66 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND. 



GrammaticaJ^ This includes most of the simple herbs then 

 known, with the Latin equivalents. The Latin is not always 

 correctl}- translated, the name of some common native flower, 

 being sometimes substituted for a plant which was unknown 

 to the writer. 



The earliest writers on this subject in England, were church- 

 men ; Alexander Necham, Abbot of Cirencester, and Bishop 

 Grosseteste, of Lincoln. They both studied at the University 

 of Paris, and thus had an opportunity of seeing for them- 

 selves the state of horticulture abroad. Their writings only 

 touch incidentally on gardening. Grossetestef (b. cir. 1175, 

 d. 1253) wrote on many subjects ; he was skilled in medicine, 

 and had a knowledge of the virtues and properties of plants. 

 The works attributed to him are so numerous, that it is scarcely 

 possible that all can have come from his pen, but everything 

 which bore his name continued to be read, and referred to, 

 for more than two centuries after his death. Therefore his 

 works on husbandry must have had considerable influence on 

 horticulture. Palladius's work, De Re Ricstica, written at some 

 early date, probably in the fifth century, was the foundation of 

 nearly all English writings on husbandry, for several centuries, 

 and most of them, that of Grosseteste included, were merely 

 translations, or adaptations, of this work. De Re Rustica is 

 in fourteen books. The first is introductory, the following 

 twelve are devoted in turn to each month of the year, the 

 fourteenth to grafting. Various recipes, such as growing apples 

 without cores or cherries without stones, were thus passed on by 

 men who took no trouble to investigate the truth of their 

 assertions, and in the fifteenth century were as much believed in 

 as they had been in the thirteenth, although gardening having 

 been practised all this time, something much more accurate 

 could have been written. A translation of Walter de Henley's 

 Husbandry is attributed, probably erroneously, to Grosseteste. J 



* Vocabularies in a Library of National Antiquities. Wright, 1S57. MS. 

 Brit. Mus. Cotton Julius A ii. 



f See Sam Pegge, Life of Robert Grosseteste. 1793, p. 308. 



J SloancMS. 686. " The tretyscoff housbandry that IMayster Groshe [de] 

 made that whiche was Bishope of Lycoll he translate this booke out off frensche 

 in to English." 



