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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Half a Hundred Herbs

The Charm of Nine Herbs – 6 Chamomile

Remember now chamomile * what you made known

what you ordained * at Alford

That no-one should ever * lose his life because of infection

if he had chamomile * with his food.

I’ve struggled a bit with this one, as I can’t imagine cooking with chamomile, but chamomile tea is a great digestive herb, served afterwards as a tea, and has both anti-inflammatory and anti bacterial properties. I knew someone who said she cured an ulcer by drinking chamomile tea, too, so I can imagine it must have saved a few lives in those days.

The official translation of the herb mægðe is mayweed, a common wild plant, but checking with the herbal dictionaries on line, I discovered that, although it is similar to the true chamomile, its chemical components are so much harsher that it has been designated as a poison.I am going with the Roman (true) chamomile, anthemis nobilis, which Grieve identifies as the Saxon ‘maythen’.

The place name Alford is a bit of a puzzle too, though there is an apochryphal reference to the Decrees at Alford, alleged to be when Christ left his apostles significant teachings – including this. Pagans also claim that this is the lore of Woden; I am not sure that contemporary herbalists made much distinction between their sacred sources!

March 25, 2017
The Charm of Nine Herbs – 5 Burdock

A burdock plant photographed in June on the island of Seil.

Put to evil to flight, now burdock,* let the great be diminished

the lesser be increased * until both are healed.

This, I admit, is a weird one, a flight of fancy, perhaps, but not without some thought and information behind it. I had even speculated that these two lines may simply belong to the lines about nettle, and ‘attorlaþe‘ (literally plague-defier’) might simply be a nickname. However, further research indicates otherwise.

Attorlaþe is usually translated as either cockspur grass, or betony, but I haven’t found either option particularly convincing. Cockspur grass has very little use in medicine – the only recorded use is to shorten labour, as the grains often act as host for the fungus ergot. Otherwise it is regarded as poison to cattle and sheep, and an invasive pest. Betony has a long tradition of use as a wound herb, a nerve tonic, to relieve anxiety and calm the digestion, and this looked quite plausible until I found another text which referred to a remedy for coughs – a mixture of betony and ‘lesser attorlaþe’ – which tells me that there must also be a greater variety.

Then there is that rather magical incantatory ‘let the great be diminished, the lesser be increased’. I was baffled by this until I came across the term ‘alterative’ which is used for herbs which are used to restore and rebalance the system, particularly the digestion, liver and kidneys. I looked up native herbs which are used as alteratives, and dandelion and burdock topped the list – and there is both a greater and a lesser burdock used in traditional medicine. I’m not altogether satisfied with this identification; it is no more than a best guess. But it is a guess that does not make the assumption that the charm is no more than a superstitious curiosity, but is a genuine element of the history of herbal medicine.

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March 14, 2017
January Garden

Gloomy as it may look, this is the garden today – cold and damp in the rising wind, but livened by a pheasant I’ve just chased away from the bird feeder. In spite of the cold – and forecast of snow – there’s an air of expectation about it. Birds are significantly noisier than they were, and there seems to be some serious jockeying for territory. The leafy plant is angelica, poised and ready, and snowdrops are emerging from the leaf litter I cleared away yesterday. The woodland bed is looking as if it has come through the winter well so far, with primroses, violets, and cyclamen looking well, and this beauty

seems to be surviving, in spite of the everyone walking over it all last summer, to prune or cut hedges.

I wanted to post this picture, because betony is one of the candidates for the fifth herb – attorlaðe the ‘plague-defier’, next one up in the posts about the Nine herbs charm. I am not happy with this identification, as I’ll discuss when we get there, and even less happy about the default option, cockspur grass. I had an alternative suggestion, but it will have to wait. Deadlines are catching up with me, and there won’t be another Charm post until after StAnza, which this year is very early in March. This may be a blessing in disguise, as someone has pointed me in the direction of an actual medical use for cockspur grass, so when I get a moment, I’m going to have to follow it up, along with a reference I heard on the radio to a healer of the benedicaria tradition from Sicily coming to England in the sixteenth century to study, only to find herself tried as a witch. (Who invited her? Where did she think she was going to study? There was mention of a university connection —) The herbal tradition is much more fascinating than the stereotypes would lead you to believe!

In the meantime I have just heard that the first two cantos of my long poem, The Wren in the Ash Tree, will be included in the next book from The Dark Mountain Project, The Ends of the World. It is due out in May, and if it is even half as good as their most recent volume, Poetics, it will be a wonderful thing to be involved with. This is a really exciting and encouraging way to start 2017.

January 10, 2017
The Charm of Nine Herbs (4) Nettle

Nettle this is called * powerful against sickness.

It drives out pain * it is powerful against sickness.

This is the herb * that fought with the serpent,

It has might against poison, * might against infection,

might against the evil one * who wanders the land.

No controversy about this one – everyone agrees that ‘stiÞe’ is nettle, and all the herbal traditions agree that it is powerful against fevers and inflammation – notoriously used against rheumatism by Roman soldiers – good for the kidneys, and a very useful antihistamine. In many countries the fibres from nettles were used to make a thread that could be woven like linen, ropes, or fishing nets. I have not found any reference to a herb that ‘fought with the serpent’ anywhere, so I can’t account for that, but Grieve says that nettles planted around beehives will deter frogs. I can’t say I ever thought frogs might be a problem, but there you go.

December 6, 2016
The Charm of Nine Herbs – (1) Mugwort

I was hoping the Old English Lacnunga would translate into a good poem for Haggards, but it really doesn’t. I might write my own Charm of Nine Herbs at some point, but while I was working at the original, I have done some research that might be interesting. The link I’ve given is to a parallel text, original and (sort of) translation. It’s not great, but some of the tricky words exist only in this text, and translators seem to choose meanings that fit their own theories. Very few of them seem to have much background knowledge of either herblore or Old English – the Penn State Garden site is an exception here, but does suffer from Dark Age syndrome – where the past is full of magic and ignorance and can safely be assumed to be wrong.

Anyway, I’m going to offer an attempt at translation, and a bit of background research, on the assumption that the Dark Ages might have lacked technical language and scientific theory, but they were good at observation and response.

Mugwort, remember * what you proclaimed,

what you laid down * in the Lord’s Decree.

First, you are called, * oldest of herbs.

You have the power * over three, over thirty.

You have power over venom, * over airborne infection.

You have power over the evil one * who wanders the world.

Mugwort was used to flavour beer, as a substitute for tea, or even tobacco in Orkney, (source Flora Celtica, published by Birlinn Books and edited by William Milliken and Sam Bridgewater). Dried leaves were used to deter fleas and to repel moths. Stems were used to make baskets. It was sometimes known as St John’s girdle, because it was believed St John the Baptist wore it, and was believed to have power to preserve from fatigue, sunstroke, wild beasts and evil spirits. Medicinally it was used for diseases of the stomach and liver, as an antidote to poison, for fevers and nervous conditions (source A Modern Herbal M.Grieve). Credited with magical powers, it was planted to protect a house from elves (Geoffrey Grigson Englishman’s Flora) and was carved on roof bosses in churches, particularly Exeter cathedral.

The Lord’s Decree was popularly held, in early Christian times, to be what Christ taught his disciples between the Resurrection and the Ascension. Of course, where communities were mixed, pagans might have attributed this wisdom to someone else entirely, but healers don’t seem to have worried overmuch. There are references to the Bible and to Woden side by side in this text.

I’ve been a bit baffled by the word ‘attre’, which I have translated as ‘venom’. It means ‘poison’ or ‘plague’, but what I think is meant is ‘contamination’ – poison, literally, but also septicaemia, toxins, pollution or bacterial infection. It is often paired with ‘onflyge’, which means literally ‘flying in’ and must be related to the word ‘influenza’ – disease that comes in the air, or because of the weather. Or as we might say, when there’s something going round.

The evil one, wandering the world, is a reference to Satan in the Book of Job (1:7). It came in handy for Grendel, too.

November 7, 2016
Penn State Garden

In my research for my version of the Old English Charm of Nine Herbs, I came across this site. It’s full of well-researched and fascinating information, which I’m sure will be of value to anyone who followed the Half a Hundred Herbs project.

Penn State Medieval Garden

Give it a glance – you’ll love it!

November 2, 2016
The Charm of Nine Herbs
I’ve been making a translation of the Old English Lacnunga, usually translated as The Charm of Nine Herbs.

This glamorous one is mugwort ‘the first and the oldest of herbs’. The best guess of what the nine herbs are (and this is in serious dispute) is:
- mugwort
- plantain
- stonecrop
- nettle
- betony (possibly cockspur grass, but I’ve never found any medicinal use for that)
- chamomile (or mayweed?)
- crab apple
- thyme (some translations give chervil, but there is no record of medicinal use)
- fennel
I have done a quick run through, but I’m not sharing the result any time soon. Apart from the fact that my Old English grammar is worse than I remembered, some of the words are pretty obscure. I’m going to have to do some homework on it!

But I have already discovered that, despite the reference to Woden in line 34, the charm is neither so pagan nor so magical as is often claimed. There are several references to Christ, plus an extended reference to the Old Testament book of Ezechiel, and some of the text looks like a scratch translation from Latin. It’s not a well-written or a well-preserved document, but it’s fascinating.

Translators seem to have the notion that medieval medicine was a mishmash of ignorance, superstition and magic, and there is very little attempt to make sense of the instructions at the end. The otherwise careful and interesting Penn State Medieval Garden site says:

prose instructions are given to take the above mentioned herbs, crush them to dust, and to mix them with old soap and apple juice.Further instructions are given to make a paste from water and ashes, boil fennel into the paste, bathe it with beaten egg — both before and after the prepared salve is applied.

I don’t think this is the case. That phrase rendered as ‘old soap’ probably means the kind of salve base we would now make from beeswax and almond oil ‘for keeping’. The word ‘sapan’ means something like a gum or resin, a thickener. I found confirmation of this in Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England (1954), where she says that egg yolks are often used as a ‘natural soap to form the emulsion’ in mayonnaise. A ‘dust’ of herbs is foliage finely chopped to make an infusion, and the oil and beaten egg make a poultice or fomentation. The instructions to recite the charm while treating the patient may be magical – after all we are now aware that the placebo effect isn’t a cheat, but a therapy – but it is also quite likely to be a mnemonic, or a way to time the brewing of the infusion, or how long a poultice should be left in place.

The other thing I found delightful is the word ‘onflyge’, which literally means ‘flying in’. It is an airborne infection, as malaria was thought to be. It’s the same word as influenza. This makes me a lot happier than anyone of my age ought to be!

Apart from this, I’ve been at the wonderful Callander Poetry Weekend, and helping to form the infrastructure of a new collective to promote creative writing where I live – the Forth Valley Writers. There will be more about this over the next few weeks. And while I was doing it, the swallows and housemartins have gathered themselves together, and gone. One day last week there were five fledglings (probably a second brood) lined up on a windowsill, waiting to be fed, and then the sky was empty. This morning on the bridge over the river, I looked up to see a cloud of small black birds heading south, and heard the robins and wrens duking it out, singing to claim their territories for the coming winter. Though it is as warm and sunny as any day this year, summer is gone.
September 12, 2016
April Already

I have been slack this year, and the garden is only just beginning to get the attention it needs, but the chives are growing lush and strong.

The knot garden is looking a bit battered – I lost four santolinas, which is a thing I never remember happening before, and I’ve already replaced two rosemary plants, but the big effort this summer is going to be taking cuttings, as insurance against the sort of disaster we had over the winter. I have planted the central triangles with early salad. Only two days later, the slugs have made their presence felt, but I hope that there will be something left for us! I have started plenty of seeds, including more vegetables – beans, welsh onions, cavolo nero and peppers, and some new herbs – anise hyssop and clary sage.

There was a lot of frogspawn, some of which was caught by frost, but you can just see that we have some tadpoles. Last summer very few of them grew up because of the cold and wet, but the weather is more promising – at least so far!

Nesting is in progress, and there is a lot of birdsong. Wrens usually seem rather late to the party compared with great tits, blackbirds and robins, but they are in full voice now, and there is a strong presence from chaffinches and dunnocks. More significant is the snip-snap noise of the chiffchaff, which seems to be the earliest of the summer migrants. There have been sightings of swallows even as close as Edinburgh, but we haven’t seen them yet. I have kept on topping up the bird feeders and we are getting visits from the kind of birds I thought we would only see in winter – reed buntings, yellowhammers, and greenfinches. The sparrows are doing well, and we seem to have a mixed colony of house sparrows and tree sparrows, which is encouraging, as sparrow numbers are causing concern.

The black-backed gull colony came back to find their usual nest site flattened and fenced off, but this didn’t hold them up. For three weeks they established their territories among the rubble, and there seemed to be more of them than ever. And then site investigations started. Now their numbers seem to have halved, but the survivors are occupying chimney pots and harassing the lives out of the buzzards. I’m not convinced that the house martins are going to be any happier when they get back in the next fortnight.

April 20, 2016
Kate Young at Celtic Connections – Umbelliferae

I got to this gig almost inadvertently when it was mentioned at the excellent event Songs of Separation last Thursday as part of Celtic Connections. My ears pricked up when someone mentioned it had something to do with herbs used in highland traditional medicine and I wasn’t too sure what we were going to get, especially as the programme notes said, ‘This concert promises to be a little unconventional’.

Unconventional it certainly was – Kate said at one point , ‘that was the death metal one,’ and mentioned that she had scored one part as ‘utter chaos’, but in fact it was rich, complex, exciting, and as the Scotsman put it in their review, created

a wayward soundscape, whose eldritch tonalities, eerie harmonies and restive rhythmic layers skilfully skirted the familiar and orthodox.

Eldritch might be a bit harsh, but it was certainly a world away from the gentle melodious voices you can hear elsewhere on the folk scene. She had an all-star band too, including the fabulous Robert McFall, whose chamber orchestra plays some of the most eclectic and interesting mix of music I’ve come across in ages.

But the interesting thing to me was the use of traditional herbal knowledge in the songs, which dealt with nettle, marigold, elecampane and bitter gentian, among others. Kate Young cited Mary Beith’s Healing Threads, the Carmina Gadelica and the wonderful resource Tobar an Dualchais, from Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, and with some authority, as she has spent a lot of time researching and working at the Dilston Physic Garden. This project is as much about preserving the knowledge and the connection to the land as it is about creating new music. She incorporates remedies, beliefs and charms into the music, including some recordings from the archives of Tobar an Dulchais, and the sequences finishes with a long piece entitled Remember the Land (which she threatened to send to David Cameron as a protest against fracking).

The concert was filmed, but I have no information about when it might be screened, and there is no indication as yet whether the piece will be recorded. But if it is, do take any opportunity to hear it.

February 2, 2016
Haggard Herbs

I think this is lesser skullcap, which I found growing wild on a grass verge near the local cinema. It’s on a narrow strip of land above a steep bank down to the river, too narrow for anyone to build on, and I’ve found plants there I’ve never seen anywhere else. In parts of Ireland, the word ‘haggard’ describes just this sort of place. Originally it derives from the old Norse ‘hæɡərd’ meaning a small enclosure near a farmhouse where crops were stored, but later it was used to mean the small scraps of land, too small for farm-scale cultivation, where the poor were allowed to grow potatoes for themselves, and later again, land that had been allowed to run wild. I also noticed, when I googled the ON word, that it is now a fictional Irish city which features in a series of apocalyptic fantasy novels, but moving on —-

Actually, that isn’t too far off where I was going with this post. When I was trying to describe the next phase of my writing (both about herbs and about poetry) I caught myself saying that when things get a bit apocalyptic, people start getting into herbs. So things must be fairly apocalyptic just at the moment, wouldn’t you think? The word ‘apocalypse’ might be too strong, but there is a serious disenchantment with the political, economic and social structures of modern life on many levels. There’s a reaction to the way we work at jobs we don’t like for the money to buy goods we need to make up for the time we don’t have; or the way we have to medicate the problems brought on by the life we are expected to live; or the way our lives are constantly being tweaked to suit the systems we set up to make things simpler; or the way shedloads of information we don’t have time to absorb are being thrown at us as a substitute for actually getting to make decisions for ourselves; or the way ‘aspirations’ are distracting us from observations of how life actually is. (This post is turning out a lot more ranty than I expected.)

Last time there was so much going on with herbs was back in the seventies when we had the energy crisis, the three-day week, riots on the streets, the threat of petrol rationing and the imminent collapse of life as we know it (little did we know!). People reacted with the self-sufficiency movement, the slow food movement, the alternative therapy movement, and a whole swathe of folksy picture books teaching you how to make herb teas, pot pourri, candles with dried flowers stuck on them, and nettle soup. Since then cookery has got more serious, herbal medicine has got more scientific (at least at its best), and the herbal beauty industry has got way more commercial. But there’s still an alternative, romantic, recusant vibe about herbs.

It happens often. When St Bernard got sick of how overdeveloped monastic life had got under the regime of Cluny, and he took his followers off to start the Cistercian order, one of his ideals was that the monks should stop going to expensive doctors who prescribed elaborate medicines, but should use ‘simple green herbs’ like the poor did. When the Irish monks went to their hermitages they wrote poems about the herbs they found in the surrounding forest. In the Bible a dinner of green herbs is a life of integrity, as opposed to the rich food and intrigues of the kings palaces. And it is certainly happening now. We are looking to the wild plants of the hedges and the haggards, not just for food, medicine and comfort, but for something symbolic.

The other thing we turn to is art. Of all sorts. Theatre in the prisoner of war camps in the second world war, murals in Northern Ireland, dance in Palestine, and music everywhere – the blues, canto jondo, protest songs of all sorts. And poetry. I wouldn’t have said this twenty years ago, because the intellectual energy seemed to be elsewhere, but it’s certainly back now. People are writing, reading and sharing poetry in ways they haven’t done for years. Poetry is beginning to reflect the lives outside the academic enclosure, use different dialects and registers, take on concerns and experiences that would have been seen as ‘unpoetic’. Poets are no longer cloistered and privileged beings who don’t get their hands dirty, or who need to be protected from the harsh world of ‘real life’, they are in it, activists, carers, fundraisers and recorders of what is happening around us. And people are beginning to see poetry as part of the process of tackling the problems of our lives. What’s named can be mended.

So both sides of my writing life are in the haggards – the wild outside places, where we might find new ways of coming to terms with the hard places of life, both practical and artistic. It’s a very interesting place to be.

S

January 8, 2016

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