110 THE OLD ENGLISH HERBALS 



which nature produces in a manner contrary to nature and very 

 wonderful. They are like marsh geese but smaller. They are 

 produced from fir-timber tossed about at sea and are at first 

 like geese upon it. Afterwards they hang down by their beaks 

 as if from a sea-weed attached to the wood and are enclosed in 

 shells that they may grow the more freely. Having thus in 

 course of time been clothed with a strong covering of feathers 

 they either fall into the water or seek their liberty in the air by 

 flight. The embryo geese derive their growth and nutriment 

 from the moisture of the wood or of the sea, in a secret and most 

 marvellous manner. I have seen with my own eyes more than 

 a thousand minute bodies of these birds hanging from one piece 

 of timber on the shore enclosed in shells and already formed . . . 

 in no corner of the world have they been known to build a nest. 

 Hence the bishops and clergy in some parts of Ireland are in the 

 habit of partaking of these birds on fast days without scruple. 

 But in doing so they are led into sin. For if anyone were to eat 

 the leg of our first parent, although he (Adam) was not born of 

 flesh, that person could not be adjudged innocent of eating flesh." 



Jews in the Middle Ages were divided as to whether these 

 barnacle geese should be killed as flesh or as fish. Pope 

 Innocent III. took the view that they were flesh, for at the 

 Lateran Council in 1215 he prohibited the eating of them 

 during Lent. In 1277 Rabbi Izaak of Corbeil forbade them 

 altogether to Jews, on the ground that they were neither fish 

 nor flesh. Both Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon derided 

 the myth, but in general it seems to have been accepted with 

 unquestioning faith. Sebastian Munster, in his Cosmographia 

 Universalis (1572), tells us that Pope Pius II. when on a visit 

 to Scotland was most anxious to see these geese, but was told 

 that they were to be found only in the Orkney Islands. 

 Sebastian believed in them himself, for he wrote of them : 



" In Scotland there are trees which produce fruit conglo- 

 merated of leaves, and this fruit when in due time it falls into 



