92 



having revealed himself. It is possible that it was the publisher's 

 own compilation of current beliefs and was not due to the researches 

 of any scholar. In all events, this work, "imprynted by me 

 Rycharde Banckes ... ye xxv. day of Marche. The yere of our 

 Lorde M. CCCCC. & xxv.", seems to be the first book on herbs 

 printed in English. It was preceded, however, by Bartholomew 

 the Englishman's De Proprietafibus Reritin, the seventeenth book 

 of which was devoted to plants and their uses ; the English version 

 of this work was printed in 1495. 



The medieval herbal was primarily medical. Descriptions of 

 the plants are secondary; in the Banckes herbal there are almost 

 none. It is a collection of information about the physiological 

 properties of plants, in 207 chapters arranged more or less alpha- 

 betically. There is intrinsic evidence that it is not the work of one 

 hand. Some plants are introduced twice, their names differently 

 spelled. 



In their introduction to the present edition the editors damn it 

 by calling it "quaint, old-fashioned." It is as quaint as our popular 

 medical works will seem 500 years hence and, naturally, as old- 

 fashioned. Perhaps this is only their way of saying that it is a 

 genuine product of the sixteenth century. Its main concern is with 

 the "aching of a man's guts" and the "wicked winds" that trouble 

 them, and other parts and complaints not here mentionable. The 

 hearty (I had almost written lusty) freedom with which these 

 contemporaries of Henry VIII discussed such matters doubtless 

 accounts for the somewhat redundantly anatomical characteriza- 

 tion of the work (again by its editors) as "sinewy, muscular." If 

 you wish to read, in rhoderri print and spelling, how our remote 

 forefathers treated their intestinal and other troubles with prepara- 

 tions hot or cold to various "degrees," moist or dry, laxative or 

 "constipulative," here is your opportunity. I refrain from further 

 quotation; the book is easily available. There is little here of purely 

 botanical interest; and none of the imaginative power of vivid 

 description which illuminates old Bartholomew's pages. Nor have 

 we any means of determining whether the work represents the best 

 medical science of its day. To judge from certain remarks of 

 Gerard some years later, many herbals of those times were com- 

 parable to our almanacs rather than to our textbooks. 



