[E160] Evidently a misprint for Peare-plums, which is the reading of all the later editions. Austen, in his Treatise on Fruit Trees, recommends that Peaches be grafted on plum stocks, such as the White Peare-plum-stock.
[E161] The word "Quince" preserves only a single letter of its original form. A passage in the Romaunt of the Rose shows an early form of the word, and also exhibits chestnut and cherry in a transitional stage of adoption from the French. The author of the Romaunt writes:
"And many homely trees there were,
That peaches, coines, and apples bere;
Medlers, plummes, peeres, chesteines,
Cherise, of which many one faine is."
It is evident that the English word is a corruption of the French coing, which we may trace through the Italian cotogna to Lat. cotonium or cydonium malum, the apple of Cydon, a town in Crete.—Taylor's Words and Places. In the Paston Letters, i. 245, occurs the word "chardequeyns," that is, a preserve made of quinces. See also the Babees Book, E.E.T. Soc. ed. Furnivall, p. 152. In the ordinances of the household of George, Duke of Clarence, p. 103, charequynses occur under the head of spices, their price being 5 shillings "the boke," or £2 10s. for 10 lbs., A.D. 1468.
[E162] "Respis." In Turner's Herbal called Raspis or Raspices, the latter of which is apparently a double plural. Probably from resp, a word that in the Eastern counties means a shoot, a sucker, a young stem, and especially the fruit-bearing stem of raspberries (Forby). This name it may owe to the fact that the fruit grows on the young shoots of the previous year.
[E163] "Reisons," most probably currants. "Raysouns of Coraunte."—Pegge's Forme of Cury, ed. 1780, p. 16.
Turner (Names of Herbes) says the currant tree is called "in some places of England a Rasin tree."—Note by Mr. J. Britten, F.L.S.
[E164] "Seruice trees." Dr. R. A. Prior, in his Popular Names of British Plants, 1870, p. 209, says: "Service-, or, as in Ph. Holland's Pliny more correctly spelt, Servise-tree, from L. Cervisia, its fruit having from ancient times been used for making a fermented liquor, a kind of beer:
Et pocula læti
Fermento atque acidis imitantur vitea sorbis.
—Virg. Georgics III. 379.
Diefenbach remarks (Or. Eur. 102): 'bisweilen bedeutet cervisia einen nicht aus Getreide gebranten Trank;' and Evelyn tells us in his Sylva (ch. xv.), that 'ale and beer brewed with these berries, being ripe, is an incomparable drink.' The Cerevisia of the ancients was made from malt, and took its name, we are told by Isidore of Seville, from Ceres, Cereris, but this has come to be used in a secondary sense without regard to its etymological meaning, just as in Balm-tea we use tea in the sense of an infusion, without regard to its being properly the name of a different plant." Wild Service, the rowan tree; Pyrus aucuiparia, Gärt.