Nothing more touching can be imagined than the fulfilment each year of this beautiful and symbolic ceremony of payment. The little town is rich in Roses, and these are gathered freely for the church service, when One Red Rose is still paid to the heirs of the sainted old baron, who died in 1778, broken in health and fortunes, even having languished in jail some time for debt. A new church was erected on the site of the old one in 1892, and in a beautiful memorial window the decoration of the Red Rose commemorates the sentiment of its benefactor.
The Rose Tavern, in the neighboring town of Bethlehem, stands on land granted for the site of a tavern by William Penn, for the yearly rental of One Red Rose.
In England the payment of a Rose as rent was often known. The Bishop of Ely leased Ely house in 1576 to Sir Christopher Hatton, Queen Elizabeth's handsome Lord Chancellor, for a Red Rose to be paid on Midsummer Day, ten loads of hay and ten pounds per annum, and he and his Episcopal successors reserved the right of walking in the gardens and gathering twenty bushels of Roses yearly. In France there was a feudal right to demand a payment of Roses for the making of Rose water.
Two of our great historians, George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, were great rose-growers and rose-lovers. I never saw Mr. Parkman's Rose Garden, but I remember Mr. Bancroft's well; the Tea Roses were especially beautiful. Mr. Bancroft's Rose Garden in its earliest days had no rivals in America.
The making of potpourri was common in my childhood. While the petals of the Cabbage Rose were preferred, all were used. Recipes for making potpourri exist in great number; I have seen several in manuscript in old recipe books, one dated 1690. The old ones are much simpler than the modern ones, and have no strong spices such as cinnamon and clove, and no bergamot or mints or strongly scented essences or leaves. The best rules gave ambergris as one of the ingredients; this is not really a perfume, but gives the potpourri its staying power. There is something very pleasant in opening an old China jar to find it filled with potpourri, even if the scent has wholly faded. It tells a story of a day when people had time for such things. I read in a letter a century and a half old of a happy group of people riding out to the house of the provincial governor of New York; all gathered Rose leaves in the governor's garden, and the governor's wife started the distilling of these Rose leaves, in her new still, into Rose water, while all drank syllabubs and junkets—a pretty Watteau-ish scene.
The hips of wild Roses are a harvest—one unused in America in modern days, but in olden times they were stewed with sugar and spices, as were other fruits. Sauce Saracen, or Sarzyn, was made of Rose hips and Almonds pounded together, cooked in wine and sweetened. I believe they are still cooked by some folks in England, but I never heard of their use in America save by one person, an elderly Irish woman on a farm in Narragansett. Plentiful are the references and rules in old cookbooks for cooking Rose hips. Parkinson says: "Hippes are made into a conserve, also a paste like licoris. Cooks and their Mistresses know how to prepare from them many fine dishes for the Table." Gerarde writes characteristically of the Sweetbrier, "The fruit when it is ripe maketh most pleasant meats and banqueting dishes, as tarts and such-like; the making whereof I commit to the cunning cooke, and teeth to eat them in the rich man's mouth."
Children have ever nibbled Rose hips:—
"I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws—
Hard fare, but such as boyish appetite
Disdains not."