174 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
plied the old Greeks with ropes and cordage; * which 
now provides the “ simple sheep 93 with the best of food, 
the cattle with the best of litter, the cottager with the 
best of thatch— 
(He made carpenters to make the houses and lodgynges of 
great tymbre, and set the houses like stretes, and covered them 
with rede and brome, so that it was lyke a lyttel towne.-— 
Froissart.)— 
and the wild bee with the most delicious honey. It is 
the bonny broom which serves us as well whether we cut 
its tufts for sweeping, for tanning leather, or for the 
manufacture of coarse cloth ; which is almost as useful 
as hops in brewing; which furnishes a wood capable of 
the most exquisite polish; which, in its ashes, gives 
a pure alkali, and in its pods and blossoms, perfume 
,and medicine. Dr. Cullen and Mead both esteemed the 
broom in cases of dropsy. 
44 E’en humble broom and osiers have their use, 
And shade for sheep and food for flocks produce.” 
It was the bonny broom which the Scottish clan of 
the Forbes wore in their bonnets when they wished 
to arouse the heroism of their chieftains, and which, in 
their Gaelic dialect, they called bealadh, in token of its 
beauty. It was this very broom from which the long 
line of Plantagenets took their name, and which to the 
last they wore on their helmets, crests, and family seal. 
It was thus :—Fulke, Earl of Anjou, having committed 
a crime, was enjoined by a holy father of the church, 
* Spartium, from sTraprov, cordage. Genista spartium has thick¬ 
set rush-like twigs, very tough and fibrous. 
