Hoxne pepper pot

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Neil MacGregor's world history told through objects at the British Museum arrives in Britain at the time of the Roman collapse. Throughout this week he has been looking at how different cultures around the globe were pursuing pleasure, roughly 2000 years ago, from smoking in North America to team sports in Central America. Today, Neil looks at how the elite of Roman Britain sustained their appetite for luxury goods and good living in the years before their demise. He tells the story through a silver pepper pot that was discovered as part of a buried hoard - hidden possibly by Romans on the run. He describes the ambitions of the elite in Roman Britain and how they satisfied their particular taste for pepper, with contributions from the food writer Christine McFadden and historian Roberta Tomber. Producer: Anthony Denselow

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects
0:07.8	from BBC Radio 4. For thousands of years Western Europeans have been entranced by the spices of the East.
0:20.0	Long before Curry became the British National dish, we dreamed of transforming our dull island
0:25.4	food with exotic flavours from India.
0:28.4	For the poet George Herbert, the phrase, The land of spices, evoked a metaphorical perfection at once
0:34.6	unimaginably remote and infinitely desirable. So it's perhaps not surprising that
0:39.9	spice has through the centuries always been not just high poetry but big business.
0:45.5	The spice trade between the Far East and Europe funded the Portuguese and Dutch empires
0:50.1	and provoked many bloody wars. Already at the beginning of the 5th century it was a trade that embraced
0:56.2	the whole of the Roman Empire. When in 408, barbarian Visigoths attacked the city of Rome. They were induced to leave only on the payment of a huge ransom that included gold, silver, large quantities of silk, and one further luxury. a ton of pepper.
1:15.0	This precious spice had made its lucrative way
1:18.0	all over the Roman Empire, from India to East Anglia. And that's where this program's object was found.
1:28.0	The trade was very important to the Romans and they made a lot of profit from it.
1:35.0	They just couldn't get enough of it. Wars were fought over it.
1:38.0	And if you look at Roman recipes, everyone starts, take pepper and mix with.
1:45.0	A history of the world in a hundred objects. The Hawks and Pepper Pot, made of silver from the 4th century AD, found in Suffolk, England.
2:19.0	This week we've travelled the globe, looking at objects of leisure and pleasure from around the world looking at objects of leisure and pleasure from around the world about 2,000 years ago.
2:23.9	We began with sex and feasting near Jerusalem in what was then the Roman Middle East.
2:28.8	We've been to North America for tobacco smoking, moved to Mexico for early team sports, and then went on to the moralising
2:35.5	pleasures of painting and poetry in China. Today I'm back with the Romans in what they might have
2:41.8	called the far west, what we think of as Suffolk.
2:45.8	We're around the year 400 and in England centuries of unprecedented peace and prosperity
	...

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