Medlars - Growing and Cooking: Growing & Cooking (English Kitchen, 30, Band 31) - Softcover

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Born and bred in Paddington, Jane and her young family moved to the East End in the mid-1980s, and she had two very distinct careers before Eastgate Larder was born. Using her linguistic background – she is fluent in French and German – Jane worked as an equities broker in the City for almost 17 years. Slowly, Jane began to plot her way out of City life.

By then, Jane had met David, a Suffolk boy from a farming background, and they discussed where they wanted to live. They chose Eastgate, a tiny hamlet near Cawston in Norfolk. There they began the next chapter of their lives,  and planted a medlar orchard

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The Story of the Medlar

If the medlar had a golden age in England, it was probably between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Early enthusiasts of growing and eating medlars may well have taken their lead from royalty. While don’t know, for example, how often Henry VIII ate them, but he certainly received at least two batches of medlars between 1529 and 1532. In an account of the expenses paid from the privy purse during that period, we find the following for November 1531:

In October the following year, Henry took Anne Boleyn to France, where he met the French king, Francis I. Henry was hoping, among other things, to persuade Francis to use his influence with the Pope to help him secure an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In 1898, P.A. Hamy published a book about their interviews. He quoted ordinances and lists of provisions for Calais, where the English entertained the French. Among the sumptuous supplies of swans, geese, capons, ducks and larks were large quantities of medlars. One list, for the two kings and their trains for four meals, included four hundred dozen pears and the same number of medlars (middlers). In another list, medlars appeared alongside their close cousins, apples and pears.  

In her book A history of gardening in England, the botanist Alicia Amherst, 1865-1941, wrote that John Chapman, Henry VIII’s head gardener at Hampton Court Palace, laid out a new orchard for him. This was to the north of the old gardens, with fruit trees such as medlar, pear, damson, cherry and apple. Henry had acquired the property, and inherited Chapman, from Cardinal Wolsey in 1528, the Cardinal having fallen from royal favour after his failure to secure the desired annulment of Henry’s marriage. 

Referring to fruit generally, Joan Morgan and Alison Richards explain that royal example ‘helped to stimulate consumption in fashionable circles, which in turn led to the establishment of new orchards to supply the metropolis’, especially in Kent. In this way, Henry’s taste for medlars may have helped to popularise them in the upper echelons of society.  Also writing on this subject in the twentieth century, Miles Hadfield, a botanical artist and garden historian, was the first president of the Garden History Society. In 1976, he listed Mespilus germanica as one of the trees which were ‘widely planted in the great period of British landscape gardening and earlier’. It had been introduced, he noted, before 1548. As such, it was ‘a very early introduction’. 

The Elizabethan trend for planting orchards and kitchen gardens continued in the early years of the seventeenth century. John Tradescant (father) started as head gardener to Sir Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. He had already obtained for his garden medlar, quince, walnut and cherry trees from a grower named Henrich Marchfeld. A couple of years later he sent Tradescant to the Low Countries to buy more stock. The gardener kept accounts of his purchases and expenses, from which we can see what plants he bought and where. They are described in Mea Allan’s 1964 book about the Tradescants. 

            Tradescant crossed by ship from Gravesend to Flushing at the beginning of October. From there, he travelled to Leiden, via Middleburg, Rotterdam and Delft. After purchasing, among other things, roots of flowers and roses, he moved on to Haarlem, to buy trees. At Delft, he acquired a variety of fruit trees from the nurseryman Dirryk Hevesson. He purchased ‘two great medlar trees’ for 4s 0d and ‘two great medlar trees of naples’ for 5s 0d. Referring generally to the prices which he paid for plants, Mea Allan considers it certain that he didn’t buy anything that could be obtained in England: ‘These entries of costly fruits and plants are therefore valuable records of first introductions to this country’.

            Ms Allan suggests that this was the earliest record of the great medlar tree of Naples and that it was ‘evidently our large Dutch medlar’. If, however, it was the medlar of Naples which had been described in John Gerard’s herbal of 1597 and was later to appear in John Parkinson’s books of 1629 and 1640, it’s likely to have been the azerole. The other ‘great medlar trees’ may have been what we now call the Dutch variety, but there is no more detailed description in Tradescant’s account.  

Later that century, The Garden Notebook by Sir John Reresby catalogues the plants grown on the Thrybergh estate in Yorkshire and ‘adds to scarce knowledge on other contemporary gardens of the time’. Among the fruit trees growing between 1633 and 1644 were eight medlars of three sorts, though the names of the varieties are not recorded. 

The appeal of the medlar extended beyond the large estates of the later period. In his diary entry for January sixth 1785, the Reverend James Woodforde, the ‘Country Parson’ of Weston Longville in Norfolk, related that Mr Dade of nearby Mattishall had brought him some medlars from Mr Smith, the vicar of that parish.       

These are interesting glimpses into the heyday of the medlar, but when exactly had it been introduced to England and what evidence is there? 

We find ourselves on the relatively firm ground of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which offer us the first clear and reliable documentary records of medlars growing in England. For example, at Westminster Abbey, which had several gardens, some within the walled precinct and others outside. Each of these was run by a monk with the role of obedientiary, a minor official. The monk gardener was responsible for supplying produce required by the Abbey. In around 1266, Richard de Ware, Abbot of Westminster, directed the compilation of the Customary, a codification of the Abbey’s customs and practices. Among other things, it listed fruit and vegetables to be provided by the monk gardener. For the Vigil of St Laurence, a highly venerated martyr, every ninth August, medlars (mespila) were specified, along with cherries in season, plums, pears and nuts.                       

In the royal...