f.50r-50v), and this is the text I’m using here (Figure 2). As with the rest of the Paston correspondence, this letter was transcribed by Fenn (1823) and James Gairdner (1896.III:23–25), although as Fenn was working with the final version and Gairdner the draft there are some discrepancies between their transcriptions. For the trickier bits of the translation I’m relying on Norman Davis’s 1983 edition, reprinted in the Oxford World’s Classics series in 1999.
In the transcription below, <⁊> means ‘and’; slashes </> indicate the ends of lines, the lines themselves being too long for Medium to cope with well; <ꝓ> is -par- (as in deꝓtyd ‘departed’); and <y> is used for both modern English <y> and for the voiceless dental fricative <þ> (Margaret’s hand doesn’t seem to distinguish between the two and I’m not sure what the standard is when it comes to transcribing these things). You’ll also note that <w> is clearly used to represent a vowel here (as in ywr ‘your’).
TEXT
[…] as for ye tydyngs her ywr cosỹ barney of wychshyngg’m ys passyd to gode hwm̃ gode asoyle / veylys wyfe and lõdonys wyfe and pycard ye bacar of twmlond ben gon also all thys howsold ⁊ thys parych ys as / ye leftyd blyssyd be gode we lewyñ in fer bwt we wut not quedr to fle for to be bettr then / we ben herr I send yw dẽi a riale for to by wt swgr ⁊ dats for me I pray yw do as wel as ye can / ⁊ send it me as hastely as ye may ⁊ send me word qwat p’ce a lī of pepr clowys masis gingyr ⁊ sinamun / almãnys rys garyngall safrwn r’ysonys of Corons grenys of ych of these send me ye p’ce of ych of these ⁊ yf it be bettr shepe / at londoñ thañ yt ys her I shal send yw mony to by wt soch stwfe as I wull haue r’mẽbr yw that I / spake to yw of to spek to ywyr brother for ye seyd C marcs wan ye deꝓtyd hens I trow ye for/gettyt that ye sent me non answer ther of in ony wys lete me haue an answer ther of in hast ⁊ send me / woord how ywyr brother and ye sped in ywyr maters and godds blissỹg and myñ mvt ye haue both ⁊ send / yw good sped in all ywyr maters wretyñ in hast on sengt Lenards eve / by ywyr modr
TRANSLATION
‘..as for the tidings here: your cousin [John] Berney of Witchingham has passed to God — God pardon him. Veil’s wife (1) and London’s wife and Pycard the baker of Tombland (2) be gone also. All this household and this parish is as you left it, blessed be God. We live in fear but we don’t know whether to flee, as it may be better than staying here. I send half a real to buy sugar and dates with for me. I pray you do as well as you can and send it to me as quickly as you can and send me word what price a pound of pepper, cloves, mace, ginger and cinnamon, almonds, rice, galangal, saffron, raisins of Corinth [=currants], grains [of paradise] — of each of these. Send me the price of each of these and if it be cheaper in London than it is here I shall send you money to buy the things I want. Remember that I told you to speak to your brother about the aforementioned hundred marks when you departed hence — I trust you forgot that you sent me no answer at all about that. Let me have an answer quickly and send me word of how your brother and you get on in your matters, and you may have both God’s blessings and mine. And I send you good speed in all your matters. Written in haste on Saint Leonard’s eve. (3) By your mother.’
NOTES
(1) I’m relying on Davis for this; I assume this Veil is known from other sources.
(2) This is reportedly the name of the ‘square facing the entrance to Norwich Cathedral close’, as a note in Norman Davis’s edition has it (p.203, n2). It’s also used as the name of a recent historical novel set in sixteenth-century East Anglia by C. J. Sansom.
(3) The final version of the letter has the added line, ‘I warn you keep this letter close and lose it not, rather burn it’ (in Davis’s modern English version).
Can you imagine being able to say ‘[t]his letter survives as a draft and a final copy’ about a text written on perishable materials in Indonesia before the sixteenth century? It’s remarkable just how much more complete the historical record is for Europe (and the temperate world in general) than for places in the tropics like Indonesia and East Africa. No letters have survived in any Indo-Malaysian languages from before 1521 and there are — as far as I’m aware — no surviving diaries, shopping lists, or notebooks either. Of eastern Indonesia, where Margaret Paston’s desired cloves and mace grew and were harvested, we have almost no written evidence of any kind aside from references to commodities and toponyms in texts from outside the region.
This is why I find these European sources so interesting and important: They are genuine medieval documents that preserve traces of the labour and lives of otherwise undocumented people in eastern Indonesia. And it is remarkable to know that, in the middle of a low-level civil war in the late Middle Ages, rich English people discussed the prices of dried Moluccan flowers and the arils of the seed of a tree that only grew on some of the tiniest islands in the Banda Sea almost 13,000 kilometres away.
The research for this post was done in early 2019 — in fact my copy of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Paston Letters arrived in March, on the morning of the day I had emergency surgery on my back. I took the parcel to the hospital with me and skimmed through the entire book while curled up or lying on my side in complete agony. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that much pain for that long — about 36 hours in total — and the remarkable thing is that it didn’t subside at all over the entire period. It didn’t come in waves or anything. The letters were somewhat diverting, although I doubt I remember very much from them.
In any case, I was alerted to this letter by a tweet by the wonderful Jonathan Healey.
As ever, let me know if you see any errors in the transcription, translation, or notes. I’m far from an expert on Middle English (and, anyway, even experts make mistakes).
I have a Ko-Fi account, in case you’re interested in showing your appreciation for this and other Medium stories: https://ko-fi.com/P5P6HTBI
A. J. West, December 2019
