the main mass of people depended for everyday first aid. Mostly illiterate and
with a herbal repertory built up over the generations by trial and error, they
neither knew nor cared about the Classical authorities. As their knowledge
was transmitted by word of mouth, it is almost unrepresented in the written
record until the nineteenth century.
Although it can be assumed that Greek and Roman colonists took their
herbal knowledge wherever they went, the extent to which it became incor-
porated into the ordinary domestic practices of those among whom they set-
tled is very hard to determine. In the colder parts of Europe many Mediter-
ranean plants would have been difficult or impossible to cultivate. The raw
material for those remedies would therefore have had to be imported in dried
form if it was to be available at all. Imports, however, by reason of the distance
they had to be brought and the risks they had to survive, would have been
costly and available only to the relatively well-off. On the outer reaches of
the Empire the proportion of their herbal heritage that the Romans would
have had access to was small, their pharmacopoeia bearing little resemblance
to its native Mediterranean richness in that respect. To make up for this defi-
ciency, borrowing from the locals is likely to have taken place. Unfortunately,
archaeological excavation throws little light on the extent of this. One purely
medicinal plant of presumptively Roman introduction, the greater celandine,
Chelidonium majus,has been detected in settlement remains of that period in
two places in the south of England and Wales; of the many other species that
have been identified from Romano-British levels, though, there is none
whose presence can be attributed unequivocally to therapeutic use.
After the Romans left Britain, the medical practices they had introduced
were perpetuated by the early Christian Church. A reminder of how much
further within the British Isles that alien Romanised culture was later dif-
fused is provided by the lingering presence down to this day of elecampane,
Inula helenium,around early monastic sites in Ireland and on islets off the
Irish and Manx coasts.^1 This plant is probably a native of central Asia, and
had the dual attraction of being a subsistence food as well as a source of med-
icine. It owed its spread across Europe entirely to human favour, and once
planted, it could indefinitely survive the competition of natural vegetation
and grazing by animals.
A second influx of alien herbs, or at least novel uses of herbs already pres-
ent, is perhaps attributable to the waves of Germanic immigrants who settled
in Britain, especially in England, in the post-Roman era. The one Anglo-
Saxon medical text written in the vernacular that survives, known to scholars
16 Herbs Without the Herbals