The Old English Herbals. Eleanour Sinclair Rohde

The writing of this book on that fascinating and somewhat neglected[1] branch of garden literature—the old English Herbals—has been a labour of love, but it could not have been done without all the kind help I have had. My grateful thanks are due to the authorities at the British Museum, to Professor Burkitt of Cambridge, and very specially to Mr. J. B. Capper for invaluable help. I am indebted to Dr. James, the Provost of Eton, for his kind permission to reproduce an illustration from a twelfth-century MS. in the Library of Eton College for the frontispiece. I find it difficult to express either my indebtedness or my gratitude to Dr. and Mrs. Charles Singer, the former for all his help and the latter for her generous permission to make use of her valuable bibliography of early scientific manuscripts. I am further indebted to Dr. Charles Singer for reading the chapter on the Anglo-Saxon herbals in proof. For their kind courtesy in answering my inquiries concerning the MS. herbals in the libraries of their respective cathedrals, I offer my grateful thanks to the Deans of Lincoln and Gloucester Cathedrals, and to the Rev. J. N. Needham for information concerning the herbals in the library of Durham Cathedral; to the librarians of the following colleges—All Souls’ College, Oxford; Balliol College, Oxford; Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; Magdalene College, Cambridge; Peterhouse, Cambridge; Jesus College, Cambridge; St. John’s College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge; to the librarians of Durham University, Trinity College, Dublin, the Royal Irish Academy, and the National Library of Wales; to the Honble. Lady Cecil for information respecting MSS. in the library of the late Lord Amherst of Hackney; and to the following owners of private libraries—the Marquis of Bath, Lord Leconfield, Lord Clifden, Mr. T. Fitzroy Fenwick of Cheltenham, and Mr. Wynne of Peniarth, Merioneth. For information respecting incunabula herbals in American libraries I am indebted to Dr. Arnold Klebs and to Mr. Green of the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis.

No pains have been spared to make the bibliographies as complete as possible, but I should be glad to be told of any errors or omissions. There are certain editions of Banckes’s Herbal and The Grete Herball mentioned by authorities such as Ames, Hazlitt, etc., of which no copies can now be found in the chief British libraries (see p. 204 et seq.). If any copies of these editions are in private libraries I should be grateful to hear of them. The rarest printed herbal is “Arbolayre contenāt la qualitey et vertus proprietiez des herbes gōmes et simēces extraite de plusiers tratiers de medicine com̄ent davicene de rasis de constatin de ysaac et plateaire selon le con̄u usaige bien correct.” (Supposed to have been printed by M. Husz at Lyons.) It is believed that there are only two copies of this book now extant. One is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the other was sold in London, March 23, 1898, but I have been unable to discover who is the present owner. For this or any other information I should be most grateful.

Eleanour Sinclair Rohde.

FOOTNOTE:

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[1] It is a remarkable fact that even the eleventh edition of the omniscient Encyclopædia Britannica has no article on Herbals.

CHAPTER I
THE ANGLO-SAXON HERBALS

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“Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.”—William Blake.

There is a certain pathos attached to the fragments from any great wreck, and in studying the few Saxon manuscripts, treating of herbs, which have survived to our day, we find their primary fascination not so much in their beauty and interest as in the visions they conjure up of those still older manuscripts which perished during the terrible Danish invasions. That books on herbs were studied in England as early as the eighth century is certain, for we know that Boniface, “the Apostle of the Saxons,” received letters from England asking him for books on simples and complaining that it was difficult to obtain the foreign herbs mentioned in those we already possessed.[2] But of these manuscripts none have survived, the oldest we possess being of the tenth century, and for our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon plant lore we look chiefly to those four important manuscripts—the Leech Book of Bald, the Lacnunga and the Saxon translations of the Herbarium of Apuleius and the so-called Περὶ Διδαξέων.

Apart from their intrinsic fascination, there are certain considerations which give these manuscripts a peculiar importance. Herb lore and folk medicine lag not years, but centuries, behind the knowledge of their own day. Within living memory our peasants were using, and in the most remote parts of these islands they use still, the herbal and other remedies of our Saxon ancestors. They even use curiously similar charms. The herb lore recorded in these manuscripts is the herb lore, not of the century in which they were written,

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