2 THE OLD ENGLISH HERBALS 



behind the knowledge of their own day. Within living memory 

 our peasants were using, and in the most remote parts of these 

 islands they use still, the herbal and other remedies of our 

 Saxon ancestors. They even use curiously similar charms. 

 The herb lore recorded in these manuscripts is the herb lore, 

 not of the century in which they were written, but of the dim 

 past ages pictured in the oldest parts of Widsith and Beowulf. 

 To the student of English plant lore, the Herbarium of Apuleius 

 and the Ilepl AtSafeaw are less interesting because they are 

 translations, but the more one studies the original Saxon 

 writings on herbs and their uses, the more one realises that, 

 just as in Beowulf there are suggestions and traces of an age 

 far older than that in which the poem was written, so in these 

 manuscripts are embedded beliefs which carry us back to the 

 dawn of history. It is this which gives this plant lore its 

 supreme interest. It is almost overwhelming to recognise that 

 possibly we have here fragments of the plant lore of our ancestors 

 who lived when Attila's hordes were devastating Europe, and 

 that in the charms and ceremonies connected with the picking 

 and administering of herbs we are carried back to forms of 

 religion so ancient that, compared to it, the worship of Woden 

 is modern. Further, it is only in these manuscripts that we 

 find this herb lore, for in the whole range of Saxon literature 

 outside them there is remarkably little mention of plant life. 

 The great world of nature, it is true, is ever present ; the ocean 

 is the background of the action in both Beowulf and Cynewulf, 

 and the sound of the wind and the sea is in every line. One is 

 conscious of vast trackless wastes of heath and moor, of impene- 

 trable forests and terror-infested bogs; but of the details of 

 plant life there is scarcely a word. In these manuscripts alone 

 do we find what plant life meant to our ancestors, and, as with 

 all primitive nations, their belief in the mystery of herbs is 

 almost past our civilised understanding. Their plant lore, 

 hoary with age, is redolent of a time when the tribes were still 

 wandering on the mainland of Europe, and in these first records 



