Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/316

 296 Hi ft or y of Domejlic Marnier s from the Latin cerafus), the peach (perfoc-treoiv, from perjicarius), the mulberry {mor-leam, from moras), the cheftnut {cyj'ten, cyft, or cyfiel-heam, from caftaiieus)* perhaps the almond {magdala-treow, from amigdahis) , the fig {Jic-leam, from Jiciis), and the pine {pin-treoiv, from pinus). The fmall kernels of the pine were ufed very extenfively in the middle ages, in the fame way as olives. We mufl: add to thefe the plum (plum-lreow), the name of which is Anglo-Saxon ; the medlar, which was known in Anglo-Saxon by a very unexplainable name, but one which was preferved to a comparatively recent period 5 the quince, which was called a cod-ceple, or bag-apple 5 the nut (h/uitu), and the hazel-nut {hcpfel-hnutti). They called the olive an oil-tree (ale-beam), which would feem to prove that they confidered its principal utility to be for making oil. The vine was ^'ell-known to the Anglo-Saxons j they called it the win-treow, or wine- tree, its fruit, winberige, or wine berries, and a bunch of grapes, geclyfire, a duller. We find no Anglo-Saxon words for goofeberries or currants ; but our forefathers were well acquainted with the ftrawberry (Jirea-berige) and the rafpberry, which they called hynd-berige. Perhaps thefe lafi-men- tioned fruits, which are known to be natives of Britain, were known only in their wild fiate.t The earliefl: account of an Englilh garden is given by Alexander Neckham, who flourillied in the latter half of the twelfth century, in the fixty-fixth chapter of the fecond book of his treatife, De naturis rerum, cyste-tree. I may remark, on these names of fruits, that Loudon imagined that the peach was " introduced into England about the middle of the sixteenth century" (" Encyclopaedia of Gaidening," p. 912) 5 and that of the fig, the " first trees were brought over from Italy by Cardinal Pole, in 1525." He seems to think that quinces and mulberries came into this country also in the course of the sixteenth century. t There is, however, an Anglo-Saxon name of a tree which I suspect has been misinterpreted. The glossaries give " r^w"/", J'efe-l'orn," and our lexicographers, taking the old sense of the word rhamnm, interpret it, the dog-rose. But in a very curious glossary of names of plants of the middle of the thirteenth century, printed in my "Volume of Glossaries," in which the meaning of the Latin word is given in Anglo-Norman and in English, we have "Ramni, grosiler, I'efe-J'orn " (p. i4i). I have no doubt that the thefe-thorn was the gooseberry. In the dialect of Norfolk, gooseberries are still called theabes. which
 * Our word chestnut is derived from the Anc;lo-Saxon cyste-hnutu, the nut of the