Alex Sapoznik

People in Lisbon were fraudulently exporting Lisbon honey, but calling it Porto honey.

If you think about that absolute darkness that must have fallen on people in the Middle Ages, and then to walk into a church.

and to have it glowing ablaze with all of these candles and the sweet smell from the beeswax, the experience of being in that kind of light must have been really extraordinary.

I started my research looking at medieval peasants and especially very poor peasants.

And one of the big questions that we have about very poor peasants and the population generally of medieval England before the Black Death is how did so many people live off of so little given what we know about medieval agriculture.

Something that I saw being mentioned in passing was beekeeping.

I am not a beekeeper, so I did wonder, could people just keep bees?

Was that a lucrative business?

How would you keep a bee in England?

It's very cold and rainy here.

It was very cold and rainy in the Middle Ages too.

We have a really nice example from 1459 where the parliament in Lisbon is dealing with complaints from merchants who are trading honey with the merchants from Porto who are saying that people in Lisbon were fraudulently exporting Lisbon honey but calling it Porto honey.

In the Middle Ages, and certainly in Christian Europe, the main point of keeping honeybees was for the wax that they produced.

The wax has lots of different purposes, but the main purpose to which it was put was for Christian religious observance in the Latin West.

After the expenses for the actual building, the biggest expense year on year was for beeswax.

All of this use of candles is very much associated with the institution of the Catholic Church.

One of the many things that Martin Luther and others disagreed with was all of that external ornamentation.

And so, as places become Protestant, they start to use wax candles much less frequently.

And we can see that really nicely illustrated in England.

We have an injunction in 1538 that forbade the use of wax and wax candles, except for the wax that was used on the altar and the candles that were on the screen that separates the altar from the rest of the church.