found in the wild in Britain—and many were probably not even available in
the best-stocked of the country’s physic gardens at that period. Either Gerard
or his publisher could not resist trying to appeal to an international reader-
ship, for by re-using a set of woodcuts made for a previous Dutch herbal the
work was given a spuriously pan-European appearance that was at odds with
its England-oriented text. Gerard’s own contributions to field botany are
overlaid by the customary farrago of Classical lore topped up with the asser-
tions of a miscellany of later learned authors. Consequently, the work
emerges as an awkward hybrid between a pioneer field manual and a run-of-
the-mill encyclopaedia for fellow practitioners. For all its promise of opening
up herbal expertise to a now much-enlarged literate lay public, Gerard’s vol-
ume was still emphatically a work by a member of the medical profession,
addressed to fellow professionals. Only rarely are there patronizing mentions
of ‘the common people’ or ‘the country people’ and of certain remedies used
by them. And that attitude was shared by leading non-medical authors even
of the stature of John Ray. Science was still struggling to free itself from folk
beliefs, and those who wished to be seen as serious students had to distance
themselves from anything redolent of older ways of thinking.
The herbals indeed were trebly misleading. They reflected the general
conspiracy of silence among the learned about the extent and efficacy of folk
medicine; they gave indiscriminate endorsement to just about every alleged
plant virtue that had ever appeared in print; and they were written largely in
obliviousness of the differences imposed by geography which make the flora
of one region dissimilar from that of another. Until the seventeenth century,
at the earliest, the natural distributions of Europe’s indigenous plants were lit-
tle known. The same was true of the range in climate and soil types that each
plant could tolerate. It was natural, as well as very convenient, to assume that
most of Europe had inherited the same broad legacy of natural herbal wealth.
The Columbian rediscovery of the New World and the opening up of
trade with the Indies were to alter the picture profoundly, though not wholly
for the better. The great influx of new drugs that resulted from this trade fur-
ther widened the gulf between learned practitioners and the majority of the
people—three-fifths as far as England was concerned—who continued to
live in rural isolation, away from even the smallest settlement worthy of being
called a town. The very fact that these remedies were novel and came from far
away allowed premium prices to be charged, leaving them way out of general
reach. As John Parkinson tartly observed in his 1640 Theatrum Botanicum,
‘Men more willingly spend their cost on strange things fetch from farre, than
18 Herbs Without the Herbals