It’s National Coconut Day, and according to a 2017 research paper in a journal called The Medieval Globe, that running gag in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where the characters keep running around the countryside banging coconuts together… that could’ve happened.
As the paper puts it, “Medieval England was unexpectedly full of coconuts.”
Serious Monty Python fans will remember that in one of the scenes in that movie, one of the characters asks King Arthur and his entourage where they got their coconuts, and when Arthur replies “We found them,” the soldier is skeptical, saying “The coconut’s tropical.”
And this is true; the world’s top coconut producers are Indonesia, the Philippines, India, tropical places like that.
England isn’t on the list.
But historian and author Kathleen E. Kennedy did a deep dive into the question and found evidence of coconuts.
There are documents as far back as the 1200s referring to coconuts, and English woodworkers made cups out of coconut shells in this period.
You may hear all that and wonder, well, how did the coconuts end up in England?
They didn’t migrate, and they weren’t brought by swallows that gripped them by the husk.
(It wasn’t a question of where he grips it. Or even a simple question of weight ratios!)
Kennedy found that English traders picked up coconuts, usually from Venetians.
They, in turn, picked them up from Alexandria, who obtained them from coconut producing lands.
But there are two very important notes we need to make here about this process.
For one thing, Europeans primarily thought of coconuts as medicine, not as a great food to pair with chocolate, and not as a dairy-free milk alternative.
And medieval people did not think of coconuts as coconuts: that word had Portuguese roots and starts showing up past the medieval period, in the 15th and 16th Centuries.
The would have called it the Nut of India, or the Great Nut.
But as far as we know, nobody in medieval England pretended to ride on a horse by getting two empty Great Nut halves and banging ‘em together.
Starting this Friday in Oklahoma, it’s the Fort Gibson Sweet Corn Festival.
As you can guess from the name, the main event here is corn, whether it’s smoked or whether it’s made into the festival’s “Famous Succotash,” which combines grilled corn and cornmeal batter with okra, onions, potatoes and smoked sausage.
Coconuts in Medieval England Weren’t as Rare as Monty Python and the Holy Grail Made You Think (The Mary Sue)
Fort Gibson Sweet Corn Festival
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