Giles Milton

when he's not working which made me laugh so much nuts nuts nathaniel's not meg a fine tome currently being developed for television it is indeed yeah um dear russell crowe has got the rights and um he's doing something with it yeah yeah so i'm not quite sure where we're at with it but i'm told it's uh it's rolling along so coming to your screens in the next couple of years hopefully

Have you never eaten kneecap?

It did it all.

It did it all.

It cured the bloody flocks, as they said, the dysentery that they were all getting.

But I think really, as you say, aphrodisiac, I mean, when you're trying to sell something for vast prices, you add all these properties onto it.

And I suppose nutmeg in the sort of 1600s was a cross between Viagra and cocaine, you know, which you mentioned earlier.

Yeah.

And this made it extraordinarily valuable, but particularly that physicians claimed it could cure the plague, the pestiferous pestilence, as it was called, which, of course, cut a sway through the population of London at the time.

And so they claimed that if you had a bit of nutmeg, stuffed it into these bizarre nasal caps that they wore.

They used to breathe through this sort of concoction of spices, of which nutmeg was the key ingredient.

When you go to Venice...

You're absolutely right.

Those beaks were filled with spices.

And it was claimed that if you breathe through those spices, you wouldn't get the plague.

Now, obviously, this was complete nonsense, but everyone believed it at the time.

And that was the important bit because it meant that everyone wanted these spices, which meant that the prices remained extraordinarily high.

Yeah, I mean, there's a wonderful account in my book, actually, of Pepys going down to the docks on a late one night and sort of doing this backhanded deal in the darkness where he shoves a few gold coins into the hands of some sea dog.

And in exchange, he's given a small sackload of nutmeg.

So, yeah, this was, you know, almost black market industry was going on in London at the time.