In days gone by—days of serfdom, oppression, battle, slavery, poverty—the countryman passed his day waiting for the next blow, living between pestilences, and praying in the dark for small sparks of comfort. The monks kept the land sweet by growing herbs in sheltered places; the countryman looked dully at Periwinkles and Roses and Columbines, thought them pretty, and passed by. Even the meanest flower, Shepherd’s-eye or Celandine, was too high for him to reach. (The poet who keeps Jove’s Thunder on his mantelpiece would understand that.) Roses were common enough even in the dark ages; the English hedgerow threw out its fingers of Wild Rose and scented the air—but where was the man with a nose for fragrance when a mailed hand was on his shoulder. Those Roses on the Field of Tewkesbury—think of them stained with blood and flowering over rotting corpses.
“I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Cæsar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in its lap from some once lovely Head.
And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River’s Lip on which we lean.
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen.”
Little did the dull ploughman think of Roses in the hedge, or Violets in the bank, he’d little care except for a dish of Pulse. Yet, all the time, curious men were studying botany, dredging the earth for secrets, as the astronomer swept the sky. The Arviells, Gilbert and Hernicus, were, one in Europe, the other in Asia, collecting good plants and herbs to replenish the Jardins de Santé the monks kept—that in the thirteenth century, too, with war clouds everywhere, and steel-clad knights wooing maidens in castles by the secondhand means of luting troubadours.