The decline of the great orchards

The bottled cider of the 1660s had been sold as a rival to wine. By the middle of the eighteenth century that claim had failed, and cider had settled into the position it would keep for two hundred years: a regional farm drink, cheap, associated with labourers, and not something a gentleman served.

Several things contributed. Trade treaties and shifting duties made Portuguese wine reliably available in England, and port occupied the place at a gentleman’s table that cider had briefly aspired to. The Devon colic controversy from the 1760s attached the word poison to cider in print. Adulteration, real and rumoured, did the rest.

Status matters commercially because it sets the price a product can command. Once cider could not be sold at a premium, the case for planting and maintaining orchards for the market collapsed, and orchards reverted to being an adjunct of the farm rather than an investment.

The long wars with France between 1793 and 1815 pushed grain prices to levels that made ploughing attractive wherever the land would carry a crop. Orchard ground is not always suitable for arable, but the general pressure on land use ran against slow-returning tree crops, and the county reports compiled for the Board of Agriculture around 1800 record orchards being grubbed as well as neglected.

Where the land stayed in grass, dairying was the competitor. Cheese and, from the middle of the nineteenth century, liquid milk sent by rail to the cities gave West Country grass a cash return that did not require waiting fifteen years for a tree to bear. Grazing under standard trees remained possible, but an orchard imposes costs on a dairy enterprise — shade, fallen fruit, obstruction of machinery — that a bare field does not.

Beer was the third pressure. Industrial brewing, improved transport and the tied house system delivered a consistent product to precisely the markets that farm cider might have supplied, and did so at a scale no farm could match.

The characteristic form of decline was not felling but neglect. A standard orchard that is not pruned, not grazed sensibly, not replanted as trees die and not sprayed or thinned will go on producing fruit of falling quantity and quality for decades before it disappears. Nineteenth-century agricultural writers complain repeatedly of exactly this: mossy, cankered, unpruned trees, gappy orchards, and no young stock coming on.

That pattern explains why the acreage figures of the later nineteenth century, when agricultural returns first begin to record orchards systematically, can appear stable while every contemporary observer describes decay. An old orchard occupies its ground long after it has stopped being an economic proposition.

It also explains the state of the fruit. Cider made from the mixed windfalls of a neglected orchard, fermented in old casks, is the cider that gave the drink its nineteenth-century reputation, and the reputation was substantially deserved.

Two things persisted through the trough. The first is the trees themselves: standard orchards planted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were still standing when the commercial industry began buying fruit in bulk at the end of the nineteenth, and they supplied it. The second is the knowledge — which fruit to plant, how to build a cheese, how to manage a cask — carried on farms that never stopped making cider for their own use.

The revival, when it came, therefore had material to work with. The commercial cider industry that formed from the 1880s onwards was built on old orchards and farm practice, and the research programme that followed at Long Ashton set out to put both on a scientific footing.

The decline should not be read as a fall from a golden age. The seventeenth-century high point involved a narrow class of estates and a small quantity of expensive bottled drink; the great bulk of English cider throughout the period was rough, local and made for consumption on the farm that made it.