Torvil Plateau Lemonroot

Overview
Cut off from the much of the Bemton Republic, the Torvil Plateau hasn’t always been the industrial powerhouse it is today. It took time for this temperate highland to become important site in the history of Bemton nobility we know it as today.

Discovery
Originally raised by agrarian custom, the prominent Haberdashers of House Vestule rose to nobility in the early 1800s with the discovery of the exceedingly profitable lemonroot plant. Utilizing the plant’s rich, yellow pigment, the clever and exceedingly beautiful Mrs. Katian Vestule invented the process to refine the root for luxury fabric, known as Decarbification, which she hoped would “bring about an end to the age of faeces green” in Torvil apparel of the time. Her discovery was a success. Demand grew for lemonroot apparel among the elites, and by 1807 Katian Vestule had become the fourth richest woman in the Bemton Republic.

(Geralde the Torpid’s “Lavish Profligate: Who's Who in the World of the Capitally Corpulent #22,” May, 1813)

Decarbification and Backlash
Decarbification was initially kept a secret process, and many a Tailor’s Guild sought to uncover the secret. In what was known as the Yellow Dealings of Counterbrook Derry, northern haberdashers stole the technology of Decarbification in what was considered at the time by the southern defense attorney Edgar “O’Leary” O’Connor to be “a folly on the coattails of the oxen most ill-bred...” This prompted a heated legal battle spanning several months over the monetary rights to scientific discoveries. At the time, many lower-class nobles felt threatened by House Vestule, and declared the monopoly on lemonroot was against the bylaws written into the Cardinal Constitution. In a brazen act of corrupt mercantilism, the Constitution voted 56-13 and sided with the northerners, and made public the process of Decarbification in the landmark court case Suit Fruit Statute: Vestule vs. Constitution.

(Suit Fruit Statute: Vestule Vs. Constitution, 1818)