A loaf of bread made in the first century AD, which was discovered at Pompeii, preserved for centuries in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. The markings visible on the top are made from a Roman bread stamp, which bakeries were required to use in order to mark the source of the loaves, and to prevent fraud. (via Ridiculously Interesting)
(sigh) I’ve seen these before, but this one’s particularly beautiful.
I feel like I’m supposed to be marveling over the fact that this is a loaf of bread that’s been preserved for thousands of years, and don’t get me wrong, that’s hella cool. But honestly, I’m mostly struck by the unexpected news that “bread fraud” was apparently once a serious concern.
Bread Fraud was a huge thing, Bread was provided to the Roman people by the government – bakers were given grain to make the free bread, but some of them stole the government grain to use in other baked goods and would add various substitutes, like sawdust or even worse things, to the bread instead. So if people complained that their free bread was not proper bread, the stamp told them exactly whose bakery they ought to burn down.
Bread stamps continued to be used at least until the Medieval period in Europe. Any commercially sold bread had to be stamped with an official seal to identify the baker to show that it complied with all rules and regulations about size, price, and quality. This way, rotten or undersized loaves could be traced back to the baker. Bakers could be pilloried, sent down the streets in a hurdle cart with the offending loaf tied around their neck, fined, or forbidden to engage in baking commercially ever again in that city. There are records of a baker in London being sent on a hurdle cart because he used an iron rod to increase the weight of his loaves, and another who wrapped rotten dough with fresh who was pilloried. Any baker hurdled three times had to move to a new city if they wanted to continue baking.
If you have made bread, you are probably familiar with a molding board. It’s a flat board used to shape the bread. Clever fraudsters came up with a molding board that had a little hole drilled into it that wasn’t easily noticed. A customer would buy his dough by weight, and then the baker would force some of that dough through the hole, so they could sell and underweight loaf and use the stolen dough to bake new loafs to sell. Molding boards ended up being banned in London after nine different bakers were caught doing this. There were also instances of grain sellers withholding grain to create an artificial scarcity drive up the price of that, and things like bread.
Bread, being one of the main things that literally everyone ate in many parts of the world, ended up with a plethora of rules and regulations. Bakers were probably no more likely to commit fraud than anyone else, but there were so many of them, that we ended up with lots and lots of rules and records of people being shifty.
Check out Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony by Madeleine Pelner Cosman for a whole chapter on food laws as they existed in about 1400. Plus the color plates are fantastic.
ALL OF THIS IS SO COOL
I found something too awesome not share with you!
I’m completely fascinated by the history of food, could I choose a similar topic for my Third Year Dissertation? Who knows, but it is very interesting all the same!
Bread fraud us actually where the concept of a bakers dozen came from. Undersized rolls/loaves/whatever were added to the dozen purchased to ensure that the total weight evened out so the baker couldn’t be punished for shorting someone.
That Susan? That Susan does not embitter herself, does not brick her heart off, does not doubt like it’s a lifeline– not yet. She yanks open the wardrobe’s doors as soon as she finds her balance, shoves through the fur coats and mothballs, and slams into the solid back of it. She shuts the wardrobe and opens it; locks it and unlocks it; throws all the coats on the floor; gets wood splinters under her fingernails from trying to get through the back of it.
It is one things to lose a home, and it is another to lose a child. I don’t think she would ever stop looking.
Her little girl couldn’t have been more than four or five. Did she have Lucy’s cheeks? Edmund’s wit? Peter had been her favorite aunt or uncle, because he had been so patient with her. He had been teaching her to read.
Susan dredges up every arcane idea she’d ever heard whispered in Narnia, about its magic, about its origins, anything that might lead to a way back. She researches the wardrobe, its make, its history. She drags its purchase papers out of a sympathetic Professor Diggory, who has never had children and who does not understand, especially not with Susan’s present pubescent face glaring up at him.
When they send her back to her parents, when the war ends, she kisses her mother on the cheek and then runs away from home, to go find the wardrobe manufacturers, to find supposed occultists in cheap little flats that smell of garlic, to bury herself in library stacks.
–
And what about the child? Her mother, aunt, and uncles all gone on a single afternoon. Susan’s daughter was just learning to read, and now she is crowned princess heir. She has beaver nannies and centaur tutors, and she has stories about how beautiful her mother had been.
The last thing she had seen of her mother had been her riding away through Cair Paravel’s gate, long dark braid whipping behind her. She is afraid of horses all her life, but she rides them anyway when she is old enough. It would not do for a queen to seem frightened.
Her father is the sort of verybminor foreign royalty who had farmed his own little plot of land way out in the backcountry. They had needed to make an alliance, but for all Susan’s practicalities that was one place she remained– what was it exactly? Faithful. Childish. Stubborn. She wanted to marry for love, and she had.
But Susan disappears, the queen and king and high king with her, and her husband gets pulled out of tending his private vegetable garden to be his only daughter’s regent. He tries to keep her separate but teach her what she needs to know, all at once, so Susan’s child grows up with that weight on her shoulders early.
She does not know it, because the court artists always painted her mother smiling, but those stiff shoulders are one of the best connections she will ever have with her mother– Susan had been made the little mother too early, too, the one relied upon, who worried and herded and doubted because no one else was going to do it. Her child is a little queen, looking out and out over the acres of land and knowing what she owes this quiet piece of the world.
She rules in peace and in war, neither Gentle or Valiant but instead Wise. Her name is spoken with love and praise, and she raises her own children to be just, to be valiant, to be gentle, to be magnificent.
–
Susan has still not given up looking when her own horn calls her home to Narnia. It has been more than a year for her. It has been hundreds for her home. Cair Paravel might be overgrown, unrecognizable. It might be recently abandoned. It might still be thriving, vibrant, alive.
But this is what matters: Susan walks up to a high green hill and all the old standing stones propped up on its ridge.
She finds her husband’s name and drops wild daisies on his grave. She finds her daughter’s grave. She traces the dates of her rule, of her life, and she drops down and weeps.
They save Narnia, again, from invaders and war, and Aslan sends them back to England.
When she forgets about Narnia, seventeen and widowed, seventeen and her child grown and buried and unknown and decomposed– when Susan forgets about Narnia it will be, more than ever, an act of self defense.
–
Alternatively: Susan manages to shake news of the rings out of Professor Diggory.
She and whichever of her siblings wants to most stumble back onto Narnian soil: Peter wouldn’t leave the two younger kids alone in England; Edmund loves Narnia as much as anyone, still feels like he’s repaying it debts that it’s already forgiven him for, but Lucy has been crying since she crashed back down on her skinny knees on the upstairs bedroom floor in the Professor’s old country house. So it’s Lucy and Susan who take the rings, then. They kiss their brothers, their co-monarchs, on their cheeks and they go.
The girls hike with younger, childish muscles to Cair Paravel, their limbs growing and strengthening in the Narnian air, remembering themselves. They will not reach their exact old heights, not for years, but they are home and that is enough to send them sprinting and dancing and crying as they travel old known paths.
Susan is smaller and her child is older, closer to grown, but they slam into each other’s open arms as soon as they see each other in that royal courtyard– however close in size they get, her mother’s arms will always be the safest place she knows.
Lucy and Susan retake their crowns. Susan curls up in the warmth of her husband’s arm, buries her face in his shoulder, and tries to inhale every year she missed. He gives them to her in stories at the breakfast table for years, in ecstatic descriptions of carrot crops missed out on and fields of grain unseen. Narnian agriculture has seen a boost in the years of his regency.
There are years of Susan’s daughter’s life that she missed, and she grasps what she can of them in recollection and anecdote. She tells them about the desperation, much more amusing now, with which she searched for them. She and her daughter build something new between them, these two daughters of Eve. Lucy still gives the best piggy-back rides even when Susan’s daughter is almost of a height with her.
Lucy and Susan reign well–valiant and gentle, blinding faith and practical doubt. When Susan’s daughter is old enough, Lucy and Susan forfeit her their crowns and stay on as advisers. They never hunt stag again, but even as an eighty year old Lucy hobbles her way down to Mrs. Beaver’s daughter’s little house for tea and to hold baby beavers in her wise old lap.
–
When Peter and Edmund get yanked back into Narnia from a train stop, Susan’s old horn is not being blown by a Calormene named Caspian.
Susan is buried on a high green hill, Lucy on one side and her husband and daughter on the other. Their granddaughters and grandsons are scattered over the hill, and Peter and Ed do not even know their names.
The stones are worn by strong wind and long decades. They are overgrown with small white flowers. The boys will go up there, later, and they will cry like the earth is still dark and fresh over each of those graves. For them, it is.
But Cair Paravel is not overgrown, destroyed, or forgotten. It is centuries older and Peter and Ed do not recognize the new additions, the court fashions, or even some of the words whispered by the gathered crowd.
They do recognize the crinkled eyes on the young queen standing crowned and patient before them, a horn in her hands. She has Edmund’s best quirked grin, and they will learn she has Lucy’s talent at speech-making and Peter’s at tactics. They recognize her long dark hair.
Steel Phoenix Studios 