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spice with the newly acquired—was a serious crime. A man convicted of adulteration forfeited his goods to the king. In 1428, The Grocers’ received a royal charter of incorporation from Henry VI. Among other items, the charter allowed it to acquire and hold land, and conveyed the privilege of overseeing the use of the beam and weights. In 1447, The Grocers’ became the official “garblers” of the land. Garblers inspected spices to ensure that they were pure, and the inspections also gave them a way to control the spice trade, which made the company even more powerful. Each year, The Grocers’ Company had to submit an account of all seized goods to the royal exchequer, and in exchange, it received half of all forfeited goods. It retained the garbling privilege until 1689.
    Pepper was the primary reason why the East India Company was established, and naturally, its founding members were successful grocers. When Queen Elizabeth I granted the company its charter in 1600, a major part of its mission was to bring down the price of pepper to English consumers.
    During the heyday of the pepper trade, the spice was more valuable than gold and silver. In 1418, an irate English grocer reported that he had been defrauded by a man who gave him tin spoons and stones rather than silver spoons, silver, and jewels in exchange for twelve pounds of pepper. The man took off before the grocer discovered the bartered merchandise was worthless. The surviving sailors of voyages to Asia were sometimes paid for their labors in quintals of pepper and other spices. A quintal was equivalent to about 125 pounds. The spices sailors received could set them up for the rest of their lives. Pepper was considered a legitimate form of money. It was used to pay taxes, custom duties, and even dowries. When Isabella married Charles I of Spain, also known as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, in 1526, her brother, John III of Portugal, paid part of her dowry in pepper. A man’s wealth was expressed by how much pepper was in a household.
    The origin of the word spice reflects its worth. Spice comes from the Latin word species , which means an item of special value. Following the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the British in 1588, King Philip II of Spain ran out of silver and couldn’t pay some of his debts. In 1589, and again in 1591, he reached into his stores of pepper to square the difference.
    Land was also purchased with pepper. The expression “peppercorn rent” arose to signify a fee lower than the usual rent, or a nominal fee, symbolized in some contracts by one peppercorn. In 1607 William III chartered Trinity Church in New York City (the lovely parish church in lower Manhattan near Ground Zero) and he demanded that the church vestry pay rent of one peppercorn annually to the crown. The peppercorn rent showed who really owned the property. The expression is still used in Britain today.
    Nutmeg and cloves were more profitable, but pepper was used in greater quantities—six to eight times more pepper than cloves and nutmeg was shipped from Asia to Europe during the age of discovery. Historian Holden Furber, a scholar who has written extensively about the English East India Company and European trading networks in Asia, estimates that the annual demand for cloves, nutmeg (mace), and cinnamon was roughly one million pounds, compared to six to eight million pounds of pepper. In the eighteenth century, the largest quantity of nutmeg sold by the VOC in Holland was only 280,964 pounds.
    The Dutch were well aware of the value of pepper, even as they obsessively pursued monopolies in other spices. This fact was not lost on their main rival, the English. During the seventeenth century, when the English and Dutch vied for control of port cities in India, Sumatra, and western Java, the directors of the English East India Company understood that pepper’s value exceeded that of any other spice because it was used by everyone.