Literary Medlars
BEAUTIFUL, BAWDY AND ROTTEN
Through the ages, writers have celebrated the beauty of the medlar tree, but associated its fruit with sex and decay.
The Floure and the Leafe, a poem in Middle English from around 1470, was once thought to have been written by Chaucer, but its author is unknown. While the poem’s narrator is out walking, she comes upon a garden with a beautiful medlar tree. A goldfinch is leaping prettily from bough to bough, eating buds and sweet flowers, and his song is answered by a nightingale in a laurel. Sitting nearby, the narrator sees bouts of singing, dancing and jousting by knights and ladies. The poem was turned into verse by Dryden. In his free version, Dryden retained the image of the medlar:
Thus, as I mus’d, I cast aside my Eye,
And saw a Medlar-Tree was planted nigh:
The spreading Branches made a goodly Show,
And full of opening Blooms was ev’ry Bough …
George L Marsh explained the significance of the medlar in 1906: the tree ‘is deciduous; its blossoms last but a short time, and its fruit ripens and rots quickly’. This reflects the qualities of ‘people who have loved idleness, and cared for nothing but hunting and playing in meads’. According to Marsh, the medlar tree was not very frequently mentioned in medieval poetry, but there is one in the heart of another garden in a French pastoral allegory, part of which was translated into Middle English as The Romaunt of the Rose. The poem narrates a dream in which a lover searches for his beloved, the Rose, described by A. L. Maycock as ‘an ideal of feminine beauty and grace’. The lover enters a garden, even and square, as long as it is wide, where trees bear medlars (nefles in the original French), among other fruit.
One of the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400, is a reeve called Oswald, slender and choleric. In the prologue to his tale, he bemoans his old age and the fact that he still has sexual desires which he can’t satisfy. As for medlars, the Reeve says:
But if I fare as dooth an open-ers
That ilke fruyt is ever lenger the wers,
Til it be roten in mullok or in stree.
We olde men, I drede, so fare we:
Til we be roten, kan we nat be rype …
Referring to the need for a medlar to be bletted before it can be eaten, Oswald makes a bitter comment on the experience that comes with old age: to be ripe, one has to be rotten. There are echoes of Chaucer in a Jacobean comedy. ‘But women are like medlars,’ says Lodovico in Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore, ‘– no sooner ripe but rotten.’
In 1856, a writer identifying himself only as “EGR” claimed to have heard the medlar called an open-arse by old men in Norfolk. He remarked that Chaucer’s Reeve was from that county, as appears from the general prologue to the Canterbury Tales. His home town was Bawdeswell, less than seven miles from our orchard at Eastgate.
But the name open-arse isn’t peculiar to East Anglia, as we can see from Shakespeare’s punning on it. In Act 2 Scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet, just before Romeo sees Juliet on her balcony, Mercutio and Benvolio playfully try to entice him out of his hiding place in the Capulets’ orchard. Referring to Rosaline, not knowing that he has fallen for Juliet, Mercutio says Romeo will sit under a medlar tree, wishing his mistress was an open-arse and that he was a poperin pear. In the words of Eric Partridge, the pun on open-arse and poperin pear, the shape of which resembled a penis and scrotum, was ‘forcibly obvious’.
In As You Like It, the Bard uses bletting as an image for rotting. Act 3 Scene 2 tales place in the forest of Arden, where Orlando hangs in trees verses of his love for Rosalind. She finds one and reads it to the Duke’s fool, Touchstone, who is disparaging and parodies it bawdily: ‘Truly, the tree yields bad fruit’. Rosalind replies that she’ll graft it with him and then with a medlar. In this way, he’ll be rotten before he’s ripe: ‘and that’s the right virtue of the medlar’, she says, in a pun on his meddling, warning that he might be ruined before he grew old.
There is a similar wordplay in Act 4 Scene 3 of Measure for Measure. Lucio is a ‘fantastique’, essentially a fop. He’s a young man of good birth, drawn to lewd behaviour. Not recognising the Duke, disguised as a friar, Lucio admits that he fathered a child by a prostitute. He denied it on a previous occasion because ‘they would else have married me to the rotten medlar’. To meddle was to engage in sex: a prostitute was ruined early in life by engaging too much.
Out of money, abandoned by his false friends, Timon of Athens retreats to a cave in the wilderness. Here he’s visited by Apemantus. In his invective against this ‘churlish philosopher’, Timon rejects the offer of a medlar to eat, saying it looks like Apemantus: ‘On what I hate I feed not’.
The Heavenly Jerusalem is evoked in an English lyric, Jerusalem, Thy Joys Divine, in a volume of Catholic songs in the British Library. It is been described as a 16th Century translation from a work by an 11th Century Benedictine monk and cardinal. In the paradise of the song, medlars grow, together with lemons, oranges, quinces, apricots, cherries, wardens, plums, pears, and ‘Indie spice’. Whether or not the reference to medlars originated with the composer or a translator, they were clearly among the fruits which would convey the city’s fecundity to an English reader of the late 1500s.
Pantagruel by François Rabelais tells the grotesque story of a giant, the son of Gargantua. Describing the origin of Pantagruel, Rabelais refers back to a time at the beginning of the world, shortly after Cain killed Abel. The earth is drenched with the blood of the just brother, and it becomes fertile in fruits, especially medlars. Everyone heartily eats the medlars, which are ‘fair to the eye, and in taste delicious’, but they cause the people to swell up. Some develop a belly like a great barrel. Others swell at the shoulders, becoming ‘crump and knobby’, as if they were carrying mountains. Still others acquire long legs, or large noses with crimson-blisters and pimples, or enormous genitals, or ears which would provide enough material for a doublet, a pair of breeches and a jacket. There are those who grow in body length, and from this race come the giants, such as Pantagruel.
There is a parody of the Bible in this myth. Professor David Quint notes a similarity between the medlars described by Rabelais and the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Rabelais contradicts the assertion in Genesis that the blood-soaked earth would not yield fruit. Instead, ‘the medlars which spring from Abel’s blood reverse the effect of the forbidden fruit’. Why would Rabelais choose medlars to be the means by which humankind finds redemption from sin? According to Camilla J. Nilles, the answer lies in their medicinal uses, which he would have known about: because they were believed to stanch blood, especially menstrual flow and haemorrhoidal bleeding, they could ‘absorb the mark left by the fratricide’.
The second volume of Cervantes’ Don Quixote was published in 1615. In a conversation with an innkeeper, Sancho Panza says that his master’s calling permits no catering or butlering: ‘we clap us down in the midst of a green field, and fill our bellies with acorns, or medlars’. In two of his plays, La entretenida and El rufiàn viudo, llamado Trampagos, Cervantes writes of peeling medlars. This may refer to a lazy person, or someone who’s stupid. Either way, the context in La entretenida suggests something coarse: Cervantes used ‘mondaníspolas’ (peeler of medlars) as a term of abuse, and possibly a term for self-abuse.
Francis Bacon began his 1625 essay Of Gardens with a passage which has become one of the most famous in the history of horticulture: ‘God Almighty first planted a garden: and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures’. Bacon advocated gardens ‘for all the months in the year’, with things of beauty in season. In October and the beginning of November in his royal gardens, there would be medlars.
Henry Peacham (born 1578) wrote a treatise on art, The Gentlemans Exercise. He described how, among the twelve months of the year, October was depicted:
[i]n a garment of yellow and carnation, upon his head a garland of Oake leaves with the Akornes, in his right hand the signe Scorpio, in his left a basket of Services, Medlers and Chestnuts, and other fruits, that ripen at the latter time of the yeere; his robe is of the colour of the leaves and flowers decaying.
The 17th Century English poet Abraham Cowley wrote six books on plants. In Book V, he described the medlar tree, its rotten fruit being ‘crown’d’, a reference to the coronet of calyx lobes. In 1666, he wrote to the essayist John Evelyn:
We nowhere art do so triumphant see,
As when it grafts or buds the tree …
By way of example, he referred to man grafting medlar on hawthorn:
He does the savage hawthorn teach
To bear the medlar and the pear …
John Philips published a poem in two books about cider in 1708. On the subject of grafting, he echoed Cowley in the lines:
And men have gather’d from the Hawthorn’s branch
Large Medlars, imitating regal crowns.
The German Jewish diarist Glückel of Hameln described how medlars helped her baby to feed. One winter, she and her mother were on their way to visit a lawyer in the town when they passed the shop of a woman who sold medlars. Glückel was fond of them, but forgot to buy any on their way home. During the night, she gave birth to her son Joseph. The baby was listless and covered with brown spots. He wouldn’t suck or open his mouth. Over the next two days, he became feebler, and Glückel began to wonder whether this was anything to do with her craving for medlars. Despite her mother’s angry scepticism, a woman was sent out to buy some of the fruit. The nursemaid placed a little of the pulp around the baby’s mouth. He ‘opened his mouth so greedily you would have thought he wanted to swallow it all at a gulp’. Happily, Joseph recovered.
There are medlar trees in the gardens of stories by Saki (H. H. Munro). In The Peace of Mowsle Barton, 1912, in the half-orchard and half-garden by the farmyard, there is a rustic seat beneath an old medlar tree. In The Boar Pig, 1914, a young girl uses over-ripe medlars to entice a boar away from gate-crashers at a garden party.
In 1923, D. H. Lawrence drew together all these strands, reflecting on beauty, sex, decay and death, in Medlars and Sorb Apples. The poem is suffused with the erotic: ‘A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture’.