CHAPTER VII 



THE LATER SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY HERBALS 



" Come into the fields then, and as you come along the streets, cast your 

 eyes upon the weeds as you call them that grow by the walls and under the 

 hedge-sides." W. COLES, The Art of Simpling, 1656. 



THE later seventeenth-century herbals are marked by a 

 return to the belief in the influence upon herbs of the heavenly 

 bodies, but it is a travesty rather than a reflection of the ancient 

 astrological lore. The most notable exponent of this debased 

 lore was the infamous Nicholas Culpeper, in whom, neverthe- 

 less, the poor people in the East End seem to have had a bound- 

 less faith. It is impossible to look at the portrait of that light- 

 hearted rogue without realising that there must have been 

 something extraordinarily attractive about the man who was 

 the last to set up publicly as an astrologer and herb doctor. 

 He was the son of a clergyman who had a living somewhere in 

 Surrey. After a brief time at Cambridge he was apprenticed 

 to an apothecary near St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and shortly 

 afterwards set up for himself in Red Lion Street, Spitalfields, 

 as an astrologer and herbalist. Culpeper was a staunch 

 Roundhead and fought in at least one battle. All through the 

 war, however, he continued his practice and he acquired a great 

 popularity in the East End of London. In 1649 he issued his 

 Physical Directory, which was a translation of the London Dis- 

 pensatory. This drew down on him the fury of the College of 

 Physicians, and the book was virulently attacked in a broadside 

 issued in 1652, entitled " A farm in Spittlefields where all the 

 knick-knacks of astrology are exposed to open sale." By this 

 time his works were enjoying an enormous sale. No fewer 

 than five editions of his English Physician Enlarged appeared 



163 



