A Book of the West. Volume I Devon. Baring-Gould Sabine

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      O bid the cider flow

      In ploughing and in sowing,

      The healthiest drink I know

      In reaping and in mowing.

      O the jovial days, &c."

      This fresh and quaint old song was taken down from an ancient sexton of over eighty near Tiverton.

      The young apple trees have a deadly enemy in the rabbit, which loves their sweet bark, and in a night will ruin half a nursery, peeling it off and devouring it all round. Young cattle will break over a hedge and do terrible mischief to an orchard of hopeful trees that promise to bear in another year or two. The bark cannot endure bruising and breaking – injury to it produces that terrible scourge the canker. Canker is also caused by the tap-root running down into cold and sour soil; and it is very customary, where this is likely, to place a slate or a tile immediately under the tree, so as to force the roots to spread laterally. Apple trees hate standing water, and like to be on a slope, whence the moisture rapidly drains away. As the song says, the orchard apples when ripe glow "gold and red," and the yellow and red apples make the best cider. The green apple is not approved by the old-fashioned cider-apple growers. The maxim laid down in the song, that the apples should be "the goodliest you can find," was not much attended to some thirty years ago when orchards were let down; farmers thought that any trees were good enough, and that there was a positive advantage in selecting sour apples, for that then the boys would not steal them. It is now otherwise; they are well aware that the quality of the cider depends largely on the goodness of the sort of apple grown. The picking of apples takes place on a fine windy or sunny day. The apples to be pounded are knocked down with a pole, but those for "hoarding" are carefully picked, as a bruise is fatal. After that the fallen apples have been gathered by women and children they are heaped up under the trees and left to completely ripen and be touched with frost. It is thought that they make better cider when they have begun to turn brown. Whether this be actually the case, or the relic of a mistaken custom of the past, the writer cannot say.

      All apples are not usually struck down – the small ones, "griggles," are left for schoolboys. It is their privilege to glean in the orchard, and such gleaning is termed "griggling."

      What the vintage is in France, and the hop-picking is in Kent and Bavaria, that the apple-picking and collecting is in the cider counties of England. The autumn sun is shining, there is a crispness in the air, the leaves are turned crimson and yellow, of the same hues as the fruit. The grass of the orchard is bright with crimson and gold as though it were studded with jewels, but the jewels are the windfalls from the apple trees. Men, women, and children are happy talking, laughing, singing snatches of songs – except when eating. Eat they must – eat they will – and the farmer does not object, for there is a limit to apple-eating. The apple is the most filling of all fruit. And yet how unlimited seems the appetite of the boy, especially when he gets into an orchard! The grandfather of the writer of this book planted an orchard specially for the boys of the parish, in the hope that they would glut themselves therein and leave his cider orchard alone. It did not answer; they devoured all the apples in their special orchard and carried their ravages into his also.

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      1

      Introduction to O'Curry (E.), Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, 1873, I. xxiv.

      2

      The New Century Review, April, 1897.

      3

      See M. Drayton's Polyolbion on this.

      4

      Davidson, "The Saxon Conquest of Devonshire," in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 1877.

      5

      "Antique and Modern Lace," in the Queen, 1874. The last chapter

1

Introduction to O'Curry (E.), Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, 1873, I. xxiv.

2

The New Century Review, April, 1897.

3

See M. Drayton's Polyolbion on this.

4

Davidson, "The Saxon Conquest of Devonshire," in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 1877.

5

"Antique and Modern Lace," in the Queen, 1874. The last chapter is devoted to Honiton Lace.

6

The Devon and Exeter Gazette, December 31st, 1885.

7

Quoted in "Some Seventeenth Century Topography," Western Morning News, May 9th, 1876.

8

Names of places, as Heavitree, Langtree, Plymtree, take the "tree" from the Welsh "tref," a farm or habitation. Heavitree is Tre-hafod, the summer farm.

9

In my Lives of the Saints, written in 1874, I accepted M. Barthélemy's view, that Virgilius held that there were underground folk, gnomes; but I do not hold this now, knowing more than I then did of the learning of the great Irish scholars, and of the voyages made by the Irish. The earliest gloss on the Senchus Mor says, "God formed the firmament around the earth; and the earth, in the form of a perfectly round ball, was fixed in the midst of the firmament." – I. p. 27.

10

Ffin– limit, gal– the level land, i. e. in comparison with the Dartmoor highlands.

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