The cherry, indeed, appears to have been one of the most popular of fruits in England, during the mediæval period. The records of the time contain purchases of cherry-trees for the king’s garden in Westminster in 1238 and 1277, and cherries and cherry-trees are enumerated in all the glossaries from the times of the Anglo-Saxons to the sixteenth century. The earl of Lincoln had cherry-trees in his garden in Holborn towards the close of the thirteenth century, and during the same century we have allusions to the cultivation of the cherry in other parts of the kingdom. The allusions to cherries in the early poetry are not at all unfrequent, and they were closely mixed up with popular manners and feelings. It appears to have been the custom, from a rather early period, to have fairs or feasts, probably in the cherry orchards, during the period that the fruit was ripe, which were called cherry-fairs, and sometimes cherry-feasts; and these are remembered, if they do not still exist, in our great cherry districts, such as Worcestershire and Kent. They were brief moments of great gaiety and enjoyment, and the poets loved to quote them as emblems of the transitory character of all worldly things. In the latter part of the fourteenth century, the poet Gower, speaking of the teachers of religion and morality, says:-- _They prechen us in audience_ _That no man schalle his soule empeyre_ (impair), _For alle is but a cherye-fayre_. And the same writer again:-- _Sumtyme I drawe into memoyre,_ _How sorow may not ever laste,_ _And so cometh hope in at laste,_ _Whan I non other foode knowe;_ _And that endureth but a throwe,_ _Ryght as it were a chery-feste._ So again, under the reign of Henry IV., about the year 1411, Occleve, in his poem “De regimine principum,” recently printed for the Roxburgh Club, says (p. 47),-- _Thy lyfe, my sone, is but a chery-feire._ During the rest of the fifteenth century, the allusions to the cherry-fairs are very frequent.[34] Yet in face of all this, and still more, abundant evidence, Loudon (“Encyclopædia of Gardening,” edition of 1850) says, “Some suppose that the cherries introduced by the Romans into Britain were lost, and that they were re-introduced in the time of Henry VIII. by Richard Haines (it should be Harris), the fruiterer to that monarch. But though we have no proof that cherries were in England at the time of the Norman conquest, or for some centuries after it, yet Warton has proved, by a quotation from Lidgate, a poet who wrote about or before 1415, that the hawkers in London were wont to expose cherries for sale, in the same manner as is now done early in the season.”