The Old English Herbals. Eleanour Sinclair Rohde
Widsith and Beowulf. To the student of English plant lore, the Herbarium of Apuleius and the Περὶ Διδαξέων are less interesting because they are translations, but the more one studies the original Saxon writings on herbs and their uses, the more one realises that, just as in Beowulf there are suggestions and traces of an age far older than that in which the poem was written, so in these manuscripts are embedded beliefs which carry us back to the dawn of history. It is this which gives this plant lore its supreme interest. It is almost overwhelming to recognise that possibly we have here fragments of the plant lore of our ancestors who lived when Attila’s hordes were devastating Europe, and that in the charms and ceremonies connected with the picking and administering of herbs we are carried back to forms of religion so ancient that, compared to it, the worship of Woden is modern. Further, it is only in these manuscripts that we find this herb lore, for in the whole range of Saxon literature outside them there is remarkably little mention of plant life. The great world of nature, it is true, is ever present; the ocean is the background of the action in both Beowulf and Cynewulf, and the sound of the wind and the sea is in every line. One is conscious of vast trackless wastes of heath and moor, of impenetrable forests and terror-infested bogs; but of the details of plant life there is scarcely a word. In these manuscripts alone do we find what plant life meant to our ancestors, and, as with all primitive nations, their belief in the mystery of herbs is almost past our civilised understanding. Their plant lore, hoary with age, is redolent of a time when the tribes were still wandering on the mainland of Europe, and in these first records of this plant lore there is the breath of mighty forests, of marsh lands and of Nature in her wildest. We are swept back to an epoch when man fought with Nature, wresting from her the land, and when the unseen powers of evil resented this conquest of their domains. To the early Saxons those unseen powers were an everyday reality. A supernatural terror brooded over the trackless heaths, the dark mere pools were inhabited by the water elves. In the wreathing mists and driving storms of snow and hail they saw the uncouth “moor gangers,” “the muckle mark steppers who hold the moors,” or the stalking fiends of the lonely places, creatures whose baleful eyes shone like flames through the mist. To this day some of our place names in the more remote parts of these islands recall the memory of those evil terrors. In these manuscripts we are again in an atmosphere of eotens and trolls, there are traces of even older terrors, when the first Teuton settlers in Europe struggled with the aborigines who lived in caves, hints as elusive as the phantom heroes in the Saxon poems, and as unforgettable.
Still more remarkable is the fact that beneath the superstructure of Christian rites to be used when the herbs were being picked or administered we find traces not merely of the ancient heathen religion, but of a religion older than that of Woden. It has been emphasised by our most eminent authorities that in very early times our ancestors had but few chief gods, and it is a remarkable fact that there is no mention whatever of Woden in the whole range of Saxon literature before the time of Alfred. In those earlier centuries they seem to have worshipped a personification of Heaven, and Earth, the wife of Heaven, and the Son, whom after ages called Thor. There were also Nature deities, Hrede, the personification of the brightness of Summer, and Eostra, the radiant creature of the Dawn. It will be remembered that it was the worship, not of Balder, but of Eostra, which the Christian missionaries found so deeply imbedded that they adopted her name and transferred it to Easter. For this we have the authority of Bede. Separate from these beneficent powers were the destroying and harmful powers of Nature—darkness, storm, frost and the deadly vapours of moorland and fen, personified in the giants, the ogres, the furious witches that rode the winds and waves; in fact, the whole horde of demons of sea and land and sky. It is the traces of these most ancient forms of religion which give to the manuscripts their strongest fascination.
Many of us miss all that is most worth learning in old books through regarding anything in them that is unfamiliar as merely quaint, if not ridiculous. This attitude seals a book as effectually and as permanently as it seals a sensitive human being. There is only one way of understanding these old writers, and that is to forget ourselves entirely and to try to look at the world of nature as they did. It is not “much learning” that is required, but sympathy and imagination. In the case of these Saxon manuscripts we are repaid a thousandfold; for they transport us to an age far older than our own, and yet in some ways so young that we have lost its magic key. For we learn not only of herbs and the endless uses our forefathers made of them, but, if we try to read them with understanding, these books open for us a magic casement through which we look upon the past bathed in a glamour of romance. Our Saxon ancestors may have been a rude and hardy race, but they did not live in an age of materialism as we do. In their writings on herbs and their uses we see “as through a glass darkly” a time when grown men believed in elves and goblins as naturally as they believed in trees, an age when it was the belief of everyday folk that the air was peopled with unseen powers of evil against whose machinations definite remedies must be applied. They believed, as indeed the people of all ancient civilisations have believed, that natural forces and natural objects were endued with mysterious powers whom it was necessary to propitiate by special prayers. Not only the stars of heaven, but springs of water and the simple wayside herbs, were to them directly associated with unseen beings. There are times when one is reminded forcibly of that worship of Demeter, “nearer to the Earth which some have thought they could discern behind the definitely national mythology of Homer.” They believed that the sick could be cured by conjurations and charms, as firmly as we believe to-day in curing them by suggestion—is there any real difference between these methods?—and when one reads the charms which they used in administering their herbs one cannot help wondering whether these were handed down traditionally from the Sumerians, those ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia who five thousand years before Christ used charms for curing the sick which have now been partially deciphered from the cuneiform inscriptions. But before studying the plant lore therein contained, it may be as well to take a preliminary survey of the four most important manuscripts.
The oldest Saxon book dealing with the virtues of herbs which we possess is the Leech Book of Bald, dating from about A.D. 900–950. Unlike some other MS. herbals of which only a few tattered pages remain, this perfect specimen of Saxon work has nothing fragile about it. The vellum is as strong and in as good condition as when it first lay clean and untouched under the hand of the scribe—Cild by name—who penned it with such skill and loving care. One’s imagination runs riot when one handles this beautiful book, now over a thousand years old, and wonders who were its successive owners and how it has survived the wars and other destructive agencies through all these centuries. But we only know that, at least for a time, it was sheltered in that most romantic of all English monasteries, Glastonbury.[3] This Saxon manuscript has a dignity which is unique, for it is the oldest existing leech book written in the vernacular. In a lecture delivered before the Royal College of Physicians in 1903, Dr. J. F. Payne commented on the remarkable fact that the Anglo-Saxons had a much wider knowledge of herbs than the doctors of Salerno, the oldest school of medicine and oldest university in Europe. “No treatise,” he said, “of the School of Salerno contemporaneous with the Leech Book of Bald is known, so that the Anglo-Saxons had the credit of priority. Their Leech Book was the first medical treatise written in Western Europe which can be said to belong to modern history, that is, which was produced after the decadence and decline of the classical medicine, which belongs to ancient history. … It seems fair to regard it [the Leech Book], in a sense, as the embryo of modern English medicine, and at all events the earliest medical treatise produced by any of the modern nations of Europe.” The Anglo-Saxons created a vernacular literature to which the continental nations at that time could show no parallel, and in the branch of literature connected with medicine, in those days based on a knowledge of herbs (when it was not magic), their position was unique. Moreover, the fact that the Leech Book was written in the vernacular is in itself remarkable, for it points to the existence of a class of men who were not Latin scholars and yet were able and willing to read books. The Leech Book belongs to the literary period commonly known as the school of Alfred. It was probably written shortly after Alfred’s death, but it is more than probable that it is a copy of a much older manuscript, for what is known as the third book of the Leech Book is evidently a shorter and older work incorporated by the scribe when he had finished the Leech Book proper.
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