When you go into a donut shop, the most common amount ordered is usually a dozen donuts. Dozen is a word of French origin that refers to 12 donuts.
However, there’s another term to refer to 13 donuts, or sometimes a little more for good measure: the baker’s dozen. Sometimes, customers might ask a baker to throw in an extra donut, bagel, or bun.
I grew up in New York, so bagels were the gold standard breakfast food for a good day. A group of friends would usually get a dozen bagels, but we never knew we could request one more.
The term is also called the devil’s dozen, and there’s good reason for that — the baker’s dozen is a term with dark and sinister origins.
In some societies, bakers had poor reputations for shorting customers the amount of bread they were supposed to give, and the punishment for a baker found guilty of shorting customers could be having ears nailed to the wall or hands cut off.
This is the story of the baker’s dozen.
Why bread was so important
According to a 1921 version of The Baker’s Helper, the baker’s dozen originated from medieval times, a time when bakers were thought of as “greedy and even dishonest,” especially in England. This presented a problem for nobles and kings — the public was dependent on bakers to make sure they were fed.
When the city of Winchester was founded in 1203, a bread law was included in the founding charter. Bread was especially a staple in urban life. There was a law dictating that bread should be available to everyone at a fair price.
The bread law said white bread could be sold for more than black bread since white bread was seen as purer.
The punishments
A baker who shortchanged a customer would be punished, and those punishments escalated throughout history.
In 1266, King Henry II took the punishments to another level. He adopted the Assize Panis. An assize law was when an official wanted to regulate the sale of bread in an area, and this particular assize aligned the price of bread and baked goods with the market price of wheat.
This assize made it so people who shorted their customers would be punished. They could be flogged or pilloried.
And it didn’t just apply to bread — the assize established price regulations for beer as well.
Bread laws and assizes were also used to discriminate. In Jaca, Spain, the nobleman promised three days of bread for anyone who joined his army. He also promised they could go to any mill they wanted to choose where they could get their bread.
But two groups of people were excluded: Jews and bakers.
According to Karen Harris at History Daily, assizes made life more difficult for bakers. They had to sell by the pound, and many bakers did not own scales, so they had no idea whether they were shortchanging customers or not on some days.
As a result, bakers decided it was better to throw in more bread than suffer extremely embarrassing punishments, so they decided to put in some extra bread for good measure. As you can imagine, being arrested or publicly whipped as a baker was not good for business, and the baker’s dozen was a wise adaptation for bakers to avoid such a punishment.
As for who bore punishments, it seems at least in English society, men and women were both fined for shorting customers as “breakers of the assize.”
A 1246 court record from Middlesex showed wives and widows named as almost extensions of their husbands (Alice Savage’s widow, Roise the Miller’s wife). In the latter example, an analysis from Penn State University cites stereotypes of the “greedy, cheating miller” being likely to be punished for these assize laws.
If you think European countries like England took shortchanging bread seriously, then the steps more ancient civilizations took should scare you.
In Babylon, shortchanging bread led to someone’s hand being chopped off. In ancient Egypt, shortchanging bread led to someone’s ear being nailed to the bakery.
Takeaways
The baker’s dozen isn’t the only term with a dark origin.
The term “blockbuster,” which is the name of a failed DVD rental store and a term for a very successful movie, originally referred to a bomb in World War II that could destroy an entire block.
The term “deadline,” which refers to the time a project needs to be finished by, was a line drawn around a prison during the Civil War — if someone tried to cross the line, they got shot.
Many of these terms could use their own article. For now, the dark origin of the baker’s dozen revolved around the disingenuous reputation of bakers and the importance of making sure the citizens of a civilization could afford their most important staple food: bread.
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This post was previously published on Frame of Reference.
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