By whom and at what period the vine was naturalised in Gaul has been a long-disputed question, which, in spite of the most careful research, remains unsolved.  The most plausible opinion is that which attributes the honour of having imported the vine to the Phoenician colony who founded Marseilles.

Pliny makes mention of several wines of the Gauls as being highly esteemed.  He nevertheless reproaches the vine-growers of Marseilles, Beziers, and Narbonne with doctoring their wines, and with infusing various drugs into them, which rendered them disagreeable and even unwholesome (Fig. 106).  Dioscorides, however, approved of the custom in use among the Allobroges, of mixing resin with their wines to preserve them and prevent them from turning sour, as the temperature of their country was not warm enough thoroughly to ripen the grape.

Rooted up by order of Domitian in 92, as stated above, the vine only reappeared in Gaul under Protus, who revoked, in 282, the imperial edict of his predecessor; after which period the Gallic wines soon recovered their ancient celebrity.  Under the dominion of the Franks, who held wine in great favour, vineyard property was one of those which the barbaric laws protected with the greatest care.  We find in the code of the Salians and in that of the Visigoths very severe penalties for uprooting a vine or stealing a bunch of grapes.  The cultivation of the vine became general, and kings themselves planted them, even in the gardens of their city palaces.  In 1160, there was still in Paris, near the Louvre, a vineyard of such an extent, that Louis VII. could annually present six hogsheads of wine made from it to the rector of St. Nicholas.  Philip Augustus possessed about twenty vineyards of excellent quality in various parts of his kingdom.

The culture of the vine having thus developed, the wine trade acquired an enormous importance in France.  Gascony, Aunis, and Saintonge sent their wines to Flanders; Guyenne sent hers to England.  Froissart writes that, in 1372, a merchant fleet of quite two hundred sail came from London to Bordeaux for wine.  This flourishing trade received a severe blow in the sixteenth century; for an awful famine having invaded France in 1566, Charles IX. did not hesitate to repeat the acts of Domitian, and to order all the vines to be uprooted and their place to be sown with corn; fortunately Henry III. soon after modified this edict by simply recommending the governors of the provinces to see that “the ploughs were not being neglected in their districts on account of the excessive cultivation of the vine.”

[Illustration:  Fig. 107.—­Interior of an Hostelry.—­Fac-simile of a Woodcut in a folio edition of Virgil, published at Lyons in 1517.]