The Redstreak and the seventeenth-century cider boom

John Beale’s Herefordshire Orchards, a Pattern for all England of 1657 is the document that put the county and its fruit in front of a national readership. Beale wrote as an advocate: his argument was that a well-planted county could supply itself with a drink as good as wine, and that Herefordshire had already shown how. The Redstreak sits at the centre of that argument, described as the fruit that made the difference between ordinary farm cider and something worth selling.

Pomona, published in 1664 as an appendix to Evelyn’s Sylva by express order of the Royal Society, repeated and amplified the claim. It is habitually called Evelyn’s, and the shorthand is worth unpicking here because it obscures how the claim travelled: the volume records six contributors, John Beale among them, so the Redstreak’s reputation was not one enthusiast’s opinion reaching print but the same circle corroborating itself. By the 1660s a reader of the improvement literature would have understood the Redstreak as the standard against which other cider fruit was measured, and planting it as the obvious thing for a landowner in the western counties to do.

It is worth reading these texts for what they are. They are promotional documents in a serious sense — arguments for a programme of planting, addressed to landowners with capital — and their enthusiasm for a particular fruit is part of the argument rather than a neutral observation. That does not make them wrong, but it does mean the Redstreak’s reputation and the Redstreak’s qualities are two different historical questions.

John Scudamore, first Viscount Scudamore, was a Herefordshire landowner of the early and middle seventeenth century whose name became attached to the Redstreak early and firmly. The usual form of the story is that he raised the variety, or brought it into the county, and promoted its planting on his estates around Holme Lacy.

What can be said is that the association is contemporary rather than a later invention: it circulates in the same generation as the fruit’s reputation. What cannot be said is that anyone raised the Redstreak in any documented sense. Seedling apples arise constantly in orchard country, and the naming of a chance seedling after the landowner who noticed it, planted it or paid for its propagation is exactly what one would expect whether or not he had anything to do with its origin.

CiderHQ therefore records the attribution as a seventeenth-century claim rather than as a fact about the fruit’s parentage. The honest statement is that the Redstreak was associated with Scudamore’s estates and promoted through his circle, and that its origin is not established.

A cider fruit that ferments to something saleable changes the economics of an orchard. Standard trees take years to come into bearing and occupy land that could carry grass or grain, so planting them is a capital decision. If the resulting cider sells in London at wine-adjacent prices, that decision looks very different from one made to supply a farmhouse.

The Herefordshire boom accordingly involved more than a fruit. It involved bottling, which allowed cider to be sold as a graded product rather than drawn from a cask on the farm; carriage down the Wye and the Severn and then by road; and a market of buyers in London who had lost easy access to French wine during periods of war and embargo. The Redstreak was the part of that system that could be named and planted.

It also mattered that the fruit was reported to make a cider that kept. Keeping quality, more than flavour, is what separates a drink that can be traded from one that must be drunk where it is made.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the Redstreak’s reputation had faded, and eighteenth-century writers describe the variety as having degenerated. The period explanation was that a variety could simply wear out over generations of grafting. A modern reading would point instead to the accumulation of virus and other systemic disease in a widely propagated clone, to the ageing of the orchards planted in the enthusiasm of the 1650s and 1660s, and to a market that had moved on.

The identity of the tree is now uncertain. Fruit called Redstreak appears in later nursery lists and in nineteenth-century pomonas, but whether any of it descends from the seventeenth-century clone is not established. The Somerset Redstreak recorded in West Country orchards is a separate, later cultivar and should not be read as the same fruit under a regional name.

What survives most durably is not the apple but the idea it carried: that cider fruit could be selected and planted deliberately for the drink it made. That idea outlasted the variety by three centuries and underpins everything from eighteenth-century pomonas to the Long Ashton classification.