Naming of cider
800 AD
Aachen Germany
The difficulty with being specific about cider’s origins is that where it is mentioned, it is not given a specific name. Pliny lumps it into “artificial wines” others refer to with the Hebrew word shekar, or Latin sicera, both colloquialisms for “strong drink.” The likely first specific naming is in Capitulare de villis, a text composed sometime in the late 8th or early 9th century that guided the governance of the royal estates during the later years of the reign of Charlemagne (c. 768–814). It lists, in no particular order, a series of rules and regulations on how to manage the lands, animals, justice, and overall administration of the king's property and assets. Cider and perry were given their own names—pomatium and pyratium. 