Pomona: Cider and Scientists in Restoration England
Dr William Poole (Tutor in English at New College, Oxford) uses his expertise in early modern literary, intellectual, and scientific history to look into the history of cider during the Restoration Era.
One of the more important books published in the seventeenth century in this country was John Evelyn’s Sylva, in 1664. Evelyn was a gentleman virtuoso, a gardener, a translator, a diarist. His Sylva was his favourite among his publications – he had himself painted holding it. Its full title commences: Sylva, or A discourse of forest-trees, and the propagation of timber in His Majesties dominions. By J.E. Esq; as it was deliver’d in the Royal Society the xvth of October, MDCLXII. But the reason why we are interested in it here today is because of what comes next: To which is annexed, the title continues, Pomona; or, An appendix concerning fruit-trees in relation to cider; the making and several ways of ordering it. Published by express order of the Royal Society. This appendix was by largely one John Beale, who also wrote a poem in Latin to Evelyn, the principal author of the work, who set it at the front of the whole book. Evelyn’s text consisted of 32 chapters on trees – their various kinds, their cultivation, their diseases, their pruning, their timbering. This was then followed by Beale’s Pomona, on fruit trees, their stocks, planting, transplanting, fencing, pruning. Beale then supplied several pages of ‘Aphorisms’ on cider, and printed too several short treatises by other hands which he had collected together. Evelyn himself then rounded off the volume with a gardener’s almanac, the ‘Kalendarium Hortense’. Six further editions of this classic work would appear to 1793. It is popularly thought to be a book about trees – Evelyn was in fact rather a dry old stick in my opinion – but this is not true: it is a book about trees, and about cider.
Why is this book important? The answer is its institutional backers. As the title states, this is a book of texts presented before and licensed by a new London society, the Royal Society, a kind of gentleman’s-club-cum-research-and-experimental-thinktank, itself the culmination of several prior collectives and clubs operating in chiefly Oxford and London in the decades immediately prior to the Restoration of 1660. The Society was officially founded in 1662, and with its incorporation came certain rights, including the right to license and to print books under its own imprimatur. It is out of the early Royal Society that the great books of English science came – Robert Hooke’s Micrographia in 1665, for instance, and Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica Naturalis Philosophiæ in 1687. The first book the society licensed and published was, however, the Evelyn-Beale Sylva, and I want you above all to hang on to this surprising fact – a great deal of the first book published by what remains the world’s leading scientific society was on how to make cider.
Before returning to that moment, however, I want simply to rehearse at high-speed what we can say about the appearance and spread of cider in England before that time.The word comes into the English vernacular tongue seemingly in the 1300s (sithere, sidre), a word that started out as the Hebrew shēkār, ‘strong drink’, and which travelled through Greek and Latin into Old French, where it had taken on the specific meaning of drink from apples. (The drink itself must be ancient, and there are references in the classical writers, specifically the cookbook known as the ‘Apicius’ and the geographer Strabo.) The English word is post-conquest, therefore, and it seems likely that the drink is too, as there is no common Anglo-Saxon word of equivalent meaning (although ‘aeppelwin’ does appear once as a gloss to ‘hydromellum’ (etymologically mead), but alongside ‘beor’ too). ‘Wassailing’ is an Anglo-Saxon word, but it just means ‘be you hale’ and was not originally connected to the drink – the specific connection does not even seem unambiguously to be early-modern either. It seems that cider is possibly a Norman, but more likely a Plantagenet contribution, borrowed from the continent. (It is first unambiguously referenced, in the Pipe Rolls or royal accounts, in 1184.) In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books of husbandry and health, cider is almost always discussed, usually alongside perry (thought of as a weaker and even a woman’s drink), for its presumed healthful or sometimes harmful effects. And although common enough by the sixteenth century, cider retained its association with the country, and is a comparatively rare sight in the urban literature of the time. In Shakespeare, for instance, the word ‘beer’ occurs six times, but only in the compounds ‘small beer’ (4), ‘double beer’ (1), and ‘beer barrel’ (1) – and ‘cider’ is not mentioned once. And if we turn to the major herbal of the time, Gerard’s Historie of Plants of 1597, we find that he talks of cider as a Herefordshire drink, and a rather basic one: speaking of an acquaintance’s estates and orchard there, Gerard commented that ‘the servants drinke for the most part no other drink but that which is made from apples’, and that the local clergyman received his tithes in the form of hogsheads of ‘Syder’. It is clear from Gerard’s tone that although common in the West Country, cider was not seen as a metropolitan or even an urban drink. The statesman and intellectual and scientific reformer Francis Bacon mentioned apple-cultivation in his Sylva Sylvarum (1627): in his section on the maturation of fruits he commented that fruits mature when heaped together, as cider-makers know, and he associated it with sea-voyages, as it kept. In Bacon’s utopian fiction The New Atlantis the inhabitants of his utopia, Benasalem, make equivalents of wine, ale, and fruit-based drinks he terms ‘a kind of Cider’
It is this Baconian connection that supplies the thread leading us to Evelyn and Beale and the Sylva. Note the echo in the titles too: Bacon wrote a Sylva Sylvarum; Evelyn a Sylva.Bacon had given agricultural reform a platform, and by including it in his larger project to reform and to advance learning, he yoked together what we might think of as technology, medicine, and science into one reforming program; and this utilitarian, even economic understanding of the advancement of learning was to influence subsequent generations of virtuosi, as they began to be termed.
The most important of these men in England in the generation before the Restoration was a Prussian settler named Samuel Hartlib. The son of a successful merchant based at the Baltic port of Elbing and resident in London since 1628, Hartlib, born in 1600, functioned from the 1630s up until his death in 1662 as an ‘intelligencer’ – a man who collected, recorded, and redistributed information on technological, mathematical, philosophical, even (perhaps especially) educational and religious subjects. Hartlib was hugely influenced by Bacon- the great historian Hugh Trevor-Roper used to call the Hartlibian movement ‘vulgar Baconianism’, and although the whiff of snobbery here has annoyed some historians, Trevor-Roper’s basic insight is right – the dozens, even hundreds of people who were in contact with Hartlib and through him with one another sought above all practical ways of divulging and popularising the Baconian dream.
Because of Bacon’s interest in agriculture, it is not surprising that apple culture and cider-making became part of Hartlib’s interests from the beginning. As early as 1634, Hartlib noted in his diary ‘No remedy in the world better or more approoved for those that are troubled with the spleene then to drinke an houre before meales a draught of good pippin-cider et to walke vpon it.’ Almost two decades later, in 1653 he recorded, fascinatingly, that ‘Mr Busby schoolmaster of Westminster a great maker of Cider’, and also that ‘Mr Vincent Master vnder Busby of Westminster schoole drunke boyled Cider, which he professed was as delicate a drink as ever he had drunke in his life.’ Busby is the famous Richard Busby, who served as headmaster of Westminster for more than half a century, and among his little pupils he might number several future giants of the new science, including Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke.
Hartlib’s further importance for the study of cider is that he encouraged several seminal publications. One of his regular correspondents was a puritan named Ralph Austen, a Staffordshire man and a parliamentary soldier, whose Treatise on Fruit Trees and Spiritual Use of an Orchard (both published together in 1653 and again in 1657, and both on the press in Oxford, where Austen was based), emphasised both the economic and the godly profit to be drawn from the cultivation of fruit trees and cider-making – a classic puritan emphasis on the spirituality of labour. Astonishingly, he is said to have opened a cider factory on rented land located between Queen Street and Shoe Lane in Oxford in 1659, which Ted Bruning thinks is the first such business in England. This plot of land is today just out the back of the main shopping centre right in the middle of Oxford, the Clarendon Centre, and perhaps a blue plaque ought to be erected there …
The second of Hartlib’s cider men is my main interest tonight – the well-connected Herefordshire man John Beale, who spent time as a Cambridge don before taking up a career as a parish priest in Yeovil in Somerset, where he ended his days in 1683. He picked up his interest in apples from his father, and his interests in Francis Bacon and Baconianism from his education. His Herefordshire relatives, the Scudamores and the Pyes, as Mayling Stubbs says, ‘helped to establish Herefordshire’s reputation in the seventeenth century as an English Pomerania’. Beale’s father ‘directed the planting of the famous Bodenham orchard as well as his own Yarkhill estate.’ The apple he championed was the redstreak. ‘According to Beale the redstreak cider apple, which later became famous as ‘Scudamore’s crab’, was originally known only in the Scudamore family. Thomas Beale was said by his son to be the ‘first founder’ of the crabstock graft which came to be celebrated in the name of the family who actively developed and promoted it.’ (Stubbs).
Beale was author of Herefordshire Orchards, A Pattern For All England (1657), the major pre-Restoration work on the subject. Beale’s Herefordshire Orchards was not the first such book, and indeed he presents it as partially inspired by his sense of the inadequacies of a much older book, William Lawson’s New Orchard and Garden (1618). But Beale’s book was promoted by Hartlib and was highly influential. He was Baconian, yes, but in the vein of the progressive dons of the period, he also believed in the continued relevance of the classical writers on agriculture, and in 1656, not all that long after Parliament had come close to shutting the universities, Beale wrote to Hartlib that ‘It were an excellent work, if any man would publish a well-corrected copy of the four Roman Husbandmen, they being rare Monuments of Antiquity; the first, namely that of Cato the Censor, being almost 2000 yeares old.’ But his main emphasis was practical. Beale thought that orchards purify the atmosphere – Evelyn too would write on how to cope with London’s smog problem by tree-planting – and Beale insisted that other counties could follow Herefordshire’s example, to the amelioration of the entire country’s economy.
Hartlib was behind the publication of Herefordshire Orchards, and he recommended Beale to the Cromwellian government for employment. An offer was made, and in 1948 Sotheby’s sold a signed letter from Cromwell to Beale probably concerning this, whereabouts unknown, but Beale declined the offer, preferring his rural life as a pastor and agriculturalist.
Hartlib put Beale in touch with two huge figures – Henry Oldenburg, another foreigner resident in London and the man destined to become the first secretary to the Royal Society; and John Evelyn, the gentleman virtuoso and gardener. Beale would continue to correspond with Evelyn until Beale’s death in the early 1680s.
Evelyn and Beale became acquainted in 1659. The two men swapped MSS and thus was born the exchange that would result in the Sylva/Pomona collaboration. The pair continued corresponding and collaborating for many years: Evelyn sent Beale an outline of his huge manuscript the Elysium Britannicum, with which Beale helped him, and Beale also co-designed with Evelyn the title-page for the semi-official History of the Royal Society by Thomas Sprat, published in 1667. He also pressed Evelyn to publish second editions of his works, including the Sylva, which duly appeared, expanded, in 1670. Beale, at this point deep in Somerset, was always full of advice for his metropolitan colleagues, perhaps too full – he advised Evelyn, for instance, on the Royal Society’s need for new headquarters, and how the Society might receive a permanent income if it could be granted the income from a tax on spirits. Beale was fundamentally, I suspect, a somewhat lonely figure, and he bombarded his three major correspondents – Samuel Hartlib, Henry Oldenburg, and Evelyn himself – with letter after letter. Today this correspondence is a still largely unpublished treasure-trove for the intellectual history of the period, in letter collections now held in the Royal Society and in the British Library, but at the time Beale occasionally bordered on the epistolary equivalent of stalking.
But everyone loved Beale, or rather his letters, at first. Henry Oldenburg read Beale’s paper ‘Aphorisms concerning cider’ before the Royal Society in December 1662. In January 1663 Beale was elected to the Society mainly on this account, and at the same meeting Evelyn was asked to edit Beale’s communications for publication with his own. This is the book I’ll now introduce you to.
Evelyn had received from Beale some notes that would be distilled as the Pomona, some ‘Aphorisms’ on Cider (57 in all). He also gathered a selection of other short tracts on cider together from the archives of the Royal Society – from the first, the Royal Society had laid down papers. The authors of these miscellaneous papers on cider are notable: one was by the courtier, astronomer, and FRS Sir Paul Neile, another by the Dorset gentleman and corresponding FRS John Newburgh, a further one was by one ‘Dr. Smith’, probably the physician and FRS George Smith, and the final number was by ‘Captain Taylor’, who must be Silas Taylor, a very interesting character who managed to combine the careers of Parliamentarian army captain, antiquary, composer, and who in the very year of the Sylva/Pomona volume, was appointed by royal warrant commissioner of the king’s storehouse at Harwich, an appointment that shocked Royalists with long memories. Beale, with Evelyn, therefore appeared alongside three further FRSs and the slightly maverick Taylor, who certainly associated with the Royal Society, but who was never elected. This was, in the manner of the early Royal Society, therefore a rather collaborative venture, featuring tracts and aphorisms by courtiers and court officials, physicians, country gentlemen, and a clergyman – Beale himself.
We might also think a little bit about the form of Beale’s writings. Pomona is a tract, notionally written by Evelyn from the papers of Beale and one ‘Buckland’, but Beale himself furnished his thoughts in the form of ‘aphorisms’. Now aphorisms were a strongly Baconian form. The first part of Bacon’s great work, Novum Organon or The New Organon was entitled ‘Aphorisms on the Interpretation of Nature and on the Kingdom of Man’. Bacon was keen on aphorisms because he thought that they might replace the more traditional way of arguing, which was by syllogism, the Aristotelian way. Bacon hated this, preferring the aphorism as presenting new information rather than a series of logical moves practised upon known premises. The ‘aphorism’ was also a kind of medical knowledge too, harking back to Hippocrates, whose aphorisms were the foundational text of western medical wisdom. (‘LIFE is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult.’) So when we encounter the seventeenth-century virtuosi writing in aphorisms, they are being consciously Baconian, and Beale’s ‘Aphorisms on Cider’ presents itself through its form as a modern, reforming text.
Beale’s work was followed by a practical initiative. As the writer in ODNB says: ‘Beale subsequently bore the cost of distributing 20,000 grafts of Herefordshire redstreak and genet moyle apples and barland pears to Somerset, Devon, and Dorset. Grafts were also circulated among the society’s members, who were encouraged to propagate them for further distribution.’ We do not really know whether this immediate initiative had long-term effects, but Beale’s work also prompted further publications from the milieu of the new science, for instance John Worlidge’s 1676 Vinetum Britannicum, or a Treatise of Cider, and such other Wines and Drinks, and Richard Haines’s 1684 Aphorisms upon The New Way of lmproving Cyder, or making Cyder-Royal. Beale himself kept up the project: when Ralph Austen, whom we encountered earlier, developed his Oxford commercial nursery in the 1670s, Beale accompanied this with a further tract advertising Austen’s work and reiterating his own theories: this was his Nurseries, Orchards, Profitable Gardens, and Vineyards Encouraged (1677). In 1685 a writer calling himself merely ‘A Lover of Planting’ published The Compleat Planter and Cyderist (2nd ed. 1690); and in 1708 there appeared the classic literary text arising from all this interest in cider: this was John Philips’s poem Cyder: A Poem in Two Books. This was hugely popular, and was written in a kind of light version of Miltonic verse. The Miltonic comparison is apt – Beale and Milton were exact contemporaries and Beale was one of the early recorded readers of Milton. He even hoped, quite unrealistically, that the great blind Republican poet might be encouraged to write in support of the Royal Society itself! History does not record whether the writer of Paradise Lost drank cider: but his Adam and Eve certainly made a mistake with an apple. After the fall, the effect on Adam and Eve is expressed by Milton as a kind of drunkenness:
As with new Wine intoxicated both
They swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel
Divinitie, within them breeding wings
Wherewith to scorne the Earth: but that false Fruit
Farr other operation first displaid,
Carnal desire enflaming, hee on Eve
Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him
As wantonly repaid; in Lust they burne:
Till Adam thus ’gan Eve to dalliance move …
‘As with new Wine’ – but the forbidden fruit was an apple; have we therefore now detected the first recorded cider-drinkers? I conclude however by affirming what I started off with: if we were to look for a cultural ‘cider moment’ in English history, a time when cider and science were allied in the cause of economic and even intellectual reform, then it was in the early Restoration, when Evelyn and Beale collaborated on Sylva and Pomona – for once again, much of the first book published by the world’s leading scientific society was on how to make cider.