Hatfield’s Herbal

The Curious Stories of Britain’s Wild Plants

GABRIELLE HATFIELD

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

HATFIELD’S HERBAL

Gabrielle Hatfield is a distinguished historian of plant medicine. She studied botany at Cambridge, then took a PhD at Edinburgh in plant medicine. The winner of two literary prizes (Michaelis‐Jean Ratcliff prize and John Thackray Medal), she is currently a research associate at Kew and a member of the council of management of Ethnomedica. Married to a GP, she has four children, several sheep, a herd of geese, a Shetland pony and a peacock, all of whom have benefited from her herbal remedies. She lives in Norfolk.

To my husband John, with love and gratitude for all he has given me – including his name for the title of this book

The illustrator

Frederick Edward Hulme, F.L.S., F.S.A. (1841–1909), came from an artistic family. His father was the landscape painter Frederick William Hulme and his grandmother had been a porcelain painter. He was a keen amateur botanist and in 1869 was made a Fellow of the Linnaean Society. He taught drawing at Marlborough College and later became Professor of Freehand and Geometrical Drawing at King’s College London, a post that (very suitably for him) covered both the arts and science faculties. The illustrations used in this book come from his best‐known work Familiar Wild Flowers (Cassell, Peter & Galpin & Co.), which originally appeared serially, in nine volumes, and was completed just before his death at Kew in 1909.

Introduction

The birds are singing and the wind is blowing in your hair as you push aside the clinging bramble shoots and step carefully over the nettles. Bending under the low branches of a sloe tree, you are into the woods. The young leaves of the silver birch are unfolding and under your hand its pale bark is cool and smooth, peeling in places to show its pink lining. There are ferns clumped around its base, and a single primrose plant, its downy buds just showing lemon cream…

All these plants are reassuringly familiar, as they must have been for countless generations, and it is all too easy to take familiar things for granted. Stop a moment and look at them again. Chewing those bramble leaves can cure a toothache. Did you know that you don’t necessarily need a dock leaf to cure a nettle sting? The juice of the nettle itself can do the trick. Sloe berries are good for an upset gut. Birch wine can help rheumatism and ferns can kill intestinal worms. The primrose yields a cosmetic as well as an ointment for burns. Such ordinary plants – and yet we are in danger of forgetting how powerful so many of them are.

The elder tree can provide us not only with remedies but also with cosmetics, dyes, fencing, insect deterrents and painkillers, not to mention the popguns that children have made for centuries from its tough, hollow stems. So many plants that we regard today simply as nuisances in gardens or agricultural land were once used and respected. The very term of ‘weed’ is used in a derogatory sense today, but in Anglo‐Saxon times weòd was the name given to any small plant. The lowly plantain that many of us regard simply as an inconvenience in our lawns can help in healing cuts and soothe insect bites. The list could go on and on; we have found human uses for so many of our native wild plants, but as we have become more and more urbanized, much of this knowledge is being lost.

THE ORIGINS OF HERBAL MEDICINE

When humans first colonized Britain, the surrounding landscape had to provide all their needs since they lived mainly on wild plants, with meat as an occasional variation. Gradually they would have learned, by trial and error, which plants and seeds and berries were good to eat and which were poisonous. The last meal that was eaten by Tollund Man, preserved in a Norwegian bog about two thousand years ago, included fat hen and heartsease. As the forests were cleared and the hunter‐gatherer lifestyle gave way to farming, domesticated animals and plants began to supply food, but there would still have been considerable reliance on foodstuffs gathered in the wild to supplement these first crops.

The origin of herbal medicine is unclear, but is highly likely to have been a by‐product of the use of plants in other ways. People would notice that a particular leaf used to bind a wound seemed to help it to heal or that a particular berry when chewed eased a headache. First aid was just one of many ways in which wild plants served early man. They provided bedding, fuel, housing, roofing and weapons as well.

As other materials replaced plants for many of these functions, plants still formed the basis of medical remedies until relatively modern times. It has been claimed that the Anglo‐Saxons had a greater knowledge of their native plants than any other race, but the written evidence of such knowledge is, literally, fragmentary and consists of frequently incomplete manuscripts.

Meanwhile continental Europe, and in particular Italy, became the seat of medical learning. In the first century AD, Dioscorides, a Greek physician, produced De Materia Medica, the first European herbal. His work and that of his Roman counterpart Pliny the Elder was translated into innumerable languages and became the basis of all the later European herbals.

These herbals became increasingly fossilized and inaccurate as they were copied and re‐copied through the succeeding centuries. Their illustrations, although of great beauty, were often too stylized for the identities of the plants depicted to be certain, so increasingly the herbals became filled with approximations of plants that the artists had never actually seen. In Britain as on the Continent generally, monks devoted their entire lives to producing the wonderfully illuminated early herbals. Usually their copying from the early classical authorities seems to have been unquestioning, but in the twelfth century an enterprising monk in Bury St Edmunds replaced at least one of the illustrations in the manuscript he was copying. He included instead a plant with which he was more familiar. All these beautiful manuscripts were, of course, accessible only to the few who could read Latin.

Even the earliest printed herbals, which began appearing in the fifteenth century, represent a distillation of the knowledge of mainly classical authorities. Since they were also written in Latin and incomprehensible even to many literate laymen, this immediately set apart the learned practitioners of official medicine from the majority of their patients. The gulf between doctors and the illiterate majority was even wider, but ordinary people continued to use plants for first aid, just as they and their forbears always had. Moreover, they used local plants that were freely available to them, whereas the authors of the printed herbals for the most part still described Mediterranean plants that had been recommended by the Greeks and Romans.

The classical authorities held such a dominant position in medical writing that John Gerard’s herbal of 1597, even though it was based on classical texts and largely lifted from an earlier English translation of Rembert Dodoens’ Pemptades, was revolutionary because it included some plants that actually grew in Britain and which he had seen for himself. Gerard’s herbal was novel in another way too: it was written not in Latin but in English and was therefore available to anyone who could read and had access to a copy. However, Gerard, as a member of the Company of Barber Surgeons, was still firmly aligned with the medical profession and had scant regard for any non‐professional practice. He does make some condescending references to the practices of the ‘common people’, and from these we can glean useful information about the popular folk medicine of his day.

The rebel Nicolas Culpeper broke the mould of the English herbals with The English Physitian. He had some medical training, having been apprenticed to an apothecary for a while after studying at Cambridge, but he had no time for members of the medical profession (nor they for him). Not only did he write in English but he also included in his book ‘such things only as grow in England, they being most fit for English Bodies’. His book became a bestseller. He championed the ordinary people and tried to make his work accessible to them. Even Culpeper’s book drew heavily on the classical authorities when he described medicinal applications of the plants. His own firm beliefs in astrology and in the doctrine of signatures further obscured his knowledge of British plant use. However, as with Gerard, we are indebted to Culpeper for recording some folk practices of medicine.

Another of the writers whose work is extensively quoted in this book is John Pechey. He was a more orthodox medical practitioner and a member of London’s Royal College of Physicians. He wrote The Compleat Herbal of Physical Plants at the end of the seventeenth century in English and clearly intended it for a literate, but non‐medical, audience. In his preface, he writes that he hopes his book will be ‘serviceable to Families in the Country, that are far distant from Physicians’.

His contemporary William Salmon, although describing himself as ‘a Professor of Physick’, was a more eccentric character and not a member of the medical faculty. However, his book The English Physician draws largely on the same, ancient classical sources used by physicians of the time. In flamboyant style, he declares on the frontispiece that this is ‘A Work of exceeding Use to all sorts of men, of what Quality or Profession soever. The like not hitherto extant.’

Generally, it remains true to say that folk practice of medicine in Britain remained largely an oral tradition, handed down by word of mouth through the generations. Today’s folk medicine represents the broken fragments of this body of knowledge, mingled by now with input from printed sources.

This herbal attempts to refocus attention on our own native wild plants and to describe the varying ways in which they have been used by ordinary people as well as by health professionals. It is unashamedly a book about British uses of British plants and does not decry the use of worldwide flora, but champions, and encourages further study of, our own largely neglected one.

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FOLK AND OFFICIAL MEDICINE

Although it is impossible to separate out completely the folk tradition of healing from the learned one, the two traditions do seem distinct as far as Britain is concerned. One obvious way in which folk medicine differs from official medicine is that the former almost entirely uses native plants – those which, as far as we can tell, occur in Britain naturally and have not been brought here by man. Official medicine has drawn on a much wider flora, using many Mediterranean plants described by classical authors and herbs and spices from the Arabic tradition. Another distinction is that folk medicine is primarily an oral tradition, passed on through generations and rarely written down because its practitioners had neither the time nor the skill to do so.

The country names that people gave to the plants around them are as varied as the communities that gave rise to them. East Anglia’s ‘paigles’ are Somerset’s ‘totsies’ and Hertfordshire’s ‘cowslips’; Scotland’s ‘bluebell’ is England’s ‘harebell’. The possibilities for confusion are endless. The plurality of common names makes it difficult to be sure, in modern taxonomic terms, exactly which plant species is being described. However, this is not a problem that is confined to folk medicine. The early, printed herbals were largely descriptions of Mediterranean plants that had been used by the Ancients; the authors ‘best‐guessed’ which plant was meant by the Ancients, and sometimes even substituted a local plant. Meanwhile the country people, without access to the written word, continued to use their local native plants and to refer to them by local names. Written records of this unofficial practice were scarce, but occasionally authors of printed books and later of local ‘floras’ (that listed the plants occurring in a particular area) referred to folk practices. Sometimes ballads and poetry refer to them. The ‘kitchen books’, notebooks of culinary and medicinal recipes kept by many members of the gentry from the seventeenth century onwards, sometimes provide glimpses of folk practice; here and there is a remedy described to the writer by a servant, a gardener or a local tradesman. But for the most part these collections of medical recipes represent the official medicine of their day.

‘Simples’, single species of plants used as remedies, are more common in folk medicine. In official medicine, polypharmacy was common – some eighteenth‐century herbal preparations contain literally hundreds of ingredients. Venice treacle, a commonly used preparation, is listed in the eighteenth‐century pharmacopoeia as containing more than seventy ingredients, and Venice treacle was itself often combined with other medicines. Even where official and folk medicine used the same plant for a given condition, in the former it was often combined with numerous other ingredients to make it more impressive, more costly, more exotic and distinct from what the ‘common people’ used. In a seventeenth‐century manuscript entitled The Winnowing of White Witchcraft, a doctor decries the ignorance of the common people. He disparages their willingness to submit themselves to their own practitioners, or ‘white witches’ as he calls them, who use ‘few salves and medicines for manifold maladies’.

Another belief has been much quoted as a symptom of the ignorance of country people – even though it was invented by an official practitioner. The ‘doctrine of signatures’ was propounded in the sixteenth century by a Swiss doctor, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (better known as Paracelsus). It suggests that each plant bears a physical sign, left by its Creator, to indicate for which human illness it should be used. However, the belief was probably based on a much simpler concept: the lesser celandine was good for piles not because it had swollen bulbils (which resembled piles) but the bulbils did provide a useful reminder of the plant’s use.

THE SPLIT BETWEEN OFFICIAL AND FOLK MEDICINE

The eighteenth century became a watershed in medicine: official medical practitioners wanted to distance themselves from the earlier, unscientific practice of medicine. They also wished to appear to have something different and exclusive to offer that was far removed from the ‘simples’ of the common people. Increasingly, exotic plant and animal ingredients appeared in their pharmacopoeias, a trend already criticized by Gerard at the end of the sixteenth century: ‘Yet it may be more truly said of phantasticall Physitions, who when they have found an approved medicine and perfect remedy neere home against any disease: yet not content therewith, they will seek a new further off, and by that means many times hurt more than they helpe.’

The almost exclusive use of Latin in prescriptions and books widened the gulf between the learned and the unlearned. The use of minerals was seen as ‘scientific’ and they were increasingly used in official practice. Blood‐letting, purging and administration of mercury were all aspects of official medicine which the poor may have done well to avoid. Even those wealthy enough to afford physicians sometimes resorted to simple home remedies, as an eighteenth‐century letter describes: ‘When the medicine of Dr Cullen failed, I shall give him garlic in brandy… I shall engage it will free him of worms and it is attended with no inconvenience, but his breath will perfume the air.’

Simple plant remedies were used less and less in official medicine and, by the nineteenth century when ‘active ingredients’ began to be isolated in the laboratory, the divorce between herbal medicine and orthodoxy was almost complete.

THE GROWTH OF HERBALISM

It was through herbalists that written plant traditions survived, in so far as they did at all. Throughout the sixteenth century, Parliament passed a series of acts aimed at making peace between the rival physicians, barber surgeons and apothecaries. In effect though, the legislation ensured that the College of Physicians had a near monopoly of medical practice and power also over the apothecaries and barber surgeons. One unforeseen result was that it left a huge proportion of the population without any medical care at all because they were too poor to afford physicians’ fees. Parliament therefore passed yet another act, allowing any of His Majesty King Henry VIII’s subjects who had knowledge of herbs to practise herbal medicine for a wide range of ailments. This act was the single most important factor in ensuring the survival of herbalism.

Rivalry between official practitioners and unofficial herbalists in Britain continued unabated. Meanwhile settlers in North America had discovered a wealth of herbs used by Native Americans and the medical practice that began to develop in North America incorporated many of these herbs, as well as the domestic medicines brought from Britain and elsewhere by the settlers.

In the eighteenth century, Samuel Thomson (1769–1843), a farmer’s son from New Hampshire, set up as a herbal practitioner. Despite continued persecution from official doctors, his practice survived and his ideas were imported into Britain in the nineteenth century and became the forerunners of today’s medical herbalism in this country. This is the reason that our present‐day medical herbalists use many North American, rather than solely native British, plants.

In‐fighting between the exponents of botanical medicine, as well as bitter rivalry with the orthodox medical profession, continued well into the nineteenth century and culminated in the Medical Reform Bill of 1852, which attempted to outlaw the practice of herbal medicine. Such was the popular outcry against this act that it was defeated and herbalism struggled on. Its survival was aided by the shortage of imported drugs during the First World War and in 1927 the Society of Herbalists (now called the Herb Society) was formed.

There followed decades of wrangling between the herbalists and Parliament, but from these fraught years there eventually emerged the modern British Herbal Medicine Association, which provided far more rigorous, scientific training. Today the National Institute of Medical Herbalists provides a thorough grounding for its students in many medical disciplines and produces the official British Herbal Pharmacopoeia, which ensures the high quality of its practice.

In Britain today, there are three strands to medical practice: official medicine, using mostly modern drugs that are no longer derived from plants; official herbalism, which uses some of our native plants and many others as well; and folk medicine, now largely vestigial, and existing largely in forgotten books and in the minds of relatively few, elderly country people. In this book, I have focused on some individual plants that are native to Britain and tried to show how they have been used in these three separate traditions.

Folk medicine has come in for a lot of scorn and has often been grossly misrepresented. To redress the balance, I have attempted to show that at least some of the valuable medicines currently in use owe their discoveries to folk medicine. So‐called ‘alternative medicine’ in Britain today is a real hotchpotch of sense and nonsense drawn from many continents and cultures. Such remedies can be worthless or even harmful if taken out of context. The preferred term of ‘complementary medicine’ implies that the best from all the different branches of healing may be brought together, but we need first to disentangle some of the threads in order to evaluate the individual remedies.

Obviously modern medicine is here to stay, but it is increasingly clear that we have not yet learned all that we can and should about the potential of our own common‐or‐garden plants. It is said that the inventor of Velcro was inspired by burdock’s hooked bracts, which stick to anything and anyone they come into contact with – we need to look at our other native plants with as fresh an eye. The untapped natural treasures of the plants of the rainforests now form a familiar story, but here on our very doorstep are humble native plants that are as yet unstudied and unappreciated.

Some of these will almost certainly prove valuable in the future. Even a plant as common as the dock has yet to be thoroughly investigated scientifically. Yet I know from personal experience how valuable a dock leaf can be in binding a bleeding cut. Likewise a plantain leaf quickly rubbed on a horse‐fly bite can prevent the swelling and irritation completely. Tansy juice rubbed on the skin deters midges. A fresh leaf of peppermint chewed for indigestion is as effective as any bought remedy and chewing one single fresh leaf of yarrow reduces the severity of a heavy period. These are small examples drawn from my own experience; there are countless others.

COLLECTING FOLK REMEDIES

Folk medicine is primarily an oral tradition, so how can we find out about it? Some historical records are to be found in manuscripts and printed books, in the herbals and floras, in poetry and literature. In addition to these sources, the living memories of those who have used such remedies in their childhood form a gold‐mine of information. The last generation of country people who have actual experience of using the remedies is now very elderly and, in many cases, their knowledge has not been written down nor has it been passed on to a younger generation. The reasons for this are various. It is very striking that many elderly country people disclaim all knowledge of ‘herbal remedies’ but, if asked what their grandmothers did for them when they were ill, will often tell of plant remedies that they regarded just as part of ordinary life – things that ‘everybody knew’. Alas, this is no longer common knowledge and it is of urgent importance that the remaining body of knowledge of folk medicine is not lost.

In my own studies, I have spoken and written to many individuals in my quest for information. Actually finding people who have such knowledge is in itself a challenge. Articles in local newspapers and local radio programmes have been very helpful. But most useful of all has been the proverbial ‘leaning on gates’ approach, simply striking up a conversation with someone who has lived in the country all his or her life. Time and again, I have been told, ‘You should have spoken to old Mrs X/Mr Y. She/he knew all about the plants and what the old folk used them for. But she/he died last year.’

When I have been lucky enough to meet someone who possesses a fund of knowledge, the next challenge has been to record the information. Best practice in oral history is to record interviews. In reality, this is often not easy to achieve. Fired with enthusiasm by a seminar in oral history, I set out one day to ‘interview’ an old man who had worked all his life with shire horses. I approached and knocked on the door, tape‐recorder in hand, but couldn’t make myself heard above the noise of barking. Eventually the door opened, just a crack. When I went in, the dog continued to bark, there was a clock with a very loud tick and the man whom I had come to see had a dreadful‐sounding cough. I shamefacedly hid the tape‐recorder, sat down and listened.

THE FUTURE OF PLANT REMEDIES

What I have found in my own small studies has imbued in me a sense of urgency: this part of our heritage is on the brink of extinction. Together with other, like‐minded people, many of them botanists and herbalists, I belong to a group called Ethnomedica, which has come into being in order to record plant remedies used within living memory. Readers are very welcome to contribute memories of any plant remedies that they have used to Ethnomedica’s growing database (www.rbgkew.org.uk/ethnomedica), based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This mass of information should become an invaluable tool for future research.

It is, at last, becoming recognized that man’s usage of plants may be viewed as a long‐standing clinical trial; remedies that have stood the test of time are likely to be worth further investigation. One might argue that such remembered remedies are more likely to be effective than the copied, re‐copied and garbled versions of early medical practice that have survived in the literature.

One remedy, described to me by a Norfolk lady who has since died, has been the subject of pharmacological studies at Kew and its mode of action is now beginning to be understood. The next challenge is to gather sufficient clinical evidence of its efficacy to persuade the medical profession to adopt it. For this to happen we need a whole new mind‐set.

We need to rid ourselves of the idea that a single ‘active ingredient’ must be the holy grail of plant medicine, since it is now becoming increasingly clear that the vastly complex chemistry of a plant means that an extract of the whole plant acts very differently on the human body from any single ingredient taken from the plant. As we learn more about plant chemistry, we are also beginning better to appreciate that the distinction between food and medicine is a largely artificial one. Every week the press has stories that concern the health‐giving properties of some of our ordinary fruits, seeds and vegetables. We need to combine our knowledge of modern technology and science with the simpler attitude of our forbears, who knew by trial and error which plants were good for them.

In the pages that follow, I have chosen to include all kinds of facts about the 185 plants described and not to limit myself to their purely medicinal uses. In this I am in good company. Turn to the sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century herbalists such as Gerard and Pechey and you will find evocative descriptions alongside information about the plants’ other uses. Modern science has added an extra dimension: the historical uses and mythology of a plant can now often be explained in the light of recent discoveries. For instance, hawthorn flowers have long been regarded as having a deathlike smell and thus as extremely unlucky indoors – analysis has shown that they contain trimethylamine, one of the first products of putrefaction.

I have tried to describe the qualities of some of my favourite native plants, but there is so much more to be said about all of them that this can serve only as the briefest of introductions. I hope that it will whet the reader’s appetite to find out more. My entries are full of quotations from other people’s work and recorded knowledge, from poets and botanists to farriers and farmers. The best way I can thank all these people is to share their insights with you.

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the numerous people who have contributed to this book. Jennifer Westwood first suggested the idea and was instrumental in introducing me to Penguin. Over the years, she and other members of the Folklore Society have been immensely supportive and encouraging. The individuals who have shared their knowledge with me also over many years are too numerous to name here; I thank them all. The staff at Penguin have been unfailingly kind and helpful. Georgina Laycock has nurtured the project and I am very grateful for her unwavering support and enthusiasm. The editorial staff have done their utmost to ensure accuracy in the text; any faults remaining must be mine.

Finally, I would like to thank Roy Vickery for allowing me to use the bistort recipe, Grace Corne for the quotation from Flora, Facts and Fables, and Dr David Allen for allowing me to refer repeatedly to the book that we wrote together.

The author and editor have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but are, of course, delighted to receive any emendations.