40
Silver pot, found in Hoxne, Suffolk, England
AD 350–400
For thousands of years western Europeans have been entranced by the spices of the East. Long before curry became a British national dish, we dreamt of transforming our dull island food with exotic flavours from India. For the poet George Herbert the phrase ‘the land of spices’ evoked a metaphorical perfection at once unimaginably remote and infinitely desirable. So it’s perhaps not surprising that through the centuries spice has always been not just high poetry but big business. The spice trade between the Far East and Europe funded the Portuguese and Dutch empires and provoked many bloody wars. Already at the beginning of the fifth century it was a trade that embraced the whole of the Roman Empire. When Visigoths attacked the city of Rome in AD 408, 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 tonne of pepper. This precious spice had made its lucrative way all over the Roman Empire, from India to East Anglia, which is where this object was found.
What we think of as Suffolk the Romans might have called the Far West. Around the year 400, centuries of unprecedented peace and prosperity in Britain were about to end in chaos. Across western Europe the Roman Empire was fragmenting into a series of failed states, and in Britain the Roman leadership was conducting a phased withdrawal. At moments like this it is tricky to be rich. There was no longer any organized military force to protect the wealthy or their possessions, and as they fled they left behind them some of the finest treasure ever found. Our object belongs to a fabulous collection of gold and silver buried in a field at Hoxne, Suffolk, around 410 and found nearly 1,600 years later, in 1992.
It looks like a small statue of the upper half of a Roman matron wearing elaborate clothes and long dangly earrings. Her hair is fantastically complicated, twisted and plaited: she is obviously a seriously grande dame and very fashionable. She’s about 10 centimetres (3 inches) high, the size of a pepper pot. Indeed that is exactly what she is – a silver pepper pot. On the underside there is a clever mechanism that allows you to determine how much pepper will come out. You turn the handle and you can either close it completely, have it fully open, or set it to a kind of sprinkling mode. This pepper pot would clearly have been owned by very wealthy people, and it’s obviously designed to amuse. Although the face is of silver, the eyes and the lips are picked out in gold so that, as the candles flickered, the eyes and the lips would appear to move. She must have been quite a talking point at Suffolk banquets.
Britain became part of the Roman Empire in the year 43, so by the time of our pepper pot it had been a Roman province for more than 300 years. Native Britons and Romans had intermingled and intermarried and in England everyone did as the Romans did. The Roman trade expert Dr Roberta Tomber elucidates:
When the Romans came to Britain they brought a lot of material culture and a lot of habits with them that made the people of Britain feel Roman; they identified with the Roman culture. Wine was one of these – olive oil was another – and pepper would have been a more valuable one in this same sort of ‘set’ of Romanitas.
The Romans were particularly serious about their food. Slave chefs would man the kitchens to create great delicacies for their consumption. A high-end menu could include dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seeds, then a whole wild boar being suckled by piglets made of cake, in which were placed live thrushes, and to finish, quince, apples and pork disguised as fowls and fish. None of these opulent culinary inventions would have been created without ample seasoning – and the primary spice would have been pepper.
Why has this particular spice remained so constantly attractive for us? I asked the author Christine McFadden about the importance of a bit of pepper in your recipe:
They just couldn’t get enough of it. Wars were fought over it, and if you look at Roman recipes, every one starts with ‘take pepper and mix with …’.
An early twentieth-century chef said that no other spice can do so much for so many different types of food, both sweet and savoury. It contains an alkaloid called piperine, which is responsible for the pungency. It promotes sweating, which cools the body – essential for comfort in hot climates. It also aids digestion, titillates the taste buds and makes the mouth water.
The closest place to Rome where pepper actually grew was India, so the Romans had to find a way of sending ships to and fro across the Indian Ocean and then carrying their cargo overland to the Mediterranean. Whole fleets and caravans laden with pepper would travel from India to the Red Sea, then across the desert to the Nile. It was then traded around the Roman Empire by river, sea and road. This was an immense network, complicated and dangerous, but highly profitable. Roberta Tomber fills in the details:
Strabo in the first century AD says that 120 boats left every year from Myos Hormos – a port on the Red Sea – to India. Of course, there were other ports on the Red Sea and other countries sending ships to India. The actual value of the trade was enormous – one hint we have of this is from a second-century papyrus known as the Muziris Papyrus. In that they discuss the cost of a shipload estimated today at 7 million sestertia. At that same time a soldier in the Roman army would have earned about 800 sestertia a year.
Regularly filling a single large silver pepper pot like ours would therefore have taken a big chunk out of the grocery budget, yet the household that owned our pepper pot had another three silver pots, for pepper or other spices – one shaped as Hercules in action and two in the shapes of animals. This is dizzying extravagance. But the pepper pots are just a tiny part of the great hoard of buried treasure. They were found in a chest containing seventy-eight spoons, twenty ladles, twenty-nine pieces of spectacular gold jewellery, and more than 15,000 gold and silver coins. Fifteen different emperors are represented on the coins; the latest is Constantine III, who came to power in 407. This helps us to date the hoard, which must have been buried for safekeeping some time after that year – when Roman authority in Britain was rapidly breaking down.
This brings us back to our pepper pot in the shape of a high-born Roman matron. With her right forefinger she points to a scroll, which she holds proudly, rather like a graduate showing off a degree certificate in a graduation photograph. This tells us that the woman is not only from a wealthy family but that she was also educated. Although Roman women were not allowed to practise professions such as law or politics, they were taught to be accomplished in the arts. Singing, playing instruments, reading, writing and drawing were all talents expected of a well-bred lady. And, while a woman like this could not hold public office, she would certainly have been in a position to exercise power.
We don’t know who this woman was, but there are clues to be found on other objects from the hoard – a gold bracelet is inscribed UTERE FELIX DOMINA IULIANE, meaning ‘Use this happily, Lady Juliane’. We will never know if this is the lady on our pepper pot, but she may well have been its owner. Another name, Aurelius Ursicinus, is found on several of the other objects – could this have been Juliane’s husband? All the objects are small but extremely precious. This was the mobile wealth of a rich Roman family – precisely the type of person who is in danger when the state fails. There were no Swiss bank accounts in the ancient world – the only thing to do was bury your treasure and hope that you lived to come back and find it. But Juliane and Aurelius never did come back and the buried treasure remained in the ground. That is, until 1,600 years later, when in 1992 a farmer, Eric Lawes, went to look for a missing hammer. What he found, with the help of his metal detector, was this spectacular hoard. And he found the hammer too – which is now also part of the British Museum’s collection.
Many of the objects in this history would mean little to us were it not for the work of thousands of people – archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and numerous others – and we wouldn’t even have found many of these objects without metal detectorists like Eric Lawes, who in recent years have been rewriting the history of Britain. When he found the first few objects he alerted local archaeologists so that they could record the detail of the site and lift the hoard out in blocks of earth. Weeks of careful micro-excavation in the laboratories of the British Museum revealed not only the objects but the way in which they were packed. Although their original container, a wooden chest about 60 centimetres (2 feet) wide, had largely perished, its contents remained in their original positions. Our pepper pot was buried alongside a stack of ladles, some small silver jugs and a beautiful silver handle in the shape of a prancing tigress. Right at the top, lovingly wrapped in cloth, were necklaces, rings and gold chains, placed there by people uncertain of when or whether they would ever wear them again. These are objects that bring us very close to the terrifying events that must have been overwhelming these people’s lives.
Written on one of the spoons in the hoard is VIVAS IN DEO (‘May you live in God’) – a common Christian prayer – and it is likely that our fleeing family was Christian. By this date Christianity had been the official religion of the Empire for nearly a hundred years. Like pepper, it had come to Britain via Rome, and both survived the fall of the Roman Empire.
PART NINE
The Rise of World Faiths
AD 100–600
Striving to comprehend the infinite, a small number of major faiths have shaped the world over the last 2,000 years. Strikingly, the defining representational traditions of Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism all developed within a few hundred years of each other: Buddhism first began to allow images of the Buddha in human form from AD 100 to 200, and the oldest images of Jesus Christ coincide with the acceptance of Christianity as the predominant religion of the Roman Empire in AD 312. At a similar time, Hinduism established the conventions for depicting its gods that are still familiar today. In Iran, Zoroastrianism, the state religion, articulated the ritual duties of the ruler to secure order in the world. The birth of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 570 set the scene for the rise of Islam, which eventually overwhelmed the many local gods who had been worshipped in Arabia.