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Eleventh Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, eats a sandwich in this handout photo.

Perspiring somewhat in their red serge coats and periwigs, the eighteenth-century characters gathered Sunday in the sleepy town of Sandwich, Kent for the full-dress re-enactment of an event that changed history.

An overdressed man wielded a sharp dagger, brandished it at the Eleventh Earl of Sandwich, plunged it into the hot flesh, hacked away, seized two pieces of bread and created one of the hand-held meals that had turned the Earl's aristocratic title into the byword for convenience food.

Two hundred and fifty years before, his ancestor the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, had solved a newfangled problem – how to eat lunch without leaving the gambling table – by having his servants stick some slices of the day's roast between two pieces of bread and deliver it to him. With that, gentility, hierarchy, cutlery, table manners, seating protocol and side dishes all flew by the wayside, and an entire lifestyle was born.

It's fair to say that the Sandwiches, great adventurers, explorers and philanthropists who also had a chain of islands now known as Hawaii named after them, have not spent the past quarter of a millennium hailing their great invention. It became a hit in the colonies, faded into cheesy mediocrity at home in Britain, and slipped from the family's hands.

But now the Hon. Orlando William Montagu, the son of the Earl, is out to make the sandwich hot again – and after spending decades persuading his dad to lend the family name, he's using the anniversary to get the Sandwich clan back into its most successful brand.

The young Sandwich is a busy man – some would say he's spread a bit too thin. But after buttering him up, he managed to fit me in between two other appointments. It was a wry conversation during which he mustered a meaty analysis.

"Of all the things we could be remembered for, are we proud of the sandwich? Absolutely. It's such a global phenomenon, it's a terrific association," Mr. Montagu told me.

"The sandwich is such a good solution to the problem of how to eat. And I think there's something about it that takes you back to your childhood – I think it's the first time that many people get to exert choice in terms of what they like."

In many ways, the creation of the sandwich marked the birth of the leisure class, and the advent of a type of individualism that, over the next two centuries, would spread from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie to the entire population.

"Nobody is saying that the Fourth Earl was the first person to eat meat and bread," says his ancestor, "but what he did was he made it acceptable that food should suit you, rather than the other way around."

He was, as his ancestors like to say, a busy chap, and between running the British navy and the first post office, patronizing the sciences, waging war with America, negotiating peace treaties with Austria, sponsoring Captain Cook's expedition and engaging in all-night card-playing bouts, he probably didn't consider the ham-and-cheese his most significant accomplishment.

Nobody of his class would have considered making money off such an accomplishment, so the sandwich trade became the domain of non-Sandwiches – that is, until Orlando Montagu came along.

For the twenty-first-century aristocrat, there is no shame in getting your hands dirty and making money – and Mr. Montagu realized that a potent brand name was going to waste. So he and his dad opened Earl of Sandwich, a roast-meat-on-bread emporium with 50 branches in Florida's Disneyworld, in Las Vegas, and now in the City of London.

"It's something of a return to the origins – we serve only hot meat on bread that's baked while you wait for your order," the youngest Sandwich says. His father continues the main family business – being one of 80 hereditary peers in the House of Lords, where he is known as a liberal-minded figure devoted to international aid and humanitarian issues.

But with House of Lords reform on Prime Minister David Cameron's agenda, he may be the last of the line. So it may be just as well that his descendents have decided to return to the original upper-crust activity.

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