The Old English Herbals Part 1

The Old English Herbals.

by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde.

PREFACE

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 ill.u.s.tration 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 grat.i.tude 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 ma.n.u.scripts.

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 contenat la qualitey et vertus proprietiez des herbes gomes et simeces extraite de plusiers tratiers de medicine coment davicene de rasis de constatin de ysaac et plateaire selon le conu 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 Bibliotheque 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:

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

THE OLD ENGLISH HERBALS

CHAPTER I

THE ANGLO-SAXON HERBALS

"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 ma.n.u.scripts, 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts--the _Leech Book of Bald_, the _Lacnunga_ and the Saxon translations of the _Herbarium of Apuleius_ and the so-called ?e?? ??da????.

Apart from their intrinsic fascination, there are certain considerations which give these ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts is the herb lore, not of the century in which they were written, but of the dim past ages pictured in the oldest parts of _Widsith_ and _Beowulf_. To the student of English plant lore, the _Herbarium of Apuleius_ and the ?e?? ??da???? 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 wors.h.i.+p of Woden is modern. Further, it is only in these ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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, h.o.a.ry 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 G.o.ds, 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 wors.h.i.+pped 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 wors.h.i.+p, 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 att.i.tude 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sociated with unseen beings. There are times when one is reminded forcibly of that wors.h.i.+p 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 ma.n.u.scripts.

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, Glas...o...b..ry.[3] This Saxon ma.n.u.script 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.s 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 ma.n.u.script, 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.

The book itself was written under the direction of one Bald, who, if he were not a personal friend of King Alfred's, had at any rate access to the king's correspondence; for one chapter consists of prescriptions sent by Helias, Patriarch of Jerusalem, to the king.[4]

We learn the names of the first owner and scribe from lines in Latin verse at the end of the second part of the MS.

"Bald is the owner of this book, which he ordered Cild to write, Earnestly I pray here all men, in the name of Christ, That no treacherous person take this book from me, Neither by force nor by theft nor by any false statement.

Why? Because the richest treasure is not so dear to me As my dear books which the Grace of Christ attends."

The book consists of 109 leaves and is written in a large, bold hand and one or two of the initial letters are very faintly illuminated.

The writing is an exceptionally fine specimen of Saxon penmans.h.i.+p. On many of the pages there are mysterious marks, but it is impossible to conjecture their meaning. It has been suggested that they point to the sources from which the book was compiled and were inserted by the original owner.

The _Leech Book of Bald_ was evidently the manual of a Saxon doctor, and he refers to two other doctors--Dun and Oxa by name--who had given him prescriptions. The position of the leech in those days must have been very trying, for he was subjected to the obviously unfair compet.i.tion of the higher clergy, many of whom enjoyed a reputation for working miraculous cures.[5] The leech being so inferior in position, it is not surprising that his medical knowledge did not advance on scientific lines. He relied on the old heathen superst.i.tions, probably from an instinctive feeling that in pagan religion, combined with the herb lore which had been handed down through the ages, the ma.s.s of the people had a deep-rooted faith.

Nothing is more obvious in the Leech Book than the fact that the virtues ascribed to the different herbs are based not on the personal knowledge of the writer, but on the old herb lore. This gives the Leech Book its special fascination; for it is the oldest surviving ma.n.u.script in which we can learn the herb lore of our ancestors, handed down to them from what dim past ages we can only surmise. We have, therefore, to bear in mind that what may strike our modern minds as quaint, or even grotesque, is in the majority of instances a distorted form of lore which doubtless suffered many changes during the early centuries of our era. Nearly all that is most fascinating in the Leech Book is of very ancient Indo-Germanic or Eastern origin, but one cannot help wondering how much the Saxons incorporated of the herb lore of the ancient Britons. Does not Pliny tell us that the Britons gathered herbs with such striking ceremonies that it would seem as though the Britons had taught them to the Persians?

One cannot read Bald's ma.n.u.script without being struck by his remarkable knowledge of native plants and garden herbs. We are inferior to our continental neighbours in so many arts that it is pleasant to find that in the ancient art of gardening and in their knowledge of herbs our Saxon forefathers excelled. It has been pointed out by eminent authorities that the Anglo-Saxons had names for, and used, a far larger number of plants than the continental nations. In the _Herbarium of Apuleius_, including the additions from Dioscorides, only 185 plants are mentioned, and this was one of the standard works of the early Middle Ages. In the _Herbarius_ of 1484, the earliest herbal printed in Germany, only 150 plants are recorded, and in the German _Herbarius_ of 1485 there are 380. But from various sources it has been computed that the Anglo-Saxons had names for, and used, at least 500 plants.[6] One feels instinctively that the love of flowers and gardens was as deep-rooted in our ancestors as it is in our nation to-day, and though we do not know exactly what they grew in their gardens--which they called wyrt?erd (literally, herb-yard)--we do know that the marigolds, sunflowers, peonies, violets and gilly-flowers which make the cottage gardens of England so gay and full of colour to-day were also the commonest plants in the Saxon gardens. Fas.h.i.+ons in large gardens have changed throughout the centuries, and there are stately gardens in this country famed the world over. But in regard to our cottage gardens we are staunchly conservative, and it is a.s.suredly the cottage garden which is characteristically English. Incidentally, one cannot help regretting that so many of our old Saxon plant names have fallen into disuse.

"Waybroad," for instance, is much more descriptive than "plantain,"

which is misleading.[7] "Maythen" also is surely preferable to "camomile," and "wergulu" is more characteristic of that fierce weed than "nettle." Those of us who are gardeners will certainly agree that "unfortraedde" is the right name for knotweed. And is not "joy of the ground" a delightful name for periwinkle?

The oldest ill.u.s.trated herbal which has come down to us from Saxon times is the translation of the Latin _Herbarium Apuleii Platonici_.[8] The original Latin work is believed to date from the fifth century, though no copy so ancient as this is in existence now.

The name Apuleius Platonicus is possibly fict.i.tious and nothing is known of the writer, who was, of course, distinct from Apuleius Madaurensis, the author of the _Golden a.s.s_. The Saxon translation of this herbal (now in the British Museum) is supposed to date from A.D.

1000-1050, and belongs to the school of aelfric of Canterbury. The frontispiece is a coloured picture in which Plato is represented holding a large volume which is being given him by aesculapius and the Centaur, and on the other side of the page is a blue circle spotted with white and red, within which is the name of the book: "Herbarium Apuleii Platonici quod accepit ab Escolapio et Chirone centauro magistro Achillis." The book consists of 132 chapters, in each of which a herb is described, and there are accompanying ill.u.s.trations of the herbs. Throughout the book there are also remarkable pictures of snakes, scorpions and unknown winged creatures. It has been pointed out that the figures of herbs are obviously not from the original plants, but are copied from older figures, and these from others older still, and one wonders what the original pictures were like. It is interesting to think that perhaps the ill.u.s.trations in this Saxon herbal are directly descended, so to speak, from the drawings of Cratevas,[9] Dionysius or Metrodorus, of whom Pliny tells us "They drew the likeness of herbs and wrote under them their effects." The picture of the lily is very attractive in spite of the fact that the flowers are painted pale blue. The stamens in the figure stand out beyond the petals and look like rays of light, with a general effect that is curiously pleasing. One of the most interesting figures is that of the mandrake (painted in a deep madder), which embodies the old legend that it was death to dig up the root, and that therefore a dog was tied to a rope and made to drag it up. It is the opinion of some authorities that these figures show the influence of the school represented by the two splendid Vienna ma.n.u.scripts of Dioscorides dating from the fifth and seventh centuries. There is no definite evidence of this, and though the ill.u.s.trations in the Saxon ma.n.u.script show the influence of the cla.s.sical tradition, they are poor compared with those in the Vienna ma.n.u.script. To some extent at least the drawings in this herbal must necessarily have been copies, for many of the plants are species unknown in this country.

[Ill.u.s.tration: aeSCULAPIUS PLATO AND A CENTAUR From the Saxon translation of the _Herbarium of Apuleius_ (Cott. Vit., C. 3, folio 19_a_)]

The Saxon translation of the ?e?? ??da???? (Harl. 6258) is a thin volume badly mutilated in parts. Herr Max Lowenbeck[10] has shown that this is in part translated from a treatise by an eleventh-century writer, Petrocellus or Petronius, of the School of Salerno--the original treatise being ent.i.tled _Practica Petrocelli Salernitani_.[11]

As has been pointed out by many eminent authorities, the School of Salerno, being a survival of Greek medicine, was uncontaminated by superst.i.tious medicine. Consequently there are striking differences between this and the other Saxon ma.n.u.scripts. The large majority of the herbs mentioned are those of Southern Europe, and the pharmacy is very simple compared with the number of herbs in prescriptions of native origin. As Dr. J. F. Payne[12] has pointed out, Herr Lowenbeck's important discovery does not account for the whole of the English book.

The order of the chapters differs from that of the Salernitan writer; there are pa.s.sages not to be found in the _Practica_, and in some places the English text gives a fuller reading. It is fairly evident that the Saxon treatise is at least in part indebted to the _Pa.s.sionarius_ by Gariopontus, another Salernitan writer of the same period.

The _Lacnunga_ (Harl. 585), an original work, and one of the oldest and most interesting ma.n.u.scripts, is a small, thick volume without any ill.u.s.trations. Some of the letters are illuminated and some are rudely ornamented. At the top of the first page there is the inscription "Liber Humfredi Wanley," and it is interesting, therefore, to realise that the British Museum owes this treasure to the zealous antiquarian whose efforts during the closing years of the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth century rescued so many valuable Saxon and other MSS. from oblivion.[13]

To the student of folk lore and folk custom these sources of herb lore are of remarkable interest for the light they throw on the beliefs and customs of humble everyday people in Anglo-Saxon times. Of kings and warriors, of bards and of great ladies we can read in other Saxon literature, and all so vividly that we see their halls, the long hearths on which the fires were piled, the openings in the roof through which the smoke pa.s.sed. We see the men with their "byrnies" of ring mail, their crested helmets, their leather-covered s.h.i.+elds and deadly short swords. We see them and their womenkind wearing golden ornaments at their feasts, the tables laden with boars' flesh and venison and chased cups of ale and mead. We see these same halls at night with the men sleeping, their "byrnies" and helmets hanging near them, and in the dim light we can make out also the trophies of the chase hanging on the walls. We read of their mighty deeds, and we know at least something of the ideals and the thoughts of their great men and heroes. But what of that vast number of the human kind who were always in the background? What of the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the swineherds, the shepherds, the carpenters, the hedgers and cobblers? Is it not wonderful to think that in these ma.n.u.scripts we can learn, at least to some extent, what plant life meant to these everyday folk? And even in these days to understand what plant life means to the true countryman is to get into very close touch with him.

Not only has suburban life separated the great concentrated ma.s.ses of our people from their birthright of meadows, fields and woods; of Nature, in her untamed splendour and mystery, most of them have never had so much as a momentary glimpse. But in Saxon times even the towns were not far from the unreclaimed marshes and forests, and to the peasant in those days they were full not only of seen, but also of unseen perils. There was probably not a Saxon child who did not know something of the awe of waste places and impenetrable forests. Even the hamlets lay on the very edge of forests and moors, and to the peasant these were haunted by giant, elf and monster, as in the more inaccessible parts of these islands they are haunted still to those who retain something of primitive imagination. And when we study the plant lore of these people we realise that prince and peasant alike used the simple but mysterious herbs not only to cure them of both physical and mental ills, but to guard them from these unseen monsters. Of the reverence they paid to herbs we begin to have some dim apprehension when we read of the ceremonies connected with the picking and administering of them.

But, first, what can we learn of the beliefs as to the origin of disease? Concerning this the great bulk of the folk lore in these ma.n.u.scripts is apparently of native Teutonic origin, or rather it would be more correct to speak of its origin as Indo-Germanic; for the same doctrines are to be found among all Indo-Germanic peoples, and even in the Vedas, notably the Atharva Veda. Of these beliefs, the doctrine of the "elf-shot" occupies a large s.p.a.ce, the longest chapter in the third book of the _Leech Book of Bald_ being entirely "against elf-disease." We know from their literature that to our Saxon ancestors waste places of moor and forest and marshes were the resort of a host of supernatural creatures at enmity with mankind. In the _Leech Book of Bald_ disease is largely ascribed to these elves, whose shafts produced illness in their victims. We read of beorg-aelfen, dun-aelfen, muntaelfen. But our modern word "elf" feebly represents these creatures, who were more akin to the "mark-stalkers," to the creatures of darkness with loathsome eyes, rather than to the fairies with whom we now a.s.sociate the name. For the most part these elves of ancient times were joyless impersonations and creatures not of sun but of darkness and winter. In the gloom and solitude of the forest, "where the bitter wormwood stood pale grey" and where "the h.o.a.r stones lay thick," the black, giant elves had their dwelling. They claimed the forest for their own and hated man because bit by bit he was wresting the forest from them. Yet they made for man those mystic swords of superhuman workmans.h.i.+p engraved with magic runes and dipped when red hot in blood or in a broth of poisonous herbs and twigs. We do not understand, we can only ask, why did they make them? What is the meaning of the myth? The water elves recall the sea monsters who attended Grendel's dam, impersonations of the fury of the waves, akin to Hnikarr, and again other water elves of the cavernous bed of ocean, primeval deadly creatures, inhabiting alike the sea and the desolate fens, "where the elk-sedge waxed in the water." If some were akin to the Formori of the baleful fogs in Irish mythic history and the Mallt-y-nos, those she-demons of marshy lands immortalised by the Welsh bards, creatures huge and uncouth "with grey and glaring eyes,"

there were others who exceeded in beauty anything human. When Caedmon wrote of the beauty of Sarah, he described her as "sheen as an elf."

With the pa.s.sing of the centuries we have well-nigh forgotten the black elves, though they are still realities to the Highlander and too real for him to speak of them. But have we not the descendants of the sheen bright elves in the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Sh.e.l.ley?

One feels very sure that our Saxon ancestors would have understood that glittering elf Ariel as few of us are capable of understanding him. He is the old English bright elf. Did not Prospero subdue him with magic, as our ancestors used magic songs in administering herbs "to quell the elf"? Here is one such song from the _Leech Book of Bald_, and at the end a conjuration to bury the elf in the earth.

"I have wreathed round the wounds The best of healing wreaths That the baneful sores may Neither burn nor burst, Nor find their way further, Nor turn foul and fallow.

Nor thump and throle on, Nor be wicked wounds, Nor dig deeply down; But he himself may hold In a way to health.

Let it ache thee no more Than ear in Earth acheth.

"Sing also this many times, 'May earth bear on thee with all her might and main.'"--_Leech Book of Bald_, III. 63.

This was for one "in the water elf disease," and we read that a person so afflicted would have livid nails and tearful eyes, and would look downwards. Amongst the herbs to be administered when the charm was sung over him were a yew-berry, lupin, helenium, marsh mallow, dock elder, wormwood and strawberry leaves.

Goblins and nightmare were regarded as at least akin to elves, and we find the same herbs were to be used against them, betony being of peculiar efficacy against "monstrous nocturnal visions and against frightful visions and dreams."[14] The malicious elves did not confine their attacks to human beings; references to elf-shot cattle are numerous. I quote the following from the chapter "against elf disease."

"For that ilk [_i. e._ for one who is elf-shot].

"Go on Thursday evening when the sun is set where thou knowest that helenium stands, then sing the Benedicite and Pater Noster and a litany and stick thy knife into the wort, make it stick fast and go away; go again when day and night just divide; at the same period go first to church and cross thyself and commend thyself to G.o.d; then go in silence and, though anything soever of an awful sort or man meet thee, say not thou to him any word ere thou come to the wort which on the evening before thou markedst; then sing the Benedicite and the Pater Noster and a litany, delve up the wort, let the knife stick in it; go again as quickly as thou art able to church and let it lie under the altar with the knife; let it lie till the sun be up, wash it afterwards, and make into a drink with bishopwort and lichen off a crucifix; boil in milk thrice, thrice pour holy water upon it and sing over it the Pater Noster, the Credo and the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, and sing upon it a litany and score with a sword round about it on three sides a cross, and then after that let the man drink the wort; Soon it will be well with him."--_Leech Book_, III. 62.