Everyone Knows You've Been To The Crusades If You Bring Back An Orange With You

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There was in England a longstanding wartime tradition — or at least there is the story of such a tradition — of spurring on military-age men who were otherwise slow to enlist with the delivery of an insulting little present. Supposedly during the Third Crusade, men of the knightly class who failed to take the cross would be sent a distaff and a ball of wool, the wool trade being crucial to the medieval English economy, and the distaff being emblematic of the specific role women played in its production.

Men and women might both tend flocks of sheep at this time without drawing undue attention to themselves, but apparently it was only men who sheared the wool in spring, and only women who spun it into yarn thereafter. If wool is spun into yarn, and not something else. It might be carded into yarn. Or it might have been spun into some third thing. Thread, perhaps. I don’t know very much about textiles.¹

One never knows just how much faith to attach to this kind of story. England was a pretty sizable country, even in those days, and there must have been an awful lot of sheep throughout the kingdom. It’s a little difficult to believe that no man from Land’s End to Berwick-upon-Tweed ever carded a bit of wool on a short-handed afternoon. Presumably at least a few of them must have done, on occasion, but at any rate that’s the story.

So any twelfth-century landowner who saw a bit of wool peeping out of the dispatch-rider’s saddlebag during his monthly visit from the King’s Messenger Corps would have nearly instantly gotten the point, and presumably decided pretty sharpish that he’d be better off taking his chances against the Ayyubids in Acre than in sticking around the neighborhood after that, because once people start making that kind of joke about you, there’s no end to it.

Next thing you know, your wife’s sister gives you a spinning wheel for Christmas, and Reynauld the blacksmith sweeps the cloak off his shoulders to cover the mudpuddle in your path on the way to church, while everybody laughs, even the priest.

Besides, once you’ve crossed the Channel, who’s to say back home whether you spent the next year fighting in Jerusalem or taking in the art in Venice, or Bruges? Practically no one from your village has ever traveled so far. You can always tell them you got separated from the other knights on the road, but that you nevertheless served Leopold V with distinction, and even faced Saladin on the field, who was so impressed with your courage and noble mien that he gave you a sword after you’d broken yours. Who would contradict you, especially when everyone knows Saladin loves complimenting his opponents in battle, and offering them weapons and jewels, for he is a very parfait and worthy knight, six feet in his stocking feet and handsome as Absalom? Just bring back an orange with you.

As long as you bring back an orange to your hometown, no one will question your Crusading bona fides. Have you noticed how any story set roughly in the twelfth century always includes a Crusader bringing back an orange to England? Oranges were to the twelfth century what oral sex was to the Tudor era.² But you can pick up an orange at almost any midsized Continental market before boarding the cutter back to Dover at Calais. Everybody who goes on Crusade brings back an orange, and everybody back at home plays along, acting like they’ve never seen one before, even though they’re common as carrots in Catalonia and the Low Countries. Just because people from your village don’t travel much doesn’t mean nobody’s ever heard of the Low Countries. Other people go there, and they bring back goods all the time. But the game must be played just the same.

“Oh, what is this mysterious harvest from farthest Araby,” is the expected response. “How it glows with an inner light, like the countenance of the Blessed Mother, or Moses’ face on the mountaintop! How radiant, how exquisite the fragrance. Perfumed apple of the sun! So delicate, and yet wrapped in a leathern, pebbled hide like a snake! It is food, and yet it is somehow not a turnip. However shall our eyes come to understand this edible riddle?” And so on, repeated anew over each returning Crusader as if for the first time. It cheers them up no end. “We may have lost Edessa, but at least I have introduced oranges to England.”

Once you have begun to notice this, you will see it everywhere. The next time you pick up a book with a Crusader in it, or turn on an episode of Cadfael, count the minutes until someone is introduced to the concept of an orange for the first time. I’ll bet my eyes you won’t have to wait long.

[Image via]

1. Or cars, as it happens. Lily, my co-parent, knows a great deal about both, and she will frequently astonish me by saying, at a glance, “That’s not rayon, that’s spandex” or “That’s a Ford Fusion,” respectively. She knows all about the differences between weaving and knitting, between four-doors and sedans, and it seems like a magic trick to me, every time. She’s tried explaining her methods to me on more than one occasion, but I prefer to let the mystery be.

2. People are always claiming that the Boleyn sisters brought back the concept of oral sex from the French court, but that can’t possibly have been true. Surely someone had thought of it before then.