As old age cast shadows over the garden of his soul, Evelyn drew together a lifetime’s experience in horticulture to compose his magnum opus, the Elysium Britannicum or Paradisium Revisitum. He never completed this compendious work, and it has only recently been edited from his surviving array of manuscripts. He did publish one chapter, however, as it blossomed into the full-length book, Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets (1699). This was filled with instructions on how to grow, pick, prepare and eat salad, from the sight-enhancing, anti-flatulent fennel to the eighteen types of pain-quelling, lust-calming lettuce. In the seventeenth century eating a dish of raw leafy vegetables was something of a novelty, out of line with the predominant valorisation of red meat. But with the increasing interest in botany and the rise of gentlemanly vegetable gardening, to which Evelyn himself contributed, salads were to enjoy a vogue. Sowing seeds no longer needed be the sole prerogative of peasants – the most noble foot could grace a spade. On the face of it, Acetaria was designed, as other commentators have pointed out, to encourage the use of salads in the English diet.5
A drawing by John Evelyn of the Evelyn family house at Wotton, Surrey, from the terrace above the gardens, 1653
But, like Thomas Tryon, Evelyn also had a theological agenda. His Preface declared that he wished to ‘recall the World, if not altogether to their Pristine Diet, yet to a much more wholsome and temperate than is now in Fashion’.6 ‘Adam, and his yet innocent Spouse,’ mused Evelyn, ‘fed on Vegetables and other Hortulan Productions before the fatal Lapse,’ and even until the Flood God did not ‘suffer them to slay the more innocent Animal’.7 In the course of his work, Evelyn was carried away by the force of his own arguments and ended up writing one of the most scholarly panegyrics of vegetarianism.8
The belief that the prelapsarian diet was healthy and virtuous appears to have become almost an established norm by the end of the seventeenth century. In common with many of his gardening contemporaries – such as Ralph Austen and John Parkinson – Evelyn’s botanical interests and lifelong practical and theoretical work on gardens aimed to recreate a garden like Eden.9 The famous gardening expert in the generation before Evelyn, William Coles, displayed this artfully in his Adam in Eden (1657) and he too regarded the vegetable diet as a path to health and long life.10 The garden, according to Evelyn, was ‘A place of all terrestrial enjoyments the most resembling Heaven, and the best representation of our lost felicitie.’11 Gardens were also like encyclopaedias. Knowing all about plants – and Evelyn’s contemporaries did try to make their botanical knowledge as comprehensive as possible – was like knowing God’s creation as Adam had known it in Paradise. Gardening was Adam’s occupation before the Fall; therefore to garden was to relive the life of Adam. Gardening, said Evelyn, was ‘the most innocent, laudable, and purest of earthly felicities, and such as does certainly make the neerest approaches to that Blessed state’,12 and he extended this common project into the realm of diet. Adam lived on raw vegetables and fruit in Eden, so if one wanted to live like Adam in Paradise, there was only one diet for it. Many herbs grew wild (‘every hedge affords a Sallet’), and were therefore obtainable without labour, just like food before the Fall.13 Composing salad was the original culinary art form: it was ‘clean, innocent, sweet, and Natural … compar’d with the Shambles Filth and Nidor, Blood and Cruelty’.14
Evelyn complemented this dietary idealism by trying to establish a more harmonious relationship with animals. Just like collecting all plants together in one place, gathering animals to live in harmony was a potent symbol of primeval harmony. Like Pepys he condemned bear-, bull- and badger-baiting as ‘butcherly sports or rather barbarous cruelties’,15 and he even tried to recreate Eden by setting up a zoo. Evelyn had been inspired by the big-cat menageries of the Turks, but he settled for a more modest collection of tortoises, squirrels and birds.16 In an emblematic representation of his desire to live in harmony with nature, he personally commissioned an elaborate ebony cabinet, now held the Victoria and Albert Museum, decorated with hard stone and gilt-bronze plaques depicting the mythical Greek vegetarian, Orpheus, taming the animals with his music.17
As a Royalist, Evelyn was a long way from the republican vegetarians who retreated into hermetic solitude, but his retreat into gardening was no less political. He visited Thomas Bushell in his vegetarian cave, and wrote in 1658 – 9 to Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Robert Boyle (who had also written a paper on salads18) that he thought gardening was an ideal around which the defeated Royalists could rally.19 There in their little Edens, Englishmen could recreate the monarchy Adam enjoyed over the creation, living as ‘a society of the paradisi cultores, persons of antient simplicity, Paradisean and Hortulan saints’.20 As a collective community, Evelyn imagined they would live like the abstinent Carthusian friars, sheltered from the malign political world, but spearheading scientific investigation and progress. Although a naïve ideal, it was just such ideas, in line with Francis Bacon’s Solomon’s House, that led to the formation of the Royal Society.21
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), the famous Royalist physician and historian of gardens, was a particularly appropriate person for Evelyn to write to. In 1650, when vegetarianism was all the rage among the radicals, Browne reflected on its theological and medical implications in his famously witty collection of essays, Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors. He hinted that God might have sent the Flood to punish people for eating flesh (a view he extrapolated from the natural-rights philosopher, Hugo Grotius) and suggested that God permitted flesh because the Flood ‘had destroyed or infirmed the nature of vegetables’. The virtuous continued to abstain, however, and the Pythagoreans and the ‘Bannyans’ still did. All this showed that ‘there is no absolute necessity to feed on any [animals]’; returning to the vegetarian diet, he concluded, might even ‘prolong our days’.22
Evelyn was a respected gentleman and a family man; his position in the Royal Society ensured his adherence to social norms; even in his diary – in stark contrast to Pepys’ frank confessions of fondling women’s breasts and committing all sorts of peccadilloes – he maintained perpetual decorum, and ‘never used its pages to reveal the secrets of the heart’, as Virginia Woolf once complained.23 So he avoided anything unseemly in his advocacy of vegetarianism, keeping his distance from mystic counterparts like Thomas Tryon by air-brushing them out of his anthology of herbivores. (Tryon requited this with mutual silence, either ignorant of Evelyn, or too much of an egotist to acknowledge his rival, except perhaps once in a miscellaneous work he might have edited.)24 Evelyn’s vegetarian idealism was a nostalgic grasp at human perfection, but it was always laced with stern-faced pragmatism. His lasting influence was inspiring a country-wide delight in gardening, and encouraging unrepentant carnivores, such as Pepys, to experiment more extensively with the bounty of fruit and vegetables.25
For most of his life at least, Evelyn relished good dishes of flesh; about a third of the recipes in a manuscript cookbook he wrote for his wife contain meat products, and even some recipes in Acetaria acknowledge that the salad is to serve as an accompaniment to mutton broth or minced beef. His diary entries – recording his delectation of oysters and especially home-caught game – reveal that he did not worry too much about what he actually ate; indeed he insisted that there was ‘no positive prohibition’ on eating flesh.26 Perhaps he considered himself vegetarian – indeed a vegetable! – even when he ate meat, for he observed that meat and men were made out of digested vegetation, so man ‘becoming an Incarnate Herb, and Innocent Cannibal, may truly be said to devour himself’.27 Only when he was staving off death in old age did Evelyn subject himself to a strict diet (which made his wife deeply anxious); this was apparently for the sake of his health, but perhaps the experience of writing Acetaria finally determined him to purify himself for the world that was to come.28
Beneath Evelyn’s polite compromising surface, however, lay a true passion. With a literal-mindedness that it is difficult to comprehend today, Evelyn, like many of his contemporari
es, fervently believed that Christ’s second coming was on its way. His desire to reform the world to the conditions of Paradise was bound up with his preparation for Judgement Day. The idea of an establishment figure such as Evelyn espousing a religious theme usually associated with the radical mid-century may appear surprising, but many of his colleagues at the Royal Society were following Bacon’s lead, trying to recover the universal knowledge enjoyed by Adam in preparation for the millennium.29 Evelyn strove to differentiate himself from the radical Fifth Monarchy Men and other millenarian groups,30 but his impulses have much in common with Tryon’s yearning to recreate Paradise. Like Tryon, he quoted Isaiah’s prophecy of the millennium and claimed that Christ’s kingdom would be vegetarian: ‘the Hortulan Provision of the Golden Age,’ he said, ‘fitted all Places, Times and Persons; and when Man is restor’d to that State again, it will be as it was in the Beginning.’31
Like Tryon also, though the other way round, Evelyn transformed into a truth of immediate relevance the old legend that religious knowledge had been passed down from Adam to the nephews of Noah, through the British Druids, to the Brahmins and thence to Pythagoras and Plato. The pagans, he said, retained ‘some opinions, agreeable to the primitive truth’. Evelyn did not regard the Brahmins as a superior authority to Christian priests, as Tryon did, but the genealogy he gave them illuminated them with a spark of divinity: ‘it was from the people of God that they received their antient Traditions.’32 Along with the Brahmins and Pythagoreans, Evelyn noted that the ancient Chaldaeans, Assyrians and Egyptians were vegetable-eaters, and that this had made them ‘more Acute, Subtil, and of deeper Penetration’.33 Such beliefs, then, were not confined to marginal eccentrics like Tryon; they appear to have been widespread. Evelyn’s mentor John Beale joined with their friend and fellow fruit-enthusiast Samuel Hartlib in believing that the return of the Golden Age was about to be fulfilled, and added that the ancient knowledge recovered by the modern Europeans, Paracelsus and Robert Fludd had been passed down to them from the Eastern gymnosophists via the Druids.34
Given his belief in their common roots, Evelyn was particularly interested in the similarities between Christianity and Hinduism. In his own copy of John Marshall’s account of ‘the Heathen Priests commonly called Bramines’ (published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) he excitedly pencilled marginalia on the features of Hinduism that appeared to agree with Christianity. He was intrigued to discover that the Hindus believed in a supreme immaterial God, heaven, hell and eternal life, that they practised ascetic fasting, and had a story about the original man in a garden being tempted by a woman, and of a flood destroying the earth until it was repopulated by a small band of survivors.35 Evelyn regarded the Hindus as distant relics of divine tradition, and this can only have spurred his interest in them. He was also an avid reader of the Indian travelogues; as well as the ancient Greek records on India and Bysshe’s Palladius, Evelyn had pored over the modern descriptions of India by Garcia d’Orta, Jacob Bondt, Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo, Duarte Barbosa, Pietro della Valle and others.36 Although he did not share Tryon’s enthusiasm, the Indians nevertheless played a crucial role in his vegetarian argument.
The biggest obstacle to Evelyn’s proselytisation of the ‘herby-diet’ was that most people thought it was not just ordinary to eat animals, but necessary for survival. While it may originally have been possible to live on vegetables, they thought that Noah’s Flood had sapped the earth of all its goodness, leaving the vegetables less nutritious than they had been; and that the human constitution had been slowly degraded and was now so feeble it needed the stronger nourishment of animal flesh.
To combat this, Evelyn trawled through ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern texts ‘to shew how possible it is by so many Instances and Examples, to live on wholsome Vegetables, both long and happily’.37 Unfortunately for Evelyn, nearly all the vegetarians he found existed only in ancient records. Pythagoras, Adam and Eve, the inhabitants of the Golden Age were all long gone, shrouded in aeons of dust and beyond the reach of empirical observation.
But the Brahmins saved the day. In a triumphant declaration (and trying to conceal that the Brahmins were the only living example he could name), Evelyn cited ‘the Indian Bramins, Relicts of the ancient Gymnosophists to this Day, observing the Institutions of their Founder’ ‘who eat no Flesh at all’. These foreign vegetarians were not the unverifiable products of hearsay, but the extant people whose habits had frequently been recorded, as Evelyn proudly put it, in ‘the Reports of such as are often conversant among many Nations and People’, and ‘who to this Day, living on Herbs and Roots, arrive to incredible Age, in constant Health and Vigour’.38 He thought of India as a living Eden, a place ‘the most pleasant & smiling of the World’ where plants grew in their paradisiacal perfection, and he credited the travellers’ reports that the Garden of Eden had been situated on ‘Adam’s hill’ in Sri Lanka.39 The Golden Age itself might not be achievable, but vegetarianism was the closest mankind could get.
The fact that the Hindus were still alive provided one of the few pieces of concrete empirical evidence that the vegetable diet was really viable. It was empirical evidence that his colleagues at the Royal Society demanded, rather than the heap of classical authorities he had accumulated. Evelyn envisaged a wholesale experimental investigation into this vegetarian people designed to determine what exactly made them capable of living solely on vegetables ‘whether attributable to the Air and Climate, Custom, Constitution, &c.’ It was his opinion that such an enquiry would prove that living on vegetables was something all humans could do.
Evelyn has been hailed as a forebear of modern environmentalism for his campaign against urban degradation and for encouraging forest conservation and replanting. He revered trees as sacred, especially ancient natural ones, ‘such as were never prophaned by the inhumanity of edge tooles’. Evelyn harked back to the Druidic sacred groves and noticed that sylvan rites were scattered across the world – from Abraham’s Quercetum to the Indians’ holy Banian Tree.40 His famous treatise Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees (1664) successfully encouraged English landowners to plant much-needed timber trees, which had been consumed by the greedy furnaces of the iron industry and ravaged by desperate commoners during the interregnum. Forests provided shelter for game, and the trees themselves produced food such as chestnuts (‘a lusty, and masculine food for Rustics’), beech-mast and acorns (‘heretofore the Food of Men … till their luxurious Palats were debauched’). Careful planting could provide country people with most of their food and drink ‘even out of the Hedges and Mounds’, making England more self-sufficient. Not only an act of political restoration, tree-planting, he concluded, was akin to God’s foresting of Paradise.41 Evelyn even lobbied Parliament to introduce laws to curb air pollution, revolted, like Tryon, by the ‘horrid stinks, uiderous and unwholsome smells’ emitted by the meat manufacturers, and the ‘rotten Dung, loathsome and common Lay Stalls; whose noisome Steams, wafted by the Wind, poison and infect the ambient Air and vital Spirits, with those pernicious Exhalations’.42
But although many of these themes seem similar to Tryon, Evelyn’s universe was fundamentally different. The existence of Hindus did help Evelyn to propose a more harmonious relationship with nature, and to reverse the artificial habits of urban society. But Hinduism did not make Evelyn step outside the confines of his religious orthodoxy. Nature did not have a value independent from mankind in the way it did for Tryon; nature, for Evelyn, was just part of God’s man-centred Providence. For Evelyn, creating harmony in and with nature was just a part of the human spiritual quest and a prerequisite for the millennium.
Nevertheless, whether it was his original intention or not, Evelyn did formulate a new position for the status of man’s relations with animals. Having empirically demonstrated that the vegetable diet was viable, Evelyn shifted the ground on which stood the usual justification for killing and eating animals. While most regarded meat-eating as a necessary cruelt
y – determined by the order of nature and the constitution of man – Evelyn had shown it to be nutritionally unnecessary. If meat-eating was unnecessary, the cruelty it entailed could be considered morally reprehensible. Evelyn did make emotional and moral appeals against ‘the cruel Butcheries of so many harmless Creatures; some of which we put to merciless and needless Torment’. Now that he had shown that it was possible to live by the innocent sport of gardening without shedding a drop of blood, he could judge that meat-eating was cruelty and intemperance.43
A similar idea is suggested in Book XV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Pythagoras points out that ‘The prodigall Earth abounds with gentle food;/ Affording banquets without death or blood.’44 But Evelyn made it relevant by transforming it from an ancient poetic ideal into a scientific observation. In that the Brahmins were a keystone in Evelyn’s rational, empirically substantiated argument, Hinduism had a role in developing a new position with regard to animals.
The case for or against Brahmin vegetarianism became the subject of a much wider controversy at the end of the seventeenth century. The disagreement escalated into a pitched battle between the so-called ‘Moderns’ (who believed that modern science had advanced humanity to its highest pinnacle ever) and the ‘Ancients’ (who held that antique civilisations were superior). Evelyn, who had always tight-roped between the two, found that the Brahmins suited his compromise perfectly: they had the hallowed stamp of antiquity and stood up to modern empirical scrutiny. But others thought that simplistic conjectures about ancient vegetarians were outweighed by the statistical evidence on modern ascetic monks at home. ‘There are many Monastical persons now that live abstemiously all their lives,’ wrote Thomas Burnet, chaplain to William of Orange, in The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684–91), ‘and yet they think an hundred years a very great age amongst them.’ Burnet concluded that vegetarianism ‘might have some effect, but not possibly to that degree and measure that we speak of.’45
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