The fruit-garden in England was as behindhand as the kitchen-garden. “We read of no plums, except once of damsons.” Fancy, choosing damsons! We had not yet invented our famous William pear, which we have sent over to France, and which to-day, in the gardens of Touraine, rivals the more ancient Bon Chrétien, already common there, and celebrated in the fourteenth century. But, across the Channel, the peaches of Anjou, the plums of Orleans, the figs of Poitiers, the French grapes and almonds, had nothing to fear from any competition. As far north as Caen and Dieppe, apples and pears of many sorts, grapes (grown for dessert on a trellis in a sheltered place), plums (purple and golden), cherries, gooseberries, green figs, almonds, and walnuts were commonly sold in the public market (the town’s headsman had a right to a handful out of every basket), while peaches and raspberries, though rarer, ripened in private gardens. Apples were about equally abundant in France and in the kingdom of King Edward; and we may suppose that the wild fruits of the cherry and strawberry, domesticated in every French _potager_, could not have been quite utterly unknown in England. * * * * * If the English, then as now, were little acquainted with the charm and cheapness of a vegetable diet, then as now their meat was better and less expensive than in France; and English wool was quite unrivalled. The chief wealth of the Anglo-Saxon farmer grew on the curly backs of his flock. Wool from the fat meadows of England was exported in exchange for wine from the dry and sunny slopes of France. Another national industry had begun to develop: English hops and English beer were already widely known, and compensated the acidity of English wine. The vine, grown round many a monastery in the south of our island, never received--and, owing to our watery sunshine, never could receive--any extensive culture. It is most unlikely, in an age when the wines of Gascony and English Bordeaux were continually introduced into the mother country, that English wine was at any time grown for drinking. It was probably cultivated for the service of the Mass, in small quantities round every abbey, as in Normandy. The accidents of warfare might intercept the vessels that brought the wines of Gascony to English shores; and thus, but for the humble vineyards of Kent and Middlesex, an unimportant incident of the Hundred Years’ War might practically, at any moment, have placed the English people under ban of excommunication. III