THE ANGLO-SAXON HERBALS 25 



" Some teach us against bite of adder, to speak one word 

 ' faul.' It may not hurt him. Against bite of snake if the man 

 procures and eateth rind which cometh out of Paradise, no 

 venom will hurt him. Then said he that wrote this book that 

 the rind was hard gotten." 



These manuscripts are so full of word pictures of the treat- 

 ment of disease that one feels if one were transported back to 

 those days it would in most cases be possible to tell at a glance 

 the " cures " various people were undergoing. Let us visit a 

 Saxon hamlet and go and see the sick folk in the cottages. On 

 our way we meet a man with a fawn's skin decorated with little 

 bunches of herbs dangling from his shoulders, and we know 

 that he is a sufferer from nightmare.^ Another has a wreath 

 of clove-wort tied with a red thread round his neck. He is a 

 lunatic, but, as the moon is on the wane, his family hope that 

 the wearing of these herbs will prove beneficial. We enter a 

 dark one-roomed hut, the dwelling of one of the swineherds, but 

 he is not at his work ; for it seemed to him that his head turned 

 about and that he was faring with turned brains. He had 

 consulted the leech and, suggestion cures being then rather more 

 common than now, the leech had advised him to sit calmly 

 by his fireside with a linen cloth wrung out in spring water on 

 his head and to wait till it was dry. He does so, and, to quote 

 the words with which nearly all Saxon prescriptions end, we 

 feel " it will soon be well with him." Let us wend our way to 

 the cobbler, a sullen, taciturn man who finds his lively young 

 wife's chatter unendurable. We find him looking more gloomy 

 than usual, for he has eaten nothing all day and now sits moodily 

 consuming a raw radish. But there is purpose in this. Does 

 not the ancient leechdom say that, if a radish be eaten raw 

 after fasting all day, no woman's chatter the next day can 

 annoy? In another cottage we find that a patient suffering 

 from elf-shot is to be smoked with the fumes of herbs. A huge 



^ Leech Book, I. 60. 



