174 THE OLD ENGLISH HERBALS 



part of knowledge as well as others, may receive that esteem 

 and advancement that is due to it, to the banishment 

 of Barbarisme and Ignorance which begin again to prevaile 

 against it." 



The real descendants, so to speak, of the herbal are the 

 quaint old stiU-room books, many of which survive not only 

 in museums and public libraries, but also in country houses. 

 These stiU-room books, which are a modest branch of literature 

 in themselves, are more nearly akin to herbals than to cookery 

 books, with which they are popularly associated. For they 

 are full of the old herb lore and of the uses of herbs in homely 

 medicines. It must be remembered that even as late as the 

 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries every woman was supposed 

 to have some knowledge of both the preparation and the medi- 

 cinal use of herbs and simples. When the herbal proper ceased 

 and the first books on botany began to make their appearance 

 the old herb lore did not fall into disuse, and the popularity of 

 the still-room books in which it was preserved may be gathered 

 from the fact that one of the first of these to be printed — A 

 Choice Manual of rare and select Secrets in Physick S- Chiriirgerie 

 Collected and practised by the Countesse of Kenf^ {late deed) 

 — went through nineteen editions. There are some old books 

 which merely inspire av/e, for one feels that they have always 

 lived in dignified seclusion on library shelves and have been 

 handled only by learned scholars. But there are others whose 

 leaves are so be-thumbed and torn that from constant associa- 

 tion with human beings they seem to have become almost 

 human themselves. Of this type are these old still-room books. 

 They were an integral part of daily life and their worn pages 

 bear mute witness to the fact. 



One of the most interesting is the Fairfax still-room book.^ 

 Its first owner was probably Mary Cholmeley, born during the 



1 Published 165 1. The earliest copy in the British Museum is the second 

 edition, 1653. 



- See Arcana Fairfaxiana. 



