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Cider in the United Kingdom is widely available at pubs, off licenses, and grocery stores. == History == Cider has been a staple of the British hearth for nearly a thousand years, if not more. In 55 BC, the Romans upon their first travels to what they called Britannia found the native population already living there making a type of cider in what is present day Kent.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The History of Cider Making )〕 Until 2002, it was thought that cider made no appearance in England before 1066, or may have died out with the Celtic age and the tale given by Tacitus of cider just a memory until the Normans. In the autumn of that year William the Conqueror invaded England and brought with him a huge horde of noblemen and their soldier/serfs from Northern France; largely in the decades after 1066 they became the overlords of the conquered Saxon/Viking mix that they enslaved and demanded their underlings tend to the imported crops they had known from across the sea. Etymology leaves the world many clues as to what came next, even in terms of cidermaking. The present day English word for Malus domesticus is the Germanic rooted ''apple'', taken from Old English ''æppel'', not the Modern French ''pomme'' nor the older Norman ''pume'', both taken from the Latin word for fruit, ''pomus''. The common people didn't speak the tongue of their masters and would have used the words they knew beforehand, including for the crops they were forced to tend: Since the early Roman era, dessert and cider apples had been spreading out of the Mediterranean and naturally would have eventually been brought to Gaul, a province of the Roman Empire after the defeat of Vercingetorix in 46 BC by Caesar, and Franconia, parts of which would have formed Magna Germania. Much later the northern part of Gaul, heavily populated by a mix of Gauls, Romans, and other Celts, became Normandy and the domain of the lords that grew apples on their fiefdoms.〔 The Normans were most certainly a vector for the arrival of continental apples to England-the word ”cider” derives etymologically from the 12th century French word cidre〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Online Etymology Dictionary )〕- but older accounts tell a different story. Saxon chronicles before their conquest of British Celts mention cider-like drinks and also mention the production of a drink called ''æppelwīn'', an ancient cognate of the Modern German ’apfelwein’’, both literally meaning a wine or alcohol made from apples. Though it is unknown if there is any relation between the ancient drink and the modern German product at least one account indicates the drink was a luxury item that only the wealthy could afford. There is also evidence from the mid-late Saxon period of the growth of orchards before, during, and after Christianisation of this group and their ceremonial use, most famously the custom of Wassail at Yuletide, and it is known that monks grew apples in their gardens. There is also more recent evidence that indicates that the Romans were growing apples and pears in their stay in Britain, and one of the Vindolanda tablets indicates that the largely Asturian derived guardsmen near Hadrian's Wall, men with an apple and cider culture predating their own conquest by Rome, were seeking the best apples that could be found locally.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Per Lineam Valli )〕 The Vikings had a well known beer based drinking culture, but may have been a witness to cider. The Eddaic poem ''Alvíssmál'' leaves this passage: Original Wording: Þórr kvað: Segðu mér þat Alvíss, - öll of rök fira vörumk, dvergr, at vitir, hvé þat öl heitir, er drekka alda synir, heimi hverjum í?" Alvíss kvað: Öl heitir með mönnum, en með ásum bjórr, kalla veig vanir, hreinalög jötnar, en í helju mjöð, kalla sumbl Suttungs synir. Translation to Modern English: Thórr said: Tell me, Alvís - for all wights' fate I deem that, dwarf, thou knowest - how the ale is hight, which is brewed by men, in all the worlds so wide? Alvíss said: 'Tis hight öl (ale) among men; among Aesir bjórr (cider); the Vanir call it veig (strong drink), hreinalög (clear-brew), the giants; mjöð (mead), the Hel-Wights; the sons of Suttung call it sumbel (ale-gathering).〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Alvíssmál )〕 The poem is contemporaneous with the Norman Conquest, and the language, Old Norse, was also spoken in pockets of England at the time. Literary analysis suggests the translation of the Scandinavian term for ''björr'' does not mean ''beer''-it is a false friend. The poem in its entirety tells the tale of a dwarf that is trying to carry off mighty Thor's daughter to marry her and Thor is cleverly trying to stall him by flattery, plying him with drink, in the hopes he will turn to stone at sunrise. The author uses a large amount of poetic license and metaphor to describe alcoholic beverages, though the poem is quite clear that ''öl'' and ''björr'' are different drinks and uses in other texts for the first word seem to describe a fermented alcohol made with barley ( a crop particularly important to Vikings) and the other much sweeter and a mystical drink worthy of the gods. In fact, a ''sumbel'' describes a special convivial occasion Vikings took to drink together. The Saxons likewise had many words for strong drink, including the word ''beór'', which indeed is a cognate of the Scandinavian word and also appears several times in one of the oldest and most famous works in the English language, ’’Beowulf’’. Many of the Saxon accounts use words for strong drink interchangeably, especially in poetry, and the texts overall show that wine and mead are two of the five favoured alcohols of Saxons, but are unmistakable for anything else: the word for ''mead'' is ''medu'' and wine, which would have been imported from the Continent as a luxury, is a cognate with the Modern German, ''wīn''. It is thought that a form of grain based alcohol was present in both the Viking and Saxon populations as homebrew, but at least one surviving text makes clear the distinction between this and what wound up on the table, and it strongly indicates cider: Ælfric, abbot of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, who lived from around AD 955 to AD 1010, wrote of John the Baptist in one of his ''Homilies'' that, ''Ne dranc he naðor ne win, ne beór, ne ealu, ne nan ðæra wætan ðe menn of druncniað.'' The translation to Modern English is: ''...Nor drank he neither wine nor beór, nor ale, nor any other drink that makes men drunk.'' Ælfric was a native speaker of Old English writing almost a hundred years before the Conquest; he was also a noted grammarian of the age who spent much time teaching his acolytes how to read Latin. He was using Latin as his source text to create dialectic on the lives of the saints and translated accordingly; one of the most important jobs of a monk in this period was to have a mastery of Latin so as to faithfully copy and read the Gospels and many secular texts that would have otherwise been lost when the Western Empire fell apart. In his ''Homilies'' he communicates that each drink is distinct from the other, notably ''ealu'' and ''beór'', very different to modern speech where ''ale'' and ''beer'' are synonyms with a similar method of production and agreeing with the Viking texts. Neighbouring Ireland and Scotland spoke (and still speak to a degree) Celtic languages closely related to each other but not to English, though both had suffered through intermittent raids and invasions by Vikings, thus both imbibing a few cultural features, like language, over two centuries. There is a story from both cultures that relates a great conflict over a type of alcohol, and the Irish account used the term ''bheóir Lochlannach'' (Viking björr, ''Lochlann'' being the Irish word for ''Viking''), but don't use their native terms for ale and beer, ''lionn'' and ''cuirm'', concurring with the Saxon texts and distinctions in Ælfric's writing that beór was a sweeter drink that was very likely an early cider in Britain. One scholar, Professor Christine Fell, posits that the drink served was an apple based alcohol using honey as a sweetener and extra fermentation agent and served in small cups that are often found in Saxon burials with the dead.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=LUDOS - Search )〕 A journalist and beer scholar, Martyn Comell, notes that with the rise of the word cider in the 12th century, the use of beór as a word disappears entirely from use as well.〔http://zythophile.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/words-for-beer-2-–-was-beer-originally-cider/〕 No form of the word was ever in use again before the 1500s, where ''beer'' was renamed following its import from German, ''bier'', and thereafter the word began to describe a grain based alcohol of barley or wheat, sometimes brewed with hops and malt.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The History of Hard Cider, From the Old Testament to the Apple Orchard )〕 Further final evidence from an archaeological dig in Gloucester in 2002 suggests that crab apples in addition to their traditional use as a foodstuff was also being pressed into an alcohol sweetened with honey.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Regia Anglorum - Food And Drink in Anglo-Saxon England )〕 With the invasion of 1066 the natural sugar in the Norman apples slowly displaced the need for honey as a sweetening agent and so began the love affair between the English and their apples and cider. Increased planting of apple trees began in earnest as soon as the feudal system introduced by William of Normandy could be secured, and continued down over what is becoming close to a thousand years. One of the earliest mentions of a named apple cultivar in English comes from the Plantagenet era near the end of the 12th century, ”Costard”. This apple was an all purpose apple that was occasionally used in cider and remained wildly popular until at least the 19th century: as an illustration, a slang term for the head or brain in the works of Shakespeare is ”costard”, a word a man who spent his life traveling back and forth between his wife in Warwickshire and the theatre in London would have known very well; indeed Shakespeare named one of his clowns after the product in the case of ''Love's Labour's Lost''. In Renaissance England, a ”costermonger” was a seller of apples or wares and remained so right up until the 1960s, long after the apple it was named for went extinct.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Down the Lane - Spivs, Wide Boys and Costermongers )〕 With the introduction of hops in the earlier reign of Henry VIII, the production of cider declined a bit but through the efforts of His Majesty's fruiterer new plantings of French varieties began in what is now Kent, setting the stage for more cross pollination with varieites already present and the expansion over the reign of Henry's children and great nephew into Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, and eastern Wales. Not all of the apples in the UK have ever been grown solely for dessert purposes, and indeed in British cookery the distinction between cider apples, cooking apples, and dessert apples has remained intact since before the Tudors and spread wherever the British colonized, with some blurring of lines in North America due to necessity and scarcity. In 1676, John Worlidge wrote his Vinetum Brittanicum, a treatise on the production and processing of apples〔 that gives great insight into how little the method has changed in 340 years. Worlidge was writing at a time in which some of the earliest written intact horticulture tracts were being produced in Britain, alongside cookbooks. Both advocate for proper storage of the apples, told which were the correct ones to use for cooking and for drinking, and in the case of Worlidge, advocated the new technique of fermentation in bottles, something that had come into vogue in the 1630s when glass was first strengthened with coke.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cider in the United Kingdom」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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