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History · Medieval to present

The history of perry

How old is perry and where does it come from?

In short

Perry — fermented pear juice, made from tannic and often inedible perry pears rather than from dessert fruit — is recorded in England from the medieval period and was made across northern France and the Low Countries as well. Its English heartland is a small area of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and the Welsh border where the soils and climate suit the trees.

It reached its greatest extent in the eighteenth century and has contracted sharply since. The standard modern description of the English cultivars comes from Luckwill and Pollard’s survey published in 1963.

The fruit and the tree

Perry pears are cultivars of Pyrus communis, selected over centuries for juice rather than for eating, with a probable contribution from wild pear populations. Many are astringent, gritty with stone cells and sharply tannic, and a good number are barely edible raw — the names recorded for them, including varieties called choke pears and huffcaps, are not flattering.

The trees are the striking part. A perry pear on its own roots or on a pear seedling stock grows very large, lives for two centuries or more, and can take fifteen years or longer to come into useful bearing. The traditional formulation, that a man plants pears for his heirs, is a statement about capital rather than sentiment.

Their distribution is unusually tight. The English perry pear district is conventionally described as the country within sight of May Hill in Gloucestershire, extending into Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Monmouthshire. Perry pears grow elsewhere, but nowhere else in Britain did they support a distinct drinking tradition.

Perry in the record

Fermented pear drink appears in English and Anglo-Norman records from the medieval period alongside cider, under forms of the word that give the modern perry and the French poiré. Manorial accounts, tithe disputes and probate inventories record pear orchards, presses and stocks of perry, generally in the same districts that make it now.

By the seventeenth century perry is discussed in the cider literature as a parallel product, made in the same equipment and subject to the same problems. It carried some of the same prestige: bottled perry from the Three Counties was sold as a fine drink in the eighteenth century, and its resemblance to sparkling wine was noticed and exploited.

The eighteenth century appears to have been the high point of planting. Contemporary agricultural writing describes large perry orchards in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, and named varieties with established reputations for the drink they made.

The 1963 survey and what it recorded

By the middle of the twentieth century the tradition was in steep decline and the cultivars were poorly documented. Luckwill and Pollard’s Perry Pears, published in 1963 out of the work of the National Fruit and Cider Institute at Long Ashton, set out to describe the surviving varieties systematically: their trees, their fruit, their season, and the character of the perry they made.

It remains the reference that later perry writing traces back to, and much of the cultivar description in circulation today descends from it. That is worth stating plainly, because it means a great deal of what is said about individual perry pears rests on a single mid-twentieth-century survey rather than on independent corroboration.

The survey also documented how much had already gone. Varieties recorded as rare in 1963 have in some cases since been lost, and others survive only as single trees or in deliberate collections.

One survey carries a great dealDescriptions of English perry pear cultivars derive very largely from the 1963 Long Ashton survey. Where CiderHQ describes a perry pear, it is usually reporting that work rather than an independent modern assessment.

What survives

Perry orchards were not replanted through most of the twentieth century, and the great majority of the old trees have gone. What remains is a scatter of veteran trees in hedgerows and pasture, a small number of managed traditional orchards, and collections assembled deliberately for conservation, including work by county orchard trusts and by the National Perry Pear Centre.

Commercial perry continued through the century mainly as an industrial product made at scale, while traditional perry from named perry pears persisted with a handful of makers in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. Welsh perry has its own protected status and its own body of practice.

The trees themselves are the conservation problem. A veteran perry pear cannot be replaced within a working lifetime, and grafting material from a dying tree is often the only way a variety survives at all. This is why perry conservation is organised around identification and propagation rather than around production.

How this developed

Certainty is marked on each entry. Where the popular account runs ahead of the evidence, that is said rather than smoothed over.

  1. Eleventh century onwards· contested

    ‘The Normans brought the perry pear’

    Perry is frequently said to have arrived in England with the Normans. Perry was certainly made in Normandy and the practice moved with people and fruit across the Channel in both directions, but no evidence establishes an introduction, and the claim requires an absence of pear drink in England beforehand that nobody has demonstrated.

  2. Medieval

    Perry in the documentary record

    Fermented pear drink appears in English records alongside cider, concentrated in the western counties and the Welsh border. The seventeenth-century cider literature later treats it as a parallel product made in the same equipment.

  3. Eighteenth century· probable

    The high point

    Extensive perry orchards in the Three Counties, named varieties with established reputations, and bottled perry sold as a fine drink.

  4. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries

    Contraction

    Perry orchards are not replanted as labour, markets and farming systems change, and the number of trees falls sharply.

  5. 1963

    Luckwill and Pollard

    The Long Ashton survey describes the surviving English perry pear cultivars and becomes the standard reference.

  6. Late twentieth century onwards

    Conservation

    County orchard groups and specialist collections work to identify, graft and preserve surviving cultivars.

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