The Book of Herbs, Rosalind Northcote [best books to read for self development TXT] 📗
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[60] Blount’s “Jocular Tenures,” 1679.
[61] “History of the Coronation of George IV.” R. Huish.
[62] Published Nineteenth Century, June 1902.
Full many maids clad in their best array,
In honour of the bride come with their flaskets
Fill’d full with flowers: others, in wicker-baskets
Bring from the marish, rushes to o’erspread
The ground whereon to church the lovers tread.
Br. Pastorals, book i.
Drayton, too, alludes to this practice in the “Polyolbion.”
In strewing of those herbs, at bridals us’d that be
Which everywhere they throw with bounteous hands and free.
The healthful balm and mint from their full laps do fly.
Song xv.
And gives a long list of wedding flowers, of which Meadow-sweet (sometimes called bridewort) is one. Gilded Rosemary, or sprigs of Rosemary dipped in sweet waters were used, and Brand gives an account of a wedding where the bride was “led to church between two sweet boys with bride-laces and rosemary tied to their silken sleeves.”[63] Nosegays, too, were gathered for weddings, and Brand quotes a remarkable and cynical passage from “The Plaine Country Bridegroom,” by Stephens: “He shews neere affinitie betwixt marriage and hanging, and to that purpose he provides a great nosegay and shakes hands with everyone he meets, as if he were preparing for a condemned man’s voyage.” Herrick’s lines beginning, “Strip her of spring-time, tender, whimpering maids,” are too well known to repeat, but they tell very prettily which flowers were appropriated to the married and which to the unmarried. Dyer tells us that this custom of strewing them is still kept up in Cheshire, with occasional sad results. Often, the flowers that were strewn were emblematical, and if the bride chanced to be unpopular, she stepped her way to church over flowers whose meanings were the reverse of complimentary!
[63] Popular Antiquities.
Drayton’s contemporaries were more amiable.
And not a garland baldrick-wise doth wear,
Some, of such flowers as to his hand doth hap
Others, such as secret meanings bear.
Shewing her love, and doth requital crave,
Him rosemary, his sweetheart whose intent,
Is that he her should in remembrance have.
Her sage, doth show his sovereignty in all;
The July-flower declares his gentleness;
Thyme, truth; the pansie, heartsease, maidens’ call.
Eclogue ix.
Herbs have pointed proverbs; for instance: “He who sows hatred, shall gather rue,”—a saying which some have found to be “ower-true”; and, “The Herb-Patience does not grow in every man’s garden,”—a piece of wisdom which may be proved only too often. Both these proverbs turn on a pun, but some herbs are alluded to in a literal sense. The old Herbalists used to count Pinks among herbs, and this flower’s name is very commonly heard in the expression: “The pink of perfection.” Mercutio says in Romeo and Juliet, “I am the very pink of courtesy”; a phrase which is wonderfully expressive. Miss Amherst quotes an old ballad to show that the periwinkle was used as a term of praise, for in this, a noble lady, a type of excellence, is called, “The parwink of prowesse.” The inelasticity of modern opinions (on herbs) forbids that I should here go into the history of this most interesting flower, beloved by Rousseau and endowed by the French with magic power. One of their names for it is, Violette de Sorcier. I will only say that the Italians call it the “Flower of the Dead,” and place it on graves; and to the Germans it is the “Flower of Immortality.” In England it was much used in garlands, and it was with Periwinkle that Simon Fraser was crowned in mockery, when in 1306 (after he had been taken prisoner, fighting for Bruce), he rode, heavily ironed, through London to the place of execution.
Clove gillyflowers were admitted, till lately, into the herb-garden, so I may mention that among several cases of nominal rent, land being held on the payment of certain flowers or other trifles, “three clove gillyflowers to be rendered on the occasion of the King’s Coronation,” was once the condition of holding the “lands and tenements of Ham in Surrey.” Roses were the flowers most often chosen for such a purpose, and roses and gillyflowers together were paid as rent by St Andrew’s Monastery in Northampton at the time of its dissolution under Oliver Cromwell. Blount[64] mentions that Bartholomaus Peyttevyn, of Stony-Aston in Somerset, held his lands on the payment of a “sextary” of Gillyflower wine annually, at Christmastide. A “sextary” contained about a pint and a half, sometimes more. “A still more whimsical tenure was that of a farm at Brookhouse, Penistone, York, for which, yearly, a payment was to be made of a red rose at Christmas and a snowball at mid-summer. Unless the flower of the Viburnum or Guelder-rose, sometimes called Snowball, was meant, the payment bill had been almost impossible in those days when ice-cellars were unknown.”[65]
[64] “Jocular Tenures.”
[65] “History of Signboards.”
Clove gillyflowers found their way into Heraldry, and appeared as heraldic emblems, and besides them, Guillim mentions “Rosemary, Sweet Marjoram, Betony, Purslane and Saffron,” being borne in Coat Armour. But, “because such daintiness and affected adornings better befit ladies and gentlemen than knights and men of valour, whose worth must be tried in the field, not under a rose-bed, or in a garden-plot, therefore the ancient Generous made choice rather of such herbs as grew in the fields, as the Cinque-foil, Trefoil,” etc.[66] It is an interesting explanation of the reason that dictated the choice of these two last herbs, often seen in heraldic bearings. One of Guillim’s corrections must specially delight all west country people. The Coat of the Baskerviles of Hereford was: Argent, a cheveron, Gules, between three Hurts. “These (saith Leigh) appear light blue and come of some violent stroke. But, if I mistake not, he is farr wide from the matter... whereas they are indeed a kind of fruit or small round Berry, of colour betwixt black and blue... and in some places called Windberries, and in others Hurts or Hurtleberries.” Guillim knew the popular name of Whortleberries better than did his fellow-author. The idea of choosing three bruises as a “charge” does not seem to have struck Mr Leigh as being at all odd.
[66] Guillim. “Heraldry.”
In Saxony Rue has given its name to an Order. A chaplet of Rue borne bendwise on “barrs of the Coat Armour of the Dukedom of Saxony” (till then “Barry of ten, sable and or,”) was granted by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to Duke Bernard of Anhalt (the first of his house to be Duke of Saxony), at his request, “to difference his arms from his Brothers’,” Otho, Marquis of Brandenberg, and Siegfrid, Archbishop of Breme. This took place in the year 1181, but the Order was not founded till more than six centuries had passed, and was then due to Frederick Augustus, first King of Saxony, who created the Order of the Rautenkrone on the 20th July 1807. In the newspapers of October 24th, 1902, it was announced that the King of Saxony had conferred the Order of the Crown of Rue on the Prince of Wales. Sprigs of Rue are now interlaced in the Collar of the Order of the Thistle, but earlier it was composed of thistles and knots. There is extreme uncertainty as to the origin or this Order, and cold suspicion is thrown on assertions that it was, of old, an established “Fraternity,[67] following the lines of other Orders of Knighthood.” The first appearance of a collar is on the gold bonnet pieces struck in 1539, where King James V. is represented with a collar composed alternately of thistle heads and what seem to be knots or links in the form of the figure 8 or of the letter S, and a similar collar is placed round the Royal Arms in another gold piece of the same year. Collars with knots of a slightly different shape appear on Queen Mary’s Great Seal and on that of James VI. Ashmole says:[68] “It was thought fit that the collars of both the Garter and Thistle of King Charles I. should be used in Scotland, 1633”; but after that the Order seems to have lapsed, for Guillim (Ed. 1679) puts the “Order of Knights of The Thistle or of St Andrewe’s” between the Orders of The Knights of the Round Table and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and speaks of all their rites and ceremonies in the past tense. This seems as if at that period there was an absolute pause in its chequered career. In 1685 it was “revived” by James II. of Great Britain, who created eight knights, but during the Revolution it lapsed again and “lay neglected till Queen Anne in 1703 restored it to the primitive design of twelve Knights of St Andrew” (Every). “By a statute passed in 1827 the Order is to consist of the Sovereign and sixteen Knights” (Burke). Sprigs of Rue do not make their
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