MEDICINAL PLANTS in Folk Tradition

(Darren Dugan) #1

as Leechbook III,^2 provides evidence of a northern European herbal tradition
substantially distinct from that of the Romans and presumably independent
in its origins. But how far did that tradition retain a discrete identity once
transported to a country with its own well-rooted body of herbal knowledge?
That solitary text could have been an attempt to set down ‘best practice’ in the
eyes of just a conservative minority, and its prescriptions may not be repre-
sentative of the behaviour of Anglo-Saxon society more generally. It may
even be a treasured relic of a time before that immigrant tradition had begun
to lose its coherence—or conceivably before that immigration had even taken
place. If plant remains unearthed in Denmark^3 are anything to go by, at least
by the Viking Age herbal cultures on both sides of the North Sea had much in
common, and species of known Roman origin such as greater celandine had
been to all appearances assimilated.
However great or small that northern influence may have been, it was
essentially southwards, to the legacy of Rome, that the monasteries looked in
the following centuries. Classical texts copied and recopied and copied yet
again, frequently undergoing corruption in the process, increasingly filled
their libraries. The herbs were crudely depicted and all too briefly described—
if described at all—and were hopefully matched as far as possible with plants
growing locally. Literacy, a near-monopoly of the monks, had become largely
identified with the ability to translate and imbibe the writings of Classical
authors, that body of ancient wisdom and experience deemed superior to any
contemporary equivalent. Literacy at the same time conferred upon its pos-
sessors a privileged apartness, an apartness which could be placed at risk by
giving credence to practices and beliefs unsanctioned by Classical authority.
Among these were the remedies that the unlettered peasantry derived from
plants that grew around them in the wild.
The eventual advent of herbals with illustrations painted or etched direct
from nature improved matters only slightly. They were still accessible only to
the few, as rare as they were expensive and with texts normally in Latin. John
Gerard’s much-celebrated Herball of 1597 was exceptional in this latter
respect. It seems to have been intended by its barber-surgeon author to serve
also as a practical guide for those fellow members of the lowlier ranks of the
medical fraternity who were not above going into the fields and woods in
search of their own raw material. From his personal knowledge, Gerard gave
directions to particular places in England where some of the scarcer herbs
could be found. What he did not make clear, though, and possibly did not
realise, was that almost exactly half the plants covered in his work cannot be


  Herbs Without the Herbals 17
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