Long after that nineteenth-century ample harvest of herbal data had been
gathered, historians continued to dismiss folk medicine as having little or no
relevance to the rise of the Western medical tradition. Many were reluctant to
accept that in a highly developed country like Britain it consisted of anything
other than cultural detritus. As late as the 1960s, Charles Singer, a much-
respected authority, dismissed it as ‘usually medieval or renaissance medi-
cine misunderstood’.^11 A more general reason why historians largely ignored
it was that, being an oral tradition, it has left next to nothing in the way of
documentary evidence for scholars to study. Until the advent of oral history,
following the spread of tape recorders, the belief that the past could be safely
reconstructed only from written records had the force of gospel. Till then, his-
torians were happy to leave cross-questioning of the illiterate to folklorists
and anthropologists. For the same reasons, glimpses of folk medicine avail-
able in such sources as folk tales, ballads and proverbs received little serious
attention from them either.
Ye t even among folklorists, interest in herbal remedies has been margin-
alised. Compared with the tales, rituals and superstitions that form the staple
of their study, herbs and their uses are a discordantly down-to-earth matter,
a kind of primitive science, more akin perhaps to folk life—that separate
study of such practical matters as farming methods and the layout of cot-
tages. Lack of botanical knowledge among folklorists has been a further rea-
son for their neglecting this area, for it is awkward to make enquiries about
herbal remedies unless one can recognise by name the plants concerned.
Until all the scraps of folk medical information collected in the ways
described have been collated and presented as a whole, it will be impossible
to convince historians or other scholars of their worth and importance. The
main aim of this book is to provide such a corpus. The body of information
that has resulted is so substantial, and involves such a high proportion of our
native flora, that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it represents a full-scale
tradition of its own. In order for so much to have survived, this tradition
must have retained its own identity, existing alongside the learned medical
tradition of the literate population but keeping its basic essence.
It is highly likely that some form of medicine existed in this part of
Europe from the time of its first inhabitants. All known primitive peoples
possess a mixture of rituals and natural therapies to cope with injury and
pain, those pressing realities on a par with hunger and death. Even apes have
been observed eating particular leaves for their apparent therapeutic effect.
By the time the Romans settled in Britain, one or more medical systems of
22 Herbs Without the Herbals