Glossary · History
Royal Society cider committee
Definition
The group convened within the early Royal Society in the 1660s to gather and publish information on cider-making. Pomona is that enterprise’s output rather than one man’s book: it was annexed to Evelyn’s Sylva by express order of the Society, and its recorded contributors include John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor alongside Evelyn.
- Subject
- History
In more detail
The committee’s interest was practical and improving: which fruit made good cider, how it should be handled, and whether cider could be made a serious national product rather than a farm by-product. Its correspondents recorded early bottling, sugar addition and the deliberate use of particular cultivars — evidence that seventeenth-century cider-making was more sophisticated than later accounts of "rough farm cider" suggest.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
History
Pomona
A descriptive and usually illustrated book of fruit varieties. The word is from the Roman goddess of fruit trees, and the genre is the principal historic record of cider and perry cultivars.
History
Early bottling
The seventeenth-century English practice of bottling cider with residual sugar in strong glass so that it refermented and sparkled — documented decades before comparable techniques are recorded for wine.
History
Cider royal
A historic strengthened cider, made by adding spirit, honey or sugar, or by concentrating the juice — a category recorded in seventeenth-century English writing on cider.
History
Stumming
The old practice of burning a sulphur match inside a cask before filling it, to sterilise the vessel and suppress fermentation in the cider put into it — the ancestor of modern sulphiting.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
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Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Pomona, or an Appendix concerning Fruit-Trees in relation to Cider
John Evelyn, Royal Society · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1664
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1670 edition held by the Internet Archive. The attribution needs correcting and CiderHQ has corrected it: *Pomona* is not a book by John Evelyn. It is an appendix annexed to Evelyn’s *Sylva*, published by express order of the Royal Society, and the contributors recorded for the volume are John Evelyn, John Beale, Daniel Colwall, Paul Neile, John Newburgh and Sylas Taylor. Beale has his own entry in this register, and the overlap is not a coincidence — the two texts come out of the same Royal Society enquiry into cider in the 1660s. Citing *Pomona* as Evelyn’s flattens a collaborative compilation into a single-author work.
Vinetum Britannicum, or a Treatise of Cider
John Worlidge · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1676
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1678 edition held by the Internet Archive. John Worlidge, active 1669–1698; the work ran to further editions including 1691, so a citation to it should say which. The full title is broader than the short one CiderHQ uses and matters for what the book can be cited for: it covers other fruit wines and drinks alongside cider, so it is evidence about seventeenth-century English fruit fermentation generally rather than about cider alone.