Medieval England Was Actually Full of Coconuts, Monty Python Got It Wrong

Coconuts in Medieval Britain (2015)

The famous coconut sketch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail convinced generations that coconuts couldn't exist in medieval England. But historian Kathleen E. Kennedy shows they were common: imported from the Maldives and India as medicine via Venetian galleys, they were turned into luxury drinking cups by English woodworkers. Oxford and Cambridge colleges still preserve fifteenth-century coconuts, and wills and customs records mention them from the thirteenth century onward.