EARLY GARDEN LITERATURE 59 



found in ^Elfric's Grammatica. 1 This includes most of the 

 simple herbs then known, with the Latin equivalents. 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 Church- 

 men : Alexander Necham, 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. Grosseteste 2 (b. cir. 1175, d. 1253) 

 wrote on many 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 Rustica, 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. De 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 recipes, such as growing apples 

 without cores or cherries without stones, were thus passed on 

 by men who took no trouble to investigate the truth of their 

 assertions, and in the fifteenth century were as much believed 

 in as they had been in the thirteenth, although, gardening 

 having been practised all this time, something much more 

 accurate could have been written. A translation of Walter de 

 Henley's Husbandry is attributed, probably erroneously, to 

 Grosseteste. 3 The original was written in Anglicized Norman- 



1 Vocabularies in a Library of National Antiquities, Wright, 1857, 

 MS. Brit. Mus. Cotton Julius A ii. 



2 See Sam Pegge, Life of Robert Grosseteste, 1793, p. 308. 



3 Sloane MS. 686 : " The tretyse off housbandry that Mayster Groshe 

 [dej made that whiche was Bishope of Lycoll he translate this booke 

 out off frensche in to English." 



