[47] See [Bibliography of English Herbals].
[48] Robert Wyer was one of the most famous printers of the early sixteenth century. He came of a Buckinghamshire family and was probably a near relation of John Wyer, also a printer who lived in Fleet Street, for both of them used the device of St. John the Evangelist. He served his apprenticeship to Richard Pynson, whose printing press was in the rentals of Norwich House near the site of the present Villiers Street, and on Pynson’s death succeeded to the business. In both his editions of the herbal there is his well-known device of St. John the Evangelist bareheaded and dressed in a flowing robe, sitting under a tree on an island and writing on a scroll spread over his right knee. At his right hand is an eagle with outstretched wings holding an inkwell in its beak, and in the background are the towers and spires of a great city.
[49] Ames catalogues two other editions of the herbal by “W. C.,” one published by Anthony Kitson and the other by Richard Kele, but no known copies of these exist.
[50] Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1913.
[51] The popular belief in the power of sweet-smelling herbs to ward off infection of the much-dreaded plague rose to its height in Charles II.’s reign, when bunches of rosemary were sold for six and eightpence. Till recently there were at least two survivals of this belief in herbal scents—the doctor’s gold-headed cane (formerly a pomander carried at the end of a cane) and the little bouquets carried by the clergy at the distribution of the Maundy Money in Westminster Abbey.
[52] For dates of later editions see [Bibliography of English Herbals].
[53] For fuller bibliographical details of the Herbarius zu Teutsch and the Ortus Sanitatis see [Bibliography of Foreign Herbals].
[54] Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine.
[55] The illustrations in the second and later editions of the Herbarius zu Teutsch are very inferior to those in the first, which are beautiful. The vertuose boke of Distillacyon of the waters of all maner of Herbes (1527), translated by Laurence Andrew from the Liber de arte distillandi by Hieronymus Braunschweig, is illustrated with cuts from the same wood-blocks as the Grete Herball.