Fruit-Culture in England. 13 



procurable. The monks always sought to establish them- 

 selves in situations favourable to the cultivation of good 

 fruit, just as they always had an eye to good fishing. 

 Under ecclesiastical influence, during the old days of 

 monastic splendour, when Tintern, and Fountains, and 

 Rievaulx, and Furness, were the centres of the local 

 civilization, there can be no doubt that many excellent 

 introductions from the Continent took place. The period 

 of the revival of learning was also eminently favourable 

 to fruit-culture. With the period of the Reformation 

 may be associated, very definitely, the original culture of 

 the gooseberry and the currant; probably, also, of the 

 strawberry and the raspberry. Henry VIII., whatever 

 his short-comings in other respects, was a great patron of 

 fruit-growing. The troubles upon the Continent which 

 drove the Flemings, with their auriculas, into old 

 England, refuge always of the destitute and forlorn, 

 again proved serviceable to our gardens. Of substantial 

 importance even greater was the assiduity, with a view to 

 improvement of quality, which marked the seventeenth 

 and eighteenth centuries. Fruit-culture at length became 

 one of the fine arts, and to-day there is no country in the 

 world in which the value of science, in many of its 

 departments, is so well demonstrated as by the British 

 fruit-grower. The precise date of the introduction of any 

 particular kind of fruit is thus in most cases indeter- 

 minable. It can be conjectured, but no more. 



The history of the importation of gathered fruit from 

 foreign countries forms quite as interesting a chapter in 



