considerable sophistication and stability were probably already established
and would have been highly resistant to alien traditions. The more remote
parts of Britain and Ireland have remained out of contact with towns and
cities until the eighteenth or nineteenth century at the earliest and would
have proved largely impenetrable by new ideas. Such was the degree of isola-
tion of many smaller islands in particular that few had any resident medical
practitioner even in the mid-Victorian period. In such areas, where the
inhabitants had to be medically self-reliant, ancestral practices had an espe-
cially good chance of surviving, particularly if, like the herbal ones, they met
compelling needs and seemed to have a basis in more than superstition.
To present a picture of a solid mass of herbal lore coming down unal-
tered from prehistoric times would, however, be unrealistic. Unquestionably,
over the years much modification must have taken place. Irrespective of the
infiltration of alien remedies from outside sources, particularly through the
influence of the Church, there would have been processes at work internally
that continually brought about change. Many folk cures remain the treasured
property of individual families, or of individual ‘wise men’ and ‘wise women’.
They are passed on by word and deed from one generation to the next, but
when a supply of suitable successors dies out, that line of knowledge is lost.
There may in addition have been elements of secrecy involved. This was par-
ticularly the case where an individual set him or herself up as a local healer
and made a living from dispensing cures. Even where no material rewards
were involved,there may have been a strong motivation for women in par-
ticular to keep very quiet about their knowledge or risk being branded as
witches. A less important factor inducing secrecy was the conviction that the
power to cure certain ailments would be lost if communicated to someone
else. In the sphere of wart-charming this belief persists to this day. However,
it is probable that within a community much herbal knowledge was shared
despite not being written down.
Even though innately conservative, folk medicine would have changed
and evolved over the years, replacing older remedies with newly discovered
ones or remedies borrowed from other sources. As learned medicine extended
its sway, interchange between the two traditions must surely have increased.
By the thirteenth century, for instance, it had been received into the depths of
Carmarthenshire by the physicians of Myddvai^12 and taken to Scotland’s
Western Isles by the no less renowned Beaton dynasty in the sixteenth.^13 This
interchange must have accelerated as populations grew, mobility increased
and there was less reluctance to try the unfamiliar. Nicholas Culpeper’s Lon-
Herbs Without the Herbals 23