(Untitled)

[aubrem]

I'm reading Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Tales series. It's set at the time of Alfred the Great. The protagonist just spent time on his land threshing corn. Corn?? What am I missing here, was there another grain called corn at that time?

Comments

[leni_jess]

It's wheat. That's what the English meant (and frequently mean) by "corn". See also the 19th Corn Laws, relating (I think) to the distribution of wheat, which caused so much unrest.

[aubrem]

ahhh, thank you so much.

[tetsubinatu]

As leni says, corn used to be just a general name for any kind of grain. After the Americas were discovered it gradually defaulted to mean maize. But still in some usages (eg: corn flour) it is non-specific. (At least in Australia it is, dunno about other countries.)

[leni_jess]

You wouldn't ever call barley or rye "corn", I think, though a "corn chandler" sold grain of all kinds. I suspect all the other corn words (from (ground) cornflour to ground (corned) gunpowder) come from what you do to wheat. (Dictionary is about 500 km away.)

[tetsubinatu]

Not these days, but in the olden days I believe that they did use 'corn' to cover all the different types of grain including barley and millet. I don't really know much about rye - I'm not even sure how long it has been around.

[miranda_macondo]

Corn = grain (any type).

[auctasinistra]

This is the only time in my life that learning about the Corn Laws in college would have been useful, and I'm too late. :-)

[aubrem]

ha. We'll pretend you were first.

[sigune]

Oooh! Is it any good? (Seeing as I loved the Warlord Chronicles, I'm curious...)

[aubrem]

It really is. I'm two books in and still don't much like the protagonist but I suspect he's on an arc and I will start to like him one of these books. Despite him (even because of him because he's still compelling) I find these books pageturners. They're absolutely fascinating. They take me right into a period of history that's too alien for me to imagine on my own. I also read Cornwell's Stonehenge book and that was *too* alien for me to like but this series is just close enough that I can relate to the character's motivations somewhat.