THE COTTAGE GAliDENEii. 
891 
September 25.] 
WEEKLY CALENDAR. 
M W 
SEPT. 25—OCT. 1, 1851. 
Weather near London in 1850. 
Sun 
Sun 
Moon 
Moon’s 
Clock 
Day of 
D D 
1 Barometer. 
Thermo. 
Wind. Rain in In. 
Rises. 
Sets. 
R. & S. 
Age. 
bef. Sun. 
Year. 
25 Th 
Wild Honeysuckle’s seed. fl. 
29.803 — 29.682 
68—48 
S.W. 
— 
52 a. 5 
52 a. 5 
sets. 
© 
8 
12 
268 
26 F 
Hedge Accentor resumes song. 
' 29.870 — 29.860 
60—44 
S. 
72 
53 
50 
6 a 52 
1 
8 
33 
269 
27 s 
Birch turns yellow. 
29.802 — 29.690 
67—48 
S.W. 
49 
55 
4 7 
7 18 
2 
8 
53 
270 
28 Sun 
15 Sunday after Trinity. 
29.867 —29.782 
63—42 
w. 
— 
57 
45 
7 46 
3 
9 
13 
271 
2Q M 
Michaelmas Day. * 
29.846 — 29.380 
62—42 
S.W. 
29 
58 
43 
8 17 
4 
9 
33 
272 
30 Tu 
Martins mostly gone. 
29.359 — 29.266 
59—40 
w. 
01 
60 
40 
8 56 
5 
9 
52 
273 
1 W 
Arbutus flowers. 
29.596 — 29.249 
59—38 
N.W. 
08 
VI 
V 
9 40 
6 
10 
12 
274 
Jarvis, Gervas, or Gervase Markham, for he spelt his name in 
all these modes in those days of phonetic spelling, was of good descent, 
for he dedicates How to choose, -ride, train, and diet both hunting 
horses and running horses, “ to the right worshipful and his singu¬ 
lar good father, Master Robert Markham, of Cotham, in the county of 
Nottingham, Esquire ; ” and Thoroton, in his history of that county, 
shows that they were an old and wealthy family. Gervase was, however, 
a younger and portionless son, for in those days all the broad acres went 
to the eldest son to maintain the dignity of “ the house,” and the 
younger sons, “ cursed with poor gentility,” were doomed to carve with 
their swords, or grub with their pen, a precarious subsistence. At different 
periods of his life, Gervase was dependant upon each of those dangerous 
weapons, but he did not have recourse to his pen until a nearly mortal 
wound, and old age, unfited him for cavaliering. 
In early manhood, we are told by one of his relatives, he was “ a great 
confidant, or as the phrase now is, the gallant of the Countess of Shrews¬ 
bury, and was in those days (1591) usually termed her champion. A 
proper handsome gentleman he was, and of great courage.” In a cause in¬ 
teresting to the Countess, having made some statement unpalatable to Sir 
John Holies, the latter wrote to him thus :—“ Gervase Markham—I affirm 
that you lie, and lie like a villain, which I shall be ready to make good upon 
yourself, or upon any gentleman my equal living.” Shortly afterwards 
meeting, and their rapiers had recourse to, Markham fell grievously 
wounded ; nor was this the worst, for vowing rashly to be revenged or 
to die without the eucharist, and still more rashly clinging to the sinful 
resolve, he never more received that sacrament, though he lived to 
extreme old age. Maimed by the wound, and unable to endure violent 
exercises, he now had recourse to his pen, and the earliest of its produc¬ 
tions was that work on Horses which we have already noticed. That 
subject exhausted, he had recourse to translating, for which he was well 
qualified, by being “ perfect master of the French, Italian, and Spanish 
languages,” and some of his translations are of extreme rarity. We 
will but mention Rhodomanths Inf email, or the Deoil conquered, of 
which the original author was Philip des Portes, and some passages of the 
translation will bear comparison with Fairfax’s Tasso, as this extract 
testifies:— 
“ Where ere he went the Furies fled before him, 
The whilst his pride augmented'by their flight, 
All things without hell gates ran to adore him : 
And now the draw-bridge stands within his sight, 
On it he proudly leaps, that quaking bare him, 
And vaunts himself thereof Lord, King and Knight: 
For why th’ Ecchidnian cur for fear was tied 
And in the burning lake did hide his head. 
And now he pulls the Eban bridge in sunder, 
And having Charon this while by the heels, 
Like to a maul makes his old pate to thunder. 
Beating the bridge, whose rented pillar reels.” 
Not contented with translating poetry, he ventured to write a tragedy, 
Herod and Antipater, in conjunction with Mr. Sampson ; and The Dumb 
Knight, “ a pleasant comedy,” published in 1608, is said on its title 
page to have been “written by Jarvis Markham,” but he had as his 
coadjutor in its composition Lewis Machin. The latter, in its preface, 
tells “the understanding reader” that he publishes it “ in his (Mark¬ 
ham’s) absence,” to refute the slanders concerning it that have been 
uttered by “ rumour, that hydra-headed monster, with more tongues 
than eyes ; ” rumours of which wc now have no other record. Varied in 
his acquirements, confident in his abilities, and prompted probably by 
necessity, he next addressed himself to the literature of the soil, although 
he knew little of gardening or of farming, for he confesses as much when 
he says, in his Farewell to Husbandry, “ Methinks I hear one fool say— 
Why writes he of husbandry and is no husband?”' The work was pub- 
| lished in 1620, and is entitled : —Farewell to Husbandry, or the enriching 
I of all sorts of barren and sterile grounds in our kingdom, to be as fruit- 
I fill in all manner of grain, pulse, and grass as the best grounds what¬ 
soever. “Attained by travel and experience.” “The experience was 
the expense of a bitter and tedious winter, but the contentment (in 
gaining my wish) made it more pleasant than all the three other seasons.” 
The conclusion of the volume, “ On the Carter’s Office,” &c., is taken, 
verbatim, from Leonard Mascall without acknowledgment. 
This was only one of the many works written by him on the same 
j subject, but we can do little more than mention their titles. In A Way 
I to get Wealth, which embraces the management of cattle and fowls, 
j recreations, the office of a housewife, the enrichment of the weald of 
| Kent, enrichment of barren grounds, the making of orchards, and the 
best husbanding of bees, Markham apologises for including so many 
subjects, and not confining himself to writing about horses “ with which 
he had been exercised and acquainted from his childhood.” However, 
he had taken to him an assistant, L. W. (an inversion of the initials of 
the real author, William Lawson), who wrote the chapters on orcharding 
and bees. 
In his English Housewife, he lays down a law which, if enforced, would 
now keep a vast majority of our countrywomen in spinsterhood, for he 
says, “ I hold the first and most principal knowledge belonging unto our 
English housewife to be a perfect skill and knowledge of cookery, because 
it is a duty rarely (excellently) belonging to a woman ; and she that is 
utterly ignorant therein may not, by the laws of strict justice, challenge 
the freedom of marriage, because, indeed, she can then but perform half 
her vow ; for she may love and obey, but she cannot cherish, serve, and 
keep him with that true duty which is ever expected ! ” 
Evelyn wrote upon Sallads a goodly folio ; and no wonder, for, according 
tp the following recipe, it was in those days no simple mixture but an 
intricate compound, which Markham heralds in thus—“To compound an 
excellent sallat, and which, indeed, is usual at great feasts and upon 
princes’ tables ; take a good quantity of blanched almonds, and with your 
shredding-lmife cut them grossly; then take as many raisins of the sun 
clean washed, and the stones picked out; as many rigs, shred like the 
almonds ; as many capers ; twice as many olives ; and as many currants 
as of all the rest, clean washed: a good handful of the small tender leaves 
of red sage or spinach : mix all these well together with good store of 
sugar, and lie them in the bottom of a great dish ; then put unto them 
vinegar and oil, and scrape more sugar over all: then take oranges and 
lemons, and pairing away the outward pilles (skins), cut them into thin 
slices, then with those slices cover the sallat all over; which done, 
take the fine thin leaf of the red cole-flower, and with them cover the 
oranges and lemons all over; then over those red leaves, lay another 
course of old olives, and the slices of well-pickled cucumbers, together 
with the very inward heart of cabbage-lettuce cut into slices; then adorn 
the sides of the dish, and the top of the sallat with more slices of lemons 
and oranges, and so serve it up.” 
One of the most curious, though not the most enlightened of his 
works, is The Second Book of the English Husbandman, and of it an 
amusing portion is that which gives the signs and omens whereby the 
husbandman may foretell the character of the future seasons and years; 
“ If,” he says, “ Christmas Day shall fall upon the Sunday, the year 
shall be good, seasonable, and abounding with all store and plenty ; if it 
fall upon Monday, the year shall be reasonable, temperate, and fruitful, 
only something subject to inundation of waters, loss by shipwreck, and 
some mortality of people ; if it fall upon Tuesday, the year will prove 
very barren and unfruitful—much dearth will reign, and among people 
great plague and mortality; if it fall on the Wednesday, the year shall 
be reasonably seasonable, though a little inconstant—there shall be plenty 
of all things, only much sickness, and great likelihood of wars ; if it fall 
on the Thursday, the year shall be generally very temperate and whole¬ 
some, only the summer subject to moistness, and much division is like to 
fall amongst the clergy ;* if it fall on the Friday, the year shall be 
barren and unwholesome, for sickness shall rage with great violence, 
much mortality shall fall among young children, and both corn and cattle 
shall be scarce, and of a dear reckoning; if it fall on the Saturday, the 
year shall be reasonably good and plentiful, only the people of the world 
shall be exceedingly perverse, and much given to mutiny and dissention 
one against another.” 
When more than eighty years of age, this veteran man of the sword 
and the pen still continued to write, and found new themes in The Art 
of Archery and The Whole Art of Angling. There is reason to believe 
that he bore arms in the king’s service during the Parliamentary war, 
and it is certain that he dedicates his book on archery to Charles the 
First, and recommends that regiments of English bowmen should once 
more be gathered together for military service. Markham had a very 
different estimate of angling from that entertained by Dr. Johnson. The 
latter defined it, “a stick and a string, with a hook at one end and a fool 
at the other;” but Markham says, the angler “must be a general 
scholar, and seen in all the liberal sciences ; as a grammarian, to know 
how to write, or discourse, of his art in true and fitting terms. He 
should have sweetness in speech to entice others to delight in an exercise 
so much laudable. He should have strength of argument to defend and 
maintain his profession against envy and slander.” So it is pretty evident 
angling had its Dr. Johnsons in those days. 
We have sought carefully, but vainly, for further records of Gervase 
Markham, and here even the heralds fail us ; for though these respectable 
recorders of births, marriages, and deaths, have not neglected the 
“ Markhams of Cotham,” yet the name of Gervase forms no branch ol 
the heraldic tree, and we know not either the date of his birth or of his 
decease. 
Meteorology of the Week. — At Chiswick, from observations 
during the last twenty-four years, the average highest and lowest tem¬ 
peratures of these days are 65° and 45.7° respectively. The greatest 
heat, 82°, occurred on the 25th, in 1842, and the lowest cold, 24°, on the 
2/th, in 1828. During the period, 84 days were fine, and on 84 rain 
fell. 
* In the present year Christmas Day falls upon a Thursday; and we 
have had anything but clerical union—so old Markham made one good 
guess. 
No. CLVL, Vol. VI, 
rarer 
