The naming of perry pears

Place names dominate, as they do for cider apples: varieties named for the parish, hamlet or farm they were first propagated from, recording where the wood came from rather than where the fruit ended up. Blakeney Red and Taynton Squash are the familiar examples, both naming Gloucestershire places.

Descriptive names form the second group, recording colour, shape, season or the tree’s habit. Some describe the fruit — its russet, its colour, its shape — and some describe the tree, its bark or the way it grows. A few describe the perry rather than the pear.

Huffcap is a family in its own right, appearing in several combinations. The word is an old term for a strong drink, and the huffcap pears are so named for the perry they were reputed to make. Multiple distinct varieties carry the element, distinguished by a place or colour prefix, and it is a good demonstration of how a descriptive term hardens into part of a variety name.

The most striking group is small and consists of names describing what the perry was said to do to the drinker — names referring to unsteady legs, to muddled heads, and in one or two cases considerably more bluntly to insensibility. CiderHQ records these as documented variety names because that is what they are. They are evidence of how the drink was regarded, and they are not an invitation.

Perry pear growing was concentrated in a small area — essentially the counties around the lower Severn and the Welsh border — and within that area varieties were often confined to a handful of parishes. Some are recorded from a single village. This is much narrower than the distribution of cider apples, and it produced a nomenclature in which the same descriptive words recur independently in different districts for different fruit.

The tree itself explains part of the pattern. Perry pears are extremely long-lived, with trees of a century or two common and older ones documented, and they are notoriously slow to come into useful bearing — the traditional saying about planting pears for your heirs is a fair statement of the position. A variety that takes a generation to prove itself does not spread quickly, and there is little incentive to plant one on speculation.

The consequence for identification is severe. A variety known from a few parishes, propagated locally, recorded inconsistently and represented now by a small number of very old trees is exactly the situation in which names and fruit come apart. The mid-twentieth-century monograph on perry pears remains the standard descriptive authority precisely because it was compiled while enough of the population survived to be described systematically.

The names are good evidence of distribution and of local judgement, and poor evidence of anything chemical. A pear named for its reputed strength tells you what people said about the perry; it does not tell you the fruit was high in sugar, and traditional perry is not generally a strong drink. The names encode reputation.

They are also good evidence for how thoroughly perry belonged to a particular corner of England and Wales. Nothing comparable exists in the French or German pear traditions, where the naming is more conventionally descriptive, and the vividness of the English and Welsh material is itself a local phenomenon worth noting.

Conservation work on perry pears has therefore had to combine name research with fruit description and, increasingly, molecular identification, since a name alone cannot establish that the tree in the field is the variety the record refers to. The pears are among the most at-risk cultivated plants in Britain, and the naming is part of the reason the rescue is difficult.