‘A quit-rent of a clove gillyflower at Easter’
‘A garden … with gillyflowers, ginger, and gromwell, and peonies powdered everywhere between.’ (quoted from the anonymous fourteenth-century poem Pearl)
The first blossom came out on my newly-planted ‘Michaelmas Red’ apple today, and, as I was browsing through the internet to find out more about this variety, I came across a line in the medieval register of Godstow nunnery, near Oxford.
Sometime around 1270, a woman named Maud Arneby sold a piece of land to one Thomas Stanford. It cost him one pound, six shillings and eight pence, plus a quit-rent of ‘one rede appull at myghelmasse’: one red apple at Michaelmas.
I was so charmed by this that I skimmed through the rest of the register. Were other rents paid in apples, too? It turns out Thomas Stanford’s red apple at Michaelmas is a type of peppercorn rent (so called because, in many cases, it was literally paid in peppercorns). Stanford paid this nominal sum to his local land owner, freeing him from the ancient obligation to offer ‘boon work’ to the local manor. The Godstow register has several gorgeously evocative examples of quit-rent. Alongside the standard peppercorns and other mentions of apples, we find quit-rents of ‘a clove at Easter’ or ‘a clove at Midsummer, and quantities of cumin. In other registers, we find cinnamon, too. Perhaps continuing a theme of spice and scent, in 1291 the Godstow nuns bought some property on a quit-rent of ‘a clove gilliflower at Easter’. The same flower - a gillyflower is a dianthus, a clove-scented pink or carnation - crops up again in an agreement between Philip Springham and John Pady, in 1275. Several agreements mention a rose, and one specifies the date, the feast of St. John the Baptist: June 24th, a good time of year for roses.
The quit-rents permeate the dry legal language of the register with breaths of spice-fragrance, calling to mind the splash of vivid colour of a medieval gallica rose, or the sweet juice of an autumn apple. They let us picture a medieval Oxford - and a medieval Godstow - where the houses and gardens and strips of land mentioned in the register, the messuages and curtilages and tenements, were planted with apple trees and rose trees and clove carnations.
These days, there is a community orchard near Godstow, in the village of Wolvercote, a few hundred yards from the ruins of the nunnery. I used to live between the two, in a house on the edge of Port Meadow, where Godstow nunnery stands. I still have a clove-scented dianthus from the tiny garden I made there. Wolvercote village is on the outskirts of Oxford, and you can easily walk across the meadows, over the canal bridge, and into the bustle of Jericho to the south-west of the city, in half an hour, going from the quiet of the ruins to the roar of traffic and press of tourists. In the orchard, there are local heritage varieties of apples: Blenheim Orange, Eynsham Dumpling, Peggy’s Pride. My ‘Michaelmas Red’ is not among them - and it’s a relatively modern apple, raised in Kent in the early twentieth century - but I am going to let it remind me of stepping out of a busy modern city and into a medieval ruin, of medieval gardens tucked behind little medieval houses, bought on a quit-rent of one red apple.