10 THE BOOK OF TOPIARY 
information to pass on to much later times ere we can 
again take up the tale of Topiary. 
Loudon points out that the Roman style of gardening 
was lost in England when the Romans abandoned this 
country at the beginning of the fifth century, but he 
surmises that, following the revival of gardening in 
France by Charlemagne, William the Conqueror would 
probably re-introduce it at the end of the eleventh 
century. Some little progress was made in the reigns 
of Henry I. and Henry II., and it was the former who 
formed the Park at Woodstock (1123), probably the 
first of which there is any record. In accord with the 
prevailing taste, it contained a labyrinth, which appears 
to have chiefly constituted the Bower so intimately 
associated with the fate of Rosamund. 
But during the twelfth century there was very little 
of either design or taste in the arrangement of gardens. — 
These latter were of limited extent and, because of the 
feudal broils that enlivened the monotony of existence, 
they were for the most part attached only to the larger 
establishments, and in them were confined within the 
Glacis, or first line of defence, which was a necessity of 
the times. Beyond the inevitable moat, orchards arose, 
wherein the horticulturally inclined among the baron’s 
retainers could indulge their taste for ornamental 
gardening; a taste which consisted then, according to 
Johnson, and continued to a much later age, ‘‘in having 
plants cut into monstrous figures, labyrinths, etc.” | 
So common a part of garden design did labyrinths and 
mazes become at this period and during the thirteenth 
century, that we find scarcely a plan among the many 
given by De Cerceau in his ‘‘ Architecture,” issued about 
1250, in which either a round or a square one does not 
appear. This brings us into the thirteenth century, an age 
wherein the taste for architecture and gardening spread 
northwards and especially took a firm hold in Holland, 
