150 Alchemilla vulgaris
asexually. Most of these are characteristic of upland hay-meadows, a habitat
in which some are considerably plentiful. Upper Teesdale, in the Pennines,
has more of the different kinds than anywhere else in the British Isles, three
of which have distributions there so strongly associated with human activity
as to suggest they were introduced at some period in the past, either inten-
tionally for medicinal purposes or accidentally as weeds.^195 No English
records of the use of lady’s-mantle in folk medicine, however, have been
traced: indeed the sole British ones are from the Highlands, where they were
in use for sores and wounds.^196
Rather, it is Ireland that seems to have made use of these herbs very
largely. The mysterious, dew-like appearance of the expressed juice evidently
gave them there a semi-magical reputation,^197 though they presumably pos-
sessed some demonstrable styptic action quite apart from that to have proved
popular for cuts and nosebleeds in Londonderry^198 and, especially, Wick-
low,^199 and perhaps a diuretic one, too, to have recommended themselves for
kidney trouble in Cavan^200 and Kerry.^201 Other applications recorded are for
burns and scalds in Cavan,^202 for ‘incurable diseases’ in Galway^203 and for
sore heads (impetigo?) under the name ‘thrush ointment’ in Kildare.^204
Aphanes arvensis Linnaeus, in the broad sense
parsley-piert
Europe, south-western Asia, North Africa, Macaronesia; introduced
into North America, Australasia
As its former name ‘parsley breakstone’ advertised, drinking a decoction of
Aphanes arvensis was once much in favour for countering gravel in the kid-
neys or bladder—for example among the poor in Bristol, as noticed by two
foreign botanists in 1571, who expressed surprise that the plant was never-
theless not well known to the herbalists.^205 Half a century later, Thomas John-
son found it being brought in from the countryside by herb women for sale
under that name in London’s Cheapside.^206 That a Herefordshire name for
the plant at much the same period was ‘colickwort’^207 —colic being a term
used for the pain caused by a kidney stone—strengthens the impression that
its use for that complaint was well established at the folk level, as does the
further fact that a name in Irish,minéan Merr (for Muire?), has survived for
it in that same connection in Westmeath.^208 The only other evidence of its
persistence in folk use in Ireland into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
seems to be from Londonderry,^209 and in England records of a similar age,
still as ‘parsley breakstone’, have been traced only from Suffolk^210 and Birm-