ctured that he was
the bailiff of the manors near Henley which belonged to the Abbey of
Canterbury. His curious and valuable _Dite de Hosebondrie_, which is
as original in its way as Cato's treatise, being entirely free from
mere literary tradition, is now available to the modern reader in
a translation, from the original barbarous English law French, by
Elizabeth Lamond, made for the Royal Historical Society in 1890.]

[Footnote 60: This was just before Pharsalia, and the army was that of
Pompey which Varro had joined after surrendering to Caesar in Spain.]

[Footnote 61: In this enumeration of trees Varro does not include the
chestnut which is now one of the features of the Italian mountain
landscape and furnishes support for a considerable part of the Italian
population, who subsist on _necci_, those indigestible chestnut flour
cakes, just as the Irish peasants do on potatoes. The chestnut was
late in getting a foothold in Italy but it was there in Varro's day.
He mentions the nuts as part of the diet of dormice (III, 15).

By the thirteenth century chestnuts had become an established article
of human food in Italy. Pietro Crescenzi (1230-1307) describes two
varieties, the cultivated and the wild, and quotes the Arabian
physician Avicenna to the effect that chestnuts are "di tarda
digestione ma di buono nuttimento." It is perhaps for this very reason
that chestnut bread is acceptable to those engaged in heavy labor.
Fynes Moryson says in his _Itinerary_ (1617) that maslin bread made
of a mixture of rye and wheat flour was used by labourers in England
because it "abode longer in the stomach and was not so soon digested
with their labour."

Crescenzi, who was a lawyer and a judge, says in his preface that he
had left his native Bologna because of the civil strifes, had taken
foreign service in several parts of Italy, and so had opportunity to
see the world. He wrote his book on agriculture because, as he says,
of all the things he learned on his travels there was nothing "piu a
bondevole, niuna piu dolce, et niuna piu degna de l'huomo libero," a
sentiment which Socrates had expressed sixteen hundred years earlier
and which was echoed six hundred years later by another far-sighted
Italian, the statesman Cavour.]

[Footnote 62: The white chalk which Scrofa saw used as manure in
Transalpine Gaul, when he was serving in the army under Julius Caesar,
was undoubtedly marl, the use of which in that region as in Britain