PREFACE. 



XXV 



drew his information, we may fairly suppose, from that 

 handbook which tlie king himself kept, in which were 

 entered '• flowers, culled from what masters soever," 

 " without method/'^ "according as opportunity^- arose/' 

 and which at length grew to the size of a psalter; whence 

 also most likely came in due time the voj^age of 0th- 

 here. It is very much the custom of the jiresent swarm 

 of critics to drag up every old author to their modern 

 standard of truth, to peer into dates, to sift, and weigh, 

 and measure, and in short, to put an old tale teller into 

 the witness box of a modern court of justice, and there 

 teaze and browbeat him because they cannot half under- 

 stand his simple talk, nor apprehend how small mat- 

 ters, in a truthful story, the exact day of the week 

 and the twentieth part of a mile become. When one 

 writer of the Middle Ages copies another there com- 

 monly arises a want of clearness in marking the tran- 

 sitions from the text of the old author to the words 

 of him who cites him. But in this case all seems smooth ; 

 the man named was patriarch of Jerusalem ; he was 

 contemporaneous with King Alfred, and the drugs he 

 recommended were sold in the Syrian drug shops, or 

 apothek^. I am, therefore, well pleased to claim for 

 this volume the publication in type of a new fact 

 about the inquiring watchfulness of that illustrious 

 ruler. 



Thus, Oxa, Dun, perhaps some others of the same Many sources, 

 sort, and Helias, patriarch of Jerusalem, are sources 

 of some of the teaching in this book. To these we 

 may add a mixture of the Hibernian,'- and of the 

 Scandinavian.^ Some of the recipes occur again in the 

 Lacnunga and in Plinius Valerianus, who, from his 

 motion* of the physician Constantinus, was later than 



' Flosculos undecunque collectos 

 a quibuslibet magitris, et in corpore 

 unius libelli, mixiim quamvis, sicut 

 tunc suppetebat recligerc,Asser. p. 57. 



- Lb. p. 10, 1, xlv. .5. 

 3 Lb. L xlvi., J. Ixx. Ixxi., IIL 

 Iviii. 



•Fol. 14 b. 1.5 a. 



