History · 1660–1680

The Royal Society and cider

Why was the Royal Society interested in cider?

In short

Cider met three of the early Royal Society’s concerns at once: it was an agricultural improvement that could be argued for systematically, it substituted a domestic product for an imported one at a time when that argument carried political weight, and its fermentation and preservation raised questions that could actually be experimented on.

The result is that cider appears in the Society’s early publishing programme, in its questionnaires to country correspondents, and in the work of Fellows who wrote about it directly. This is the reason English cider has a documentary record in the 1660s that most farm drinks of the period do not.

An institution built for questions like this one

The Royal Society, founded in 1660, set out to gather natural knowledge by collecting and comparing reports rather than by reasoning from authority. Agriculture was among the first subjects it organised itself around, and a Georgical Committee was formed in the mid-1660s to collect information on husbandry from correspondents across the country by means of a standard set of questions.

That method suited cider unusually well. Cider making varied from parish to parish, was practised by literate landowners as well as by labourers, and produced a result that could be compared: this fruit against that fruit, this year against last. A questionnaire circulated among country gentlemen could return exactly the kind of material the Society wanted.

It also mattered that several of the men involved had personal stakes in orchard counties. Improvement literature of this period is rarely disinterested, and a Fellow recommending the planting of cider fruit was often recommending something he had planted himself.

The mercantilist argument

Through the middle decades of the seventeenth century, wine was imported, largely from France, and was periodically expensive or unobtainable because of war, embargo and duty. A drink that could be produced on English land and compared favourably with claret was therefore an argument about the balance of trade, not only about taste.

This is the frame in which cider is presented in the printed literature of the 1650s to 1670s. The recurring claim is not that cider is pleasant, but that a properly planted county need not send its money abroad. Planting orchards becomes a patriotic and economic act, which is precisely the register in which improvement writers preferred to work.

Reading the enthusiasm of this period requires holding that argument in view. The high claims made for English cider in the 1660s are claims made in the middle of a case being argued, and CiderHQ treats them as evidence of what was being urged rather than as measurements of quality.

What was actually investigated

The practical questions the Society’s circle addressed were the ones a cider maker still faces. Which fruit to plant, and how to propagate it. How long to hold fruit before milling. How to keep a cask from spoiling, and what happens when cider is racked off its lees. How to preserve the drink so that it survives a journey.

Preservation and containment were the most consequential. The behaviour of cider in strong glass under cork, and the fact that a cider bottled before fermentation had entirely finished would become brisk, were observed and written about in this circle — a strand treated separately under early bottling.

Fermentation itself could be described but not explained. Yeast as an organism was a nineteenth-century finding, and seventeenth-century writers worked with an account of fermentation as a motion or spirit within the liquor. Their descriptions of what happens are often acute; their explanations of why are of their period.

Which cultivars to plant, and the propagation of grafted trees.
Fruit handling before the mill, including holding fruit to sweat.
Racking, fining and the keeping of casks.
Bottling under cork in strong glass, and the briskness that followed.
Comparison of cider with imported wine as a matter of national economy.

What the episode left behind

The most durable legacy is documentary. Because cider was taken up by an institution that published, the English cider of the 1660s and 1670s is described in print in a way that the cider of the 1560s is not. Much of what is confidently said about early cider practice traces back to this narrow window of texts, which is itself a bias worth naming: we know this period well because it was written down, not because it was necessarily more important than the centuries either side.

The second legacy is the habit of treating cider as a technical subject. The line from Beale and Worlidge to the National Fruit and Cider Institute is not continuous, but the assumption that orchard and cellar practice can be investigated, compared and improved is recognisably the same assumption.

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.

1660
The Royal Society is founded
An institution committed to collecting and comparing reports of natural and practical knowledge.
1664
*Sylva* and *Pomona*
Evelyn’s treatise on trees, with its cider appendix, is published under the Society’s authority.
Mid-1660s
The Georgical Committee
A standing committee circulates questions on husbandry to country correspondents, with orchards and cider among the subjects.
1676
Worlidge’s *Vinetum Britannicum*
The fullest technical account of the period, covering mills, presses, vessels and bottling.

Also answered on this page

Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.

Did scientists study cider in the seventeenth century?
Why did English writers compare cider to wine?

Places

What people ask next

Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.

What was long ashton research station and why does it matter to cider — The National Fruit and Cider Institute opened at Long Ashton, near Bristol, in 1903, to apply laboratory analysis to an industry that had until then run entirely on custom. It became part of the University of Bristol, was renamed Long Ashton Research Station, and worked on cider fruit, juice chemistry, fermentation and orchard practice for most of the twentieth century.
Where is cider made in england — Overwhelmingly in the West Country — Somerset, Herefordshire, Devon, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire — with smaller traditions in Kent, Sussex, East Anglia and the north.
What was the cider boom of the seventeenth century — In the middle of the seventeenth century English gentlemen began planting the Redstreak deliberately and bottling the result, and cider briefly became a fashionable drink discussed alongside wine. The improving literature of the period is the reason we know so much about it.
When did cider first become sparkling — Deliberate sparkling cider depended on strong glass bottles and secure corks, which English glassmaking supplied in the seventeenth century. English writers describe bottled sparkling cider before sparkling champagne was established.
What is evelyn’s pomona
What is herefordshire cider

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.

Where to go next

The history of cider — The rest of the history, by period and by tradition.
Cider culture — What survived from this history and is still practised.
Regions — The places this happened in, and what they make now.