EARLY GARDEN LITERATURE 
59 
found in TElfric’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 
[de] made that whiche was Bishope of Lycoll he translate this booke 
out off frensche in to English.” 
