Migrating Coconuts

sca-nerd:

english-history-trip:

eastiseverywhere:

Still from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
UK (1975)
[Source]

Coconut cup
England (c. 1470 – 1500 with later additions)
Silver-gilt, coconut, chrysoprase
[Source]

Kathleen Kennedy writes for the Mary Sue:

Forty years old this year, the coconut sketch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail may be one of the most iconic opening scenes in film history. The pillar of chivalry, Arthur, King of the Britons, appears riding an imaginary horse like a child on a playground. His faithful servant, Patsy, accompanies him, banging two coconut halves together to make the sound of the horse’s hooves. Arthur and Patsy are very, very serious about their quest. They are the only ones who are.

The whole scene concentrates on those coconuts. The put-upon straight-man of the film, Arthur, gamely tries to explain the existence of coconuts in medieval England (“they could have been carried”). The grail remains all but forgotten as the guards on the castle walls uproariously tear down his explanations. (“Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?”)… Audiences are left in stitches and thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of coconuts existing in medieval England.

Except medieval England was lousy with coconuts. No, really, and Monty Python may well have known it.

They’re Oxbridge men, after all, and several Oxford and Cambridge colleges still preserve coconuts given to them in the fifteenth century. Here’s a fifteenth-century coconut cup that came to Oxford more recently. While parts of it were added more recently, the original elements are medieval. This is the only medieval English coconut cup currently displayed online, and it shows how the shell was strapped into a goblet form using a harness of silver or gold. The English continued to make coconut cups after the medieval period—in the sixteenth century, seventeenth century, and beyond. They were numerous enough that by the fifteenth century, individual households might boast several coconut cups. One humble esquire highlighted the prestige of these cups when he willed his coconut cup to his heir in tail male, just like the Bennett estate in Pride and Prejudice or the Crawley estate in Downton Abbey.

But why make luxurious golden goblets out of coconuts? And how did they get to medieval England anyway, if swallows didn’t carry them?

In the Middle Ages, coconut palms were not yet as widespread as they are today. Coconuts grew in their native Maldives, in India, and perhaps parts of western Africa and the Middle East. (They were also growing in western Central America, but had gotten there on their own, crossing the pacific like small, tasty boats without a swallow in sight.) Coconuts formed a regular part of commerce across the Indian Ocean from Roman times, and this trade appears to have continued with little disruption straight through the ancient and medieval periods. Given England’s Roman history, it isn’t impossible that Life of Brian-era English might also have had access to coconuts. These coconuts weren’t transported all that way to be made into cups, however. They were imported as medicine.

Beginning regularly once again in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, medicinal coconuts arrived in England. This time, they were packed on Venetian galleys along with luxuries from silks to sugar, and next to exotic pets like monkeys and parrots. In turn, the Venetians got the coconuts from Alexandria and from the same trade networks that the coconuts had been part of for millennia. 

They were not called coconuts, either. The name “coconut” derives from the Portuguese and dates to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-after the medieval period. In the Middle Ages, Europe knew the coconut as the “Nut of India” or “Great Nut.” It was the great, big whopping nut that was transported all the way from India—the only nut large enough to make into a drinking cup.

Let It Be Known: Coconuts Migrate.

Coconuts Migrate.

Names of Jews in Medieval Navarre (13th–14th centuries)

Names of Jews in Medieval Navarre (13th–14th centuries)

bodleianlibs:

MARCH. The traditional labour of the month is trimming trees. You can either do this delicately with a billhook, like the gentleman on the left, or DECISIVELY with an axe, like the gentleman on the right.

You can view the original of this image for free online!

The History Girls: CROSS YOUR LEGS AND HOPE TO DIE: What those effigies are really telling you by Elizabeth Chadwick

The History Girls: CROSS YOUR LEGS AND HOPE TO DIE: What those effigies are really telling you by Elizabeth Chadwick

sca-nerd:

I found the instructions on how to do the hairstyle I want to try! Now I just have to attempt it. Thankfully I have a roommate who can help me with the braiding.

Janet Stephens has a bunch of really awesome videos on historic hair. I used her stuff when doing Roman.

skraddaren-elef:

Min Jumbles bringeth all the peasants to the yard.
And they’re like ‘please giveth, for I am starving’
And I was like bitch, no, because I ate ‘em all already.

Seriously, through. I did. These never even made it into the cooling rack (except for the few that were artfully assembled for this photo)

Jumbles (jambals, or any of the other five hundred spellings thereof) were supposedly created around 600 bc by a monk, but there are various other recipes that are more or less the same documented regularly from the 1400’s and onward.

This is really the MVP of medieval cookie recipes. Alone, it can be used to make four different types of cookies, and if you add other ingredients and spices, the combinations are endless.

I used a modern recipe and altered it to use medieval ingredients by switching out the refined sugar for honey

Jambals:

2 cups sifted flour
1 tbsp honey
2 tbsp cream (or milk)
1 stick butter (softened but not mushy)
2 egg yolks
¼ tsp salt
(Optional anis seeds)

Mixture flour and powdered sugar for rolling

Mix dry ingredients together, then add wet ingredients and mix together with your hands until it feels like play doh. Chill for at least half an hour (or don’t, I’m not the boss of you and we all got places to be)

Preheat to 350f and prepare baking sheet with parchment paper.

For sugar cookies:
Roll out and cut out shapes as you would normal cookies, or drop as spoonfuls onto baking sheet

For jambals:
Take small amounts and roll out into thin squiggly logs, then make fun shapes like knots and pretzels.

Bake 12 minutes on top rack until lightly golden brown

Reblogging because you know I am totally going to make these tomorrow and tell you all about it.