[119] Ibid., p. 700.
[120] Ibid., p. 1075.
[121] Ibid., p. 210.
[122] Ibid., pp. 888 and 913.
[123] Ibid., p. 144.
CHAPTER VII
THE LATER SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY HERBALS
“Come into the fields then, and as you come along the streets, cast your eyes upon the weeds as you call them that grow by the walls and under the hedge-sides.”—W. Coles, The Art of Simpling, 1656.
The later seventeenth-century herbals are marked by a return to the belief in the influence upon herbs of the heavenly bodies, but it is a travesty rather than a reflection of the ancient astrological lore. The most notable exponent of this debased lore was the infamous Nicholas Culpeper, in whom, nevertheless, the poor people in the East End seem to have had a boundless faith. It is impossible to look at the portrait of that light-hearted rogue without realising that there must have been something extraordinarily attractive about the man who was the last to set up publicly as an astrologer and herb doctor. He was the son of a clergyman who had a living somewhere in Surrey. After a brief time at Cambridge he was apprenticed to an apothecary near St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, and shortly afterwards set up for himself in Red Lion Street, Spitalfields, as an astrologer and herbalist. Culpeper was a staunch Roundhead and fought in at least one battle. All through the war, however, he continued his practice and he acquired a great popularity in the East End of London. In 1649 he issued his Physical Directory, which was a translation of the London Dispensatory. This drew down on him the fury of the College of Physicians, and the book was virulently attacked in a broadside issued in 1652, entitled “A farm in Spittlefields where all the knick-knacks of astrology are exposed to open sale.” By this time his works were enjoying an enormous sale. No fewer than five editions of his English Physician Enlarged appeared before 1698, and it was reissued even as late as 1802 and again in 1809. There is a vivid description of Culpeper in The Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1797:—