4 THE OLD ENGLISH HERBALS 



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 every- 

 day 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 



