THE ANGLO-SAXON HERBALS 3 



of this plant lore there is the breath of mighty forests, of marsh 

 lands and of Nature in her wildest. We are swept back to an 

 epoch when man fought with Nature, wresting from her the 

 land, and when the unseen powers of evil resented this conquest 

 of their domains. To the early Saxons those unseen powers 

 were an everyday reality. A supernatural terror brooded over 

 the trackless heaths, the dark mere pools were inhabited by 

 the water elves. In the wreathing mists and driving storms of 

 snow and hail they saw the uncouth " moor gangers," " the 

 muckle mark steppers who hold the moors," or the stalking 

 fiends of the lonely places, creatures whose baleful eyes shone 

 like flames through the mist. To this day some of our place 

 names in the more remote parts of these islands recall the 

 memory of those evil terrors. In these manuscripts we are 

 again in an atmosphere of eotens and trolls, there are traces of 

 even older terrors, when the first Teuton settlers in Europe 

 struggled with the aborigines who lived in caves, hints as elusive 

 as the phantom heroes in the Saxon poems, and as unforgettable. 

 Still more remarkable is the fact that beneath the super- 

 structure of Christian rites to be used when the herbs were being 

 picked or administered we find traces not merely of the ancient 

 heathen religion, but of a religion older than that of Woden. It 

 has been emphasised by our most eminent authorities that in 

 very early times our ancestors had but few chief gods, and it is a 

 remarkable fact that there is no mention whatever of Woden in 

 the whole range of Saxon literature before the time of Alfred. 

 In those earlier centuries they seem to have worshipped a personi- 

 fication of Heaven, and Earth, the wife of Heaven, and the Son, 

 whom after ages called Thor. There were also Nature deities, 

 Hrede, the personification of the brightness of Summer, and 

 Eostra, the radiant creature of the Dawn. It will be remembered 

 that it was the worship, not of Balder, but of Eostra, which 

 the Christian missionaries found so deeply imbedded that they 

 adopted her name and transferred it to Easter. For this we 

 have the authority of Bede. Separate from these beneficent 



