34 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
THE HEDGE-BANKS OF DEVON AND COENWALL. 
ABSTRACT OF PAPER BY MR. THOMAS ADOLPHUS CRAGOE, F.R.G.S. 
(Read October 19th, 1876.) 
Before the busy hum of feudal life had first gathered round the 
now mouldering castles of the Plantagenets — ere yet their gray 
turrets had chequered the English landscape — many of our west- 
country hedges were undoubtedly green with ivy, as they now are. 
They antedate our Henries and our Edwards, and the Norman 
churches have crumbled to dust by their side. 
May we not even trace them back to the dim era of Saxon en- 
croachment ? Are they not lost in the mists of British dominion ? 
History tells us, that long before the coming of Caesar the 
Britons had, in the south-east and also in the south-west of the 
kingdom, "made the first and most requisite steps towards a civil 
settlement, and had there, by tillage and agriculture, increased to 
a great multitude.' ' Britain was called by the early Greek writers 
the " Court of Ceres," and the fertility of Damnonia is by them 
particularly recited. 
In after times Strabo and Diodorus of Sicily unite in their report 
of its fruitfulness ; and that the soil gave such increase without 
the aid of human labour, "long and perse veringly employed," it is 
impossible to believe. 
Strabo speaks of gardens near the British houses in the south ; 
and the number of towns along the south-western shore mentioned 
by Suetonius sufficiently affirms the population ; whilst from remote 
times the Britons managed beehives and orchards, had cornfields 
and cattle. They were not always the mere pastoral vagabonds of 
the schoolboy's crude fancy, but skilful workers in metals, who 
made their own armour and chariots, and maintained seminaries of 
learning at the public expense, which were sought from beyond 
the sea. Now, we can imagine neither garden nor cornfield without 
a boundary ; nor can we believe that such a people, content with 
