One scholar, Professor Christine Fell, posits that a drink served was an apple-based alcohol using honey as a sweetener and extra fermentation agent and served in small cups that are often found in Saxon burials with the dead. There is also more recent evidence that indicates that the Romans were growing apples and pears in their stay in Britain, and one of the Vindolanda tablets indicates that the largely Asturian-derived guardsmen near Hadrian's Wall, men with an apple and cider culture predating their own conquest by Rome, were seeking the best apples that could be found locally. There is also evidence from the mid-late Anglo-Saxon period of the growth of orchards before, during, and after Christianisation of this group and their ceremonial use, most famously the custom of Wassail at Yuletide, and it is known that monks grew apples in their gardens. Though it is unknown if there is any relation between the ancient drink and the modern German product, at least one account indicates the drink was a luxury item that only the wealthy could afford.
Saxon chronicles before their conquest of the Britons mention cider-like drinks and also mention the production of a drink called æppelwīn, an ancient cognate of the Modern German ’apfelwein’’, both literally meaning a wine or alcohol made from apples.
The Normans were most certainly a vector for the arrival of continental apples to England-the word cider derives etymologically from the 12th-century French word cidre -but older accounts tell a different story. Much later the northern part of Gaul, heavily populated by a mix of Gauls, Romans, and other Celts, became Normandy and the domain of the lords that grew apples on their fiefdoms.
Since the early Roman era, dessert and cider apples had been spreading out of the Mediterranean and naturally would have eventually been brought to Gaul, a province of the Roman Empire after the defeat of Vercingetorix in 46 BC by Caesar, and Franconia, parts of which would have formed Magna Germania. The UK is the largest producer of cider in Europe and has enjoyed a renaissance in the 21st century, with a greater diversity of producers, brands and consumers than ever before. It has been made in regions of the country where cider apples were grown since Roman times in those regions it is intertwined with local culture. Cider in the United Kingdom is widely available at pubs, off licences, and shops.
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