Originating in West Asia, saffron certainly grew in Persia (and Iranian saffron still rivals Spanish in quality) and was found in Southern Europe in antiquity, used medicinally and as a dye. The Moghuls used it in food and took it with them from Persia to India (Kashmiri saffron is prized, and some Indian women still use it to dab on their foreheads as a mark of caste). Arabs grew it in Spain by 960, but returning Crusaders brought the crocus corms to Italy, France and Germany in the 13th century, and tradition says that a 14th-century pilgrim smuggled a corm into England in his hollow staff. By the time of Saffron Walden’s 16th century rebaptism, the crop was obviously commercially important there. (In his 1996 The Essential Saffron Companion, John Humphries says it became a taxable commodity in 1420.) Yet, then as now, it was more often found in culinary use in the West of England, particularly Cornwall, in the local speciality of saffron cake and buns, and some scholars think it arrived there, says Davidson, “long before the 14th century via the Phoenicians and their tin trade with Cornwall”.