Medieval bakers at work, detail from a 13th century, Belgian psalter, Los Angeles, Getty, MS 14, fol. 8v.
12 May 2020
A baker’s dozen is thirteen of something. But why thirteen? The short answer is that we don’t know for sure, but we do have a pretty good guess.
The practice of adding an extra loaf of bread to the purchase of a dozen is widely believed to date to a series of medieval English laws, the Assizes of Bread and Ale. These laws strictly regulated the price and weight of loaves of bread that were to be sold and assigned punishments to bakers who shorted or overcharged customers. The first version of these laws was promulgated in the twelfth century during the reign of Henry II, but there were a number of them in succeeding years through to the early fourteenth century and the reign of Edward II. The most famous of these is the 1266 law promulgated under Henry III, but that is not the first nor only one.
So, the explanation goes, bakers began adding an extra loaf gratis to each dozen for two reasons. The first is that it prevented them from accidentally selling an underweight loaf and potentially being subject to punishment, but bakers often produced more than the local community could eat, and the excess was sold to hucksters who would resell the bread elsewhere. Since the law prohibited raising the price of a loaf of bread, the free loaf enabled the hucksters to make a profit.
The phrase baker’s dozen, however, doesn’t appear until long after these medieval laws were enacted, so there is no record that connects the phrase to the older laws, and the earliest known appearance of the phrase has nothing to do with baking. From Thomas Nash’s 1596 Haue Vvith You to Saffron-Vvalden:
Fie, this is not the fortieth dandiprat part of the affectionate Items, hee hath bequeathed on your mysterie, with fiue thousand other doctrinal deuotions, hath he adopted himselfe more than a by founder of your trade, conioyning with his aforesaid Doctor Brother in eightie eight browne Bakers dozen of Almanacks.
The phrase also appears in John Cooke’s play Green’s Tu Quoque, or the City Gallant, which is first known to have been performed in 1611 and was published in 1614.* In the play, a group of men are gambling at dice and calling out their bets:
Spend. For me, six.
Omnes. And six that.
Sta. Nine; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8: eighteene shillings.
Spend. What’s yours, sir?
Scat. Mine’s a Bakers dozen: master Bubble, tel [i.e., count out] your mony.
Bub. In good faith I am but a simple gamester, and doe not know what to doe.
Scat. Why, you must tell your money, and hee’le pay you.
From the use of the phrase in these two works without explanation in a context that has nothing to with baking, it’s pretty clear that baker’s dozen was a well-established term by the early modern era.
But while we can’t say for certain that the medieval laws are indeed the origin of baker’s dozen, it’s not an unreasonable guess.
Sources:
“The Assizes of Bread, Beer, & Lucrum Pistoris.” Medieval Sourcebook. 1998. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/breadbeer.asp
Cooke, John. Greenes Tu Quoque. London: Iohn Trundle, 1614. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Nash, Thomas. Haue Vvith You to Saffron-Vvalden. London: John Dante, 1596. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. baker n.
Photo credit: J. Paul Getty Museum.
* = The OED dates Greene’s Tu Quoque to 1599, but this is probably an error. The OED entry hasn’t been revised since being written in 1885.