120 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND. 



with teasons (= festoons) made of ivy and holy, with all manner 

 of strange fruits, as pomegranates, oranges, pompions, 

 cucumbers, grapes, with such like spangled with gold, and 

 most richly hanged." 



Of course, such banqueting-houses were only made on 

 State occasions, and could only be afforded by the wealthy. The 

 mount in an ordinary garden was surmounted by an arbour of the 

 plainest description. It may have been a great convenience as 

 a point from which a good view could be secured, especially in a 

 garden not sufficiently grand or large to have a raised terrace ; 

 but in these more modest gardens, unless planted with flowering 

 plants and creepers, a mount cannot have been a beautiful 

 object. There is such a mount still to be seen at Boscobel. 

 Nothing could be plainer than this ; and it is probably a 

 good sample of the mounts I am speaking of, although it 

 cannot be so early as Elizabethan times. It was most likely 

 made when the house was built, about 1620, and it was in its 

 present state when Charles II. hid in the oak-tree hard by. The 

 battle of Worcester was fought on Wednesday, September 3rd, 

 1651. The Saturday following, Charles spent in hiding in the 

 " Royal Oak," at Boscobel, and the next day, " His Majesty, 

 finding himself now in a hopefull security, spent some part of 

 this Lord's-day in a pretty arbor in Boscobel garden, which grew 

 upon a mount, and wherein there was a stone table and seats 

 about it. In this place he pass'd away some time in reading, 

 and commended the place for its retiredness." * 



The mount was not always a circular lump standing out in 

 the garden ; it appears that it was still sometimes banked up 

 against the outside wall. Bacon describes this kind also : " At 

 the end of both the side grounds," he writes, " I would have 

 a mount of some pretty height, leaving the wall of the enclosure 

 breast-high, to look abroad into the fields." The erections placed 

 on the top of mounts did not do away with the use of other 

 arbours in less exposed places in the garden. Some "arbour 



* Boscobel, or the History of His Sacred Majesties most miraculous Preser- 

 vation after the Battle of Worcester, 3 Sept., 1651. By Thomas Blount, 1660; 

 reprint, 1822. The illustration on page 121 is from this work. 



