EARLY GARDEX LITERATURE. 63 



good list of herbs in Anglo-Saxon is to be found in ^Elfric's 

 Granimatica.^ This includes most of the simple herbs then 

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

 correctly 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 

 churchmen ; Alexander Xecham, Abbot of Cirencester, and 

 Bishop Grosseteste, of Lincoln. They both studied at the 

 University of Paris, and thus had an opportunity of seeing 

 for themselves the state of horticulture abroad. Their writings 

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

 d. 1253) wrote on man}^ 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 Riistica, 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. Dc 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 impossible recipes were thus 

 passed on b}- men who took no trouble to investigate the truth 

 of their assertions. In the fifteenth century, Grosseteste was 

 as much believed in, as he had been in the thirteenth, although 

 gardening was practised all this time, and something much more 

 accurate could have been written. These w^orks j contain chieflv 



-■• Vocabularies in a Library of Xatio)ial Antiquities. Wright, 1S5 7. MS. 

 Brit. Mus. Cotton Julius A ii. 



f See Sam Pegge, Life of Robert Gross:t.'ste. 1793, p. 308. 



X SloaneMS. 686. " The tretyseoff housbandry that Mayster Groshe [de] 

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

 in to English." 



