W G Hoskins, in The Making of the English Landscape (1954), has but a single mention of orchards, in his angry final chapter on the landscape today, in which he deplores, among other acts of vandalism, the destruction of ‘apple trees that are the successors of those that grew here in the time of Charles I’. Oliver Rackham refused to include orchards in The History of the Countryside (1986) because he considered them to belong to the realm of the garden and other forms of formal planting, not to the natural world (an odd omission, since the central theme of that book is that nothing in the countryside is natural – from woodland, to hedges, to fields, watercourses, and ponds, all represent the intersection between nature and culture).
Yet orchards and their fruit played an important role in the lives of early farming communities that is hard to appreciate today, say Gerry Barnes and Tom Williamson in their new book on English orchards (see ‘Further reading’ below). As John Sinclair put it (in The Code of Agriculture, published in 1818): ‘the produce of an orchard, in favourable seasons, will pay the rent of an industrious cottager’. Cider and perry formed part of the wages of day labourers and casual workers, especially at harvest time, and surplus apples might be sold to a cider-maker, or in local markets: in 1798, Randall Burroughes, a farmer at Wymondham in Norfolk, retained 15 sacks of apples from his orchard for his family’s use and sold 28 sacks in Norwich market for £8 2s 0d, making as much profit from apples as he gained from fattening and selling a bullock.
An apple a day keeps the landlord away
Orchard fruits made up part of the tithe payments made to a rector, vicar, or tithe owner, and when these payments began to be commuted to a cash equivalent in the 17th century, they were deemed to be the same value as a hive of bees, being thus taxed at 1d a year. Bees and orchards went together: as Ralph Austen emphasised in his A Treatise of Fruit-Trees (1653), ‘beside all the profit and pleasure that may be made of an orchard in an ordinary way, by cider, perry, sale of fruits and use of them all the year in the house, there may be another profit made of them, by the labour of the industrious bees’. Further uses for orchards not in Austen’s list included the use of prunings and dead trees as fuel, the value of the hay they provided, and their use for grazing (mainly by sheep or poultry, especially geese).
