SC - Re: Meats/spices in MA

[Bonne of Traquair]

>
>Um, I think you are assuming that having enough money to buy a pennyworth
>of pepper means you ahve enough money to do any of the above things.

I disagree that sometimes having the penny means anything much can be said 
about it.


> > I think the difference in opinion comes from this:  At what point does  
>a
> > dirt grubbing peasant ... cross
> > the line to small landowner?

>Um. I think the difficulty is that people assume ... peasants are poor by 
>definition. You have completely left out what
>became the 'working class'.

As a matter of fact, I was _describing_ the working class and asking at what 
point one moved from poor into working class. My sentence did not say that 
the small landowner is still a peasant, but I do realize that. You said 
'prosperous peasant' before, and I was noting that anyone fitting that 
description was part of the new working class and increasingly able to buy 
spice, etc. This sets them apart from the poor, who only occaisionally can 
make such purchase, if ever. It also sets them apart from earlier peasants, 
who had no access to the market for spice.


>depending on how well the crops on
>your land did, and how much land you managed to rent (and whether you had
>rent), you could do enough in a year to be able to buy a few pretties at
>the fair after harvest.

A few pretties is not regular consumption.  It's not that I don't accept the 
idea that poor peasants sometimes had bits of luxury. I disagree over what 
to say about it.

>Peasant, despite our modern conditioning, doesn't mean 'starving poor
>person' or even 'starving serf'. It means, according to the OED, " One who
>lives in the country and works on the land, either as a small farmer or as
>a labourer; spec. one who relies for his subsistence mainly on the produce
>of his own labour and that of his household, and forms part of a larger
>culture and society in which he is subject to the political control of
>outside groups; also, loosely, a rural labourer."

Was this always the definition? I see nothing in it that allows us to say 
medieval peasants enjoyed the use of spices without a qualifier as to amount 
and frequency.

I think we have a time as well as money division between our opinions.  My 
basic viewpoint is very early period, when there was much less of the 
in-between class. I agree that the later we go, the more people had spice, 
that is common knowlege. But we can't say that that medieval peasants had 
spices without making clearer WHEN and WHICH of them had spices.

Please say more about the itenerant grocers (I think that was the phrase in 
your early post.)

Bonne
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