Note 32 — Chapter XIII · OCCUPATIONS OUT OF DOORS.—THE PLEASURE-GARDEN.—THE LOVE OF FLOWERS, AND THE FASHION OF MAKING GARLANDS.—FORMALITIES OF THE PROMENADE.—GARDENING IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

There is, however, an Anglo-Saxon name of a tree which I suspect has been misinterpreted. The glossaries give “ramnus, þefe-þorn,” and our lexicographers, taking the old sense of the word rhamnus, interpret it, the dog-rose. But in a very curious glossary of names of plants of the middle of the thirteenth century, printed in my “Volume of Glossaries,” in which the meaning of the Latin word is given in Anglo-Norman and in English, we have “Ramni, grosiler, þefe-þorn” (p. 141). I have no doubt that the thefe-thorn was the gooseberry. In the dialect of Norfolk, gooseberries are still called theabes.