3-16 THE HOP CROP. 



under a certain cultivation. In the time of the Caro- 

 lingian dynasty, an old document, in the shape of a letter 

 of donation by King Pepin, speaks of humularice, which, 

 without doubt, must have been hop gardens. In like 

 manner, in the year 822, Adilard, abbot of Corby, freed the 

 millers belonging to his district from all labour relating to 

 hops, and on this occasion used the words humulo and 

 brace, by which is to be understood corn and malt 

 used for beer. In the chronicles of the next, and up to 

 the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, mention becomes 

 more frequent of the existence of hops in a cultivated state, 

 and of their use in the preparation of beer, for which we are 

 undoubtedly indebted to the Germans, who were acquainted 

 with its use for this purpose long before it was introduced 

 into our own or the other countries of the Continent. In 

 the breweries of the Low Countries, hops seem to have been 

 first generally known in the beginning of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury ; for about this time we find many complaints that the 

 new method of brewing with hops lessened the consumption 

 ofgruit, and also the income arising from it, termed gruit- 

 geld. To this word gruit several different meanings have 

 been attached by different commentators. By some it has 

 been considered as signifying malt ; by others a peculiar 

 ferment, representing the yeast of our present system of 

 brewing ; others again look upon it as a term for a certain 

 mixture of herbs from which the beer was brewed, and 

 that the gruitgeld arose from a certain tax, imposed either 

 upon the herbs themselves or to be paid at each time of 

 brewing. From one of the historians of the period, we 

 learn that John, Bishop of Liege and Utrecht, complained 

 to the Emperor Charles X., that for thirty or forty years, 

 a new method of brewing, that is to say, with the addi- 

 tion of a certain plant called humulus or hoppa, had been 

 introduced, and that his income arising from gruitgeld 

 had been thereby much lessened. The emperor, there- 



