II
France in the Middle Ages, and even in the earlier half of the fourteenth century, was still a vast agglomeration of heterogeneous races, each with different customs and different traditions. Aquitaine was as English as Surrey was French; Brittany was still a separate and generally an inimical country; Burgundy, Provence, and even Périgord, were petty sovereignties independent of the crown of France. These different districts had each their different manner of letting land and providing for its tillage.
But, in almost all of them, French agriculture was already remarkable; far superior, for instance, to that of our own England, notwithstanding her temperate winters and rich soil. The land, ploughed four times a year in the south of France,[8] was ploughed only once in England,[9] and there is no record of any harrowing or rolling. The crops chiefly grown in England were wheat, barley, oats, peas, beans, and vetches; hemp, so abundant a crop in France, was less frequently harvested. The English kitchen-garden was then, as now, singularly deficient. We, who to-day, as a rule, possess neither chicory, cardoon, scarole, and hardly any sorrel in our borders, who seldom stew or stuff a cucumber, who are unaware what excellent soup may be made from a cabbage with a little butter, or even from the water in which green peas have been boiled,—we were still poorer in our invention during the Middle Ages; though, at least, in those days our dinners were not saddened and soddened by the boiled potato. “Onions, nettles, mustard, leeks, and peas were the only esculent vegetables,” according to Mr. Thorold Rogers. “We probably also possessed cabbage, but I have never found either seed or plants quoted.”[10]
Meanwhile, across the Channel, brussels-sprouts (or pommes-de-choux), three other kinds of cabbage, wintergreens, spinach and sorrel, beetroot, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beans and peas, watercress, lettuce and even the larger kind known as Romaine (introduced into France from Avignon by Bureau de la Rivière), sweet basil, with every kind of herb, no less than cucumbers, garlic, leeks and onions, rhubarb and fennel, pumpkins, borage, raddish, were in daily and abundant cultivation. France in those days had even dishes of which she has lost the trick to-day, such as violet leaves, cooked like spinach or served as a salad, the green ears of wheat boiled with melted butter, and the young burgeons of the vine, dressed with a sauce piquante; additions to the table of which, for some reason, we have disused the habit.[11]
The fruit-garden in England was as behindhand as the kitchen-garden. “We read of no plums, except once of damsons.” Fancy, choosing damsons! We had not yet invented our famous William pear, which we have sent over to France, and which to-day, in the gardens of Touraine, rivals the more ancient Bon Chrétien, already common there, and celebrated in the fourteenth century. But, across the Channel, the peaches of Anjou, the plums of Orleans, the figs of Poitiers, the French grapes and almonds, had nothing to fear from any competition. As far north as Caen and Dieppe, apples and pears of many sorts, grapes (grown for dessert on a trellis in a sheltered place), plums (purple and golden), cherries, gooseberries, green figs, almonds, and walnuts were commonly sold in the public market (the town’s headsman had a right to a handful out of every basket), while peaches and raspberries, though rarer, ripened in private gardens. Apples were about equally abundant in France and in the kingdom of King Edward; and we may suppose that the wild fruits of the cherry and strawberry, domesticated in every French potager, could not have been quite utterly unknown in England.
If the English, then as now, were little acquainted with the charm and cheapness of a vegetable diet, then as now their meat was better and less expensive than in France; and English wool was quite unrivalled. The chief wealth of the Anglo-Saxon farmer grew on the curly backs of his flock. Wool from the fat meadows of England was exported in exchange for wine from the dry and sunny slopes of France. Another national industry had begun to develop: English hops and English beer were already widely known, and compensated the acidity of English wine. The vine, grown round many a monastery in the south of our island, never received—and, owing to our watery sunshine, never could receive—any extensive culture. It is most unlikely, in an age when the wines of Gascony and English Bordeaux were continually introduced into the mother country, that English wine was at any time grown for drinking. It was probably cultivated for the service of the Mass, in small quantities round every abbey, as in Normandy. The accidents of warfare might intercept the vessels that brought the wines of Gascony to English shores; and thus, but for the humble vineyards of Kent and Middlesex, an unimportant incident of the Hundred Years’ War might practically, at any moment, have placed the English people under ban of excommunication.