1 8 THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE APPLE AND PEAR. 
The simple fall of an apple has done good service in the cause of science :— 
“ Lo ! sweetened with the Summer light 
The full juiced apple, waxing over mellow, 
Drops in the silent Autumn night.” 
Tennyson. 
It was the falling of an apple that attracted Sir Isaac Newton’s attention, and led that 
profound Mathematician to the discovery of the law of Gravitation, which forms the very foun¬ 
dation of the Newtonian philosophy. 
The early history of the Pear offers much less of interest than that of the apple, It is one 
of the trees which Homer describes as forming the gardens of Alcinous and of Laertes, the father 
of Ulysses (Odyssey vii. 119, and xxiv. 337). It is named by several of the old writers; who 
mention the great age to which the tree lives, and Theophrastus especially notes the fact of the 
fruit from old trees being of better quality than from young ones. We have seen that Pliny 
mentions numerous varieties and the great esteem in which they were held. There is no mention 
of Pears in England for some four or five centuries after the Roman invasion, but there is every 
probability that the cultivated varieties were introduced by the Romans, and that they were 
afterwards grown very much in the Monastic gardens. The early Abbots were many of them 
Normans, and their Institutions were intimately connected with or were simply offshoots of, similar 
religious houses on the Continent; and there is doubt but that many varieties of fruit were 
thus introduced from time to time, as indeed is shewn by the names of the fruits themselves, and 
particularly of those of pears. 
There is a tradition that King John was poisoned in a dish of pears—“As the devil made 
use of the apple for the destruction of man, so did the devil’s imps use the pear to a wicked end, 
when the monks of Swinsted, inviting King John to a banquet, poisoned him in a dish of pears, 
though others write it was in a cup of ale.” ( Gwillim , Display of Heraldry). And whether this 
may be true or false, it certainly implies that stewed pears formed at that time 
“ A dainty dish to set before a King.” 
A paper on early English Horticulture, by Mr. T. Hudson Turner in the Archceological 
Journal , Vol. v., contains the following interesting notice of Early Pears.—The accounts of the 
4th and 20th years of Edward I. (1276 and 1292), it appears that young pear trees were produced 
for the royal gardens, at Westminster, of these sorts, Kaylewell or Calsivell, Rewl or de Reg if la, 
and Pesse-pucelle. The Kaylewell\ was the Caillou , or Burgundy pear, a hard, inferior sort, only 
fit for baking, but it seems to have been most generally grown in England, and there is extant a 
writ of Henry III., directing his gardener to plant it both at Westminster and in the garden at 
the Tower. The Rewl was the pear of St. Regie, a village in Touraine. It is noticed by 
Neckham, Abbot of Cirencester (1157-1217), who wrote an unpublished work, “ De Naturis remind 
(M. S. British Museum). The Pesse-pucelle may have been the variety anciently known in France 
as Pucelle de Saintonge , another variety being Pucelle de Flandres. 
