2 74 History of the English Landed Interest. 



script dating from early in the fifteenth century, and in all 

 probability the product of some religious house in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Colchester. Here is a treatise on agriculture so 

 advanced in erudition and scholarship as to have been con- 

 sidered worthy by Milton to be ranked with those of Cato, 

 Varro, and Columella. There is little doubt that the mediaeval 

 monks had access to all these authors, as well as Pliny, Virgil, 

 and others. They had but to refer to the pages of the first- 

 named writer to learn the uses and cultivation of the cucum- 

 ber, cabbage, lettuce, radish, parsnip, turnip, and other now 

 well-known garden vegetables, to say nothing of the many 

 orchard and field products mentioned therein. 



And yet even the monks were much behind the times ; for 

 the French were cropping their gardens with three or four 

 different kinds of cabbage, Brussels sprouts, spinach, sorrel, 

 beetroot, carrots, turnips, lettuce, rhubarb, fennel, and other 

 greens, at a time when their English contemporaries were 

 content with little besides the common cabbage, the native 

 nettle, the leek, and Egyptian onion.^ Then, too, the meats of 

 a Frenchman's dinner were rendered wholesome and palatable 

 by a ragout of green wheat-ears boiled in butter, or a sauce of 

 young vine-burgeons, or a succulent salad, whilst on this side 

 the Channel it is not certain if the majority of Englishmen 

 knew the flavour of the commonest variety of cabbage. And 

 yet the last-named vegetable was a native of Europe ; the 

 savoy and wirsing grew wild in Upper Italy. The artichoke 

 (merely an improved thistle), the turnip and carrot were also 

 of European origin. Of Eastern plants the cauliflower did not 

 probably arrive in Europe till just before the Thirty Years' 

 War, but the shalot was brought back by the palmers long 

 ere this from Palestine.- The most famous, probably also 

 the earliest, variety of any edible plant in this country was the 



* That beans and cabbages were cultivated in the cottage gardens by 

 the time of Henry III. is evident from Widow Alice's complaint in Court 

 Leet of the damage done by her neighbour's pigs in rooting up these 

 vegetables, vide Le Placitis et Curiis tenendis, The Court Baron Selden 

 Society, page 75. 



- Hehn, Cultivated Plants and Domestic Animals. 



