MEDIEVAL HERBAL

REMEDIES
T HE O LD E NGLISH H ERBARIUM
AND A NGLO -S AXON M EDICINE
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BY A N N E VA N A R S DA L L

Illustrations by
Robby Poore

RO U T L E D G E
NEW YORK AND LONDON
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Published in 2002 by
Routledge
270 Madison Ave,
New York NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Copyright © 2002 by Routledge.

Illustrations copyright © 2002 by Robby Poore.

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

Transferred to Digital Printing 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

Medieval herbal remedies/Anne Van Arsdall

ISBN10: 0-415-93849-X (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-415-88403-9 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-93849-5 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88403-7 (pbk)
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For Aunt Mary Lou, Robby, Jonathan, and Jay

 Neither the author nor the publisher recommends or advises using any of the
herbal remedies provided in this book. Instead, we advise considering the
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herbal remedies herein as historical documents that increase our understand-

ing of medieval healing practices. Please consult a physician concerning
medical questions.
 Contents

Foreword ix
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Linda Ehrsam Voigts

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii

CHAPTER 1
OSWALD THE OBSCURE: THE LIFELONG
DISAPPOINTMENTS OF T. O. COCKAYNE 1

CHAPTER 2
COCKAYNE’S HERBARIUM 35

CHAPTER 3
THE OLD ENGLISH HERBARIUM IN A LARGER
EUROPEAN CONTEXT 68

CHAPTER 4
THE HERBARIUM: MANUSCRIPTS, ILLUSTRATIONS,
AND THE NEED FOR A NEW TRANSLATION 101

CHAPTER 5
A NEW TRANSLATION OF THE OLD ENGLISH HERBARIUM
Herbarium: Contents 119
Herbarium: Remedies 138
References 231
Index of Plant Names 243
Index of Medical Complaints 253
General Index 257

vii
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 Foreword
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It is a curious situation when a medieval text stands twice in need of rescue if

it is to be understood and valued by modern readers, but that is the case for
the Old English Herbarium. This medical and botanical treatise, written in
the language of the Anglo-Saxons at the end of the first millennium, requires
an accurate and lucid translation if it is to be used by those who value knowl-
edge of the science and healing arts in an earlier era. Happily, Anne Van Ars-
dall has produced for this volume such a skilled and readable translation,
based on the 1984 De Vriend edition.
Van Arsdall has, however, provided us with more than a useful translation
from the Old English. She also has made clear why the Herbarium has been for
more than a century neglected at best and misunderstood at worst, for the work
has been available to those lacking specialized expertise in Old English only
through the strange but influential 1864 translation and commentary by the
Rev. T. Oswald Cockayne. Van Arsdall has rescued this text not only from the
barriers presented to modern readers by Old English but also from the obfusca-
tions and confusions of Cockayne’s translation in his Leechdoms, Wortcunning,
and Starcraft of Early England, the only modern English version available until
the twenty-first century. In the process she has brought to light striking infor-
mation about the sad life and death of this Victorian London schoolmaster.
Cockayne’s story calls to mind the sufferings of Dickens’ fictional world as
well as the intellectual milieu depicted in K. M. Elisabeth Murray’s Caught in
the Web of Words and Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman.
Although Van Arsdall’s careful and vigorous translation of the Old Eng-
lish Herbarium and the strange story of Cockayne are reasons enough to
value this book, her study makes other significant contributions. She sets this
Anglo-Saxon work in an early-medieval medical context, and she clarifies its
uses with recourse to contemporary practice of herbal medicine in Hispanic
America that derives from medieval Europe.

ix
 x Foreword

The Herbarium, attributed wrongly to Apuleius Platonicus, was one of a

number of Old English texts—occupying some thousand manuscript
pages—that mark the first flowering of vernacular medical writing in
medieval Europe. It is an expanded version of a late Roman treatise that sur-
vives in Old English in four manuscripts, one of them strikingly illustrated
(British Library Cotton MSS, Vitellius C. iii). This text is by no means a
mindless translation of Mediterranean herbal remedies; rather it displays
practical knowledge of plants widely available in Anglo-Saxon England
through cultivation and import. Van Arsdall adds to our understanding of the
uses of this text by drawing on present-day curandera practices in the south-
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western United States. She makes a cogent argument that texts like the Old
English Herbarium served as aide-mémoire for the apprenticeship system
that trains traditional healers.
This volume provides insight into the origin and uses of this remedy
book of some 185 plants. It also explains its vexed reception since Cock-
ayne’s mid-nineteenth century translation, situates the Old English Herbar-
ium in the context of living traditions of healing, and allows the reader to
encounter it directly in a clear and graceful translation.

LINDA EHRSAM VOIGTS

 Acknowledgments
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My heartfelt thanks go to Professor Michael MacMahon of the University of

Glasgow for his unselfish assistance in helping to obtain often hard-to-find
information about Oswald Cockayne, for sharing his knowledge about the
nineteenth century, and for his continued encouragement with my work. I
thank Professor Maria Amalia D’Aronco of the University of Udine for sup-
plying me with vital materials related to the Old English Herbarium and for
sharing with me her knowledge of medieval herbals and philology. It was
generous of Prof. D’Aronco to send me unpublished material to use and to
help me from afar. I am indebted to Professor Linda Ehrsam Voigts of the
University of Missouri at Kansas City for her guidance and encouragement
as this work progressed. I am grateful to Stephanie Ball, M.D., for her will-
ingness to answer questions about medical conditions and medical practices
as well as for her enthusiasm about medieval medicine.
I thank the professors at the University of New Mexico who helped shape
this study: in particular Drs. Helen Damico and Donald Sullivan, and Drs.
David Bennahum, Patrick Gallacher, Claire Waters, and Gail Houston. Hats off
to the staff of Interlibrary Loan at Zimmerman Library, University of New Mex-
ico for performing miracles. I am indebted to the College of Arts and Sciences
of the university for its award of an academic fellowship supporting my study.
My thanks to the staff at Harvard’s Houghton and Widener libraries for their
helpfulness in the fall of 1998 while I was using the Cockayne collection. I am
grateful to Professor Peter Bierbaumer of the University of Gratz for giving me
copies of his out-of-print works on Anglo-Saxon botanical terms. At Sandia
National Laboratories, for their continued support, I thank Drs. Nancy Jackson
and James E. Miller, as well as my supervisors and colleagues there who often
accommodated an erratic work schedule so that I could complete this work.
To my wonderful family, thank you all, not only for your support and
love through it all, but for the humor that keeps me from taking myself too

xi
 xii Acknowledgments

seriously. Special acknowledgment to my brothers Clyde and Bob, my

sisters-in-law Sybil and Inez, and to my extraordinary daughters-in-law
Lynne and Stacy for their never flagging encouragement, and to Isabelle
and those to come, who give us hope for the future. Last but not least in the
family, Mephisto, thank you for your long years of comfort. Finally, to Dr.
Werner Paul Friederich, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
and to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, my appreciation for a lifetime of
inspiration.
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 Introduction
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The Old English Herbarium, an Anglo-Saxon medical text from about A.D.
1000, is a translation of a fifth-century Latin work containing information on
medicinal plants, the names of conditions for which they are beneficial, and
directions for making remedies with them. The Old English Herbarium and
its Latin predecessor are somewhat terse written legacies from the early-
medieval period, when healing was based largely on plants and other natural
substances. The work is valuable for the history of medicine because it is
strikingly similar in manner of presentation, content, and seeming impreci-
sion to modern texts on herbal medicine, a field to which modern pharma-
ceutical research is now turning for new or alternative therapies. A thesis
advanced here is that these medical texts, medieval and modern, assume the
user already has a great deal of familiarity with such material and knows how
to diagnose conditions and make the remedies listed. The texts are not
intended to be instructional, but are like cookbooks for experienced cooks.
For many decades, the Herbarium has been depicted as having been
nearly useless in Anglo-Saxon England because it is a translation of a Latin
work, the issue being whether the plants mentioned would have been avail-
able in the British Isles and whether the Anglo-Saxons actually used (or were
capable of using) remedies from a supposedly foreign, Continental tradition.
Such a depiction is demonstrated here to be erroneous, and the intent of this
work is to present the Herbarium in a new and more positive context within
the mainstream of Anglo-Saxon and European medieval healing practice.
This work is structured in two parts. Part 1, comprising chapters 1 and 2,
shows how a once vital medical text was transformed into a literary curiosity.
Part 2, chapters 3, 4, and 5, places the Herbarium in an early medieval, pan-
European cultural and textual tradition and interprets its contents using living
traditions of herbology and modern biochemical investigations; a new trans-
lation of the Herbarium makes up chapter 5.

xiii
 xiv Introduction

The argument presented here is that when the Rev. T. Oswald Cock-
ayne’s 1864 Rolls Series edition and translation of the Old English Herbar-
ium appeared in his Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early
England, it constituted a major transformation of what had been a book for
healers. Put into a style that was controversial and antiquated even in 1864,
and prefaced by biased remarks about the healing tradition to which it
belonged, the Old English Herbarium emerged as a work that was of interest
only to literary specialists. The original Latin text had been a standard refer-
ence work throughout medieval Europe, including Anglo-Saxon England, yet
the preface Cockayne wrote for the Old English version of it suggests it had
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been of little use to the Anglo-Saxons because it was a translation from Latin
and belonged to a classical or rational tradition that was alien to Anglo-Saxon
healers. In addition, Cockayne’s emphasis on the magical, superstitious, and
other nonrational elements in the Herbarium and other medieval medical
works has contributed to a generally negative and close-minded perception of
medieval medicine generally. As discussed here, the bulk of medieval mate-
rial is not superstitious or magical, but straightforward treatment using
medicinal plants.
Chapter 1 presents much new material about Cockayne (1807–73), the
editor and translator of the Old English medical texts, a man who experi-
enced many disappointments in mid-nineteenth-century London. He aspired
to be recognized as an Anglo-Saxon scholar and philologist, and he was a
prolific writer and translator, all the while teaching classics to schoolboys in
the basement rooms of King’s College School. Dismissed summarily from
his position when he was at an age to retire, his life ended tragically not long
thereafter on the cliffs of Cornwall. His historical and cultural biases are
reflected in his many works, most of which have long been forgotten but are
reviewed here, together with a lost battle Cockayne fought with the eminent
Joseph Bosworth, the first professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. The details
of Cockayne’s final days, generally not known, also are here.
Chapter 2 discusses how Cockayne transformed the Old English
Herbarium into a literary curiosity, thereby making it into what might be
termed “Cockayne’s Herbarium.” The state of medicine in mid-nineteenth-
century England is reviewed to depict the world of medicine during Cock-
ayne’s life; it was a state much closer to the medieval world than our own. In
addition, his style of translation is shown to be attuned to the practices of the
archaizing writers of his time, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
for example, but because the style rings today (and to his time) awkwardly,
arcanely, and obscurely, it makes what had been a serious medical text sound
ridiculous. Finally, the chapter shows how subsequent scholars have tended
wrongly to pursue and to emphasize Cockayne’s suggestion that the Old
English Herbarium was part of a classical tradition and beyond the intellec-
tual grasp of the Anglo-Saxons, considering two other Old English works,
 Introduction xv

Bald’s Leechbook and the Lacnunga, to be more representative of Anglo-

Saxon medicine.
Chapter 3 places the Latin Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius, the original
for the Old English work, into a unique medieval medical tradition, with ele-
ments drawn from classical and other sources. The Herbarium of Pseudo-
Apuleius is a compilation that was used throughout medieval Europe, and
chapter 3 shows that the medicinal plants for which it calls were available
from southern Europe into the British Isles. It also draws analogies to the
modern curandera tradition in the southwestern United States (with its roots
in medieval Spain) and to modern herbology to demonstrate that the manner
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of healing outlined in the Herbarium is adaptable enough to be tailored to

plants in different climates and to peoples in very different times. This tradi-
tion relies on apprenticeship with an experienced healer, knowledge of
medicinal plants and how to administer them, and to a lesser extent, texts that
record the plants and their use for certain conditions. For this reason, the
Herbarium can best be understood not only from what is found in the written
text, but in the context of this healing tradition, which exists today much as it
did then. Finally, modern scientific approaches to the contents of the Herbar-
ium of Pseudo-Apuleius and its Old English translation are showing that
some of the cures are beneficial, and that in fact the uses for some of the
medicinal plants may suggest new cures for the present.
Chapter 4 discusses the manuscripts in which the Old English Herbar-
ium is found as well as the debates concerning its dating and possible prede-
cessors. Discussions concerning the illustrations in MS Cotton Vitellius C iii
also are reviewed briefly in this chapter. The chapter closes with an assess-
ment of Cockayne’s 1864 translation and a justification for this new one.
Anyone reading Cockayne knows that a new translation is very much
needed to make this text comprehensible to those who read neither Old Eng-
lish nor Latin and are not familiar with anachronistic nineteenth-century
English. The translation relies upon experience with the modern practice of
herbal medicine, drawing upon this still vital tradition to interpret the
Herbarium’s terse directions. The underlying premise of the translator is
that this is an important work, exemplifying a dynamic type of medieval
medical text used throughout Europe, one that merits serious attention.
Chapter 5 is a new translation of the Old English Herbarium, including its
contents list.
The title of the work implies that the Old English Herbarium is an herbal
(a book of plants), but instead it is a remedy book based on 185 medicinal
plants, which are listed by name. Following the name are conditions the plant
helps alleviate, then directions on how to administer it, either alone or with
other ingredients. The classical herbal certainly is its basis, but both the Old
English Herbarium and the Latin work from which it was translated repre-
sent another, albeit slightly different in genre, as discussed in chapter 3. In
 xvi Introduction

“Herbals: Their History and Significance,” George H. M. Lawrence explains

the term “herbarium” as follows:

The noun herb arose in the Middle Ages from the Latin herbarius, which was
then analogous to the congener bestarius, the latter being a work about
beasts, or animals. At that time the masculine form herbarius was used to
identify a herb-gatherer, or herbalist, while the neuter form herbarius [sic, the
editor made a mistake, the word here should be herbarium] was used for the
place where the herbs were grown, i.e., the herb garden. The herbarium of
that time and well into the sixteenth century had a second definition—a place
where the herbs were depicted, such as an album of drawings or illustrations
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of them; notes about them often would be included. A herbarium, then, could
be either an herb garden or a portfolio or book. (Lawrence 1965, 3–4)

He says in later years “herbarium” was restricted to denote only a volume or

portfolio of pressed or preserved plants—the antecedent of the term herbar-
ium as it is used today. The classic herbal was more a botanical work, often
illustrated, Dioscorides’ Materia Medica and the herbals of the Renaissance
being characteristic.
Seminal articles on herbals (and medieval medicine) can be found in
Jerry Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
(1999a) and Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany
(1999b). Interesting general books on herbals include Agnes Arber, Herbals:
Their Origin and Evolution, A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670
(1938) and The Illustrated Herbal by Wilfrid Blunt and Sandra Raphael
(1979).

About the Illustrations

Through the many centuries of the late classical and medieval periods, it was
traditional for manuscript illustrators to base their renditions of plant, animal,
and other figures on earlier works. We continue this ancient tradition here.
With the facsimile edition of the Old English Herbarium by D’Aronco and
Cameron on a drafting table beside him, artist Robby Poore (a graphic
designer for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) took up the
challenge of making original drawings of thirty of the plants from the
Herbarium and a representative snake and scorpion to accompany this trans-
lation. We hope the anonymous illustrators of yore will smile on our work.
 1
Oswald the Obscure
The Lifelong Disappointments of
T. O. Cockayne
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Where art thou, O nameless one?

And dost thou laugh to look upon
My eagerness thy tale to read
Midst such changed hope and fear and need?
Or somewhere near me dost thou stand,
And through the dark reach out thine hand?
Yea, are we friends?
—William Morris,
Envoi to the Eyrbyggja Saga, 1870

In a listing of Anglo-Saxon scholars by importance, somewhere toward the

end, but certainly present, would be the Rev. T. Oswald Cockayne (1807–73).
Cockayne was the first (and so far the only) person to transcribe from the
original eleventh-century manuscripts and translate into modern English the
three major Anglo-Saxon medical manuscripts—the Old English Herbarium,
Bald’s Leechbook, and the Lacnunga, which he published in three volumes in
1864 under the title Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early Eng-
land.1 This is now virtually the only work for which he is known.
Only the briefest biographical details are generally given about Cock-
ayne’s life. The following pages have the first comprehensive account to
date, containing details that are not widely known, such as his enigmatic rela-
tionship with some of the British circle of more famous mid-nineteenth-
century early English scholars, Henry Sweet (1845–1912), W. W. Skeat
(1835–1912), and Joseph Bosworth (1789–1876). Also of interest is that by
1878, only a few years after Cockayne’s death, the American book collector
William Medlicott already owned most of Cockayne’s personal library and
some of his handwritten notebooks. When Medlicott offered his extensive
library for sale that year, Harvard purchased most of the Cockayne material,
and it remains in the Houghton and Widener Libraries.2

1
 2 Medieval Herbal Remedies

The facts of Cockayne’s life are the stuff of a bittersweet Victorian

novel. An ordained minister, Cockayne obtained a master’s degree in 1835
when he was twenty-eight, and seven years later he became a schoolmaster,
teaching Latin, Greek, and mathematics in the basement rooms of a boy’s
school in London. There he stayed for twenty-seven years (1842–69), when
he was summarily dismissed from his position at the age of sixty-two without
a pension. Only a few years later, in 1873, he allegedly committed suicide.
When mention is made of Cockayne today, he is generally assumed to have
been an eminent nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon scholar, but the details of
his life do not bear out this assumption. His feat in transcribing and translat-
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ing the Old English medical texts, together with his other laborious and now
overlooked contributions to scholarship, become all the more monumental
when the facts about his tragic life are known.

Cockayne, the Philologist: The Lost Battle with Bosworth

Before translating the Old English Herbarium in the early 1860s, Cockayne
published an odd assortment of works: Civil History of the Jews (1845), A
Greek Syntax with Metrical Examples (1846), History of France (1848; sec-
ond revised edition 1850), History of Ireland for Families and Schools
(1851), and Life of Marshal Turenne (1858). His Civil History of the Jews,
which saw two editions in 1845, showed him to be a biblical literalist:
“Sacred and profane history spring from separate fountains, and flow in
separate streams, and yet they unite in certain particulars to prove that the
miracles of the Exodus are real events.”3 Cockayne’s expressed intent in
writing the work was to locate exactly where biblical events occurred, quot-
ing from such sources as, for example, “Mr. Burckhardt’s Travels in Syria
of 1822” and “Ignatius of Rheinfelden” from 1656 to shed light on biblical
stories using the type of citations popular in the nineteenth century: cryptic
author names of mostly forgotten works at the bottom of the page, some-
times with a volume or page number, often without, for example, “Mr. Clin-
ton’s Fasti, vol. 1.” Though he did not say it in so many words, Cockayne
obviously thought little had changed in the Holy Land since the time of the
prophets.
Cockayne’s scholarly interests, mirrored in his publications, turned to
Anglo-Saxon studies with a passion—the early 1860s marked a flurry of
works on philology and Old English. He published two philological works,
Spoon and Sparrow (1861) and Narratiunculae Anglice Conscriptae (1861),4
and three translations/editions for the Early English Text Society, Ste.
Marherete the Meiden ant Martyr (1862), Hali Meidenhad (1866), and
Juliana (1872) with Edmund Brock. The three-volume Leechdoms, Wortcun-
ning, and Starcraft of Early England, published in the Rolls Series
(1864–66) later became Cockayne’s best known work. Appearing intermit-
 Oswald the Obscure 3

tently was The Shrine: A Collection of Papers on Dry Subjects, in 13 Parts

(1864–70),5 presenting short essays and transcriptions of Old English texts.
The quaintness of his original titles mirrored his penchant for an arcane style
of translation and a love of older languages.
Cockayne’s publications on philology give an insight into the field of
Early English studies as it was developing in the mid-to-late-1800s and
reveal a particular Weltanschauung from the middle of the Victorian Age,
rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible, just as the Darwinian theory of
evolution—and concurrently theories of language evolution—were emerg-
ing. This was a seminal era for linguistics, the connection between Sanskrit
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and the European languages having been asserted, challenged, and generally
accepted. Considerable discussion then ensued in terms of explaining the
connection between languages, when the possible relationship of Western
languages to Sanskrit and Hebrew was being debated—but Cockayne was
not in the mainstream of the debate.6 The important element for him was that
any linguistic study had to be compatible with a literal interpretation of the
Bible, and his real interest in languages was cultural, not linguistic. He pre-
ferred to focus on social customs and the evolution of meaning as found in
written texts, not on descriptions of language change and language families
apart from the texts.
Spoon and Sparrow7 was Cockayne’s major, if unheralded, contribution
to linguistics and philology. He stated in it that an early form of Teutonic
coexisted with Homeric Greek, Phoenician, biblical Hebrew, Latin, and San-
skrit. He reasoned that because the world’s languages were differentiated by
the Lord at Babel, the changes in language groups could be traced to this
event. For him, a key to understanding these changes was word borrowing,
and vocabulary is the important word here. Cockayne’s quest was to establish
word families and to trace who borrowed what word from whom. He soundly
rejected derivational explanations: “Nobody, it may be presumed, is bound to
pin his faith upon all that everybody has said about derivations from the san-
skrit. . . . Latin and greek words must be like the sanskrit both in shape and
sense, and variations must in some way explained or paralleled, or else the
comparison is unconvincing” (Spoon, 4).8
Rather than seeking to formulate general laws, Cockayne used a plethora
of invented rules to distinguish borrowed words from what he called “true
parallels.” In his publications, Cockayne was very much the Victorian scholar
in using no footnotes, no explanation of the reasons behind his pronounce-
ments, and no appeal to any authority but his own judgment. His study of
words resembles somewhat the method for compiling the Oxford English
Dictionary and its quest to ascertain the original meaning of words in English
(and Cockayne liked to point out wrong usage).
Cockayne’s etymological method, if it can be called that, is not easy to
follow; a typical explanation is the following:
 4 Medieval Herbal Remedies

Some instinctive tests exist by which to discriminate between borrowed

words and true parallels. Thus compounds can hardly be accepted [as true
parallels?] . . . Afformative letters added to the visible root afford a strong
ground of suspicion. Yet I would say “instinctive tests” rather than rules, for
it is not reasonable to suppose but that old roots had acquired some affor-
mative letters while still some of the kindred nations were undivided from
each other. (Spoon, 7)
One or two principles may seem here sometimes to be tacitly assumed
without proof; one is, that in the same syllables, or more exactly, in varied
forms of equivalents, that which retains the greater number of letters is the
more ancient. . . . [I]n such instances as May,
 (pl.), Magnus, the
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shorter form of May [i.e., the English word] is older, having none of the
afformative syllables of the others. In this instance a root which to Homer
800 B.C. had perished, and was dead of age, still survives in the common
talk of England. (Spoon, 8)

Cockayne’s personal sense of the original languages, Teutonic among

them, was his major justification for conclusions about what must have been
the original words in Teutonic and other languages. His supposed proofs of
relationships among words across language families are actually descriptions
of how words might be assumed to be related based on comparisons of
vaguely similar meaning. Spoon and Sparrow has nearly a thousand num-
bered paragraphs, each illustrating findings such as those provided in the
examples above.
Cockayne did not know that he was considering words in languages
from quite different ages and at various developmental stages, a factor the
newer German-based linguistics was beginning to recognize. The concept
was emerging of a parent language (Indo-European) behind even Sanskrit
and ancient Greek for a certain number of the world’s languages, not for all
of them, and the new concepts did not involve a need for Babel. Indeed, it
was becoming extremely difficult by 1861, when Spoon and Sparrow was
published, to reconcile common reckonings of time based on the Bible and
what linguistics was demonstrating. This was a period when the traditional
world view based on the biblical account was under siege on all fronts and
was slowly giving way to a new one based on Darwin and evolution. Cock-
ayne was not alone in clinging to the old.
Cockayne maintained that (at least when he was living) much of English
usage had, in fact, never been written down, and to back himself up, cited
several words and phrases used in the countryside that were not in any dic-
tionary. For this reason, he thought many ancient Teutonic words also
remained unknown. Here may be the major reason Cockayne chose to tran-
scribe and translate the Anglo-Saxon medical texts; he may have hoped to
find a medical or plant vocabulary that was unique to Teutonic. At paragraph
twenty-three in Spoon and Sparrow, he makes the interesting observation:
 Oswald the Obscure 5

The deficiencies of the vocabulary of anglosaxon books are supplied by

glossaries. How many must have been the words that Ælfric never heard,
how many that he refused to admit when he did hear them, how many that
did not present themselves while compiling a glossary. A small examination
of unpublished manuscripts will soon convince any one who can read the
language, that the admirable industry of Lye and Manning had not com-
pleted the whole task: nor has any one equal to the undertaking yet
appeared. . . . Modern lexicon makers are not to be named in the same page
as the old heroes of this battle. (Spoon, 10)

Edward Lye (1694–1767) did not live to see the publication of his Dic-
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tionarium saxonico et gothico-latinum, which was edited and published with

his memoirs in 1772 by Owing Manning (1721–1801). One biographer in the
British Biographical Archives called Lye “a learned divine,” and his dictio-
nary was a standard authority in the nineteenth century. Cockayne, W. W.
Skeat, and others always referred to it simply as Lye and Manning. The mod-
ern “lexicon maker” to whom Cockayne refers here is Prof. Joseph
Bosworth, whose Anglo-Saxon Dictionary appeared in 1838.
Nearly buried toward the end of Spoon and Sparrow is a statement by
the author that reveals the keen disappointment Cockayne must have felt
most of his life, after sifting through uncounted numbers of words in so many
languages, producing so many works, teaching, and being virtually ignored.
He was clearly thwarted in his desire to be recognized as a philologist. He
wrote here that he wanted to gain the reader’s confidence by testing his own
theories on numerals and some common proper names. “That I am surprised
at the results would be a small thing to say; though they are imperfect and
partial, I trust that they will win the assent of all scholars in Europe: and if
so, they cannot fail to lead on to an application of the ordinary principles of
philology in the case of the hebrew, and to bring it more or less within the
reach of illustration from other tongues” [emphasis added] (Spoon, 265).
Spoon and Sparrow certainly did not garner Cockayne the assent of many—
if any—scholars in Europe, and its author continued to be largely ignored.
Cockayne may have modeled Spoon and Sparrow on Professor Joseph
Bosworth’s 1836 The Origin of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages,
which was also organized into numbered paragraphs. Bosworth was a well-
known authority on Anglo-Saxon at the time, being the first professor of the
subject at Oxford and the editor of a dictionary of Old English, a publication
over which he and Cockayne would soon spar, as discussed below. There is
no doubt that Cockayne knew Bosworth’s publications. In The Origin of the
Germanic Languages, Bosworth showed himself to be a biblical literalist like
Cockayne and many people of his day, at one point stating: “The minute
investigation of language is not only important in examining the mental pow-
ers, but in bearing its testimony to the truth of Revelation, and in tracing the
origin and affinity of nations.”9 Bosworth explained that at Babel, the Lord
 6 Medieval Herbal Remedies

confused the pronunciation of an original language so that people could not

understand one another. His explanation of language change was more suited
to the linguistic reasoning of the German school than Cockayne’s, even if in
particulars Bosworth was not entirely correct. Consequently, Bosworth was
able to accept the new linguistics much more readily than Cockayne.
The year that Spoon and Sparrow was published, Cockayne suffered a
major disappointment. He applied for an honorary title from King’s College
and was turned down. Yet by the time he petitioned for the honorary title,
Cockayne had published Narratiunculae Anglice Conscriptae and Spoon
and Sparrow, both of them philological works, and he was at work on an
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edition/translation of the Old English Seinte Marherete. The procedure for

granting an honorary title had recently been created at the University Col-
lege of London at the time Cockayne made his request, so the request would
not have been unusual.10 Among the few details Charles Singer offers about
Cockayne is the college’s refusal to grant him “. . . the title of Honorary Pro-
fessor of Philology in the College, though he had well earned it by his writ-
ings” (Singer in Cockayne 1961, 1:xvii). About the same time (1861–62),
records of the Philological Society show that Cockayne left the society,
which he had joined in 1843, a year after its foundation. His resignation is
surprising, because this society was at the center of the linguistic/philologi-
cal debate, and its members encompassed the leading philologists in Eng-
land. What may have happened to cause him to leave the society and
whether the reason or reasons were connected with the denial of his hon-
orary title is not clear, but the two events were so close in time, they almost
certainly were related and did not bode well for his fortunes as a scholar of
early English.
In spite of these personal setbacks, Cockayne began to transcribe and
translate the major Anglo-Saxon medical manuscripts, which the Rolls Series
published as Leechdoms, Wortcraft, and Starcunning of Early England in
three volumes from 1864–66. It is unfortunate that the publication records of
the Leechdoms, part of the Longman’s Company archives housed at Reading
University, have disappeared, apparently destroyed during bombings in
World War II. G. Michael C. Bott of the Reading library related: “It is curious
not to find a ledger entry [on Cockayne’s volumes] since the series of ledgers,
commission and divide, are unbroken (despite the fires!) from ca. 1800; curi-
ous too that Cockayne’s volumes are not mentioned in Longman’s trade mag-
azine Notes on Books which starts in the 1850s.”11 It would be interesting to
know whether the Rolls Series approached Cockayne to do the work or
whether he offered to do it, and whether he was paid.
Evidence from Cockayne’s personal notebooks at Harvard and essays
published in The Shrine show him to have been extremely interested in the
vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxons. In fact he clearly believed he was a more
reliable authority on the vocabulary and language of Old English than
 Oswald the Obscure 7

Bosworth, because at about this time, 1863–64, he tried unsuccessfully to

become part of the Anglo-Saxon dictionary that Bosworth was revising.
It seems that Cockayne sent a letter to Oxford University demanding he
be named joint or chief editor of the dictionary with his name on its title
page, saying he expected to be well paid for his services. If Oxford did not
meet his demands, Cockayne said he would publish a pamphlet about
Bosworth’s deficient knowledge of Old English. He even sent Bosworth a
draft of the text, saying he planned to send it further “to all the Reviews and
to men of influence in Oxford and London,” a quote from a defense of
Bosworth that was published soon after Cockayne made good on his threat
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and published the anti-Bosworth pamphlet.12 It appears that Cockayne never

received a reply to his demands from anyone, and in 1864, he published “Dr.
Bosworth and His Saxon Dictionary” in The Shrine. Cockayne subsequently
never denied having made the demands.
C. B. Thurston, an Oxford associate of Bosworth’s, explained in his
nineteen-page-long A Few Remarks in Defense of Dr. Bosworth that no reply
was sent to Cockayne because his accusations were so off-base, nobody
thought Cockayne would dare publish them. Thurston gave the reason for
Bosworth’s silence as “the style and spirit of the [Cockayne’s] whole pam-
phlet, which appeared a sufficient answer, especially in Oxford, where the
high tone of gentlemanly feeling, which pervades the whole University, can-
not endure such assumptions and personalities; he [Bosworth] therefore let
the matter rest” (Thurston, 5).
Much later, J. J. R. Tolkien quoted from Cockayne’s attack on Bosworth
to begin his landmark 1936 lecture, “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Crit-
ics”: “In 1864 the Reverend Oswald Cockayne wrote of the Reverend Doctor
Joseph Bosworth, Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon: ‘I have tried to
lend to others the conviction I have long entertained that Dr. Bosworth is not
a man so diligent in his special walk as duly to read the books . . . which have
been printed in our old English, or so-called Anglosaxon tongue. He may do
very well for a professor.’ These words were inspired by dissatisfaction with
Bosworth’s dictionary, and were doubtless unfair.”13
More than dissatisfaction, indeed, deep-seated anger appears to have
prompted Cockayne to publish eleven pages of bitter indictments in “Dr.
Bosworth and His Saxon Dictionary,” beginning “Should it be made
clear . . . that any new edition prepared by Dr. Bosworth can hardly be free
from grave errors, it must be the most anxious wish of all who respect that
most noble home and nursery of learning, that the responsibility for those
errors shall rest with Dr. Bosworth alone [and not be associated with Oxford]”
(Shrine, 1). While admitting that Bosworth’s 1855 Compendious Anglo-Saxon
Dictionary had some merit, Cockayne questioned what readers might expect
from a new and improved edition, surmising the new edition might now to its
detriment include linguistics (philology for Cockayne), saying “. . . but it is
 8 Medieval Herbal Remedies

not comparative philology (filology) nor Bopp nor Pott nor an army of Ger-
man fanatics in languages, that we want in a Saxon Dictionary. We look for a
work that shall reassure young students, that shall shew them their way in old
English sentences, that shall convince them that our old tongue was grammat-
ical and that its periods will bear the ordinary tests” (Shrine, 2). The “German
fanatics” to whom Cockayne refers were Franz Bopp (1791–1867) and
August Friedrich Pott (1802–87). Bopp was a well-known German linguist
who published his Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and
Teutonic Languages in 1816, looking particularly at the grammatical structure
of these languages. He continued to add more languages to what was emerg-
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ing as an Indo-European language group. The place of Sanskrit in this scheme

was debated—was it the parent language or a brother to Latin and Greek?
Bopp took the brother approach; some like August Schleicher sought an
Ursprache (possibly Sanskrit) and wrote about languages in terms of youth,
maturity, and decay, a theory that was mirrored by many historians of the time
about the evolution of societies. Pott wrote Einleitung in die Allgemeine
Sprachwissenschaft, but was not as well known as Bopp.
Cockayne then turned his attention in the attack to Bosworth’s creden-
tials, saying that he doubted whether the Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon
had even bothered to read any Anglo-Saxon or the standard authors on the
subject:

Up to this point I have tried to lend to others the conviction I have long
entertained, that Dr. Bosworth is not a man so diligent in his special walk,
as duly to read the books, especially the Gospels, which have been printed
in our old English, or so called Anglosaxon, tongue. He may do very well
for a Professor, but before the University of Oxford shares with him the title
page of a dictionary I will try to make my voice, feeble as I know it to be,
heard on the other side. Let me now proceed to prove, if I can, that in 1855
when he published his Compendious Dictionary he was unacquainted with
Kembles Codex Diplomaticus published ten years before. (Shrine, 4)

The major allegation was Bosworth’s incorrect assignments of gender to

nouns, for example: “Baec, a beck, Kemble in the Codex published in 1845
marks masculine. Under the spelling in 1855 Dr. Bosworth does not seem to
know it; under Becc no gender is assigned. Did he despise the scholarship of
J. M. Kemble, or had he never, ten years afterwards, seen his book?” (Shrine, 7).
Cockayne asserted that in 1855 Bosworth was “ill acquainted with the
literature of which he made a dictionary” (Shrine, 9) and said it was no won-
der that Bosworth “who has not had time, in better than seventy years, to read
our classical Old English, should be not very well up in the glossaries”
(Shrine, 11). Cockayne challenged Bosworth to reply to each of the charges
and to prove he had “done his duty as a lexicografer.” The attack closed:
 Oswald the Obscure 9

Against Dr. Bosworth I have no further grudge, than what one feels towards
a man who has not done his work well. I have just put out of hand a volume
in which some errors he has committed, none of them here mentioned, were
corrected without bringing his name in all. But I find myself unable to stand
by, silent, when the name of the University of Oxford is to be put on the title
page of such a book as he shall make. (Shrine, 11)

The anger and resentment in these remarks tempt speculation that Bosworth
might have been behind the refusal in granting Cockayne the honorary title in
1861 and that Cockayne might have known it.
The reply did not come from Professor Bosworth directly; in his pam-
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phlet defending Bosworth, Thurston said the professor was “determined not
to notice it” (Thurston, 4). As Thurston elaborated on the scenario, Bosworth
was told that a Mr. Cockayne was preparing a pamphlet against the dictio-
nary and inquired who this Mr. Cockayne was. Choosing his words carefully,
Thurston said they ascertained that Cockayne was one of the undermasters at
King’s College School, London, thus clearly establishing Cockayne’s lowly
status vis-á-vis the Oxford Professor. Yet by this time, Cockayne had pub-
lished part of the Leechdoms, the Narratiunculae Anglice Conscripitae,
Spoon and Sparrow, and Seinte Marherete for the EETS, and had been an
active member of the Philological Society.
Thurston said he used Bosworth’s notes to reply to each of Cockayne’s
accusations, asserting that Bosworth read Anglo-Saxon manuscripts at an
early age and copied out numerous passages from manuscripts at the British
Museum and elsewhere for his first Anglo-Saxon dictionary, published in
1838. Thurston questioned the dates Cockayne assigned to Bosworth’s large
dictionary, saying it was published in 1848, not 1855, stating:

. . . it is clear that Mr. Cockayne was so little acquainted with Anglo-Saxon

literature and bibliography in the year 1855, as not to know that this Com-
pendious Dictionary was published in 1848. It proves . . . that his Anglo-
Saxon studies have not been close, nor minute, nor of long duration, not
having commenced before 1855, and perhaps some years later. His time,
therefore, limited as it is by his scholastic duties, would leave very little
opportunity for a careful reading of the numerous MSS in the British
Museum, exclusive of those in Oxford and Cambridge. (Thurston, 7)

There was, however, indeed an 1855 edition of the Bosworth dictionary

(if admittedly not the original edition), and Harvard’s Widener Library owns
Cockayne’s annotated copy of it.
In the pamphlet, Thurston correctly criticized Cockayne for being “unable
to rise above the consideration of genders and conjugations” (Thurston, 9),
saying the prevailing feature of Cockayne’s attack was a depreciation of others
and praise of himself. Thurston concluded the pamphlet as follows:
 10 Medieval Herbal Remedies

I have, I believe, succeeded in showing that Mr. Cockayne is—

Wrong in his dates; and therefore
Wrong in the conclusions he draws from those dates;
Wrong as to his statement of errors;
Wrong as to the knowledge of the Gospels;
Wrong as to the omission of genders;
Wrong in the genders of nouns;
Wrong in the meaning of brecan and brecende;
Wrong in the meaning of English beholden, and its application;
Wrong in the meaning of the Anglo-Saxon behealdan; and
Wrong in his supposed influence with the University of Oxford; and that
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therefore, his judgement on a literary work is as worthless as his attempt to

interfere with an existing arrangement is unjustifiable. (Thurston, 18)

There was a sequel to this particular incident. That same year, 1864,
Cockayne replied to Thurston in The Shrine, volume 3, where his “Postscript
on Bosworth’s Dictionary” began, “To some private representations, I reply,
that in Dr. Bosworth’s dictionary I see just the small merit that I admitted; it
is no more trustworthy of footing than a Welsh bog.” He called the reply
“noisy and unsubstantial” (but did not name Thurston) and offered more
from his “stock of Bosworthian blunders” (Shrine, 24). Not only did he con-
tinue the accusations about Bosworth, he included the German philologist
Christian Wilhelm Michael Grein (1825–77), about whom he said
“. . . edited the texts without critical acuteness; and his dictionary may be
truly ‘admirable’ to our Oxford lexicon maker, but it is at first sight no great
thing to others” (Shrine, 26–7). Cockayne ended by saying that he could not
abide or tolerate in the Bosworth reply what he called “audacious volunteer-
ing, the gratuitous speculation, the unlawful enterprise” (Shrine, 27). The
exchange appears to have ended here, but it was clearly prompted by more
than scholarly concern on the part of Cockayne. He took on a lion of the
establishment, and, to add to his other disappointments, did not even merit a
personal reply. Instead, an underling was sent into the fray, and the battle
royal for Cockayne was merely a minor tiff for Bosworth.
Why Cockayne turned later in his life to Anglo-Saxon as the focus of his
scholarship is uncertain, because at heart he appeared to have always cher-
ished the culture and literature of the classical world and to have regarded the
world of the Germanic tribes with a certain amount of disdain. In particular,
when speaking of the early Germanic world, Cockayne frequently referred to
the Teutonic tribes coming in contact with the “superior” race and civiliza-
tion of Rome and Greece. Moreover, Cockayne offered few comments on
original Anglo-Saxon poetry or prose literature other than saints’ lives, even
though he owned and annotated a copy of Benjamin Thorpe’s 1855 edition of
Beowulf (currently in the Harvard collection), and scattered references to
other original Old English works can be found, but none with any judgment
 Oswald the Obscure 11

on their quality. On the other hand, Cockayne dealt at length with Gawin
Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid into Middle Scots.14 His extensive
remarks about the translation are found in a cardboard-bound notebook at
Harvard (MS ENG 641).
It might be argued that all Cockayne’s translations from Old English,
including those of the three saints’ lives, served pragmatic, not literary, pur-
poses; they centered on virginity and virtue, geography, magico-medicine,
and charms. In fact, at Harvard is a leather-bound, blank book belonging to
Cockayne of much better quality than the cardboard-bound notebooks on file
there. In it, he had carefully allotted pages to each letter of the alphabet, writ-
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ing the letters in ink at the top of the page, and had begun making notes
throughout the book on Anglo-Saxon geographical names, obviously with
the intention of continuing the work for many years.
Cockayne acquired considerable linguistic ability in Old English, and
he was continually concerned with exactness in dealing with it, witness his
obvious alarm at Bosworth’s continued success in publishing what he con-
sidered faulty material. It is noteworthy that Cockayne and Bosworth were
both trained classicists; indeed, Bosworth published a text on translating
Latin that went through several editions.15 Whereas Cockayne remained a
teacher of classics in a boys’ school, Bosworth gained some fame and a
doctoral degree while living in Holland (1829–40), returning to England
and several vicarages, then being named Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-
Saxon at Oxford in 1857, about the time Cockayne appears to have begun
to be seriously engaged in studying and writing about Anglo-Saxon.
Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, first published in 1838, and his other
writings on Old English are reported to have earned him 18,000 pounds
sterling over the years, a very large sum at the time and enough to enable
him in 1867 to endow a professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, Cock-
ayne’s alma mater. Remarks by W. W. Skeat and Henry Sweet cited later in
this chapter show that Bosworth was not always praised without reserva-
tion as a scholar, and his biography by Henry Bradley in the standard Dic-
tionary of National Biography is fairly critical. Bradley (1845–1925), a
philologist and lexicographer, was an editor of the Oxford English Dictio-
nary. Interestingly enough, Bradley’s entry on Bosworth cites Cockayne’s
Shrine as one of its sources (the publication in which the attack on
Bosworth had appeared).
But if Bosworth’s scholarship, his ideas on etymology and linguistics,
even the dictionary for which he is so famous can be correctly judged as
flawed, yet he did not infuse his work with bias favoring Rome and Greece
and against the Anglo-Saxon world. Bosworth’s work revolved around his
interest in philology and linguistics, and he did not stray far from it in his
publications. In contrast to Cockayne’s prefaces to the Leechdoms, the pref-
ace to one of Bosworth’s earliest publications, Elements of Anglo-Saxon
 12 Medieval Herbal Remedies

Grammar (1823), revealed Bosworth’s admiration for the barbarian speakers

of Anglo-Saxon and established them as the founding fathers, as it were, of
British civilization:

We have insensibly imbibed the opinions of the Roman authors which we

have read, and, with the name of Goths, have constantly associated every
species of ignorance, cruelty, and barbarity; not considering that we, as
Englishmen, are indebted to the descendants of the Gothic tribes for our
existence, our language, and our laws.16
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Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary went through many printings in his life-

time and has been a standard for many years despite its drawbacks (after his
death it was revised and enlarged by T. Northcote Toller and printed again in
1882).
Cockayne, on the other hand, although publishing and attempting to
publish on many of the same subjects as Bosworth, saw less success. Few of
his publications are read today—with the notable exception of the Leech-
doms. Unfortunately, and unlike Bosworth’s works, the Leechdoms was writ-
ten from the vantage point of a classicist examining the rude world of the
northern Germans, and it established a biased foundation for much modern
writing about Anglo-Saxon medicine in particular and the medieval medical
tradition generally, as explored further in subsequent chapters.

Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England

Why then, did Cockayne undertake this massive work? He may have been
seeking as-yet-undiscovered vocabulary from the Teutonic world by looking
at the medical manuscripts. Or, perhaps this unveiling of what he called
superstition and folly would vindicate his attitude toward the Anglo-Saxon
world—possibly it helped shape that attitude; perhaps in translating these
three magico-medical texts he wanted to set the record straight about the cul-
ture of these Anglo-Saxons. It is no matter of chance that volume 1 of this
series on “science before the Norman conquest” opens: “It will be difficult
for the kindliest temper to give a friendly welcome to the medical philosophy
of Saxon days” (Cockayne 1965, 1:ix). He portrayed the Germanic tribes as
being in awe of Rome, which may be true, but then stated that they were
incapable of mastering much of what the superior civilization offered,
extending that prejudice to the corpus of early medieval medical texts:

Not only the Engle and Seaxe, the warrior inhabitants of our own island, but
all the races of Gothic invaders, were too rude to learn much of Gallenos, or
of Alexander of Tralles, though they would fain do so. The writings of Mar-
cellus, called Empericus, the Herbarium of Apuleius, the stuff current under
 Oswald the Obscure 13

the name of Sextus Placitus, the copious volumes of Constantinus

Africanus, the writings of St. Hildegard of Bingen, the collections out of
Dioskorides, the smaller Saxon pieces, are all of one character, substituting
for the case of instruments and Indian drugs, indigenous herbs, the worts of
the fatherland, smearings, and wizard chants. Over the whole face of
Europe . . . the next to hand remedy became the established remedy, and the
searching incision of the practiced anatomist was replaced by a droning
song. (Cockayne 1965, 1:xxvii)

The following chapter includes a discussion of how Cockayne trans-

formed what had been a respected and much used early medieval medical
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text into a literary curiosity. It shows how the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius

(in its Anglo-Saxon version known as the Old English Herbarium) and the
other Anglo-Saxon medical texts became in his hands objects of ridicule and
examples of superstition. Not only the transformation of medical texts into
curiosities, but the world of misconceptions about medieval medical prac-
tices suggested by Cockayne would be taken over and greatly amplified by
Charles Singer, as discussed in chapter 2. Cockayne’s training, profession,
and most of all, his personal preferences in culture and literature help explain
the attitude with which he approached all the Anglo-Saxon medical texts and,
despite his linguistic exactitude, reveal him to have been prejudiced toward
the culture that spoke Anglo-Saxon (whereas Bosworth apparently was not,
though both men shared similar backgrounds and scope of interests).
Cockayne’s merit as an Anglo-Saxonist was questioned by the Bosworth
exchange, his philological works went unnoticed, and so too did his transla-
tions, even the Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England for
which he is known today. The Leechdoms represent enormous effort. They
are primarily philological works on Anglo-Saxon culture, whose purpose is
revealed in the prefaces Cockayne wrote to each of its three volumes, where
as mentioned, he discussed the early Germanic peoples from the vantage
point of a clearly superior civilization, looking rather fondly at the English
people in their childhood days.
The longest preface he wrote was for volume 1, which contains his tran-
scription and translation of the Old English Herbarium. The 105 pages of his
preface cover Greek, Roman, and early Germanic and Anglo-Saxon medi-
cine, and they generally lambast early Germanic medical lore and practices
and praise the classical. Among other notions that Cockayne introduced here
is the idea that superstitious practices, such as incantations and amulets,
although not absent in classical times, became more prevalent as the Ger-
manic nations overcame the Roman Empire. He devoted a number of pages
to examples of what he clearly considered ridiculous treatments for various
ailments throughout the Middle Ages, contrasting them at many points with
the classical approach and lamenting the loss of medical and surgical knowl-
edge from the ancients. He even suggested that Anglo-Saxon healers did not
 14 Medieval Herbal Remedies

believe in what they wrote: “Possibly the makers of magic gibberish [the
Saxon leeches] were as incredulous as men are now in its efficacy: but what
mattered that? The leechbook must adapt itself to its day” (Cockayne 1965,
1:xxxiii). This preface shares the muddled organization, lack of coherence,
and pompous style of Spoon and Sparrow.
Volume 2 of the Leechdoms contains the three books that make up
Bald’s Leechbook, another medical text that is roughly contemporary with
the Old English Herbarium. Cockayne’s preface says very little about the
Leechbook, and instead discusses what he termed the manners and customs
of the Anglo-Saxons, defending the Saxons against charges that they were
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“mangy dogs. . . . [R]oving savages [who] stuffed their bellies with acorns”
(Cockayne 1965, 2:vii). In fact, he painted quite a detailed and favorable pic-
ture of the early Saxons and their food, medicines, and drink, saying that he
was here drawing together in one place “scattered notices” about this subject.
The footnotes are characteristically vague and hard to connect to actual
works, all of them primary sources, but it is also very clear that Cockayne did
not mention Sharon Turner’s The History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799–1805),
which he certainly knew and occasionally cited by name in his other writ-
ings.17 Turner’s volume 3 covers “The Manners of the Anglo-Saxons after
Their Occupation of England” and it contains information on food, medicine,
customs, and education, the same topics Cockayne treated later. Though he
quibbled with Turner about details of the Anglo-Saxon language, he clearly
shared Turner’s concept of history, a concept that is fundamental to under-
standing Spoon and Sparrow and especially Cockayne’s prefaces and notes
to the Leechdoms.
This concept views all known history as being subsequent to the Flood,
which happened at about 2348 B.C. At that time, the human race was
renewed, and very early, these people (who were in a state of civilized per-
fection) began to separate into the civilized and nomadic nations; in Turner’s
words: “. . . from hence [the nomadic peoples] first spread into those wilder
and ruder districts, where nature was living in all her unmolested, but dreary,
and barbarous majesty.”18 It was natural that the nomadic peoples change as
they migrated, and some (notably the Celts) sank into absolute barbarism.
Others, like the Teutonic tribes, though living a rough and vigorous life, man-
aged to maintain the highest moral code and the best of what they took with
them from civilization.
While the nomadic migrations were underway, many of the civilized
nations, as Turner put it “degenerated into sensuality, into debasing vices,
and to effeminate frivolities” (Turner, 1:11). Turner devoted three volumes to
the establishment of the Anglo-Saxons in England, seeing the result this way:

But the Saxons were one of those obscure tribes whom Providence was
training up to establish more just governments, more improving institu-
 Oswald the Obscure 15

tions, and more virtuous, though fierce manners, in the corrupted and incor-
rigible population of imperial Rome. And they advanced from their remote,
almost unknown corridor of ancient Germany, with a steady and unreceding
progress, to the distinguished destiny to which they were conducted.
(Turner, 1:116)

Echoes of Turner are found throughout Cockayne’s writings, though Cock-

ayne expressed much greater preference than Turner for Roman and Greek
accomplishments in comparison with the Anglo-Saxon world.
Another source Cockayne failed to list by author and title is Thomas
Wright’s A Volume of Vocabularies, Illustrating the Condition and Manners
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of Our Forefathers as Well as the History of the Forms of Elementary Educa-

tion and of the Languages Spoken in this Island, from the Tenth Century to
the Fifteenth (1857). Cockayne’s personal copy of this book is at Harvard’s
Houghton Library; it is a copy with the signature of O. Cockayne on the
inside front cover, in pencil, with the date 1863. Wright’s book contains
many of the texts that Cockayne said he used for this preface (and for the
other prefaces). If Cockayne was guilty of omitting at least these two
sources, he was certainly not guilty of neglecting to cite his own works; he
listed the Leechdoms, Spoon and Sparrow, The Shrine, and Narratiunculae as
sources used in writing the prefaces.
Cockayne summarized Bald’s Leechbook in this way:

Notwithstanding that this is a learned book, it sometimes sinks to mere dri-

veling. The author almost always rejects the Greek recipes, and doctors as
an herborist. It will give any one who has the heart of a man in him a thrill
of horror to compare the Saxon dose of brooklime and pennyroyal twice a
day, for a mother whose child is dead within her, with the chapter in Celsus
devoted to this subject, in which we read, as in his inmost soul, an anxious
courageous care, and a sense of responsibility mixed with determination to
do his utmost . . . (Cockayne 1965, 2:xx)

It would be vain to defend these prescriptions, Cockayne asserted, saying

that Saxon leeches tried to qualify themselves for their profession by search-
ing the medical records of classical cultures.
Volume 3 of the Leechdoms contains Lacnunga, an Anglo-Saxon book
on medicinal plants and healing remedies with many chants and incantations.
In addition are smaller works, the 

  (About Schools), “On
the Formation of the Foetus,” a section titled “Starcraft” containing “prog-
nostics from the moon’s age, a [Sun] “Dial,” “On the Calendar,” a “Treatise
on Astronomy and Cosmogony” by Bede; a section on charms; and a curious
addition with a long preface containing miscellaneous historical pieces. Also
in this volume is a glossary of Saxon names of plants, as well as the “Durham
Glossary of the Names of Worts.” In the preface to this particular volume, a
 16 Medieval Herbal Remedies

haughty Cockayne wrote: “in the collection now printed we are allowed an
insight into the notions and prepossessions upon scientific subjects of the less
instructed portion of Saxon society. The unfounded hopes, scruples, and
alarms of the ignorant, ignorant by comparison [with the Saxons who sought
classical learning], are justly regarded by the wise with a copious contempt”
(Cockayne 1965, 3:vii–viii). An overview of heathen Saxon mythology, a
lengthy, rambling discourse on dream lore, and finally a history of astrology
and healing with a long passage about the books of Hermes make up most of
the preface. More than ten pages are then devoted to Ælfric’s writings and a
discussion of who Ælfric might have been. It is not clear how or whether the
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discussion relates to the texts in this volume, other than an opening remark
that “the authorship of the translation or adaptation of the work of Bede de
Temporibus has been attributed to the grammarian Ælfric.”(Cockayne 1965,
3:xiv). Volume 3 contains the Anglo-Saxon version of Bede’s De Tempo-
ribus, but it is a small portion of the works collected there.
Singer may have been correct about Cockayne’s prefaces being out of
date, his reason for dropping them and substituting his own in his 1961
reprint of the Leechdoms. However, without them, the true flavor and intent
of the translator is lost. The three prefaces show Cockayne not as a student of
Anglo-Saxon or medieval medicine, nor as a seeker of knowledge about
plants and how they might have been used since Greek times, nor as an
impartial translator of practical medical treatises, but more as a member of a
clearly superior civilization looking into the follies of long ago. Whatever
purpose he had in doing the work, it was not as a contribution to the serious
history of medicine and healing. To add to the poignancy of Cockayne’s situ-
ation with regard to his reputation and to posterity, Cockayne would not want
the Leechdoms to be the sole work for which he has received some kind of
fame, and the fame only happened in later years. In many ways, he seemed to
think the Old English medical/magical manuscripts revealed a childish and
superstitious, if necessary, side of life in Anglo-Saxon England. He was far
more interested in the philological aspects of Old English, witness his con-
cern that the major Old English dictionary of his day be correct. We must
therefore sympathize with him; anyone who offers thoughts and publications
to posterity shares the same helplessness as Cockayne before the world’s
judgment and the inevitable passage of time. Nevertheless, Cockayne’s
Leechdoms, Wortcraft, and Starcunning of Early England will remain the
starting point for all studies of Anglo-Saxon medical texts.

Oswald Cockayne, the Teacher

It remains a mystery why early biographical sources state that Cockayne
was “the son of a Mr. Cockin.” In fact, this listing continues in the British
Biographical Index19 and Modern English Biography, who list (Thomas)
 Oswald the Obscure 17

Oswald Cockayne—born in Bath in 180720—as the son of a Mr. Cockin,

implying that at some point he or his father must have changed the family
name to Cockayne. Elsewhere, he is listed as being the son of J. Cockayne,
a clerk of Bath.21 Cockayne always signed his name and published as O. or
Oswald Cockayne, yet for some unknown reason, he is now always
referred to as Thomas Oswald or T. O. Cockayne. Biographers began this
tradition soon after his death, yet Cockayne himself never used the given
name “Thomas.” From 1824 to 1828, Cockayne attended St. John’s Col-
lege, Cambridge, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree and where the
standard biographies say he was a “tenth wrangler,” meaning he excelled at
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mathematics. (However, the records of St. John’s have him as thirtieth

Wrangler for 1828 [Venn 1922–27, 80].) He became a deacon in the
Church of England on 7 April 1833. That same year, he was named Curate
of Keynsham; then on 2 October 1834, he was ordained in the Diocese of
Bath and Wells. For a short time thereafter, he ran a school at Keynsham
Grange. Why Cockayne left the school is not known, and details about his
life for the next few years are lacking. It is known that in 1835 he obtained
the master of arts degree from Cambridge, which then, as now, is not an
earned degree.22
In 1842, Cockayne obtained a position as assistant master at King’s Col-
lege School in London, which had opened in London’s Strand District in
October 1831 as a junior department to King’s College of the University of
London. King’s College was established to fill an educational gap between
the Mechanics’ Institutions and Oxford and Cambridge, the latter “largely
the preserves of the aristocratic and the rich.”23 It was the first school of its
kind in London, but by the middle of the century, it was facing competition
from numerous day schools that had been opening. Finances were precarious
the entire time Cockayne taught there; a 3 percent tax on salaries was enacted
for several years simply to help ensure the school’s survival. The school was
governed by a council, whose decisions about the school’s operation and per-
sonnel matters were final. Headmasters and masters taught without contracts
and had to petition to be granted pensions.
Descriptions of the physical ugliness and miserable conditions at the
school in the mid-1800s are recorded in some detail in King’s College
School: The First 150 Years. Before it relocated to Wimbledon in 1897, the
school had the Thames to its south, the Strand to the north, and Strand
Lane to the east. It occupied the ground floor and basement rooms of Som-
erset House, a grand building that has been renovated; however in the mid-
nineteenth century the school’s accommodations there were grim indeed.
In fact, the author of the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers,” Sabine Bar-
ing-Gould (1834–1924), a cleric, folklorist, and prolific author who
attended the school while Cockayne was there, wrote about his alma
mater:
 18 Medieval Herbal Remedies

A more depressing set of buildings could hardly have been contrived. The
College and School form the east wing of Somerset House, and were built
by Smirke in 1828, fossilized ugliness. We had to descend stone stairs and
pass through an iron gate in which the gas was always burning. The win-
dows, however, did look out into the hard paved play yard, surrounded by
high stone walls, in which not a blade of grass showed, and not a leaf quiv-
ered in the air. The place exercised a depressing effect upon the spirits, and
the boys in the playground appeared destitute of buoyancy of life, crushed
by the subterranean nature of the school and the appalling ugliness of the
buildings. (KCS, 19–20)
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The basement rooms were cold and damp in winter and hot and glaring
in the summer. Overcrowding was common; the playground abounded in
fights and intimidation of younger boys, behavior which continued in the
unsupervised privies and caused complaints from parents. Pupils regularly
broke windows of neighboring houses and went wandering into the nearby
theater district, which was infamous for its loose morals. In fact, one of the
school’s neighbors was a bordello, and its occupants could beckon when the
four hundred or so boys were on the school’s playground. The area around
the school was dimly lit, crowded, and noisy—Dickens was describing the
London to which it belonged at this very time, and in fact his eldest son,
Charley, went to King’s College School for one term. He left because of a
serious attack of scarlet fever.
Six days a week in this cacophonous and morose setting, Cockayne
taught the Upper Fourth Class in the school’s Division of Classics, Mathe-
matics, and General Literature, whose course of instruction included Divin-
ity: Greek, Latin, English, and French; Mathematics: arithmetic; Writing:
history and geography. The Upper Sixth Class learned Hebrew as well.
Cockayne’s classes were on Homer, Xenophon, Cicero, and Virgil, and he
taught Euclidian geometry and arithmetic.
Although Miles and Cranch described Cockayne as “a most distin-
guished scholar . . . and the leading philologist of his day,” they also said he
was “a highly idiosyncratic teacher,” complaints having been lodged about
him in 1864 and 1866 (KCS, 66). In fact, Cockayne was more than idiosyn-
cratic—he was obviously controversial. In November of 1869, Cockayne
was formally accused of talking to his class “unnecessarily of subjects
which could only tend to corrupt them”24—by then he had been an assistant
master at the school for twenty-seven years. Following the accusations, a
Committee of Five, including the Principal of the College and the Headmas-
ter of the School, investigated the matter, and as notes from the school
archives reveal, several boys had said that Cockayne had made what they
thought were inappropriate remarks in class, and several parents had threat-
ened to withdraw their sons if Cockayne remained their teacher. Cockayne
was summoned before a subcommittee on 15 November, and the statements
 Oswald the Obscure 19

about his conduct were read to him to confirm or deny. The seasoned school
master did not deny that he had said much of what was alleged, but in his
defense, said it was far better to speak openly of such things so the boys
would “have the evil effects of vice clearly set before them.” Subsequently,
the subcommittee withdrew a few of the statements, but left most standing,
and then submitted a report to the full committee, which voted to terminate
Cockayne.
The Committee of Five called Cockayne in on 20 November, at which
time they dismissed him. Suddenly, he was unemployed and without any
hope of finding either a scholarly or clerical appointment because he had no
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recommendation from the place where he had taught most of his life. Cock-
ayne must have sensed what the outcome of the investigation would be,
because he printed the small pamphlet titled “Mr. Cockayne’s Narrative” that
very day. In it, he stated that one person (“a Delator”) made the accusations
against him, that he was never given a copy of the evidence against him, and
that the boys mentioned had been in his class as much as five years earlier.
Even the Committee was embarrassed by the flimsiness of its own evidence,
he said, adding, “The chairman of the committee, with sarcastic generosity,
offered me, not the evidence, but the report seasoned to his own taste, and
said I might publish it in the ‘Times’.”25
Miles and Cranch print portions of the “Narrative,” some of which read
as follows (the allegations, here called statements, were numbered, and
Cockayne replied to them in turn):

[It was alleged] 1. That I said Chloe was a prostitute. I reply that is not a
favourite word of mine; perhaps “courtesan.” 2. [That I said] “Her full
time was come.” That I said. What full time? answer, “Nine months.”
Nothing further. . . . 5. A boy had an awkward way of driving his hands
down into his pockets: that I [Cockayne] said——meeting him “on the
other side of the street” (so) would fancy something was the matter with
him. In the place of the blank [the word that was omitted] Ladies was
read. My reply: that the boy’s position was offensive to the eyes, and
whether I said Ladies I cannot tell after so great lapse of time. (Miles and
Cranch, 66–67)

To Cockayne’s printed version of the “Narrative,” he appended ten letters of

sympathy and support from parents and former pupils. Obviously, Cock-
ayne had sent them the “Narrative” to elicit support, but it was to no avail. It
might be added that most of the allegations against Cockayne concern dis-
cussion of incidents in classical history and mythology that involve sex, a
subject that was taboo in Victorian England. The style of the reply is typical
of Cockayne.
Cockayne’s frank reply to statements 7 and 8 is in the records of the
school and reveals more of his rather odd personal convictions.
 20 Medieval Herbal Remedies

That I had spoken of diseases coming upon fornicators, and had alleged that
no exemption attaches to bad women riding in carriages. Reply: that we had
Horatius before us, a free liver, a pig of the herd of Epicurus, with his Chloes
and Lydias and Barines, a fresh name at every ode, giving an autobiography
of his amours, it was desirable, speaking to lads mostly of fifteen, sixteen,
and seventeen, to warn them that his sin is visibly punished by God. Espe-
cially that by a direct providential interference about the year 1500 A.D., God
seeing men vicious in this respect, notwithstanding the teachings of religion,
had sent a heavy plague to deter them. (“Narrative,” 3)

In closing the “Narrative,” Cockayne claimed that the Council had

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“declared war, especially against the age of sixty-five, at which their workers
must retire pensionless.” School records in fact indicate that in increasingly
difficult financial times, the school let senior men go and replaced them with
junior faculty, frustrating the juniors who had no hope of advancement, and
forcing senior men to try to obtain positions elsewhere when they saw (or
thought they saw) the handwriting on the wall.
In addition to teaching all week, Cockayne is listed as one of four masters
who took students as boarders, a way many school masters of the time earned
much needed extra money. He lived at 16 Montague Street in Russell Square
the entire time he taught at the school. In 1865, the school’s first and long-time
headmaster, under whom Cockayne had taught since he entered the school,
was forced to leave, but was given a pension. In that year, salaries were
reduced by 3 percent, and there was growing uneasiness about the school
because of its physical condition and the difficulties under which students had
to study, the notorious lack of discipline, and complaints about the staff. In any
case, Cockayne was immediately replaced by the Council secretary’s son.
Ironically, Richard Morris, the early-English scholar and philologist, was hired
as First Form Master that same year.26 The winter of 1869–70 looked bleak
indeed for Oswald Cockayne.

Cockayne’s Pupils: W. W. Skeat and Henry Sweet

Cockayne had another life while he was teaching boys classical languages
and mathematics at King’s College School—he was copying Anglo-Saxon
manuscripts by hand, by the light of a candle or lantern, consulting with a
number of persons on the details of what he was reading. He also kept a set
of closely written notebooks that contain information about many of the texts
he consulted as well as his thoughts about philological works (some of
which, as mentioned, are at Houghton Library). It happened that Cockayne
had two famous early English scholars as students in his classes—W. W.
Skeat and Henry Sweet—but separated in time by about ten years.
Skeat was in Cockayne’s Fourth Form in the early 1850s; later, in a book
of reminiscences, Skeat wrote:
 Oswald the Obscure 21

During part of the time when I was at King’s College School, in the Strand,
it was my singular fate to have for my class-master the Rev. Oswald Cock-
ayne, well known to students as a careful and excellent Anglo-Saxon
scholar, perhaps one of the best of his own date. He was an excellent and
painstaking teacher, and it was, I believe, from him that I imbibed the
notion of what is known as scholarship. In after life, it was my good fortune
to know him personally, and I always experienced from him the greatest
kindness and readiness to help. After his death, I acquired some of his
books, including his well-known and useful work intitled Anglo-Saxon
Leechdoms, and some of his carefully executed transcripts. His transcript of
Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints, in particular, has often proved useful.27
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It may be that Skeat sold these books either to a dealer or to Medlicott (from
whom Harvard obtained them), because some of the books he mentions are at
Harvard.
Skeat’s kind words about what he learned from his teacher did not apply
to his learning Old English from Cockayne, who never taught Anglo-Saxon
at the school, except perhaps informally. The painstaking work of editing,
translating, and printing Anglo-Saxon manuscripts was entirely on his own
time. Skeat also mentioned here that Cockayne sent him a copy of The
Shrine, noting it abruptly breaks off at page 208, and saying he was not aware
it ever went any further. He called the publication very characteristic of
Cockayne and said he found the corrections to Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon dic-
tionary published in it of service (too late, however, to be of any service to
Cockayne in the 1864 encounter with Bosworth).28 Apparently, Skeat did not
keep in touch with Cockayne after he left King’s College School, and it was
only some years later that the two met again, in the late 1860s or early 1870s,
most probably after the dismissal. Lacking academic credentials, Cockayne
may well have been forced to rely on Skeat and other acquaintances for
information about the manuscripts to which he earlier had easy access, and
Skeat mentioned consulting some Cambridge manuscripts for Cockayne dur-
ing this period.
On a personal note, Skeat told of hearing Cockayne preach:

It was once my fortune to hear Mr. Cockayne preach a sermon without notes,
and I was much struck with his eloquence of expression. His language had
the classic elegance of the well-read scholar, and approached more nearly
the style of Johnson than I should have expected. He told me that he pre-
ferred to preach extempore, as he disliked the labour of writing down the
discourse; and there was certainly no need for him to do so. (Pastime, lxvi)

The other well-known early English scholar in Cockayne’s classes

(1862–63) was Henry Sweet, who entered the school in 1860 and left in 1863
to study in Heidelberg. Later events connect Cockayne and Sweet over the
 22 Medieval Herbal Remedies

years in a relationship that is interesting, if unclear.29 They shared lives of

professional and personal disappointments that are remarkably similar in
their details, although at least Sweet was recognized in his own time as an
authority on Anglo-Saxon, a recognition denied Cockayne. Miles and Cranch
said in their discussion of Cockayne at King’s College School (without giv-
ing a source): “Sweet, who was an eccentric in many ways, always boasted
that he was self-educated, but he clearly kept in touch with Cockayne in later
years, and the two reviewed each other’s philological books” (KCS, 28).
MacMahon too believes that Sweet was often in contact with Cockayne, not-
ing that Sweet sent Cockayne a review copy of his now famous paper on the
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Old English dental fricatives, read to the Philological Society in 1869. At that
time, Sweet was still an Oxford undergraduate and Cockayne was no longer
a member of the society.
In the paper, Sweet quoted Cockayne to the effect that the letter f was
a late introduction in writing Anglo-Saxon, and that the oldest manuscripts
used w in all cases. Sweet countered Cockayne in his paper, saying the f
was “not altogether unknown to these early scribes.”30 In addressing Cock-
ayne’s reviewer’s remarks, Sweet included Cockayne’s justification for
what he had written in the review—what Cockayne really meant to say by
w being used “in all cases” was that it was used in all grammatical cases and
not “in all instances” in the early manuscripts. At the very end of Cock-
ayne’s review, referring to Sweet’s explanation of how scribes used to writ-
ing Latin might have developed the w, then the f for writing Anglo-Saxon,
Cockayne wrote: “I hope that he [Sweet] has not confused the ancient days
of the Lindisfarne Latin text, with the much later time, variously placed, of
the Saxon glosses” (Sweet, 184). Though outside the scope of this study,
Cockayne’s hard-to-follow ideas on language change and phonetics seem
to be remarkably similar to those of Sweet as articulated in this early paper,
where, in arguing strongly against such theories as Grimm’s laws of lan-
guage change, Sweet wrote, “Grimm’s law has been compared to a rolling
wheel; it has been described as a primary and mysterious principle, like
heat or electricity; but I am unable to see in it anything but an aggregation
of purely physiological changes, not necessarily connected together”
(Sweet, 176). It is interesting that Sweet’s professional life was later
devoted to trying to distance Anglo-Saxon studies from the Germanic
school of comparative philology (or linguistics) and that it most certainly
was Sweet who answered Cockayne’s cry to teach young students about
Old English.31 Might he have gotten at least the germ of these ideas from
his schoolmaster?
Three years after delivering the paper, in 1872 when Cockayne was by
now unemployed, Sweet published an unflattering review of Cockayne and
Edmund Brock’s Liflade of St. Juliana (1872) in which he wrote:
 Oswald the Obscure 23

The translations are on the whole very accurate but some of the renderings
require criticism. . . . In many parts of his version Mr. Cockayne has fallen
into the common error of confounding translation with translitera-
tion. . . . This style of translation not only makes the old language ridicu-
lous, but also exercises an injurious influence on English scholarship, by
deadening the modern reader’s perception of the changes (often very deli-
cate) of meaning which many old words preserved in the present English
have undergone.32

Such criticism from a much younger colleague (Sweet had not yet graduated
from Oxford) must have hurt, and is particularly poignant when we know the
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strained circumstances of Cockayne’s existence at the time.

If Cockayne had whetted Sweet’s interest in Anglo-Saxon studies, which
seems probable (under the circumstances of their knowing each other at the
school), Sweet never acknowledged it. In fact, Sweet scholar M. K. C.
MacMahon believes that Sweet seemed to be going out of his way to distance
himself completely from Cockayne, noting an account of Sweet’s academic
relationship to Cockayne by Henry Cecil Wyld, a good friend of Sweet’s:

He [Sweet] received his early education from various private schools and
finally at King’s College School, where he was under the ferrule of Cock-
ayne, the editor of the Leechdoms. One is tempted at first sight to relate the
circumstances to the bent which Sweet’s interests began to take about this
time, and which was to be the ruling motive of his life. But his connection
with Cockayne, purely fortuitous in origin, does not seem to have been
responsible for his beginning the study of Old English, nor indeed did the
afore-mentioned scholar exercise any lasting or characteristic influence
upon his pupil.33

MacMahon believes that Wyld got this information from Sweet himself,
who also said that his knowledge of Old English came from Edward John-
ston Vernon’s A Guide to the Anglo-Saxon Tongue of 1863. That there was no
1863 edition of this work, in the opinion of MacMahon, makes it even more
likely that Sweet may have known the Vernon from Cockayne (editions
appeared in 1846, 50, 55, 61, 65, 72, and 1878).34
Why Sweet (and possibly others) distanced himself from Cockayne may
lie in whatever reasons there were for denying Cockayne the honorary philo-
logical position in 1861, and certainly for Sweet because of Cockayne’s ear-
lier altercation with Bosworth over the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Sweet was a
rising star at Oxford and was very much in Bosworth’s favor during the time
Cockayne was alienating himself from the Oxford scholars. Certain other
details about Sweet’s life and career deserve mention because they are
related to the Bosworth incident and may well have added to the unhappiness
 24 Medieval Herbal Remedies

of Cockayne’s last few years. MacMahon mentioned that Sweet’s work on

the Student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon began during his teenage years
(MacMahon, 167). At the time he left King’s College School and went to
Heidelberg, Sweet was eighteen. It cannot be proved that Cockayne had any-
thing to do with Sweet’s dictionary, but it seems probable that he did. We
know from Skeat’s Student’s Pastime that at this very time Cockayne, too,
was working on an Anglo-Saxon dictionary: “At the time of his death, he had
actually completed, on clearly written slips, the letters A to E [of a new
Anglo-Saxon dictionary, because he was dissatisfied with Bosworth’s]; and
these came into my hands with the other papers” (Pastime, viii–ix). In the
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same article, Skeat said that he passed Cockayne’s notes for a new Anglo-
Saxon dictionary on to Professor T. Northcote Toller to use in his supplement
to Bosworth. A little too late to help Cockayne were Skeat’s words about
Bosworth’s dictionary, which Skeat said was “only a translation of Lye and
Manning.”
Sweet returned to England after Heidelberg, and in 1868–69 enrolled at
Oxford, where Professor Bosworth taught. As Hal Momma noted, even
before he entered the university, Sweet was asked to work on a revision of the
Old English dictionary, an offer he declined (Momma, 2). This was precisely
at the time Cockayne lost his position at King’s College School and was
struggling to make a living, and publishing The Shrine. Surely Cockayne
must have known about the request for Sweet to help on the same dictionary
that he had so vocally opposed only a few years earlier, and as Skeat noted,
Cockayne was compiling his own entries for a new dictionary at that very
time. Indeed, on the last page of The Shrine is a list of publications by
Oswald Cockayne. It lists “A Dictionary of ee Oldest English Vulgarly Mis-
named Anglo-Saxon” and “A Grammar of Saxon English” as being “in
hand,” but they seem never to have been published. Of the dictionary, a state-
ment reads “From ee printed literature, and from a body of transcripts of
what remains unpublished, is in preparation. Some progress has been made
for ee press.”
Sweet paid Cockayne at least one small compliment. In a footnote to the
preface of his edition of the Pastoral Care, Sweet said Cockayne was the
only editor in England or abroad who “did not ignore the genuine West-
Saxon manuscripts” in studying King Alfred’s language, others preferring
“garbled reflections” (Sweet, Alfred, v). But the very next year, Sweet pub-
lished the unflattering review of Cockayne’s Juliana (1872), then graduated
from Oxford in 1873, the year and the season in which Cockayne died,
allegedly by his own hand. As Cockayne sank further into oblivion and
finally into despair, Sweet’s career seemed to be rapidly rising, and it appears
likely that Cockayne must have known about Sweet’s success in the field to
which he had contributed so much, gaining little apparent reward. Yet like
Bosworth and Cockayne, Sweet was studying classics at Oxford, not Ger-
 Oswald the Obscure 25

manic languages, so that he would have a better chance for a teaching posi-
tion. About Sweet’s early success with Anglo-Saxon, MacMahon wrote:

By the time he [Sweet] graduated B.A. in 1873, he had already published

the Cura Pastoralis, critically reviewed nine works in the academic press
(including ones by Alexander John Ellis, John Earls, [Cockayne] and vari-
ous continental philologists), read three papers to the Philological Society,
and published three other brief items on linguistic topics. (MacMahon, 168)

It would be most interesting to know more about the nature of Cockayne’s

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relationship with Sweet during and after King’s College School.

The Final Years

After his abrupt dismissal from King’s College School in November 1869,
with no pension and little hope of employment, Cockayne continued to try to
sell his writings. In 1870, The Shrine was listed as available by subscription
at twenty shillings (or one shilling an issue) from the author, who had evi-
dently moved from Montague Street to 13 Manor Park, Lee, S.E., London.
He may have sold part of his personal library to raise funds. Glued into Cock-
ayne’s copy of Benjamin Thorpe’s 1842 Codex Exoniensis: A Collection of
Anglo-Saxon Poetry, from a MS in the Library of the Dean and Chapter of
Exeter, which Harvard owns, at page 355 is a scrap of paper (with notes on
Anglo-Saxon handwritten on the reverse). On it is a note from Trübner and
Co., American Continental and Oriental Literary Agency, 60 Paternoster
Row, London, dated May 10, 1872. It reads, “Mr Trübner presents his com-
pliments to Mr Cockayne and will have much pleasure in looking at Mr
Cockayne’s collection any day next week. Mr Trübner will be in every day
between 12 and 2 o’clock.”
Thorpe’s Codex Exoniensis was in the collection that Medlicott eventu-
ally purchased, a collection including annotated copies of Benjamin Thorpe’s
Beowulf, Bosworth’s Compendious Dictionary of 1855, Cockayne’s personal
copies of his own publications, as well as several other books mentioned
here. Four volumes of Cockayne’s handwritten notebooks might also have
been part of the collection, because they too went to Medlicott; three of them
contain a miscellany of information on Anglo-Saxon, and one, as previously
mentioned, contains numerous corrections to Douglas’s Middle Scots trans-
lation of the Aeneid.35 If he did sell—or even had to consider selling—the
books that had been so much a part of his life, as witnessed by his extensive
annotations in them, it must surely have added to the distress that his dis-
missal caused him.
Another bit of evidence as to Cockayne’s strained circumstances
remains in one of the handwritten notebooks at Houghton Library. On the
 26 Medieval Herbal Remedies

back of hand-numbered page 330, and facing page 331, is about a third of a
sheet of printed blue paper with some of Cockayne’s notes on the Anglo-
Saxon poem Waldere written on the back. The paper is from the North West-
ern Railway of Montevideo Company, Limited, indicating that the company
was founded to put in 110 miles of railway in Uruguay along the frontier
with Brazil from Salto to Santa Rosa and claiming that a decree of the gov-
ernment from 12 December 1870 “guarantees to the Company a certain
amount of revenue for 40 years from the date of opening of each section of
the Line.”36 On the back of page 331 of the notebook is the rest of the blue
paper, and it is dated 14 June 1872 with an offer to invest, rewards guaranteed
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based on the success of a similar railway in Brazil. The printed offer is signed
by J. B. Davison, secretary of the Company, 113 Cannon Street. Whether
Cockayne actually made an investment in the company is not known, yet the
fact that he kept the paper is intriguing and points to his at least having
looked into it, perhaps as a way to try to find money on which to live.
Other than these few clues, little is known about Cockayne’s life after he
left King’s College School. In February 1998, MacMahon wrote that he had
found “absolutely no reference to Cockayne in the philological literature of
the 1870s. For whatever reason or reasons, he simply slid from view. Even
Furnivall, that gregarious character of the Philological Society—and many
others—seems to have overlooked him.”37
Cockayne’s final three years on earth were unhappy, to say the least. His
efforts as a teacher and scholar of Anglo-Saxon philology had not earned him
a place either as a pensioned schoolmaster or as one of the recognized
experts in his chosen field. Sometime in May 1873, Cockayne went to Hast-
ings, and in early June, his steps turned west toward the sea and Cornwall.
Because at that time there was not yet a train to his destination in St. Ives, he
must have gone by carriage. On the nearby cliffs in the late afternoon of June
3 or 4, Oswald Cockayne apparently took his own life. The brutal facts of
what seem to be his suicide cannot be better given than by quoting in full
what appeared in the Cornish Telegraph; the first entry is dated 18 June 1873.

Discovery of the Body of a Traveller Who Had Committed Suicide a

Fortnight Since.
The greatest possible excitement was created in the town on Sunday after-
noon by a report that the dead body of a man had been discovered by some
children near the edge of cliffs, a little to the westward of Cardew, and
which proved to be true. The same children had seen the body there a week
before, and supposing it to be a man sleeping, had thrown some small peb-
bles to awake him and then ran away. The body was identified as that of a
traveller, who had put up for a short time, about a fortnight since, at
Hodge’s “Western” hotel, where he had left his carpet-bag, and which
remained there unclaimed. A pistol was found in his breast-coat pocket,
with which he had shot himself. The body was rapidly becoming decom-
 Oswald the Obscure 27

posed by the fortnight’s exposure, and appeared to be that of a man between

50 and 60 years of age.
The man was lying on his side, with his head under a rock, and was
seen there a week ago by other boys, who also thought him asleep. The boys,
on Sunday, at once gave notice to P. C. Bennett, who was soon on the spot,
and on turning over the body, it was found that the man had been shot
through the eye, from which worms were now crawling. The ball had passed
out at the back of the head, and the body was quite black from being so long
dead. The only articles found in the pockets of the deceased were a map of
Cornwall, a lock of hair (of a light colour,) a pistol in his coat pocket, and a
powder and shot flask. The pistol had been fired off, the cap being split.
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There were also 6s 10 1/2d in money, and the wearing apparel con-
sisted of an overcoat, a black coat, vest, striped trowsers, boots with cloth
tops, drawers, and stockings. Deceased is supposed to be a man about 60
years of age. He had grey whiskers, and was about 6 feet high, but it is not
yet known who he was. He arrived at the “Western” hotel, on Sunday fort-
night, and left the hotel on the Monday afternoon, between 3 and 4 o’clock.
After paying his bill he had 6s 10 1/2d in change. He said he was only going
on the hills to see the sea. Deceased left a carpet-bag at the hotel, locked.

[Below, from the Cornish Telegraph, Wednesday, 25 June 1873, page num-
ber not identified in the copy.]

Identification of the Gentleman Supposed to Have Committed Suicide

at St. Ives.
The identity of the gentleman who was discovered dead in the neighbour-
hood of St. Ives, some days ago, has at last been established. On Friday the
police officer at St. Ives received a telegram from a gentleman asking for
information relative to the deceased’s description. The reply induced the
gentleman to visit St. Ives on Saturday, when he was enabled, without hes-
itation, to identify the deceased, from the description given and from his
clothes—his body having been previously buried.
It appears that the deceased was the Rev. Thomas Oswald Cockayne, a
clergyman of the Church of England, without charge, aged 65 years. He left
his home, near Bristol, some weeks ago, with the avowed intention of going
to Hastings, for the benefit of his health. About a week before the fatal
occurrence his relatives were shocked to receive a letter from him, bearing
a Western postmark; and that stating that he should never return home
again. Their suspicions and fears were at once aroused, and they instituted a
searching but fruitless inquiry after him. Newspaper paragraphs, announc-
ing the sad occurrence, arrested their attention, and induced them to extend
their inquiries to St. Ives, which ultimately led to the discovery of deceased.
Deceased appears to have been of an eccentric disposition, and latterly
shewed unmistakable signs of melancholy. Many years ago [in fact less
than three] he was one of the masters of King’s College School, London,
and singularly enough the Rev. J. B. Jones, vicar of St. Ives, on whom
devolved the duty of paying the last sad rites to deceased, was one of his
 28 Medieval Herbal Remedies

pupils at King’s College at that time. Mr. Cockayne was at one time a stu-
dent at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he became wrangler and B.A.
in 1828, and M.A. in 1834. He entered holy orders in 1831, when he
become [sic] curate of Keynsham, and was ordained priest by the Bishop of
Bath and Wells in 1833.
The deceased was a man of considerable literary attainments, and had
published several works, principally relating to Anglo-Saxon literature. Of
these three were published in the transactions of the Philological Society,
viz., “Saxon Narratiunculum,” “Saxon Leechdom,” and “St. Margaret, in
Old English.” He was also the author of a Greek syntax, a life of Turenne,
and outlines of Jewish, French, and Irish histories.
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In keeping with the mysteriousness of his death, no death certificate has

yet been found, nor was an inquest made into the death on the cliffs. If it
seems improbable that he could have shot himself through the head and then
returned the weapon to an inside pocket, it does not appear to have raised a
question in the mind of the authorities at that time. Why he was in St. Ives
with a map—as though he were unfamiliar with the area and needed to find a
certain place, perhaps to meet someone—remains an open question. No other
mention of his passing, either in the form of a eulogy or even a notice, has
been found other than brief newspaper obituaries though he knew and was
known to the circle of Anglo-Saxonists in England and the United States at
that time. In fact, the obituary column in the London Times for 25 June 1873
says only “At St. Ives, Cornwall, suddenly, the Rev. T. Oswald Cockayne, of
Manor Park, Lee, Kent.” It seems odd that the Rev. John Balmer Jones, Cock-
ayne’s pupil, did not recognize the unidentified suicide he buried at St. Ives.
The disappointments of Oswald Cockayne continue after death. He is
known by a name (Thomas Oswald) he never used, and for a work (Leech-
doms, Starcraft, and Wortcunning of Early England) he probably did not
value as highly as Spoon and Sparrow or The Shrine. His life is now rele-
gated to terse descriptions generally including the epitaph “eminent,” which
he did not enjoy in life. Like the former pupil who did not recognize him,
posterity has buried the real Oswald Cockayne. What remains is the epitaph,
“eminent scholar,” which sadly misses the mark in describing this man.

Cockayne’s Legacy in Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of

Early England
In 1857, the British Treasury funded the Master of the Rolls to publish
“materials for the History of this Country from the Invasion of the Romans to
the Reign of Henry VIII” under competent editors, “preference being given,
in the first instance, to such materials as were most scarce and valuable”
(Cockayne 1965, 1:3). The Rolls Series is titled Rerum Britannicarum Medii
Aevi Scriptores: The Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland
During the Middle Ages. As mentioned, Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcun-
 Oswald the Obscure 29

ning, and Starcraft of Early England began to appear in 1864 with the
descriptor added to the title page “A Collection of Documents, for the Most
Part Never Before Printed, Illustrating the History of Science in this Country
Before the Norman Conquest.”
At present, it can only be surmised how, when, and why Cockayne became
interested in the Anglo-Saxon medical (or scientific) manuscripts, many of
which were housed at the British Museum not far from where he lived and
taught. Whether he was requested to read these particular manuscripts or did it
as a matter of his own interest is not known. What Cockayne published in vol-
ume 1 was a transcription of an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Herbarium of
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Pseudo-Apuleius, a long-lived Latin medical treatise that was widely dissemi-

nated throughout Europe from the fifth century until well into the Renaissance,
with his own archaic modern English translation on facing pages. The Rolls
Series volumes began a new life for this ancient work (and for the other medical
texts in Cockayne’s volumes as well), a life largely shaped by their nineteenth-
century discoverer and interpreter, who was very much a man of his time. The
Latin Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius was a late-classical/early-medieval med-
ical text that circulated on the continent and came to the British Isles, where it
was used in Latin and in the vernacular translation. Thanks to Cockayne and
the Anglo-Saxon enthusiasts of his time, the work became transformed in the
mid-nineteenth century into a literary curiosity that would be studied for rea-
sons other than medical history for many years after.
What is not generally mentioned about the Old English Herbarium, as
the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius became known following Cockayne’s
edition, is that the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius circulated in Latin
throughout the medieval West because it was a standard reference text on
medicinal plants and health remedies, being copied, excerpted, quoted, and
finally, translated into vernaculars. Although it ceased to be used as a work
unto itself at some undetermined point, it lived on—indeed lives on—in
other works that borrowed its information and used it again and again. The
history of the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius—a medical work—is fairly
clear, a translation into Anglo-Saxon being one part of its long life (as dis-
cussed here in chapter 3). However, as a resurrected philological and cultural
oddity, the Herbarium of Cockayne’s Leechdoms has another story indeed.
The destiny of this once-esteemed medieval medical text was to fall into
the hands of a nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonist with peculiar attitudes
toward history and linguistics, prudish concerns for morality, and biased
opinions toward medicine (but as reviewed here, he lived in a time when
medicine was primitive by modern standards). Oswald Cockayne had a thor-
ough scholarly knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and a thoroughly dense scholarly
approach toward translations of that language, and he elected to translate the
ancient medical work and to put it in context in a series of prefaces. In 1864
the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius emerged from the oblivion of museum
storage—but as a different work, a literary creation. The following chapter
 30 Medieval Herbal Remedies

discusses the Herbarium and its fate after being lifted from the oblivion of
manuscript archives and translated into Wardour Street English, then pub-
lished with prefaces destined—together with the style of translation—to
prejudice the reception of this work.

Notes
1. Rev. Oswald Cockayne, ed., Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early
England, 3 vols., Rolls Series, vol. 35 (1864–66; London: Kraus Reprint Ltd.,
1965), hereafter cited in text as Cockayne 1965. Charles Singer removed
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Cockayne’s prefaces, substituted his own preface, and reprinted this work as
the Rev. Thomas Oswald Cockayne, ed., Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Star-
craft of Early England (London: The Holland Press, 1961); hereafter cited in
text as Cockayne 1961.
2. For detailed information about the Medlicott collection and how much of it
came to the Harvard libraries, see J. R. Hall, “William G. Medlicott
(1816–83): An American Book Collector and His Collection,” Harvard
Library Bulletin, n.s., 1:1 (Spring 1990): 13–46. Hall’s article gives the par-
ticulars of when Harvard purchased Cockayne’s works from the Medlicott
collection.
3. The Rev. O. Cockayne, The Civil History of the Jews from Joshua to
Hadrian; With a Preliminary Chapter on the Mosaic History (London: John
W. Parker, West Strand, 1845), 20.
4. This curious selection of works in Old English and Latin has as its full title
Narratiunculae Anglice Conscriptae: De Pergamenis Exscribebat Notis Illus-
trabat Eruditis Copiam (Soho Square [London]: Iohannem R. Smith, 1861).
The title page, introduction, contents page, and notes to Narratiunculae are
all in Latin. Cockayne here transcribes the Old English and gives notes in
Latin for The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle from Cotton Vitellius A.xv, The
Wonders of the East from Cotton Vitellius A.xv and from Cotton Tiberius B.v,
The Passion of the Virgin-Saint Margaret from Cotton Tiberius A.iii, excerpts
from On the Generation of Man from Cotton Tiberius A.iii, and Mambres
Magicus from Cotton Tiberius BV folio 87. On the inside back cover of his
Spoon and Sparrow is the notice that “of Narratiunculae only 250 printed:
and a right to raise the price of the last-sold copies will be reserved.”
5. O. Cockayne, The Shrine: A Collection of Occasional Papers on Dry Subjects
(London: Williams and Northgate, 1870); hereafter cited in text as Shrine.
When these papers originally appeared is not clear, but in 1870, they were
listed as available from the author by subscription at 13 Manor Park, Lee,
S.E., London, the address the Times gave for him in its obituary of 1873.
Many of Cockayne’s notes for this work and for the Narratiunculae are in
two notebooks housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library, which are not dated,
but have entries that Cockayne dated in 1859 through 1864.
6. Linguistics in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century is a vast topic covered in
general works such as W. F. Bolton, A Living Language: The History and
Structure of English (New York: Random House, 1982) or Thomas Pyles, The
 Oswald the Obscure 31

Origins and Development of the English Language (New York: Harcourt,

Brace, Jovanovich, 1971). Seminal works that launched the linguistic debate
include Rasmus Rask’s prize-winning essay on the origin of Old Norse
(1818) and Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (1822).
7. O. Cockayne, Spoon and Sparrow, SPENDEIN AND CAR, FUNDERE AND
PASSER; or, English Roots in the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew: Being a consider-
ation of the Affinities of the Old English, Anglo-Saxon, or Teutonic Portion of
our Tongue to the Latin and Greek; with a few pages on the Relation of the
Hebrew to the European Languages (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861);
hereafter cited in text as Spoon.
8. Cockayne’s lack of capitalization and commas has been retained in all quotes.
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Though a connection between the two men cannot be established, Cock-

ayne’s lack of attribution being what it is, Cockayne’s ideas and muddled
explanations of linguistic occurrences were quite similar to those of John
Horne Tooke (1736–1812), who attempted to trace historical changes in indi-
vidual words across many languages. See for example John Horne Tooke,
Epea pteroenta, or the Diversions of Purley, new ed., rev. and corr. with addi-
tional notes by Richard Taylor (London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, 1840).
Diversions was originally published in 1805.
9. The Rev. J. Bosworth, The Origin of the Germanic and Scandinavian Lan-
guages and Nations: with a Sketch of their Literature, and short chronologi-
cal specimens of the Anglo-Saxon, Friesic, Flemish, Dutch, the German from
the Meso-Goths to the Present Time, the Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, and
Swedish: Tracing the Progress of these Languages and their Connection with
the Anglo-Saxon and the Present English (London: Longman, Rees, Orme,
Brown, and Green, 1836), 2.
10. Prof. M. K. C. MacMahon, e-mail message of February 28, 1998.
11. G. Michael C. Bott, e-mail message of June 9, 2000.
12. C. B. Thurston, A Few Remarks in Defense of Dr. Bosworth and His Anglo-
Saxon Dictionaries (London: Macmillan, 1864); hereafter cited in text as
Thurston.
13. J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics,” in The Monsters
and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. C. Tolkien (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1983), 5. Tolkien gives his source as Cockayne’s Shrine, 4. Tolkien’s
point in using the quote was that if Bosworth lived in 1936, Cockayne would
have been able to criticize him for not reading the works because none were
available, Anglo-Saxon studies having declined so greatly by that time.
14. Bishop Gawin Douglas (c. 1474–1522) wrote original Middle Scots poetry
but is best known for The XIII Bukes of Eneados of the Famose Poete Virgill
Translatet out of Latyne Verses into Scottish Metir (ca. 1500; first printed in
1553). A new edition with a glossary was issued in 1710 and may be the edi-
tion Cockayne used, since he often referred to the glossary’s entries in the
notebook. Why Cockayne was studying this particular translation of Virgil is
not known.
15. Joseph Bosworth, Latin Construing: or Easy and Progressive Lessons for
Classical Authors, with Rules for Translating Latin into English (London: W.
Simpkin and H. Marshall, 1824), sixth edition in 1846.
 32 Medieval Herbal Remedies

16. Joseph Bosworth, Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar (London: Richard Tay-

lor, 1823), i.
17. Velma B. Richmond, “Historical Novels to Teach Anglo-Saxonism,” in Alan J.
Frantzen and John D. Niles, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social
Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 178, writes of Turner,
“Very influential was Sharon Turner’s The History of the Anglo-Saxons
(1799), which Scott identifies in the preface to Ivanhoe as most helpful. Turner
exemplified the Romantic view of history as organically unified: ‘[T]he past is
seen as a peculiarly national affair, as having a direct connection with the pre-
sent fortunes of the nation, and as an organically intertwined and self-validating
system of institutions and values’[citing A. Fleishman, The English Historical
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Novel].” Turner, incidentally, claimed that he was the first to note the signifi-
cance of Beowulf, which he brought to the public’s attention in 1805.
18. Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons: Comprising the History of
England from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest (1799–1805), 3
vols., 4th ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 1:7;
hereafter cited in text as Turner.
19. MacMahon wrote in June 1998 that the archives of the British Biographical
Index (BBI; based in Glasgow) have Cockayne’s information filed under
“Cockin,” but why this is so is not clear. The BBI is based on the British Bio-
graphical Archives (BBA), which also has T. O. Cockayne listed under
“Cockin,” even though its three entries about him all refer to him as Cock-
ayne. The explanation may be that F. Boase’s Modern English Biography
(cited as one of the sources for the BBA), first published in 1892, appears to
have the initial reference to “Cockin” as Cockayne’s given name; however
Boase gave no reason for the “Cockin” reference. The Dictionary of National
Biography, on the other hand, first published in 1917 (but founded in 1882)
lists him as Thomas Oswald Cockayne, philologist, with no information
about his place of birth or parents. It makes no reference to the alleged
“Cockin” parentage.
20. The BBI lists only the year of his birth; his place of birth is listed in John
Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis: A Biographical List of All Known Students,
Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge from the
Earliest Times to 1900, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1922–27); hereafter cited as Venn. Singer in Cockayne 1961, preface to vol.
1, listed his birth date as 1809, but he provided no sources for his biographi-
cal information on Cockayne.
21. Venn, 80. MacMahon learned directly from St. John’s College that the county
of Cockayne’s birth was Somerset, and that the College lists his father as the
Rev. J. Cockayne (emphasis added).
22. The details of his ordination and priesthood are from Venn; only the Cam-
bridge dates and degrees are in the BBI. No sources located indicate whether
Cockayne was ever married. Singer in Cockayne 1961, preface to vol. 1, xvii,
said Cockayne took Holy Orders in 1831 and “was later Curate of Keyn-
sham”; he did not mention his master’s degree. Singer also said that Cock-
ayne became an assistant master at King’s College School “two or three years
later” (it was actually not until 1842, eight years after he was ordained and
 Oswald the Obscure 33

seven after obtaining the master’s degree) and said only that he taught “gen-
eral subjects.” Singer gave no more dates for Cockayne’s life and death,
although he did mention his dismissal from the school “under distressing cir-
cumstances,” his apparent subsequent poverty, and death by his own hand.
23. Frank Miles and Graeme Cranch, King’s College School: The First 150 Years
(London: King’s Cross School, 1979), 1; hereafter cited in text as KCS.
Details about the school and Cockayne’s tenure there are from this same book
unless otherwise noted.
24. The archives of King’s College provided photocopies of the allegations (or
statements as they are called) about Cockayne as well as Cockayne’s defense,
a printed pamphlet of four pages titled “Mr. Cockayne’s Narrative.” In the
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“Narrative” is his remark that he had been “thirty three years in the service of
King’s College School,” when in fact, the official records show him to have
been an assistant master from 1842–1869 (not 1836). Perhaps he worked in a
part-time capacity for the school, and this would explain what he did after
leaving the school in Keynsham Grange in the mid-1830s.
25. Cockayne’s remarks are quoted from Miles and Cranch and from Cockayne’s
privately printed pamphlet, “Mr. Cockayne’s Narrative,” photocopy from
King’s College archives, ref. IC/68, with permission of King’s College
School; hereafter cited in text as “Narrative.” The details of the dismissal are
in Miles and Cranch, 65–7.
26. Charlotte Brewer, in her chapter on Walter William Skeat in Helen Damico,
ed., Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Disci-
pline (New York: Garland Press, 1998), 139–150, says that Skeat acknowl-
edges Morris’s considerable influence on his work in Middle English. Skeat
was one of Cockayne’s pupils.
27. Rev. Walter W. Skeat, A Student’s Pastime: Being a Select Series of Articles
Reprinted from “Notes and Queries” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), viii;
hereafter cited in text as Pastime.
28. Sweet too brought up the topic of Bosworth’s dictionary. Although he did
not say he agreed with Cockayne’s personal attack on Bosworth’s scholar-
ship, he mentioned in a footnote the “highly amusing instances of the way in
which gross errors have arisen and been handed down from dictionary to
dictionary” that Cockayne published in The Shrine. See Henry Sweet, King
Alfred’s West Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care (1871; London:
Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, reprinted 1930), vii; hereafter cited in text as
Sweet Alfred.
29. See M. K. C. MacMahon, biography of Henry Sweet in Helen Damico,
Medieval Scholarship; hereafter cited in text as MacMahon.
30. Henry Sweet, “The History of the TH in English” (1869) in H. C. Wyld, Col-
lected Papers of Henry Sweet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 176; here-
after cited in text as Sweet. (First printed in the Transactions of the
Philological Society, 1868–69, London, 272–88.)
31. Hal Momma in “Old English as a Living Language: Henry Sweet and an
English School of Philology,” a paper presented at the annual conference of
the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, Palermo, Sicily, Italy, July
1997; hereafter cited in text as Momma. Momma said that Sweet thought the
 34 Medieval Herbal Remedies

philology of Germany was one-sided and defective, privileging written letters

over spoken sounds of living languages and dialects.
32. Henry Sweet, review of Liflade of St Juliana, Academy III, 52 (15 July 1872):
278. In 1871, in the preface to the Pastoral Care (x), Sweet was careful to
point out that in his translation he “carefully avoided that heterogeneous mix-
ture of Chaucer, Dickens, and Broad Scotch, which is affected by so many
translators from the Northern languages.”
33. Henry Cecil Wyld, “Henry Sweet,” Modern Language Quarterly IV, ii (July
1901): 73.
34. Edward Johnston Vernon, A Guide to the Anglo-Saxon Tongue: A Grammar
after Erasmus Rask (London: J. R. Smith, 1846).
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35. The notebook on Douglas is catalogued as 12491.11 at Houghton Library,

Harvard.
36. Houghton Library, Harvard, MS 641.1, vol. 2.
37. M. K. C. MacMahon, e-mail of February 1998. Frederick James Furnivall
(1825–1910) directed the Early English Text Society publications for many
years, and Cockayne published in the series.
 2
Cockayne’s Herbarium
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It will be difficult for the kindliest temper to give

a friendly welcome to the medical philosophy
of the Saxon days.
—Oswald Cockayne, Old English Herbarium

Transformations
Several modern misconceptions about medieval medicine and magic, partic-
ularly in Anglo-Saxon England, were suggested by Cockayne’s prefaces and
translations in Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England.
Though he may not have intended it, he helped advance an attitude that
medieval medicine was preposterous, that intelligent people could not have
taken it seriously, and that it could not have worked much, if at all. The prej-
udicial attitude he exhibited toward early medieval medicine continues today
and is the first misconception explored here.
Also from Cockayne’s prefaces emerged an image of Anglo-Saxon
leeches, as he liked to call the healers of the time, vainly seeking to compre-
hend classical remedies that were beyond their intellectual reach while chant-
ing gibberish and saying nonsensical words reflecting native magic. This
suggestion encouraged later scholars beginning with historian Charles Singer
to distinguish between the degenerating classical medicine carried on in library
texts from native medico-magic, the supposed norm in practice. The argument
presented here, by contrast, is that medicine and native (Germanic) magical
practices are nearly impossible to separate in early medieval texts, an argument
bolstered in chapter 3, where a pan-European, early medieval medical tradition
is described, which combined magic and medicine in its nascent stages.
The last misconception discussed here is the false impression Cock-
ayne’s translations leave on the reader (and left in his own day): They

35
 36 Medieval Herbal Remedies

emphasize the notion that the subject matter is, if not ludicrous, woefully
antiquated. Far from being straightforward translations, his Leechdoms,
Wortcunning, and Starcraft represent a transformation of ancient texts on
healing into literary oddities. In all fairness, this was not Cockayne’s
intent; he merely wanted to emphasize their ancient Germanic origins.
Unfortunately, he chose an archaizing style of translation that was in
vogue among some Victorians although ridiculed by others. It is a style
that perpetuates misconceptions about the material and its seriousness.
This chapter discusses these continuing misunderstandings about early
medieval and Anglo-Saxon medical texts, the Old English Herbarium in
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particular, that continue because of and in spite of Oswald Cockayne.

The State of Medicine in Cockayne’s Time

Cockayne’s prefaces to each of the three volumes of the Leechdoms reflect
his historical perspective and his bias concerning primitive medicine. How-
ever, medicine and pharmacology during Cockayne’s lifetime were in many
respects closer to those of the medieval period than to those of the twentieth
century. In the few places in his prefaces where Cockayne addressed medi-
cine, and not Anglo-Saxon culture in general, it was to express horror or dis-
may at Anglo-Saxon practices; yet from the vantage point of modern
medicine, dismay and horror are the general reactions to the nineteenth-
century medicine Cockayne knew. To put his translations and prefaces in
context, a brief overview of the state of medicine as Cockayne would have
experienced it is in order.
Medicine was entering a new era in the second half of the nineteenth
century; it might be fair to say that the long tradition of medical care that
originated with the Greeks and Romans was finally ending—at least as the
basis for officially sanctioned medicine as practiced in most Western coun-
tries. That long-standing medical approach was largely based on empiric
remedies prescribed after observation of the patient and drawing on received
wisdom about medicinal plants and minerals, used either alone or in com-
pounds with other plants, and mixed with a variety of substances.1 Treatment
was founded more on knowledge that a remedy seemed to help rather than on
why it helped, using scientific knowledge of disease and the chemistry of
healing medications.
Louis Pasteur (1822–95) began to publish his pioneering discoveries in
bacteriology in the 1860s, explaining how epidemics spread. Because of
his writings, use of vaccinations and “pasteurization” became more wide-
spread, and disinfectants were more common in preventing contamination
and infection. At the same time Cockayne was writing about the surgical
skills of the Greeks and Romans, many surgeons were just beginning to use
anesthesia, and it took until the turn of the century for anesthetics to win
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 37

acceptance by the majority of surgeons. (The first successful demonstration

of ether was in 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital and the use of
anesthesia spread rapidly thereafter; even so, it was not universally
accepted.) Needless to say, for much of Cockayne’s life, surgery was a last
resort for many, the patient often preferring death rather than submitting to
the knife.2 Without anesthesia, the challenges facing a surgeon in cutting
into and performing a procedure on a thrashing and screaming patient were
daunting. Prevention of infection and the ability to sedate patients enabled
surgery to achieve tremendous advances during the late nineteenth century.
It was then that surgery became a respected part of the medical profession
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after centuries of being looked down upon as mere barber-surgery. As

Inglis noted, “The war between physicians—who thought of themselves as
the only true doctors—and the surgeons had been particularly venomous,”
and was underway with a vengeance as early as the thirteenth century
(Inglis, 133).
Life expectancy throughout Europe during Cockayne’s lifetime was
forty years, by 1900 it was fifty, and in 1950 it was seventy, a fact that is gen-
erally attributed to improvements in preventive medicine in the late nine-
teenth century and to continual improvement in nutrition.3 But the history of
medicine tends to be written in terms of famous men and milestone achieve-
ments, not in terms of mundane statistical knowledge, as Erwin Ackerknecht
put it:

The mundane character of preventive medicine has made it a stepchild in

the eyes of medical history and in the sympathies of the larger public. Even
in this book, the history of preventive medicine has played second fiddle to
the history of clinical medicine. This is due mainly to the fact that our med-
ical education is primarily designed to prepare clinicians who treat diseases
rather than to prevent disease.4

Many medical historians attribute swift advances in medicine in the later

nineteenth century to the Industrial Revolution with its rapidly increasing
urban population and the attendant woes related to health under crowded and
unsanitary conditions, a sad phenomenon that also enabled clinical observa-
tion to be made on large numbers of people and statistics to be kept on dis-
eases, treatments, and the success with cures. (For medicine in the later
nineteenth century, see Inglis, “Public Health,” 165–71, and Ackerknecht,
“Public Health and Professional Development in the Nineteenth Century,”
195–202.)
Specialization was just coming into being in the mid-1800s when Cock-
ayne lived, and although it is now characteristic of Western medical practice,
the general practitioner and general surgeon of the time opposed it because of
its traditional association with traveling quacks, as Ackerknecht discusses in
 38 Medieval Herbal Remedies

his chapter 17, “The New Specialism of the Nineteenth Century.” Ackerknecht
also said in 1955 that more than half the physicians in the United States were
specialists, with fifteen areas of specialization being recognized, whereas in the
1850s, medicine recognized only four broad areas that had existed for cen-
turies: medicine, surgery, obstetrics, and gynecology. Not everyone, even
today, applauds the increasing trend toward specialization, and Inglis laments
the demise of the general physician in favor of specialists who are in “water-
tight compartments which too often cut off the specialist, not merely from
other branches of medicine, but from wider interests” ( Inglis, 144).
Part of Inglis’s discussion about “The Doctor and the Quack” deals with
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the mostly adversarial relationship between physicians and apothecaries (in

addition to their quarrels with the surgeons). Local apothecaries actually acted
as general practitioners; they compounded their own prescriptions, made
house visits, and were far less expensive than physicians. Speaking about the
time when Cockayne lived, Inglis described apothecaries in England:

The chief complaint about apothecaries was that they cheated the patient by
prescribing bogus drugs: as they made prescriptions up themselves the
temptations must often have been too much for them. . . . But in Britain, the
apothecaries managed to entrench themselves as general practitioners, in
spite of the powerful attacks mounted on them [by physicians and
chemists]. . . . The apothecaries, however, were lucky in that they acquired
status just in time to be recognized as doctors, when the various and previ-
ously disunited elements of the medical profession began to coagulate into
a profession. (Inglis, 135–36)

In the United States, interestingly enough, the rural nature of much of the
country tended to prolong the life of the doctor/apothecary/surgeon in one
person.
A student at King’s College School soon after Cockayne began teaching
there (1844–45), Sabine Baring-Gould vividly remembered details of his
own medical treatment as a child in the mid-nineteenth century as he penned
his memoirs in 1922. Having received great relief from pleurisy when his
mother applied mustard poultices to his chest, Gould’s opinion toward them
soon changed:

I had them [mustard poultices] not only applied to my chest and to my back,
but also on one occasion behind and below my ears. There the poultice was
kept on so long that when removed it carried off my skin with it, and the
fresh growth was brown as the hide of a West Indian. . . . Not only did the
windows of apothecaries display in those days outspread yellow wax-
bedaubed chamois leathers, but also, what was more interesting, globes full
of water, containing leeches. I have on my chest to this day the triangular
scars produced by the bites of those blood-suckers. . . .
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 39

My constitution must have been robust, in spite of the opinion of the

physicians, or I could not have survived the draughts of castor-oil, the blue
pills followed by drenches of senna and salts, the powders barely disguising
themselves in raspberry jam, the ipecacuanha doses, the gargles, the plas-
ters, the blisters, the cotton-wool paddings before and behind the ribs, the
leeches, the cuppings and the bleedings.5

During Cockayne’s lifetime, it was not always clear exactly who was a
reputable physician and who was a quack; indeed, it would be difficult to
make such a distinction in an age predating regulation of the medical, surgi-
cal, and pharmaceutical professions. In an essay on medical ethics in the
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nineteenth century, Peter Bartrip wrote:

When referring to the early nineteenth or previous centuries there are sound
reasons for avoiding pejoratives, for with medical training and qualification
highly variable, it was often far from clear precisely who was the
quack. . . . As for the medical corporations, which were supposed to regu-
late the profession, these were, in reality, unable to prevent the unqualified
from practising or even to warrant the skill and probity of their members.
Thomas Wakley [an early editor of the Lancet], it should be remembered,
built the reputation of the Lancet by exposing quackery and incompetence
in high, as well as in low places.6

Bartrip showed that this situation prevailed through most of the century,
and even licensed physicians lent their names to “secret remedies and nos-
trums” since it was a major source of income. The ethical question then arose
as to whether the formula could be kept secret from other physicians if it
indeed promoted health, but of course the risk was that the ingredients could
either be replicated and sold by others or shown to be bogus. In turn, Bartrip
wrote, the British Medical Journal (which became recognized early on as the
organ of the British Medical Association) derived much of its income from
advertisements for these potions and nostrums—the question raised even at
that time was whether it was ethical to do so. Patent medicines, meaning pre-
pared remedies sold over the counter and touted to cure one or more ail-
ments, and medical cults outside established medicine—for example,
osteopathic and chiropractic healing, Christian Science, spiritualism, and
mesmerism—were also developing in parallel with was what happening
within the medical establishment.
Perhaps Cockayne shared the increased public interest in health issues,
shown by the number of periodicals devoted to the topic: “For various rea-
sons, the nineteenth century saw huge growth in the number of medical jour-
nals including from 1823, weeklies which dispensed a varied diet of news,
opinion, scholarly articles and so forth” (Bartrip, 196). Chemical and medici-
nal preparations made up the majority of the advertisements, and the medical
 40 Medieval Herbal Remedies

literature showed that physicians were divided as to their opinion toward

them. The situation sounds much the same as it is today, with hundreds of
remedies readily available at local drugstores without a prescription and
promising myriad cures.
Various schools of herbal medicine were legal and popular in Cock-
ayne’s lifetime, and it was not until the twentieth century that medicinal
plants no longer were part of the official medical curriculum. A brief history
of herbal medicine described its practice during Cockayne’s time as follows:

Like the undercurrent of hostility between Chiropractors and Osteopaths, or

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between herbalists and homeopaths, this in-fighting [between schools of

herbal medicine] only proved the claim by regular medicine that herbalists
were unscientific and their system was in disarray. Instead of joining forces,
herbalists insisted on their distinct party loyalties. [Albert Isaiah] Coffin was
proud, for instance, that he knew nothing of pathology, pointing out his daily
habit of curing things which regular doctors claimed to understand but could
not cure. [John] Skelton saw the wider issues, speaking for a complement of
diverse therapies. . . . At least the various splinter groups of herbal medicine
managed to deluge Parliament with protests against anti-herb legislation.7

Cockayne verified this state of affairs in medicine in the preface to vol-

ume 1 of the Leechdoms, where he wrote:

Our own medicines are very largely taken from what we call the vegetable
kingdom; but their composition is concealed from the patient by the mys-
teries of prescriptions and of foreign names. A sick man thinks himself
effectively tended, if he chance to make out that his doses contain Tarax-
acum, Belladonna, Aconite, Hyoscyamus, or Arneca, or if he be refreshed
with Ammonia; but he smiles contemptuously at the herb woman who
administers dent de lion, nightshade, wolfsbane, henbane, elecampane, or
who burns horn in the sick chamber. Perhaps herbs are more really effectual
than we shall easily believe. (Cockayne 1965, 1: liii)

In brief, this was the world of healthcare Cockayne would have known while
he copied out the Anglo-Saxon medical treatises toward the middle of the
nineteenth century—it was a medical world that many today would not con-
sider modern but “medieval,” as often used today to mean primitive.

Cockayne’s Herbarium and Its Influence on the

Reception of Medieval Medicine
The verdict on medieval medicine since the time of Cockayne’s 1864 pref-
aces and translations can at best be called controversial. His editions of the
Anglo-Saxon medical texts—widely cited by anyone working with early
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 41

medicine in England—are part of the generally negative foundation of schol-

arship about the topic since he wrote, a foundation that may be finally erod-
ing. In addition, his prefaces to the three volumes of the Leechdoms were
negative in tone toward the Anglo-Saxons and their attempts at medical treat-
ment, and these prefaces presaged later writers.
By using selected quotations from a wide assortment of medieval med-
ical works as Cockayne did, anyone can certainly exaggerate what moderns
consider to be the ludicrous in them, and Cockayne’s translations and the
information contained in his prefaces have long been a major source for his-
tories discussing early medieval medicine. Unfortunately, many later writers
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on the subject not only adopt Cockayne’s disdain for herbal cures, incanta-
tions, charms, and the like, but extend that disdain to all of medieval medi-
cine. The evaluation of healing practices during the Dark Ages as
summarized by S. G. B. Stubbs and E. W. Bligh in Sixty Centuries of Health
and Physick is fairly typical for general medical histories. In a chapter titled
“A Thousand Years of Darkness,” they wrote:

We have chosen to attempt a brief note on the medieval background rather

than to present strings of names of tedious writers and lengthy specimens of
the futilities of medieval recipe books. It is obvious that if this attempt be a
fair representation nothing in the way of medical science as we understand
it could exist. In fact it did not—in Europe.8

Theirs is certainly not an isolated evaluation, and although Cockayne himself

did not cause all the negativity, his translations and prefaces contributed to it.
For example, in an 1898 essay under the rubric “Odd Volumes” in which
he considered several older works, the Right Honorable Sir Herbert
Maxwell, Bart., M.P. turned to “a collection of Anglo-Saxon treatises on
medicine,” which he said were admirably edited by Cockayne.9 Maxwell in
many ways expanded on the prejudice toward medieval healing practices that
Cockayne’s prefaces suggested, and he was even more pointed. Maxwell
wrote, for example:

one turns indolently to it [Cockayne’s work] to see what mad or blind

pranks our forefathers played with their constitutions, and to thank God that
we are not such blockheads as they. In truth, many of the remedies pre-
scribed seem worse than the diseases they professed to cure: unspeakably
nasty, some of them . . . (Maxwell, 660)

In this review were notions whose echoes are heard even today, such as the
certainty that even the physicians and wise men of the day did not believe in
the cures they prescribed and used because they were obviously ludicrous
even then. Another was that the Teutonic healers vainly tried to understand
classical medicine and because they could not, they simply passed on written
 42 Medieval Herbal Remedies

remedies blindly without knowing why. Maxwell did not dwell on the use of
magic in Anglo-Saxon medicine, though he mentioned superstition and use
of prayers and pagan charms together. The outlook in the essay very much
reflected Cockayne’s and Sharon Turner’s as discussed in the previous chap-
ter: a benevolent consideration of the childhood of the English nation.
Even though the Celtic tradition was and is strong in large parts of Great
Britain, neither Turner nor Cockayne treated it at any length, and they did not
discuss a unique Celtic medical tradition that might have underlain or con-
tributed to the Anglo-Saxon; their goal after all was to find the roots of
Anglo-Saxon culture. In fact, both men expressed quite a bias against the
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Celts, whom they considered inferior. Turner claimed the Celts lost the moral
virtue they needed to survive, in contrast to the superior Saxons who com-
pleted their destiny in laying the foundation for Great Britain (Turner,
1:196–242). Cockayne even said the Saxons were given “the Keltic careless
tribes for a prey” (Cockayne 1965, 1:x).
Moreover, few modern works attempt to deal with ancient Celtic medi-
cine itself, scholars preferring to study Celtic divination and magic (a trend
seen in studying the Anglo-Saxon medical works as well, as discussed later).
However in Magie, médecine et divination chez les Celtes, Christian-J. Guy-
onvarc’h looked closely at Celtic medicine and found that healing was part of
the duties of the druids, that medicine and spiritual practices were inter-
twined. He said that because the druids learned everything orally in a secret
twelve-year apprenticeship, nothing was written down. Thus, only remnants
of the druids’ healing practices may have survived the years of their being
outlawed under the Roman Empire and being suppressed by Christianity.
Therefore, precious little—if any—of the Celtic (druidic) healing tradition
survived even into Anglo-Saxon times. Guyonvarc’h concluded:

Nous avons quelques notions précises sur le matériel chirurgical de la

Gaule romaine, mais nous ne savons absolument rien sur celui des Celtes
insulaires, rien non plus sur la pharmacopée irlandaise et, tout compte fait,
relativement peu de choses sur la pharmacopée celtique continentale de
l’Antiquité, hormis mention des plantes, dont celle que nous connaissons le
mieux, grâce à Pline l’Ancien, est le gui.10

In addition, Guyonvarc’h argued that medicinal plant lore must have been
widespread and fairly homogeneous in the ancient world and that early med-
icine was probably quite similar everywhere, with everyone, including the
Celtic druids, using the same basic natural ingredients.
Forty years after Cockayne’s Leechdoms was published, in a stated effort
to spark interest in the history of English medicine, Joseph Frank Payne,
M.D., gave two lectures before the Royal College of Physicians in June 1903,
citing “lamentable apathy and but little industry” on the part of British med-
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 43

ical historians toward studying the history of their profession in England

from the earliest time.11 Central to his topic were the Anglo-Saxon medical
texts Cockayne had translated, texts that, according to Payne, still had not
received the attention they deserved. He told his audience that Cockayne’s
works presented all that was left of the medical library of Anglo-Saxon Eng-
land, yet in a prefatory note to the published lectures, he acknowledged hav-
ing received help from Henry Bradley, who, he said “corrected a large
number of inaccuracies in Mr. Cockayne’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon
texts” (Payne, v). Bradley, as noted earlier, was an editor of the Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary. Nothing more was said in the lectures or in notes in the book
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about Bradley’s alleged corrections to Cockayne’s work, and the content and
extent of these corrections are not known.
Payne portrayed the tradition that the library of Anglo-Saxon medicine
represented in a much more sympathetic light than Cockayne, Turner, and
Maxwell. In contrast particularly to Cockayne, Payne praised the intelligence
and ingenuity of the Anglo-Saxons:

In no other European country was there, at that time or for centuries after,
any scientific literature written in the vernacular. . . . This is proof that the
Anglo-Saxons possessed high intelligence and activity of mind; though not
necessarily that they possessed deep learning. . . . The other quality which
we find in the medical as in the pure literature, and which seems character-
istic of the Anglo-Saxon mind, is that readiness to learn from all sources,
that hospitality to ideas, of which I have already spoken. (Payne, 33)

Payne considered Bald’s Leechbook to be the most important of the

Anglo-Saxon medical texts because it was an original compilation written in
Old English using a variety of sources. He considered the Herbarium to be “a
continuation of the noble project of that great king [Alfred], to put in the
hands of his people the best books of all kinds, written in their native
tongue,” and later in the lecture, Payne outlined the great importance of the
Herbarium to the early medieval world (Payne, 38). However, he observed
that, not withstanding the merits of the texts, they could not transcend the
time in which they were written. Echoing Cockayne, Payne described the
early medieval period to be “the time when European medicine stood at its
very lowest level; and if any period deserved the name of the dark ages it was
this” (Payne, 57).
Yet Payne displayed a remarkably tolerant attitude for his time toward
the allegedly superstitious elements of Anglo-Saxon medicine: “the charms,
incantations, exorcisms, the wearing of amulets or other magical objects, the
employment of ceremonies and religious rites in the gathering or prepara-
tions of medicines, and so forth” (Payne, 94). He said that what modern Eng-
lishmen would call superstition had been part of every known medical
 44 Medieval Herbal Remedies

system to the present and he characterized the modern European art of heal-
ing as an exception. In more detail than Cockayne’s prefaces, and certainly
more lucidly, Payne contrasted the Greek art of healing—with its lack of
superstition or appeal to supernatural beliefs—with most other healing sys-
tems in the world, all of which have relied on various forms of superstition.
With regard to the charms and other superstitious materials in the Anglo-
Saxon medical texts, Payne, like Cockayne, touched on the possibility of
being able to trace their origin to a locale or a tribe, acknowledging that much
pagan material had very probably been adapted to the Christian pantheon as
time progressed. Payne devoted considerable space to this discussion, and it
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seems obvious he was responding to a known interest in this side of the

ancient healing arts. He took the position that it was difficult, if not impossi-
ble to determine with certainty the origin of any one charm or practice, not-
ing that they came out of a tradition spanning a great deal of time and a huge
geographic area (including countries surrounding and affecting the West), at
a time and place when superstition and healing were inextricably inter-
twined. Apropos this topic, Payne remarked:

It is not easy from the form or contents of a charm to know whether it orig-
inated in folklore or in borrowed learning. A great deal of so-called “folk-
medicine” is old-fashioned regular medicine which has sunk down to the
level of the unlearned, and has sometimes put on a rustic dress. It is not all
so, of course, but many charms and the like collected by students of folklore
and called provincial may be traced to Oriental, Greek, or Latin sources
(Payne, 108). . . . It is probable that, if we knew more about it, we should
find the roots of other portions in the old folk-lore of the Teutonic and
Celtic peoples, but of this I am not competent to speak. (Payne, 142)

Many of the topics Payne discussed in 1903 were repeated almost in his
own words beginning in the 1920s by Charles Singer, whose most accessible
works do not acknowledge or cite Payne. However, if Singer appropriated
ideas from Payne, he did so with a decided agenda and gave them his own
bent. Singer’s writings are numerous and ubiquitous and have long been part
of the essential readings for those who write on medieval medicine.12 Singer,
like Payne, saw in the Old English (indeed in all medieval) medical texts a
conglomeration of traditions, one of which was the end of Greek rational
medicine, in his words “the last stage of a process that has left no legitimate
successor, a final pathological disintegration of the great system of Greek
medical thought.”13 Throughout his many works, this message resounds:
Medieval medicine is monstrous and preposterous.
As mentioned earlier, Singer reissued the three-volume Leechdoms in
facsimile in 1961 and substituted his own preface for Cockayne’s, saying:
“Each of the three [original] volumes had a long preface. These we omit
because they are misleading in the present state of knowledge” (Cockayne
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 45

1961, 1:xx). And so in this edition of the Leechdoms, the bias in Singer’s
1952 Magic and Medicine was even more closely linked to the Old English
works, much of it gleaned from what Cockayne and Payne had said without
crediting them with the ideas. The following was typical for Singer in evalu-
ating medicine in Anglo-Saxon England:

The Anglo-Saxon leech had no originality. That quality, for him, would
have a negative value. He had no understanding of even the rudiments of
the science of classical antiquity. His sources were very various and the
demonstration of them provides the chief interest of these volumes of
Cockayne. The general level of this medicine will be found far lower, far
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more barbarous, than the common accounts of Anglo-Saxon culture sug-

gest. The sources of this debased material, if accurately and completely dis-
played, would reveal much of the social circumstances of England for
several centuries before and for a century after the Conquest. . . .
[T]hus Cockayne’s Leechdoms should be regarded as an end not a
beginning. They provide good examples of the darkest and deliquescent
stage of a [sic] outdated culture. (Cockayne 1961, 1:xix–xx, and xlvii)

About ten years later, Wilifrid Bonser, one of Singer’s pupils, continued
Singer’s ideas in detail in a book whose title, The Medical Background of
Anglo-Saxon England, is misleading, and whose subtitle actually tells the
truth: “A Study in History, Psychology, and Folklore.” The preconceived
notions about medicine and what motivated its healers that was seen in Cock-
ayne and Singer were repeated and amplified here. Though the following
statement was not attributed to Singer, it exactly carried on his ideas and per-
petuated the ideas he promoted about early medieval medicine generally,
Anglo-Saxon in particular:

Western medicine stagnated for more than five hundred years from the later
Imperial Roman times until it began to revive in the hands of the Arabs. The
chief reason for this stagnation was the lack of that inquiring spirit to which
one is accustomed today. . . . Most leeches were content to copy dead mate-
rial without questioning this authority.14

Yet Singer’s verdict on medieval medicine was not accepted unani-

mously in his day, even though it proved—and continues to prove—to be
quite popular. Historian Loren MacKinney disagreed with Singer, his con-
temporary, on the question of exactly what medieval medicine represented:

Dr. Singer, the eminent English scholar, has defended medieval medical
history on the ground that it is a study in the pathology of civilization. But
it is more than this; it is the birth and growth of a new civilization. Early
medieval civilization consisted of two healthy elements, and one that was
old and pathological. In the West, although classical civilization was sick
 46 Medieval Herbal Remedies

unto death, much of it was preserved through its union with a vigorous
young religion (Christianity) and a sturdy new race of rulers (the Germans).
These two furnished the active elements by which a practically new civi-
lization was created. The early middle age is a period in which the clergy,
originally dedicated to supernatural healing, and the Germanic people,
addicted to primitive folk medicine, slowly progressed to the point where
they could appreciate classical medical science and apply more intelli-
gently the results of their own practical experience [emphasis added].15

MacKinney cited examples of bias such as Singer’s (and carried on by

Bonser) toward the “Dark Ages” in several nineteenth-century scholars, and
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attributed this prejudiced attitude toward the Middle Ages to received knowl-
edge from high-school history teachers with outmoded views. He wrote,
“Many an educated man’s conception of the early middle ages is merely an
amplified image of the term dark age, the sole remnant of youthful acquisi-
tions in a history class” (MacKinney, 21).
Stanley Rubin, a somewhat later writer on the subject, shared MacKin-
ney’s objectivity about examining the details of medieval remedies to see if
they might have helped the patient at all, but his Medieval English Medicine
also demonstrates a personal bias similar to that in Cockayne, Singer, and
Bonser against the whole tradition of medicine in Anglo-Saxon England.
Rubin’s work concentrates on Anglo-Saxon and the early years of Norman
England, and cites interesting archaeological evidence to give substance to
the narrative that few other works use. However, instead of being grounded in
the concrete, the work is replete with assumptions prefaced by words like
“undoubtedly” and “no doubt” and postulations of what might have been.
Rubin repeatedly underscored the terrible living conditions that must
have prevailed at the time, but not from an objective archaeologist’s point of
view. For example, with no citation of sources, he described the miserable
dwellings of the early Anglo-Saxons as being semisunken and stated, again
without archaeological or other evidence: “Refuse would quickly accumulate
and general squalor prevailed.”16 He continued in the same passage: “Domes-
tic hygiene was impossible under these conditions and infectious diseases
and others caused by squalor and dirt would have been common and wide-
spread.” The evidence now available for living conditions and medical treat-
ment in Anglo-Saxon England certainly does not put the Anglo-Saxons on a
level high enough to satisfy the sanitary concerns of the twentieth-century
Western world, but “squalor” is not a term to be used lightly. If Rubin had
cited as much archaeological data for all of his descriptions of life in Anglo-
Saxon England as he did for diseases shown in skeletal remains, his picture
would have much more validity. The way of life then may have been primi-
tive by our standards, but substantive evidence would show just how primi-
tive it actually was and whether there were any redeeming features. In their
dissertations on Anglo-Saxon medical works, Barbara Olds and Frieda Han-
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 47

kins adopted Rubin’s technique of reaching a number of “doubtless” conclu-

sions, and they both cited Rubin’s work.17
In discussing Rubin’s book, an apparently offhand remark concerning
Cockayne must be mentioned. In light of his actual place among Anglo-
Saxonists, it could be seen as cruel: “In this monumental work a modern
English translation of much of this material is presented, and while in some
instances the translation may not meet the demands of more recent standards
of scholarship, this does not in any way detract from the success the editor
undoubtedly achieved” (Rubin, 44). The unhappy life and lack of success of
Cockayne are discussed in chapter 1. In leaving Rubin, a final quote is in
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order, summing up in many ways the author’s biases toward the tradition as a
whole yet objectivity toward some of the details: “While much of what is to
be discussed in this and other chapters may seem crude, distasteful in parts
and perhaps even useless from a modern medical point of view, it was, at
least, the serious and not ignoble attempt of an early population to alleviate
suffering and distress—a not unworthy endeavor” (Rubin, 45). A new way of
looking at medieval medical practices that is at variance with the above-
mentioned scholars is presented in chapter 3. This approach, shaped by
researchers such as Linda Voigts, John Riddle, and M. L. Cameron, compares
medieval practices with the very similar and very old traditions of herbology
and curanderismo (folk medicine in Hispanic culture).
If Cockayne’s condescending attitude toward medieval medicine has
persisted into the present, fueled to some extent by Singer’s legacy, so has his
implied distinction between native and classical medical practices, a distinc-
tion that has also promoted serious misconceptions about the state of medi-
cine in Anglo-Saxon England and early medieval Europe generally.
Cockayne compared Anglo-Saxon medical practices and knowledge unfa-
vorably to the Greek and Roman, even saying Anglo-Saxon leeches lacked
the intellectual power to understand classical medicine. He also wrote at
length about the Anglo-Saxons’ superstitions and charms and other primitive
practices, which he believed they brought with them when they migrated into
England. Cockayne simply made this distinction in his prefaces based on
what he surmised he knew from the texts and his own understanding of his-
tory; it has subsequently become received wisdom.
The modern literary/historical custom has been to categorize late classical
and medieval medical texts as being primarily from the rational Greek tradi-
tion or from the barbaric and superstitious one. This neat division has been
especially prevalent in Anglo-Saxon studies, and if Cockayne did not invent
it, his writings certainly contributed to its becoming established as fact—pri-
marily by Singer and Bonser, who espoused it vocally and spent much
energy in identifying the origins of separate (largely) folkloric aspects of
medicine/magic. However, this division of types is more suited to literary
studies than to medical history. It does not appear to reflect correctly what
 48 Medieval Herbal Remedies

was going on in a tradition of healing that used a fluid body of texts, oral
transmission, and a system of apprenticeship for practitioners (discussed in
chapter 3) that was also coupled with magic or often religious aspects, as
healing often is even today. By isolating magical (and supposedly Germanic)
elements from the classical and others in the texts and pursuing them as iso-
lated elements to literary ends, sight is lost of the medical tradition. It
becomes fragmented into many parts, and a view of the whole is distorted.
Appropriating and expanding on Cockayne’s ideas, Singer and later
Bonser (in even greater detail) separated out classical and “barbaric” ele-
ments in medicine as much as possible, seen particularly in Singer’s From
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Magic to Science (where, it might be added, Singer’s choice of words was

remarkably similar to Henry Sigerists’s, whose 1923 work on classical and
medieval medicine is discussed in the next chapter, but was not mentioned by
Singer). For example, Bonser wrote:

But magic, as will be seen from the following pages, was associated with
most branches of medicine, thereby ousting the healing art itself. The
assessment of what was of value for healing purposes was therefore entirely
different from what it had been in classical Greece and what it is today.
Thus one must not necessarily look in a prescription for any physiological
effect which the ingredients might have had on a patient. (Bonser, 8)

In chapter 3, several modern scholars are discussed who are studying the
physiological effects and bio-chemical properties of medicinal plants and
providing scientific explanations as to why many medieval remedies are con-
figured in the way that they are—to ensure that they work and not because
they invoke any magical power.
In a summary statement, Bonser’s teacher, Singer, said, “The magic and
medicine of Early England must be studied as a whole if we wish to learn
something of the cultural factors that have gone to make up this remarkable
system, or to gain a true picture of the attitude of the inhabitants of this coun-
try towards the healing art, before the arrival of that scholastic method and
Arabian learning which wrought nearly as great a mental revolution in the
thirteenth, as the experimental method and scientific attitude in the seven-
teenth century” (Singer, Science, 136–7). (It should be noted that medical
historian John Riddle believes the scholastic approach to medicine actually
hurt herbal prescriptions, since they then became part of a complex world of
theory divorced from practice.)18 In actuality, Singer’s goal was apparently to
see not the whole, but the parts, and to expose each to scathing ridicule.
Bonser, like Cockayne and Singer but in more detail, discussed the folkloric,
magical, anecdotal, literary, and ostensibly scientific aspects of medieval
medicine as evidenced by a welter of details, none of which painted a picture
of what actual practice might have been as a whole. One allegedly scientific
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 49

introduction to a discussion of skin disease bears quoting in this regard

because it is typical for Bonser: “It becomes obvious from a study of Anglo-
Saxon medicine that, generally speaking, the interior of the body was then
practically unknown, and that its exterior claimed most of the attention of the
leech. The number of recipes for skin diseases is therefore large” (Bonser,
369). The causes of such disease are said to be “neglect of personal hygiene”
based on “abundant evidence,” none of which is cited.
Singer’s view was that the magical folk practices of the Germanic peo-
ples, which they had brought from the Continent, gave way before the written
word of classical medicine. However, he characterized the magic as barbaric
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and preposterous and the classical as decayed Greek science that was mind-
lessly copied. This characterization reinforced the notion of distinct tradi-
tions, which tended to fragment the way in which medieval medicine was
viewed. It also created the untenable notion that Latin- and Greek-based texts
like the Herbarium were for some reason copied in the scriptoria but never
used in medieval Europe. Of the remedies in the Anglo-Saxon medical texts,
particularly the Herbarium, he said:

It would be an error to regard all the elaborate prescriptions in these writ-

ings as indicating the actual lines of treatment. For practical reasons many
of the recipes could not have been prepared. Any leech who claimed that he
had so prepared them would have been guilty of fraud. In fact dark age
medical manuscripts are partly mere literary material and in places hardly
more than scribal exercises. They are always unintelligently copied and the
prescriptions are often mere elaborate displays of learning. Many of the
remedies that they set forth were completely unintelligible to the leeches of
the time; others involved preparations altogether beyond their meager tech-
nical skill [emphasis added]. (Singer, Science, 24)

Singer offered scant proof for his claims, and his statements were made with
little appeal to what was in the texts—except for the charms. Bonser built on
this notion.
It appears to have been Singer who introduced the idea that the Herbar-
ium was a “mere” translation of a classical text that was for reasons unknown
slavishly copied; he may have derived the notion from Cockayne’s estima-
tion of the intellectual capacity of the leeches to learn from the classical
world. At any rate, Singer was careful to isolate the native Anglo-Saxon and
Germanic lore from what was assumed to be the bookish, classical medical
tradition. The argument presented here is that although vestiges of early Ger-
manic lore are somewhat more evident in the Lacnunga and Bald’s Leech-
book, the two other Anglo-Saxon medical texts, evidence points to the fact
that by the time these texts were written and the Herbarium of Pseudo-
Apuleius was translated into Old English, a composite, distinctly medieval
tradition had been established throughout Europe, and the Herbarium, Bald’s
 50 Medieval Herbal Remedies

Leechbook, and the Lacnunga all belonged to it (as discussed in more detail
in chapter 3).
The argument made here challenges the neat division of medieval medi-
cine into classical and barbaric, a categorization suggested in Cockayne that
was made into law by Singer and continued in Bonser and others. To the con-
trary, the present work shows that by the early medieval period, practical
medicine had fused classical and “barbaric” elements (which included
Roman superstition) into one tradition, which is reflected in the Herbarium
and the other two Anglo-Saxon texts. However, enabled by Cockayne’s edi-
tions and translations of all the Anglo-Saxon medical texts and following
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Cockayne’s and Singer’s suggestions, scholars in search of what can be con-

sidered unique to Anglo-Saxon folklore and folk medicine have deemed the
supposedly classical Herbarium useless to early England and have declared
the Leechbook and Lacnunga to be goldmines of hidden information about
the native culture. The thesis of the present work is that to understand the
medical practice of Anglo-Saxon England, it must be studied in the context
of the Continental tradition to which it clearly belonged. Moreover, the tradi-
tion must be seen as a whole to be understood, not broken into hypothetical
parts that are allegedly Teutonic, Celtic, classical, and the like. In addition,
one basis for the argument is that there is no reliable way to isolate pristine
elements characterizing Ur-Anglo-Saxon culture as distinct from a general
Indo-European one.
The assumption that the Herbarium and works like it were not useful
medical texts was stated more or less as received knowledge in the two
unpublished dissertations mentioned earlier. Frieda Hankins, for example,
listed the main sources for knowledge of Anglo-Saxon medicine and magic
only as MSS Harley 585 and Royal 12.D.xviii, because the Lacnunga and
Bald’s Leechbook are in them, and she characterized the Herbarium merely
as “an Anglo-Saxon translation from the Greek Apuleius . . . a description of
herbs and plants” (Hankins, 2). Singer was nearly alone in thinking the
Herbarium came from the Greek, and the original is generally accepted to
have been in Latin. Likewise, in speaking about Cockayne’s translations of
the medical texts from Anglo-Saxon England, Barbara Olds claimed that
“[o]f all these writings, the most studied and the most useful for an under-
standing of Anglo-Saxon medicine are the Lacnunga and Leechbook” (Olds,
2). Of the Herbarium, Olds said it was a compilation based on Pliny, written
in North Africa at the end of the fifth century. Published works continue the
assumed distinction, such as a recent work by Karen Jolly, in which what is
called “rational” or “classical” medicine in the Herbarium is contrasted unfa-
vorably with what is considered to be useful “native” material in the Lac-
nunga and Bald’s Leechbook.19
Both Olds and Hankins also cited Charles Talbot’s Medicine in Medieval
England, a work that claimed Bald’s Leechbook and the Lacnunga were
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 51

important because they reflected actual practice. Talbot’s work placed the
Herbarium in the category of classical (sometimes referred to as rational)
medicine and the author mentioned it almost as an aside to the two other
works. At the same time, however, Talbot acknowledged the known and sus-
pected classical sources that can be found everywhere in Bald’s Leechbook
and also in the Lacnunga. Talbot’s argument is that when the Romans left
England, all that remained for the Saxons to encounter were “the descen-
dants of the serfs who had clustered in villages on the outskirts of the
Roman cities. . . . Like all primitive peoples the Saxons had some knowl-
edge of herbs and a rudimentary acquaintance with surgery. But it was more
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empirical than rational, overlaid with magic and superstition and rooted in
folklore. This was to persist long after the introduction of what is called
rational medicine.”20
Talbot postulated that classical, which he called rational, medicine could
have come to England with Theodore of Tarsus and could have been taught at
his school at Canterbury. Moreover, he devoted considerable space to the
medical writing that by then existed on the Continent and could have been
available to the Anglo-Saxons through the system of monks and monasteries
who were the keepers and transmitters of texts, and were also serving as
medical healers. He listed the standard authors of these classical texts, and
complimented highly the contents in Bald’s Leechbook that came from these
authors. For example: “The Leech-Book embodies the teaching of Greek
writers as transmitted by Latin translations. . . . In short, far from the Leech-
Book being a tissue of folk remedies and irrational ideas, it embodies some
of the best medical literature available to the West at that time. . . . Indeed
even the irrational remedies which appear from time to time in the Leech-
book are the same as those used by Galen and Celsus” (Talbot, 18–19).
When evaluating the Lacnunga, Talbot echoed Cockayne and Singer in
expressing his complete certainty that a society capable of producing the
likes of Ælfric and Wulfstan would have had “little place” for such supersti-
tion and magic. His conclusion on the work was, “[t]o lay great emphasis,
then, on a single extravagant text like the Lacnunga is to throw everything
out of perspective.” This is true; however it is misleading for Talbot, like
Singer and Bonser, to find Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Celtic, and Teutonic
sources for this work alone, since such sources are typical for early medieval
medicine and its combination of the rational, folklore, and magic. (Talbot
cited only two sources for his chapter on Anglo-Saxon medicine: the 1904
work by J. F. Payne, English Medicine in Anglo-Saxon Times, and Grattan
and Singer’s Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine.) The modern fixation with
data collection in subdivided and precise compartments fosters such frag-
mentation, to the point that one may lose sight of the tradition as a whole.21
In contrast to the trend established by Cockayne and Singer, and con-
tinued by Bonser and others, not everyone sees a neat distinction between
 52 Medieval Herbal Remedies

classical medicine and magical native Germanic practices. A study by Faye

Getz, though concentrating on late medieval medicine in England, stresses
the interrelationship of Latin and vernacular medical texts in Anglo-Saxon
England and traces what she termed an encyclopedic medical tradition from
the ruins of Rome through the early Middle Ages, one which encompassed
magic in its early stages. Getz described it as combining medicinal herbs,
simple remedies, and charms, and linked it to the medical tradition of the
Benedictine monasteries and the texts associated with them (which included
all the Anglo-Saxon texts).22
Two conferences also pointed up the union of magic and medicine in the
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medieval period. D. G. Scragg, one of the organizers of the 1987 and 1988
conferences on medieval medicine at Manchester, England, wrote in an intro-
duction to some of the papers published after the conference: “No one in
Anglo-Saxon England would have distinguished magic and medicine in the
way that we do today, and it was logical therefore that, after the successful
conference in Manchester in 1987 on Anglo-Saxon medicine, there should be
a follow-up conference to look at magic and at those credited with supernat-
ural healing powers.”23 The eight papers in the two publications cover a wide
range of medical subjects, and treatments using herbs are mentioned in many.
The conferences are mentioned here to underscore their focus on medicine
and magic together.
What emerges from many of the writings reviewed here, beginning with
Cockayne, is that modern studies often try to understand past traditions by
breaking them into their parts: with medieval medicine split into Greek,
Roman, Germanic, magic, folkloric traditions, and so forth. One part of the
medieval medical tradition has received a disproportionate amount of atten-
tion, beginning again with Singer’s appropriations from Cockayne, and that
is magic. However, to a great extent, it is clear that the understanding of what
is alleged to be magic in Anglo-Saxon (and medieval medicine generally) is
based on false assumptions. Cockayne fostered a search for magic; for exam-
ple in the preface to his volume 1 (1965), he described the medicine of the
northern leeches during the “rudest ages” as being a combination of medici-
nal plants, charms, and incantations (xxvii). He then likened the superstition
of the Germanic tribes to superstitious practices of the Roman Church in the
“earlier ages of our modern period” (xxviii), practices such as “medicine
masses, and blessing of worts out in the field.” He quoted Germanic and
Scandinavian sources to show the widespread belief in the power of witches,
dwarfs, wizards, even by such people as Bede and Theodorus, Archbishop of
Canterbury.
Godfrid Storms, however, challenged the idea that magic or, even more
specifically, pagan magic, could easily be identified as such in medieval
medical texts (in this he echoes Payne, discussed earlier). In Anglo-Saxon
Magic, Storms discussed magic, its origins, and how magic was used to heal;
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 53

hence, the two Anglo-Saxon manuscripts with the most magic, Bald’s Leech-
book and Lacnunga, are the center of the study.24 (The Herbarium was not
excluded, and a number of its remedies are said to have a magic element.)
Storms was early in tying all three Anglo-Saxon medical texts to a pan-
European tradition with the goal of finding the Ur-Germanic and the Ur-Indo-
European in them, a quest not unlike Sir James George Frazer’s in the
Golden Bough, which he cited. However, Storms clearly stated how difficult
it is to separate the native from the classical sources in any of this material.
(Singer, on the other hand, said that certain ancient elements were discernible
in the Anglo-Saxon Lacnunga, but included no evidence.)
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Of particular relevance with regard to Singer and those who followed

him in seeking the native in the Old English medical texts is the careful
approach Storms took in his chapter 5, where he attempted to distinguish
Anglo-Saxon, classical, and Christian elements in the magico-medical texts.
He said that the Anglo-Saxons had no general denomination for magic, nor
did the Romans, and found that Anglo-Saxon expressions mainly referred to
the way in which the magic actions were performed, rather than to magic in
general. He said that they used abstract terms made with -craeft to describe
magical practices. In addition, Storms thought that it was relatively easy to
recognize and distinguish Christian from pagan elements, but much more
difficult to separate pagan Germanic elements from pagan classical elements.
Singer identified four unique elements that he believed distinguished
pagan Teutonic ideas about the cause of disease: (1) flying venoms, (2) the
evil nines, (3) worm as the cause of disease, and (4) the doctrine of elf-shot
(Singer, Magic, 52–62). With regard to the first three, which are interrelated
as Singer explained it, the god of health and good luck, Woden, smashed the
serpent or worm, the symbol of death, into nine pieces, and these pieces pro-
duced nine venoms that fly through the air and cause disease. He cited ref-
erences to these three doctrines particularly in the Lacnunga. Singer
described in some detail how dwarfs and elves were blamed for disease in
the pages cited. However Storms concluded that with the exception of the
last, elf-shot, “we can hardly speak of distinguishing characteristics because
the same elements occur in classical magic as well, as was admitted by
Singer” (Storms, 118). Whereas Singer thought the Anglo-Saxons brought
these four elements of magic with them from their Continental homes to
England, Storms found them to be part of a common pool of Indo-European
information—not characteristically Anglo-Saxon—saying: “If we find a
well-developed vernacular formula whose contents do not point to a foreign
source, we can be sure that it is a true Germanic charm.” In fact, Storms
thought that even if the existence of an Anglo-Saxon tradition could be
established, it need not differ from that of Italy and Greece, and to back this
up said, “If some charm or practice is recorded by Marcellus or Alexander
of Tralles, it may still be of Teutonic origin, because they both spent part of
 54 Medieval Herbal Remedies

their life among Teutonic tribes, and they were influenced by Teutonic
superstition” (Storms, 121).
The modern practice of isolating the Old English Herbarium from the
other Anglo-Saxon medical texts because it is thought to be “classical” has
tended to diminish the importance of the Herbarium to its time and as a part
of the medical tradition of Anglo-Saxon England. Cockayne’s prefaces to the
Leechdoms laid the foundations for this isolation, which is echoed in later
scholars studying the Anglo-Saxon medical texts. A. J. Minnis spoke about
contextualization and medieval literary texts, and his thoughts clearly apply
here. In his Medieval Theory of Authorship, Minnis wrote, “Cultural change
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is one thing: cultural imperialism is something else. One can only hope that
the greater awareness of medieval literary theory and criticism will help us
go back to the texts and their contexts with the desire to listen and learn, not
to shout down and dominate.”25
This study has Minnis’s admonition in mind in looking at the legacy of
Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England and
in the placement of the Old English Herbarium in the pantheon of Anglo-
Saxon medical texts. Looking at this work only as a rational, classical work
has tended wrongly to isolate it from the supposedly more native Lacnunga
and Bald’s Leechbook. In the following chapter, the Herbarium of Pseudo-
Apuleius is studied as part of an early European medical tradition to which it
and the Old English version belong, and it becomes clear that the Old Eng-
lish Herbarium must be put back on the shelf beside the Lacnunga and the
Leechbook as texts that were valuable for understanding their time. (In all
fairness, the Latin medical manuscripts from the same period must be
included too.) All belonged to the same basic tradition, just with a different
mix of sources. The texts in Anglo-Saxon England were found throughout
the monastery libraries of Europe, with the same evidence for their having
been used. J. D. A. Ogilvy characterized the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius
as “[a]pparently the standard medical text of the later Anglo-Saxons. . . . It
is really a complex of Dioscorides, Pseudo-Apuleius, Pseudo-Musa (De
Herba Bettonica, De Taxone) and Sectus Placitus Papyriensis De Med. ex
Animalibus.”26 By the time it was translated into Old English, the Herbar-
ium complex in England also included the additions and revisions of those
who had copied, translated, and used it over the years.

Cockayne’s Translations as Transformations

Cockayne’s prefaces to the Leechdoms and his translation style set the stage
for reading the Anglo-Saxon medical texts as literary curiosities, nothing
more. Cockayne viewed the Anglo-Saxons as cultural children, lacking the
refinements and medical skill of the classical world, and as a result his
“translations” were actually transformations of the Anglo-Saxon medical
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 55

texts. For the Old English Herbarium, Cockayne transformed it into what
might be called Cockayne’s Herbarium, whose legacy continues today.
That such transformations are not unusual is the message in Lawrence
Venuti’s book, The Scandals of Translation. The work illustrates how a trans-
lation can intentionally influence the way a different culture will receive the
original, and the argument presented is that translations reflect the transla-
tor’s perception/reception not only of the work itself, but of the culture from
which the work comes.27 (Venuti’s primary interest was literary translations
and the problems in translating—or failures to translate—the literature of
marginalized cultures. In many ways, Cockayne saw Anglo-Saxon culture as
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marginal, in our words, as a third-world country.) Venuti argued that the

choice of words, the omissions, the paraphrases, the adaptations involved in
translating any text, but particularly literature, from one language to another
constitute a reworking of the original text, no matter how “literal” the trans-
lation is intended to be. He wrote:

Translation wields enormous power in constructing representations of for-

eign cultures. Foreign literatures tend to be dehistoricized by the selection
of texts for translation, removed from the foreign literary traditions where
they draw their significance. . . . Translation patterns that come to be fairly
established fix stereotypes for foreign cultures, excluding values, debates,
and conflicts that don’t appear to serve domestic agendas. (Venuti, Scan-
dals, 67)

Although Venuti was primarily concerned with modern literature and the
effect of translations on how foreign texts are received in dominant cultures,
his ideas are very much applicable to Cockayne’s treatment of Anglo-Saxon
works. Cockayne’s translations should not be seen simply as translations but
as appropriations of “foreign” (read historical) texts by a dominant culture.
They are creations of a nineteenth-century antiquarian whose historical prej-
udices and stereotypes are obvious.
Two recent works dealing specifically with the influence of nineteenth-
century scholarship on Anglo-Saxon studies help explain why Cockayne
transformed the medical texts with which he worked (albeit unintention-
ally), and why his ideas and Singer’s have gained such ready acceptance. In
The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism, E. G. Stanley discussed a quest in
Anglo-Saxon studies to find the pagan Germanic, a discussion that pertains
to the foregoing review of what has occurred in studies of the medieval med-
ical texts. Stanley’s thesis is that “[f]or a long time Old English literature
was much read in the hope of discovering in it a lost world of pre-Christian
antiquity, for the reconstruction of which the Old English writings them-
selves do not provide sufficient fragments.”28 Stanley pointed out that mod-
ern followers of Jacob Grimm have tried to exclude all Christian elements
 56 Medieval Herbal Remedies

from interpretations and sources of Anglo-Saxon literary works in an effort

to remove this “veneer” from the pagan underpinnings (Stanley, 1).
Stanley’s explanation of how Grimm and his followers used mythologi-
cal etymology to back up their literary conclusions sheds much light on com-
ments often made about such works as the Lacnunga (Cockayne used the
same kind of word tracing):

The use of the poetic vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxons to illustrate the con-
tinuity of pagan concepts even after the introduction of Christianity is a fea-
ture of much of Jacob Grimm’s philological work; and following his
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example it became a standard feature of Anglo-Saxon scholarship. For

example, Grimm asserts that phrases like hilde woma are redolent of pagan-
ism because woma is etymologically connected with Omi, one of the Norse
names of Odin, and means “a noise” like that of an approaching God. The
element of noise aroused a feeling of awe and the sense of a god’s immedi-
ate presence; as Woden was also called Woma, and Ovon also Omi and
Yggr, so the expressions woma, sweg, broga, and egesa are used by the
Anglo-Saxon poets almost synonymously for spirits and divine manifesta-
tions (from Deutsche Mythologie 1844). (Stanley, 17)

Cockayne’s fanciful etymologies in Spoon and Sparrow, derivations that are

very much like Grimm’s in intent, are discussed in chapter 1. In fact, Stanley
specifically mentioned Cockayne and the medical text Lacnunga in this con-
nection: “Thunor is never mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon charms, but Cock-
ayne supplied that want by emendation and was followed, though with a
different interpretation, by Bosworth under fyrgen in his Dictionary” (Stan-
ley, 90).
Like Stanley, Allen J. Frantzen in his provocative Desire for Origins: New
Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition examined in detail the fun-
damental role of nineteenth-century scholarship to modern trends in Anglo-
Saxon studies. Though Frantzen’s purpose in writing the book was to examine
critically what these foundations have meant to modern scholarship, he
brought out certain points about the seminal years of Anglo-Saxon studies in
Germany and England in the nineteenth century whose repercussions can be
traced to modern critical attitudes toward the three Anglo-Saxon medical texts.
These attitudes have led to regarding the Herbarium as (merely) a translation
from the Latin, Bald’s Leechbook as a composite with some “native” elements,
and the Lacnunga as of relatively pure, native Germanic derivation. Frantzen’s
underlying thesis is that we create the origins we seek. Frantzen called for a
consideration of memory and oral tradition (neither of them written), and the
fact that Latin and Old English were used by the same people at the same time
in interpreting written texts. About translations, he said, “We know that the tex-
tual relations of Anglo-Saxon literary culture were more complex than the sim-
ple translation model (“from” Latin “to” Anglo-Saxon) allows.”29
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 57

This issue of creation versus translation, which reaches into hermeneu-

tics, goes far beyond the scope of this study, as do the larger issues of trans-
lation theory. However translation per se merits brief discussion, even though
the primary texts of concern are Cockayne’s translations of scientific (nonlit-
erary) works, where accuracy and impartiality rather than literary interpreta-
tion and the issue of authorial intent are the major concern. Indeed, few
works on translation theory deal with the topic of translations of scientific
works, favoring literary translations entirely because of the problems they
create with literary interpretation. (An especially provocative discussion of
Venuti’s targets the largely unacknowledged problems associated with study-
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ing literature in translation, which is so prevalent in schools and universities.

In Scandals of Translation, Venuti asserted that discussion is seldom raised
about the problems associated with studying a translation, which is an inter-
pretation or a new work based on the original. See especially his chapter 5,
“The Pedagogy of Literature.”)
The issue of faithful translation versus paraphrase is, of course, not new.
In Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, Rita
Copeland wrote:

[During the Roman Empire] Rhetoric sought to establish itself as the mas-
ter discipline, the province of textual or oratorical production, relegating to
grammar that of language use and glossing and interpretation of the poets.
Cicero originated the “non verbum pro verbo” concept in De optimo genere
oratorum 5.14–15. Jerome and others passed it on. To translate as an orator
in the profession of rhetoric, means one can exercise the productive power
of rhetoric—not just as a grammarian who only should translate word for
word because their duty is to “practice within the restricted competence of
the textual critic whose duty is to gloss word for word.”30

Copeland restricted her study to academic critical discourse in Latin and ver-
nacular traditions, that is, to the academic study and reception of ancient auc-
tores. As she observed: “My arguments do not necessarily extend to the
emergence of popular translation in genres such as the lai or the metrical
romance from one vernacular language to another, nor to hagiographical or
devotional writings, nor to translation of scientific or technical works”
(Copeland, 5). But in her discussion of translation as belonging either to
rhetoric (inventio, creation/paraphrase) or to grammar (ennaratio, literal/word-
for-word), Copeland was exploring much the same territory as Venuti, simply
in a different age. And, although describing medieval translation strategies,
Copeland could have been talking about Cockayne’s translation of the Anglo-
Saxon medical texts here: “A chief maneuver of academic hermeneutics is to
displace the very text that it proposes to serve” (Copeland, 3). Cockayne’s style
of translating transformed the Anglo-Saxon text from a medical reference writ-
ten in a reasonably plain style into fanciful literary arcana.
 58 Medieval Herbal Remedies

Presenting the same argument for the Anglo-Saxon age, Janet Bately
showed in her 1980 lecture “The Literary Prose of King Alfred’s Reign:
Translation or Transformation?” that already in the age of King Alfred
(ninth-century England) when the Herbarium was almost certainly in Eng-
land and may well have been a candidate for translation, the issue of literal
translation versus paraphrase versus adaptation into Englisc was certainly a
concern, though again, primarily for literary or philosophical works, not
expressly for medicine and science.31 In fact, in using Alfred’s famous
description of his translation technique—hwilum worde be worde, hwilum
andgit of angiete—in the preface to Alfred’s translation of Gregory’s Pas-
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toral Care, Bately introduced a discussion of whether the literary prose of

Alfred’s reign was actually translation or instead a transformation. Her con-
clusion was that “[j]ust as Alfred’s wood-gatherer took it [wood] from more
than one source and transformed it into a fair dwelling for the refreshment of
the body, so the king himself and at least one other translator of his reign
shaped their source material for the refreshment of the mind, and discarding
literal translation transformed the Latin into what may be called independent
English prose” (Bately, 21). By interpreting difficult Latin passages for the
reader as they “translated” passages into English, the translators of Alfred’s
time tended to be actually transformers, Bately found.
The transformations have continued. For example, Josephine Helm
Bloomfield suggested that Frederick Klaeber’s venerated edition of Beowulf
(1922) strongly reflects values in Prussian Germany at the turn of the twenti-
eth century, a situation analogous to what Cockayne did with the medieval
medical texts. Klaeber favored “kind” and “kindness” in notes, articles, and
glosses when the words used referred to Queen Wealhtheow, Bloomfield
argued, but elsewhere, in masculine contexts, those same words were given
such meanings as “lordly,” “glorious,” and “fitting.” Klaeber did not alter the
character of Wealhtheow by conscious intent, Bloomfield suggested, but
explained that he (like Cockayne) was shaped by his own culture and it nec-
essarily affected his scholarship. Bloomfield wrote, “Even a scholar so great
as he [Klaeber] might not have been able to escape or override the influences
of his own culture in such areas as gender and gender roles (or indeed in such
areas as family relationships and political authority).”32
Transformation is an apt term for Cockayne’s translations of literary and
technical texts; and the argument presented here is that in the case of the
Anglo-Saxon medical texts, the transformations have negatively influenced
the reception of these works in the modern world. Yet although outrageously
convoluted at times, Cockayne’s translations were in tune with literary trends
in England at the time, trends toward escapism into earlier eras, especially
the Middle Ages, as seen in the works of, for example, Sir Walter Scott, John
Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(Rossetti and his brother were pupils at King’s College School at about the
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 59

time Cockayne may have first taught there, 1837–41), William Morris, and
Alfred Lord Tennyson. Unfortunately, although he never talked about trans-
lation theory per se, Cockayne consciously chose a style that was controver-
sial, was never particularly praised, and quickly went out of vogue, one
whose intent was to recall a bygone era, such as Anglo-Saxon England, by its
use of antiquated words and turns of phrase.
In the mid-1860s, the time when Cockayne was translating the Anglo-
Saxon medical texts, a literary dispute about the best way to translate ancient
works occurred. In chapter 3 in a volume on the history of translation,
Lawrence Venuti termed it the war between proponents of “fluent transla-
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tion” (championed by Matthew Arnold) and “foreignizing translations”

(embraced by F. W. Newman, the Pre-Raphaelites, and William Morris),33
but the essential question was whether literalism or poetry should prevail in a
translation, in this case, of Homer. In this book, Venuti was studying how
translation can be seen as a locus of difference, finding that the Victorian elite
used fluent translation to strengthen upper-class values. Fluent translation
erases the differences; foreignizing emphasizes them. It is clear that Arnold
and Newman differed on the audience for noble poetry such as Homer, with
Arnold holding scholars as the audience and arbiter of taste, Newman aiming
at average readers, feeling this was also Homer’s audience.
According to Venuti, Newman ([1805–97] brother of the Cardinal) chal-
lenged the main line of English-language translation in his 1856 translation
of Homer’s Iliad, because he “adopted a discourse that signified historical
remoteness—archaism. He argues against a modern style for ancient works
in translation. He even argues for using ‘Saxo-Norman’ for Homer, because
his [Homer’s] style is nearer the old English ballad [style] than the polished
verse of Pope” (Venuti, History, 122–23). Venuti characterized Newman’s
translations as “rich stew drawn from various literary discourses” (Venuti,
History, 124), and, in fact, Newman published a glossary with his translation
to define the archaic terms he used. Newman considered his translation to be
a faithful imitation of Homer’s style and diction, which he said ranged from
the popular to the noble, from the archaic to modern, thus to Newman’s mind
justifying his use of archaic terms and ballad meter; in other words, creating
a rather popular poem, because the original was popular (and noble) and
came from an heroic age.
[Homer’s] beauty, when it is at its height, is wild beauty: it smells of the
mountain and of the sea. If he be compared to a noble animal, it is not to
such a spruce rubbed-down Newmarket racer as our smooth translators
would pretend, but to a wild horse of the Don Cossacks; and if I, instead of
this, present to the reader nothing but a Dandie Dinmont’s pony, this, as a
first approximation, is a valuable step towards the true solution. . . . I regard
it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer
ought not to adopt the old disyllabic landis, houndis, hartis, etc., instead of
 60 Medieval Herbal Remedies

our modern unmelodious lands, hounds, harts; whether the ye or y before

the past participle may not be restored; the want of which confounds that
participle with the past tense. Even the final en of the plural of verbs (we
dancen, they singen, etc.) still subsists in Lancashire.34

Matthew Arnold (1822–88), the Oxford professor of poetry and literary

critic, thought Newman’s was a very bad translation—so bad that he roundly
criticized it in a lecture series published as On Translating Homer in 1861.
The pejorative term “to Newmanize” originated in this lecture; Arnold
“coined a satiric neologism for Newman’s translation discourse—to “New-
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manize”—and for the next twenty-five years this word was part of the lexi-
con of critical terms in the literary periodicals” (Venuti, History, 140).
Leading literary magazines kept the subject alive, and it is reasonable to
assume that Cockayne was aware of the controversy though he nowhere
addressed translation style. Arnold spoke up for poetry, assailing Newman’s
style and forced diction, claiming that in his effort to be true to the original,
Newman created something that was based on wrong principles and, most
importantly of all, was displeasing to the modern reader of English.

Mr. Newman says [in his introduction to his translation of the Iliad] that
“the entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that of a translator
ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible
to the elements thrown into our language by classical learning.” Mr. New-
man is unfortunate in the observance of his own theory; for I continually
find in his translation words of Latin origin, which seem to me quite alien to
the simplicity of Homer—“responsive,” for instance, which is a favourite
word of Mr Newman, to represent the Homeric xóo: “Great Hec-
tor of the motely helm thus spake to her responsive./But thus responsively
to him spake godlike Alexander.”35

Also involved in the dispute, largely by choosing Newman’s style of

translation, was William Morris (1834–96). Among the endeavors for which
he is famous are decidedly not his translations of ancient and medieval works
(published roughly between 1860 and 1895), which used this archaic style.
In a recent book on Morris by Paul Thompson, all of these translations merit
only about two paragraphs of commentary.

Morris’s verse translations, like his prose versions of the sagas, miss the
essential qualities for success, clarity, and readability. They are accurate
translations, but so carefully kept to the original lines and order of phrases
that they are difficult to read. For the Aeneid and the Odyssey Morris relied
on his own Greek and Latin, but for Beowulf he had the help of a Cam-
bridge scholar, A. J. Wyatt. It is perhaps the worst thing he ever wrote, quite
incomprehensible without a glossary.36
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 61

Echoing this evaluation, Venuti said that Longman’s Magazine called Mor-
ris’s translations “Wardour-Street Early English,” a kind of sham antique.
The periodical questioned the authenticity of his archaism and linked it to
nonstandard English and marginal literary forms: “Poems in which guests go
bedward to beds that are arrayed right meet, poems in which thrall-folk seek
to the feast-hall a-winter, do not belong to any literary centre. They are
provincial, they are utterly without distinction, they are unspeakably absurd”
(Venuti, History, 14, quoting Longman’s Magazine 12 (Oct) 1888: 585–94).
Cockayne died before Morris’s translations of Homer, Virgil, and
Beowulf appeared; however, he might have known Morris and Eirikr Mag-
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nusson’s 1869 translation of the Volsunga Saga, the first into English, or
some of Morris’s earlier works either translated from or based on the
Nordic sagas. In Sigurd the Volsung (1876), Morris created an epic that
“was based on medieval forms, but combined with a wholly new freedom.
Morris wrote it in rhymed couplets, binding the long lines with frequent
alliteration” (Thompson, 198). Thompson considered this “ a great poem,
an epic of truly heroic stature. Today it is acknowledged, but little
read. . . . It is set in the world of the sagas, but its values are those of Mor-
ris, not the Norsemen” (Thompson, 202). The latter part of this estimation
applies equally to Cockayne’s Leechdoms. Though Morris cannot be really
linked to Cockayne in any conclusive way, Cockayne translated in a style
very much like that of Morris. The style was embraced by some of his con-
temporaries, writers and scholars who were interested in ancient and
medieval languages and who sought to transmit some of the flavor of
remote ages to the present (many, such as Morris and Newman, for political
reasons). Earlier, the historian Sharon Turner advocated and used an
archaic style in translating Anglo-Saxon poems (Beowulf among them),
most of which are in volume 3 of his History of the Anglo-Saxons. He said
that his translations were “literally faithful, in order that the style, as well
as the sense, of the Anglo-Saxon writer might be perceived” (Turner, 1:vi).
Cockayne clearly belonged to this well-established tradition of archaizing
translation, which went out of vogue even as he was using it. Anyone who
uses the Loeb Library editions of the Latin and Greek authors is well-
acquainted with archaizing translations.
However, one contemporary review of Cockayne’s Leechdoms, the only
one identified for this work to date, was favorable to its translation style. In
what amounts to a fourteen-page essay on ancient and medieval medicine
and magic, much of its information gleaned from Cockayne’s prefaces with-
out acknowledgment, an unnamed reviewer in the Dublin University Maga-
zine for May 1867 wrote:

The translation fully possesses the compactness and rough strength of the
original. Any reader of philological taste will scarcely arise from the persual
 62 Medieval Herbal Remedies

of the volumes without a deeper liking for unadulterated English than he

entertained before, so well does it combine clearness, compactness, and
vigour, and fitness.37

In dealing with the subject matter of Cockayne’s three volumes, however, the
reviewer presaged the interest and biases following decades would bestow on
them: fascination with the magical elements and belief that the alleged med-
icinal properties of plants was “mystical.” Sweet’s unfavorable review of
Cockayne’s Juliana (the only other identified review of Cockayne’s work
published in his lifetime) is cited in the previous chapter, with its estimation
that his style makes the Anglo-Saxon work sound ridiculous.
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Cockayne’s translations of Hali Meidenhad and St. Margaret (both from

1866) exemplify the archaizing style of translation, for better or worse. Per-
haps such a style can be justified for this type of literature, inspirational reli-
gious texts from the early Middle Ages. Perhaps Cockayne felt, like Newman
and Morris, that the following would convey a sense of a time far-removed:

Eus, woman, if eou hast a husband to ey mind and enjoyment, also, of

worldly weal, must needs happen to ee. And what if it happen, as ee wont
is, eat eou have neieer ey will wiv him, nor weal eieer, and must groan
wivout goods wivin waste walls, and in want of bread must breed ey row of
bairns; and still fureer, viro quem summo odio habes, succumbere, who,
eough eou hadst all wealv, will turn it to sorrow. . . . 38
From the Herbarium:
3. For stirring of the inwards, take this same wort, work it to a salve; lay it
to the sore of the inwards. It also is well beneficial for heartache.
4. For sore of the milt (spleen), take juice of this same wort one cup, and
five spoonsful of vinegar; give (this) to drink for nine days; thou wilt won-
der at the benefit. Take also the root of the same wort, and hang it about the
mans swere (neck), so that it may hang in front against the milt (spleen);
soon he will be healed. And whatsoever man swallows the juice of this
wort, with wondrous quickness he will perceive relief of the inwards. This
wort a man may collect at any period. (Cockayne 1965, 1:113; entry XVIII
for cyclamen)

All of Cockayne’s translations, including the Leechdoms, read this way, and
today the Early English Text Society has replaced his Hali Meidenhad,
Juliana, and St. Marherete. The fact that they have been replaced does not
mean that his translations were not accurate, but that the style makes them
needlessly difficult to read and understand.
It is unfortunate that Cockayne chose this dense and difficult style for
the medical texts, because scientific texts demand clarity above all, and the
translations in his three-volume Leechdoms are, for the most part, so incom-
prehensible to the modern reader that they serve no useful purpose other than
to illustrate examples of medieval superstition. The Old English medical
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 63

texts are just now beginning to be taken seriously as the basis for objective
studies of medieval medicine and its practice, instead of being used primarily
as sources for scholars seeking superstitions and charms. When they have
been used at all, Cockayne’s translations have primarily been part of literary
and, not medical studies, and their content has generally not been used in
healing or to understand medieval medical practice or the herbal medical tra-
dition. It might be noted that Singer felt it necessary to provide a new trans-
lation of the Lacnunga for his Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine for reasons
of style and accuracy.
Already in Hali Meidenhad, as seen in the short passage above, Cock-
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ayne chose to translate some passages from Anglo-Saxon not into modern
English but into Latin, a practice he also followed in the Leechdoms. His
rationale was this: “Eis treatise on ee high state of virginity contains so many
coarse and repulsive passages, eat it was laid out for printing wieout a mod-
ernized version; . . . ee most objectionable portions have been Latinized”
(Cockayne Meidenhad, v). In some of the texts, gynecological conditions
were also too coarse and repulsive, because the Victorian clergyman often
ran Latin into his modern English translation, leaving a reader who cannot
read the original Anglo-Saxon totally perplexed about what is happening. For
example, when translating uses for the plant “conyza,” he wrote: “2. This
wort conyza, sodden in water, and mulieri sedenti supposita matricem purgat.
3. Si parere mulier nequit, succum huius herbae cum lana ad naturam eius
applices, cito partum perficiet” (Cockayne 1965, 1:267). And even when he
did translate the entire passage into modern English, the meaning is not
always clear: for the sprenge plant (Euphorbia lathyris), Cockayne wrote:
“For sore of the inwards, take a shrub of this wort tithymallus, pound it in
wine, so that of the wine there be two draughts, add then thereto two spoons
of the ooze of the wort, let him then drink this fasting; he will be healed”
(Cockayne 1965, 1:225). And for yarrow, (Achillea millefolium), Cockayne
supplied, “In case that any man with difficulty can pass water, take ooze of
this same wort with vinegar, give it him to drink; wondrously it healeth”
(Cockayne, 1965, 1:195). Although being faithful to the Old English origi-
nal, Cockayne was not being friendly to the reader of modern English. Liter-
ary specialists may have no trouble with such turns of phrase. The
Herbarium, however, was not intended for this readership, to which it is now
largely confined because of Cockayne’s translation.
All the works envisioned for the Rolls Series were to round out a history
of England from the earliest times, and Cockayne’s intent in rescuing the med-
ical/scientific texts from museum storage was to demonstrate practices current
during the infancy of the British nation. The prefaces Cockayne wrote for his
volumes of the series set the tone for how these texts ought to be received, and
in the case of the medical works, he compared them most unfavorably with
classical Greek texts and practices, since he believed the Anglo-Saxons
 64 Medieval Herbal Remedies

incapable of mastering classical medicine. But in suggesting that Bald’s

Leechbook and the Lacnunga abounded in charms and magic that were bar-
baric (hence possibly purely Germanic) and assigning the Old English
Herbarium to the classical Greek tradition, Cockayne set up an artificial divi-
sion between the texts that did not exist when they were used, a division he
made little of because he was not particularly interested in either the medical
or magical content of the texts. Later scholars of Anglo-Saxon language and
culture were very interested in the magic and folkloric aspects and made much
of them, to the exclusion of the Old English Herbarium.
In contrast, on the European continent the Herbarium of Pseudo-
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Apuleius, is regarded as one of several important Latin medical texts that cir-
culated widely in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and into the
Renaissance. There, its being translated into Anglo-Saxon is considered to be
only part of the long life of this Latin work. In Anglo-Saxon studies, how-
ever, the Old English work is regarded (or more often dismissed) as a mere
translation of a classical Latin work, hence not particularly valuable to the
people who copied it. In reality, the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius (thus also
the Old English Herbarium) is not a purely classical work, but is part of a
distinct medical textual tradition that evolved during the early Middle Ages,
a tradition to which Bald’s Leechbook and the Lacnunga also belong. The
following chapter discusses that tradition and the practices that went with it.
They were similar in England and in southern Europe because the medicinal
plants and other needed ingredients for remedies could have been grown or
obtained everywhere, south to north. An appeal to modern herbology, which
has its roots in these same traditions, helps in understanding how the Herbar-
ium and other texts might have been used in many geographical locations
through many centuries.

Notes
1. See for example Brian Inglis, A History of Medicine (Cleveland: World,
1965), hereafter cited in text as Inglis; Lois N. Magner, A History of Medicine
(New York: Marcel Dekker, 1992), and Merck’s 1899 Manual of the Materia
Medica: A Ready Reference Pocket Book for the Practicing Physician (New
York: Merck, 1899).
2. For a riveting account of the history of anesthesia in the West, including a
firsthand account of a patient who underwent surgery without it, see E. M.
Papper, Romance, Poetry, and Surgical Sleep: Literature Influences Medicine
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). See also Victor Robinson, Victory
Over Pain: A History of Anesthesia (New York: Henry Schuman, 1946),
which includes classical and medieval attempts at anesthesia, and Thomas E.
Keys, The History of Surgical Anesthesia (1945; New York: Dover, 1963).
3. See William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Doubleday, 1976),
especially chapter 6, “The Ecological Impact of Medical Science and Organi-
 Cockayne’s Herbarium 65

zation since 1700,” and Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Bio-
logical and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1972) for a discussion of nutrition.
4. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, M.D., A Short History of Medicine (New York: The
Ronald Press, 1955), 195, hereafter cited in text as Ackerknecht.
5. Sabine Baring-Gould, Early Reminiscences: 1834–1864 (New York: E. P.
Dutton, n.d. [1922]), 112–3. The book is a goldmine of information on the
minutiae of life during the mid-nineteenth century in England and France. In
addition, W. M. Thackeray’s Pendennis of 1850 describes the life of a con-
temporary apothecary by that name.
6. Peter Bartrip, “Secret Remedies, Medical Ethics, and the Finances of the
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British Medical Journal,” in Robert Baker, ed., The Codification of Medical

Morality: Historical and Philosophical Studies of the Formalization of
Western Medical Morality in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, vol.
2 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995), 191–2; hereafter cited in text as
Bartrip.
7. Amanda McQuade Crawford, “Western Herbal History,” (Albuquerque: The
National College of Phytotherapy, 1996), 20.
8. S. G. B. Stubbs and E. W. Bligh, Sixty Centuries of Health and Physick, in
their chapter on the early Middle Ages titled “A Thousand Years of Darkness”
(London: Sampson, Low, Marsten, 1931), 86.
9. Herbert Maxwell, “Odd Volumes—I,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 163
(May 1898): 652–70; hereafter cited in text as Maxwell.
10. We have some precise ideas about surgery in Roman Gaul, but we know
absolutely nothing about it for the Celts in the British Isles, and nothing about
Irish pharmacopoeia, and generally relatively little about Continental Celtic
pharmacopoeia during the classical period outside some references to plants,
of which the best known, thanks to Pliny the Elder, is mistletoe. Christian-J.
Guyonvarc’h, Magie, médecine et divination chez les Celtes (Paris: Payot,
1997), 224.
11. Joseph Frank Payne, The Fitz-Patrick Lectures for 1903: English Medicine in
the Anglo-Saxon Times (London: Clarendon Press, 1904), 4; hereafter cited in
text as Payne.
12. See for example Charles Singer, From Magic to Science: Essays on the Sci-
entific Twilight (1928; New York: Dover, 1958); hereafter cited in text as
Singer, Science, and his “The Herbal in Antiquity,” The Journal of Hellenic
Studies 47 (1927): 1–52.
13. J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1952), 94; hereafter cited in text as Singer,
Magic. Grattan was mainly responsible for the translation of the Lacnunga
that appears here and for philological work with the Old English texts, as
Singer explained in his introduction to this work. That Singer was responsible
for the broad theories on medieval medicine is evident from his new preface
to Cockayne’s Leechdoms.
14. Wilifrid Bonser, The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study
in History, Psychology, and Folklore (London: The Wellcome Historical
Medical Library, 1963), 6.
 66 Medieval Herbal Remedies

15. Loren MacKinney, Early Medieval Medicine (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Press, 1937), 57–8; hereafter cited in text as MacKinney.
16. Stanley Rubin, Medieval English Medicine (New York: Barnes and Noble,
1974), 14; hereafter cited in text as Rubin.
17. Barbara M. Olds, “The Anglo-Saxon Leechbook III: A Critical Edition and
Translation,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Denver, 1984); hereafter cited in text
as Olds. Freda Richards Hankins, “Bald’s Leechbook Reconsidered,” (Ph.D.
diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991); hereafter cited in
text as Hankins.
18. See John Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the
Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
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19. Karen Louise Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in
Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), see espe-
cially 105. Although Jolly talked here about a composite and partly unwritten
medical tradition, for some reason she excluded the Herbarium and works
like it entirely from the realm of medicine as it was practiced in Anglo-Saxon
England.
20. C. H. Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England (London: Oldbourne, 1967),
9–10; hereafter cited in text as Talbot.
21. For a discussion of the texts that were available to Anglo-Saxon healers, see
for example M. L. Cameron, “The Sources of Medical Knowledge in Anglo-
Saxon England,” Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983): 135–55
22. Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1998). See in particular her chapter 3, “Medieval English Medical
Texts.” What Getz called the encyclopedic tradition appears to be the same that
Jerry Stannard and others called Rezeptliteratur, a genre discussed in detail in
chapter 3. Getz did not reference Stannard or the standard writers on Rezeptlit-
eratur, although she did cite Bonser, who mentioned the genre in several places.
23. D. G. Scragg, Superstition and Popular Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England
(Manchester: University of Manchester, 1989), 7. A companion volume is
Marilyn Deegan and D. G. Scragg, eds., Medicine in Early Medieval England
(Manchester: University of Manchester, 1989).
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