The sweet temptation of scrumping

In autumn when apples cascade off the trees and bedeck the orchard’s floor with fields of red and gold, thoughts naturally turn to an ancient survival instinct: foraging – or, as we tend to call it in my part of the world, scrumping. Yet although scrumping seems as English as Shakespeare, conker fights and Bonfire nights, it is quite a recent word borrowed from the Middle Dutch schrimpen, meaning shrivelled (or perhaps a derivation of the verb ‘to scrimp’).

When sugar was scarce in medieval times, fruit was an obsession and the autumn harvest closely guarded. Not just apples either. There is the Chaucerian medlar in the Reeve’s Tale:

A fruit which is rotten before it is ripe
Unless I fare like medlar, all perverse
For that fruit’s never ripe until it’s worse.

Medlars, though seemingly like apples but really roses, are often a coded reference for fallen women.