Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 5.djvu/399

 IN EARLY TIMES. 299 and indigestible was shared by Pliny ; the opinion was due probably in both cases to the fact that the most common varieties of that fruit were adapted chiefly to culinary pur- poses. Necham makes no practical remarks on horticultm'c ; he was acquainted, however, with the process, still in use, of grafting the pear on the thorn. Grafting was a branch of horticultm-al science which exer- cised the minds and ingenuity of the religious from the earliest time. Manuscripts of the works of Varro, Columella, and Pal- ladius were of frequent occurrence in the monastic libraries of the middle ages ; and the expermientalists of those days, al- though they certainly failed to produce, fully believed in those marvellous results said to be attained by grafting, which de- ceived the credulous from the days of Virgil and Pliny to the time of Evelyn. Of the vine, which was extensively cultivated in this coun- try during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Necham says little. That it was so cultivated in order to make wine there can be no doubt ; and at the present time it seems wholly in- credible that such a controversy as that which took place in the last century between Daines Barrington, who adopted the opinion of Sir Robert Atkyns^, on the one side, and Dr. Pegge on the other'^, respecting the culture of the vine, could have been maintained so long in sheer ignorance of the vast mass of accounts relating to vineyards which are pre- served in our several Record offices. From the time of Henry II., the great rolls of the exchequer present numerous illus- trations of the subject, and although after that monarch's acquisition of Guienne, in right of his consort, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the manufacture of wine in this countiy may have been checked by the importation of a more generous product from Bom'deaux ; still wine, whatever may have been its quality, continued to be made in many a vineyard in England even so late as the fifteenth centmy. The accounts of the keeper of the vineyard at Windsor castle in the reign of Edward III. detail every operation, from planting, grafting, and manuring, till the fruit was pressed, casks made or repaired, and the wine barrelled '. For some time the superintendence of the Windsor vineyard was in the hands of one Stephen of g That vinea meant an ay)ple orchard. Journals of Works at Windsor, preserved Ancient and Present State of Gloucester- among the Exchequer Records formerly in shire, p. 17. the custody of the Queen's Remembrancer '' Archaeologia, vol. i. and ii. and now deposited in Carlton Ride. These accounts are included in the