RURAL ENGLAND IN THE PAST 27 



England which, with all our grumblings, we love 

 so well. We may well believe it is to that inborn 

 love of flowers that England owes the cottage 

 gardens which are now no less her glory than 

 her grand ancestral homes, and which has 

 saved for the English people some sense of 

 artistic beauty which otherwise, in poor and 

 often squalid surroundings, must altogether have 

 perished. 



But here again, perhaps, we may underrate, or 

 are hardly aware of the debt of gratitude English 

 cottage gardening owes to oversea influence. The 

 day came when those same Flemish cloth-workers 

 who, aforetime, had so willingly sent their ship- 

 loads of " sallets " and cabbages and onions to 

 Hull, were driven by stress of cruel war and per- 

 secution from their own peaceful homes. Natu- 

 rally they sought and found a harbour of refuge 

 in the land which had in earlier times asked their 

 help, and to whose prosperity they had so largely 

 contributed by setting up their looms in north 

 and east and west. We have but meagre records 

 to tell of any influence other than with regard to 

 the manufacture of wool that may have been ex- 

 erted by those earliest emigrants, except that again 

 and again references are to be met with to Nor- 

 wich, a central point of settlement, as "a place 

 very much addicted to the flowry part." It is an 

 established fact, however, that the Walloon re- 

 fugees of the sixteenth century, who were welcomed 

 by the Cinque Ports, and who settled in conside- 

 rable numbers in Sussex and Kent, left a very 

 distinct mark on our horticulture. First of all, 



