the folk records from most parts of Britain and Ireland with the conspicuous
exception of the Scottish Highlands and most of Wales—from which all the
species have probably been absent historically.
To a striking extent the main uses to which mallows have been put and the
relative frequencies of those uses parallel those recorded for comfrey (Sym-
phytum officinale). This strongly suggests that the two have served as alterna-
tives, the mallows standing in for comfrey in areas where that much less gen-
erally distributed plant is rare or absent. Not only have both been valued for
treating swellings (pre-eminently for sprains in the case of comfrey), but they
have both been widely used as well, if to nothing like the same extent, for two
other purposes. The more important of these, accounting for the 40 mallow
records, is as a demulcent for coughs, colds, sore throats, asthma and chest
troubles—chewed or sucked or infused and either drunk or gargled in the
case of mallows. The other is for easing rheumatism, stiff joints or backache,
though that category of complaints might equally well be subsumed within
the main one of poulticed inflammation.
Other ailments against which mallows have been deployed in Britain
include sore or strained eyes (Cornwall,^41 Somerset,^42 Gloucestershire^43 ),
varicose veins (those second two counties again), toothache and teething
(Devon,^44 Caernarvonshire^45 ), kidney and urinary troubles (Devon,^46 Lin-
colnshire,^47 Yor kshire^48 ), dysentery (Devon,^49 Isle of Man^50 ), corns (Nor-
folk^51 ), gripes in children (unlocalised^52 ) and gonorrhoea (Devon^53 ).
Ireland departs from the general patterns in one very major respect. The
practice of bathing a sprain or, much more rarely, a fracture with the liquid
produced from boiling the leaves or roots receives at least seven times as many
mentions in the records from there as in those from Britain, accounting for
not far short of a third of all the records from the British Isles for the uses of
poultices for swellings. Inexplicably, that application of mallows to sprains is
strongly concentrated in Leinster, which is one part of Ireland in which these
plants might have been expected to have been supplanted by comfrey for that
purpose had the latter been a comparatively late introduction by settlers from
England. That matters are not that simple is further shown by the use in
Louth of a poultice ofboth (as if to be on the safe side) and by the fact that in
the records for the western county of Limerick^54 mallow has been found
mentioned only once but comfrey no fewer then twelve times. The impres-
sion that Malva sylvestris,rather, could have been the latecomer and not com-
frey, as one might at first suppose, is supported further by the comparative
paucity of Irish records for most of the rarer purposes for which mallows
St John’s-worts to Primulas 109