THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 35 



over, there was an early Saxon name for the peach. The Latin is 

 " Persica; " the early Anglo-Saxon is " Persoc treou; " the English, 

 "peach."' But gardening in England for most part went as it came, 

 with the Romans, and, during nearly a thousand years of struggling with 

 barbarians after the fall of the Roman Empire, the peach, in common with 

 all other garden-plants needing culture, seems to have disappeared and 

 was not reintroduced until in the Thirteenth Century. 



That the peach came to England, as a permanent asset, from France, 

 is so certain from the general history of English horticulture, though there 

 be no authentic record to substantiate the statement, that we need con- 

 sider no alternative. One looks in vain for a satisfactory date for the 

 beginning of peach-culture in England. In Prance the monastic orders, 

 as we have seen, were the conservators of horticulture, as they were of all , 

 arts excepting war, and we feel sure that, as the Church reached England, 

 some good bishop, father or brother planted peaches in a monastery garden. 

 Yet our quest of a date is rewarded with nothing earlier than 121 6, in which 

 year, according to the Chronicle of Roger of Wendover,^ " King John, at 

 Newark, in the midst of his despair and disappointment, hastened his 

 end by a surfeit of peaches and ale." From this we may certainly say 

 that peach-culture was established in England at least as early as the 

 beginning of the Thirteenth Century. 



Two hundred years elapse before we find another reference to the 

 peach in England. Lydgate, English monk and poet (1375-1440?), as 

 quoted by the Hon. Mrs. Evelyn Cecil,' mentioned peaches among " the 

 fruits which more common be." Possibly an earlier reference is found in 

 Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose: 



" And many hoomely trees there were 

 That peches, coynes, and apples bere." 



English fruit-books commonly accredit the introduction of the peach 

 in England to a certain Wolf, gardener to Henry VIII, and fix the date at 

 about 1524, but the quotations given show that this fruit was probably 

 well established long before the Sixteenth Century. Perhaps it suffices 

 to say that the peach began to be cultivated in England at the close of the 

 Middle Ages — a time sufficiently vague to be convenient in the state of 

 inexactness of our knowledge. 



'Cecil, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn A Hist, oj Card, in Eng. 3. 1910. 

 'Ibid. 38. 1910. 

 » Ibid 48. 1910. 



