The Roman de la Rose gives the best possible idea of both the French and English gardens of the Middle Ages. It was chiefly written by Guillaume de Loris, in the first half of the thirteenth century, and was probably well known in England before it was translated by Chaucer into English. There are several manuscript copies of it containing descriptions in the text, accompanied by illustrations giving vivid pictures of the pleasure garden. Its formthe walls enclosing it with their surrounding moat, the subdivisions of latticework, the “flowery mede,” shaded by fruit trees, with a fountain in its center, and the stone-coped beds, containing clipped shrubs and other smaller plantsare clearly shown from various points of view.
In the most important of these illustrations (which is on the opposite page, and was taken from a fourteenth-century Flemish manuscript preserved at the British Museum), the garden is shown as a whole, ornamented with many quaint details. It is enclosed by a crenellated wall, surrounded by a moat. The subdivisions are formed by a fence of wooden trellis-work, on the topmost railing of which is balanced a peacock. In the left-hand division...
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