MANUSCRIPT AND PRINTED HERBALS 57 



" Take the Timber thereof and burn it to coales and make 

 powder thereof and rubbe thy teeth thereof and it shall keep thy 

 teeth from all evils. Smell it oft and it shall keep thee youngly. 



" Also if a man have lost his smellyng of the ayre that he 

 may not draw his breath make a fire of the wood and bake his 

 bread therewith, eate it and it shall keepe him well. 



" Make thee a box of the wood of rosemary and smell to it 

 and it shall preserve thy youth." 



That Banckess Herbal achieved immediate popularity is 

 attested by the fact that the following year another edition of 

 it was issued, and during the next thirty years various London 

 printers issued the same book under different titles.^ Robert 

 Wyer^ ascribed the authorship of those he issued to Macer, 

 and in the edition of 1530 he added, after " Macer's Herbal," 

 *' Practysed by Dr. Lynacro." Whether this statement is true 

 it is impossible to discover, but we know that the great doctor 

 died some years before Wyer set up as a printer, and his name 

 does not appear in any of the subsequent editions of the herbal 

 issued by other printers. In Wyer's edition there are some good 

 initial letters very similar to those used by Wynkyn de Worde. 



The most interesting edition of the herbal is that printed 

 by William Copland, in which first appear the additional chapters 

 on " The virtues of waters stylled," *' The tyme of gathering 

 of sedes " and " A general rule of all maner of herbes." He 

 issued two editions bearing the same title and differing only 



^ See Bibliography of English Herbals. 



2 Robert Wyer was one of the most famous printers of the early sixteenth 

 century. He came of a Buckinghamshire family and was probably a near 

 relation of John Wyer, also a printer who lived in Fleet Street, for both of 

 them used the device of St. John the Evangelist. He served his apprenticeship 

 to Richard Pynson, whose printing press was in the rentals of Norwich House 

 near the site of the present Villiers Street, and on Pynson's death succeeded 

 to the business. In both his editions of the herbal there is his well-known 

 device of St. John the Evangelist bareheaded and dressed in a flowing robe, 

 sitting under a tree on an island and writing on a scroll spread over his right 

 knee. At his right hand is an eagle with outstretched wings holding an ink- 

 well in its beak, and in the background are the towers and spires of a great city. 



