Hello,
Currently trying to translate a royal treasure inventory from 1399. It’s in medieval French and a phrase keeps popping up and I need to know what its significance is.
The phrase is pois’ de Troie and it directly translates as peas of Troy! Either I’m doing a bad translating job (likely!) or it means something I don’t understand.
Here’s an entry with it in:
Item, iiij chargeours d’or faitz de mesme l’or, pois de troie CCxxv marcz, summa, MMiiij li.
Any help gratefully received.
"Pois" in this context mean "poids", as in weight, as in a stand in for financial value.
Depending on the audience that you are translating the inventory for, it is pretty standard to leave currencies in the original (whether or not you modernize the spelling is a personal call; just be consistent). Usually this comes with an expository footnote. This is the most common practice if you will just be translating a few examples out of the inventory for quotation in a larger work.
Depending on the context in which you are translating, you may use a glossary or introductory translator note to cover it. If this were for publication, because it is an inventory, most readers will find a weights a measures appendix useful.
For a nineteenth-century historical discussion of the currency's origins see: H. W. Chisholm, On the Science of Weighing and Measuring and the Standards of Measure and Weight (London: MacMillan & Co., 1877), p. 56.
It is also mentioned here in Dictionnaire d'autrefois (see definition 8).
I think you may have run into the problem where a word with multiple meanings has been translated according to only one of those meanings.
Pois can mean peas, but it has other meanings too. Pois, depending on context, can mean:
This is due to the convergence to three different Latin words, pisum (peas), postae (then), and pensum (weight). In the case of royal inventories, the phrase 'pois de troie' almost always mean 'Troy weight'. Troy weight is a unit of measurement for precious metals and gems which began to be used toward the end of the 14th century. Confusingly, the units of troy weight are the same as units of currency, so to show that the numbers refer to a weight rather than a value, the phrase 'pois de troie' is put in front of the numbers. The gold dishes weigh 225 marks, bringing the total amount of gold treasure to 2004 pounds in troy weight.