192 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Danish Jordbeer^ German erdbeere^ Netherland aerdbesie, Smoland 

 Jordbar, while even the English Strawberry, the Anglo-Saxon 

 Streowberie, spelled in modern fashion by Turner in 1538, is said 

 to have been derived from the spreading nature of the runners of 

 the plant, and to have come originally from the observed strewed, 

 anciently strawed, condition of the stems, and reading as if written 

 Strawedberry plant. It was called Straberry by Lidgate in the 

 fifteenth century. 



The classical history of the Strawberry can be written very 

 shortl}'. Virgil refers to the " humi nascentia fraga " in his 

 third Eclogue ; Ovid to the " arbuteos fructus montanaque fraga" 

 in his Metamorphoses, book 1, v., 104, as furnishing a food of the 

 golden age and again in the 13th book, " mollia fraga ; " and Pliny 

 mentions the plant b}' name in his lib. xxi., c. 50, and sepa- 

 rates the ground-strawberry from the Arbutus tree in his 

 lib. XV., c. 28. The fruit is not mentioned in the cook-book 

 ascribed to Apicius Coelius, an author supposed to have lived 

 about A. D. 230. The Greeks seem to have had no knowledge of 

 the plant or fruit ; at least there is no word in their writings which 

 commentators have agreed in interpreting as applying to the 

 strawberry. Nicolaus Myripsicus, an author of the tenth centur}', 

 uses the word phragouli, and Forskal in the eighteenth century 

 found the word p/t?-aoMZi in use for the strawberry b}' the Greeks 

 about Belgrade, and Fraas gives this latter word for the modern 

 Greek, and Sibthorp the word Kovkoumaria, which resembles the 

 ancient Greek Komaros or Komaron, applied to the Arbute tree, 

 whose fruit has a superficial resemblance to the strawberry. 



Neither the strawberrj^ nor its cultivation is mentioned by Ibn- 

 al-awam, an author of the tenth century unusually full and com- 

 plete in his treatment of garden, orchard, and field products, nor 

 by Albertus Magnus, who died A. D. 1280. It is not mentioned 

 in " The Forme of Cury" a roll of ancient English cookery com- 

 piled about A. D. 1390 by two master cooks of King Richard II ; 

 nor in " Ancient Cooker}-," a receipt book of 1381 ; nor at the 

 Inthronizalion Feast of George Neville, Archbishop of York, in 

 1504. The fruit was, however, known in London in the time of 

 Henry VI, for in a poem b}' John Lidgate, who died about 1483, 



we find 



" Then unto London I dyde me hye, 

 Of all the land it bearyeth the pryse ; 

 ' Gode pescode,' one began to cry — 

 ' Strabery rype, and cherrys in the ryse.' " 



