Walden, which owned but that single style before it became in the long ago the seat of saffron culture, derives its name from “Weal-den,” the wooded hollow, or perhaps “the hollow in the woods,” and was anciently situated in the dense glades of the great Forest of Essex. When Geoffrey de Magnaville obtained the grant of a market for his town it became “Chipping,” or Market Walden, and it was not until the reign of Edward III. that this style and title was changed for the name it now bears. The seal of the borough, dating from the time of Elizabeth, still alludes to that much-prized plant, and perpetrates the lamentable pun of three saffron flowers “walled in” by a castle; while the badge of the mayor’s chain, made in 1873, repeats that hoary play upon words.
ARMS OF SAFFRON WALDEN.
Saffron, long since disappeared from local ken, is said to have been introduced to England from Palestine so early as the times of the Crusaders, and to have been brought over, originally a single bulb, hidden in a palmer’s staff. Its name is a corruption of the Arabic “sahafaran,” but to botanists it is Crocus sativus, the cultivated, as opposed to Crocus agrestis, the wild crocus. It was the supposed medicinal virtues of the plant that made it so much in request and so largely cultivated here in the latter part of the sixteenth century, when Fuller, writing of the town, speaks of it as one “which saffron may seem to have coloured with the name thereof.” Those old curative properties are now quite disregarded, but they were once considered potent. The very least of the benefits it conferred was the exhilaration of the spirits, so that the old proverb for a merry fellow was “He hath slept in a bag of saffron,” and Gerard, in his herbal, says: “The moderate use of it is good for the head, maketh the sences more quicke and lively, shaketh off heavie and drowsie sleepe, and maketh a man merrie.” But other and more convivial things have long been found to produce the same results. While it was thought to relieve hysterical depression, it was good also for the small-pox. Placed in bags under the chins of sufferers from that fearful disease, it was supposed to bring on the eruptions, and so quickly relieve the patients. Fuller gives very emphatic testimony to its virtues. “Under God,” he says, “I owe my life, when sick of the small-pox, to the efficacy thereof.”
So beneficent a plant, of course, commanded a high price. In Fuller’s time saffron sold at £3 a pound, and in 1665, the year of the Great Plague of London, it rose to £4 1s. 10d. Those were, by consequence, the times of saffron adulteration.
“No precious drug,” he says, “is more adulterated with cartamus, the inward pilling of willow,” and suggests that dealers should look carefully into the matter.
Of its high qualities he was, as we have seen, fully convinced, but another proof he advances, is not, to a sceptical modern world, altogether conclusive. The Age of Faith is past, but it was current in Fuller’s era. He, at any rate, had the capacity for infinite belief, as we shall see. “In a word,” he sums up, “the sovereign power of genuine saffron is plainly proved, for the crocodile’s tears are never true, save when he is forced where saffron groweth (whence he hath his name of ‘croco-deilos,’ or the saffron-fearer), knowing himself to be all poison, and it all antidote.” The logical conclusion of this belief would have been that wholesale saffron-buyers should have kept a staff of crocodiles as (so to speak) tasters, and by their tears, or the want of them, have gauged the purity of those purchases.
Hollingshead, writing of saffron cultivation, calls the farmers of it “crokers.” It was a culture that must then have earned many a fortune, and so late as 1717 it was worth £1 6s. 6d. a pound; but, what with that curse of all industries, over-production, the carelessness of the growers, and shameless adulteration, price and quality declined. Then, too, the dependence of medicine upon the old herbalists began to decay, and the reputation of saffron fell off to such an extent that by 1790 it was no longer cultivated at Walden, and the “crokers” were in another sense justified of their name.
Nowadays saffron is chiefly used as a colouring material for aromatic confections, for liqueurs and varnishes. Put in common cakes, that prove to have been made of something suspiciously like sawdust and paste, the yellow hue it gives produces a specious and illusory richness only discovered too late