MEDICINAL PLANTS in Folk Tradition

(Darren Dugan) #1

current around the start of the nineteenth century in the Highlands,^139 where
it was steeped in buttermilk. In Leicestershire it was used specifically to
remove the disfiguring marks left by smallpox.^140 The other, no less time-
honoured practice has been to wear the leaves in shoes or other footwear to
prevent over-sweating leading to soreness, hence the names ‘traveller’s joy’
and ‘chafe grass’. In addition to pilgrims,^141 carriers in eighteenth-century
Nottinghamshire^142 and schoolboys in nineteenth-century southern York-


  Currants, Succulents and Roses 143

Potentilla anserina, silverweed
(Fuchs 1543, fig. 351)
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