A Brief History of Sandwich
Toponyms, Eponyms, the Loaf-Giver and Captain Cook
One thousand years ago, Sandwich was a borough in Kent, held by the Archbishop of Canterbury and produced ‘40,000 herrings for the sustenance of the monks’, according to the Domesday Book. Today, the sandwich is two slices of bread with some kind of food in the middle.
How did it make that journey?
The first part of the place name Sandwich comes from the old English sand, which means, sand. Sand itself is a word rooted in Germanic (contrasted with sabulum, the Latin root which gives French and Spanish sable, or Italian sabbia). Wīc, an Old English word for a settlement or harbor, from Latin vīcus (“village”). Other famous wīcs include Greenwich (Green town), Ipswich (Gip’s town), and Norwich (North town).
Sandwich sits on the River Stour (one of the many rivers Stour in England — Stour meant strong or powerful). At the time of the 40,000 herrings, the tide came far enough up the Stour that Sandwich itself was a port — indeed one of the Cinque (five, from French) Ports that also included Dover, Hythe, New Romney, and Hastings. Since then, the Stour has sufficiently silted up that the town is now two miles from the sea.
The Loaf Man Cometh
Sandwich was made an Earldom (the title Earl comes from Old Norse, jarl), in 1660 and its first Lord (from Old English hlaford, meaning ‘loaf-giver’!) was the naval commander Sir Edward Montagu. Lord Sandwich is therefore a toponym (named after a place).
However, it was not the first Lord Sandwich who was to give the loaf (divided, with filling), but his descendant John Montagu, who became the fourth Lord Sandwich in 1729 at the age of ten.
The fourth Lord Sandwich grew up to hold important official roles including as Postmaster General, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Secretary of State for the Northern Department.
It was in this latter role that a French travel writer, Pierre-Jean Grosley, refers to in his account of the birth of the sandwich.
“A minister of state passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming-table, so absorbt in play, that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a bit of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he eat (sic) without ever quitting the game. This new dish grew highly in vogue, during my residence in London: it was called by the name of the minister, who invented it.” Pierre Jean Grosley, translated by Thomas Nugent, A Tour to London, Or, New Observations on England and Its Inhabitants (Lockyer Davis, 1772), p. 149
Captain Cook meets his end on the sands of Sandwich Islands
In his admiralty role, Lord Sandwich was a patron of a young Captain James Cook. On Cook’s Third Voyage across in the Pacific in 1778 he discovered the archipelago of Hawai’i (the Place of the Gods) which he named the Sandwich Islands (after the man, not the food nor the place, make it an eponym).
Cook returned there in 1779, and on Valentine’s Day attempted to kidnap the Island’s chief Kalaniʻōpuʻu as hostage for a stolen longboat, but the Hawaiians faught back and Cook was killed — stabbed in the Chest on the sand of Kealakekua Bay (the pathway of the god”, thus returning the story full circle. Hawaii’s 1840 Constitution changed the name back from the Sandwich Islands, with the usage of ‘Sandwich Islands’ slowly dying out after that.
The Last Crust
In this way, we can safely conclude that sandwich is an eponym — a word named after a person — like Caesar Salad. Since the coining of the (small s) ‘sandwich’, the food has become more popular in books than the (big S) (either as the place in England, the Islands in the Pacific, or Lord Sandwich), with the point of crossover in 1942 (according to Google n-Gram).
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