market, purchase wisely, and rise from class to class much as he may to-day. 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]