PEPPER

5th January 2024

Photo Credits: ChViroj (Getty Images), Frank Cone (Pexels), CANVA

I will take the lecher. He is at my house. He cannot ‘scape me.

‘Tis impossible he should. He cannot creep into a half-penny purse,

nor into a pepper-box. But lest the devil that guides him should aid him,

I will search impossible places.

FORD: Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 3, Scene 5

PEPPER (Piper nigrum)

Shakespeare uses Pepper mainly in a metaphorical sense to indicate sharpness, or the smallness of the peppercorns, but he also includes a reference to Pepper Gingerbread. The term ‘Peppered’ to mean covered with wounds is also used is Henry IV, Part 1 and Romeo and Juliet.

Pepper was an important spice and also included in medicines in Elizabethan England. Artefacts like the Romano-British Hoxne Empress Pepper-pot show that Pepper had been available, to some at least, in Britain since antiquity.

John Gerard recognises different types of Pepper, the Black Pepper, the Long Pepper, the White Pepper and also Ethiopian Pepper. Black Pepper is the dried fruit (or drupe) of Piper nigrum, and White Pepper is the inner seed. Green and Red Peppercorns can be made from Piper nigrum by different processing techniques. Long Pepper (Piper longum) is closely related to Black Pepper and also native to South Asia.

The Red and Green Peppers we use in salads today, and Chilli Peppers come from an unrelated Genus, Capsicum, part of the Nightshade Family of which Tomatoes and Potatoes are members. Capsicums are native to the Americas. John Gerard includes references to these ‘Indian or Ginny Peppers’. He says “we have received seed for our English gardens, where they come to fruit-bearing: but the cod does not come to that bright red colour which naturally it is possessed with, which hath happened by reason of these unkindley years that are past: but we expect better when God shall send us a hot and temperate year.”

Black Pepper is a climbing plant, native to India but grown in other parts of the world and traded for millennia. The Romans valued Pepper highly and Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century C.E., says “both pepper and ginger grow wild in their respective countries, and yet here we buy them by weight - just as if they were so much gold or silver.”

More Information

BBC: History of the World in a 100 Objects (Hoxne Pepper Pot)

British Museum: Hoxne Pepper Pot

John Gerard, 1597 (first edition), The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1636 edition accessed via Archive.org)

Kew Plants of the World Online: Piper nigrum

Pliny, Natural History, Book 12, Chapter 14:7, The Pepper Tree (accessed via Perseus Tufts)