Sugar-Cane: Antedating the Entry in the Oxford English Dictionary

Abstract

THE earliest record of the compound word sugar-cane listed in the second edition of OED dates from 1568: ‘1568 tr. Thevet's New found Worlde lxxvii.126 “The stalke groweth like to Sugar Canes.”’ This word appears over one century earlier, however, in John Lydgate's poem, ‘An Invocation to Seynte Anne’, in which he refers to Mary's mother as a ‘blissful sugre-canne!’ (line 65).1 The portion of the manuscript (British Library MS. Additional 16165) in which the poem appears has been dated to approximately 1420–7; Ralph Hanna III suggests that the poem's style and rubric, which states that the piece ‘was a command performance for Anne, countess of Stafford’, further narrows the terminus ante quem to 1424.2 During the Middle Ages sugar was considered to be a luxury as well as a medicine;3 similar to honey, sugar could be employed as a metaphor in devotional literature to great effect. Lydgate, a Benedictine monk from Bury St Edmunds, labels the divine sweetness of both the Virgin Mary and Christ as ‘sugar’ elsewhere.4 Referring to St Anne as a ‘blissful sugre-canne’ is therefore appropriate for several reasons. Throughout the poem Lydgate develops the religio-botanical metaphor by describing how Anne is descended ‘of þe stocke and roote’ of Jesse (lines 22–3); she bore ‘þe feyre fruyt’ (line 29) and brought forth nourishment in the form of ‘þe holy manna, / Foode of mankynde’ (lines 45–6). Medieval vernacular literature employed a number of botanical epithets to refer to Anne, including the grapevine, rosebush, and tree trunk.5 One cannot help but wonder if the learned monk Lydgate was tempted to refer to Anne as a sugar-cane not only because of the association of Anne with sweet medicinal nourishment as well as with metaphors of vegetation, but also by the closeness of the words Anna and canna, Latin for cane, or the punning similarity between the Latin words sacrum (neuter singular of sacred) and saccharum (sugar).