“Fennel tea,” he tells me, “is good to purify the blood, mallow is excellent for rheumatism, whilst thyme, pounded fine, serves in cases of colic.” Boiled lily bulbs for healing wounds, I am told, are also good. Then, in the corner against the wall, there is a patch of the old single violet, which I have heard is very soothing for inflammation, and now often advocated for curing cancer. Also a clump of borage, which Gerard declares, “comforteth the heart, purgeth melancholy, and quieteth the phrantick.” A few steps away I saw a patch of crane’s-bill, the old geranium of the Middle Ages, which the same writer recommended to be prepared with red snails and to be taken internally.
Besides these, nestling against the wall, I noted a plant of golden mouse-ear just coming into blossom. Here they call it “grin the collar.” It is a wild plant which the Elizabethan herbalist speaks of with affection, and which he says he found growing in dame Bridget Kingsmill’s ground, on distant downs, “not far from Newberry.”
I saw also bursting into blossom roots of the old single peony. It was of the sort that I have been told must be gathered in the night, or else the ill-fated gatherer may be struck blind.
Some years ago, I remembered once asking for a blossom of this sort in a cottage garden to copy in my embroidery. But the old woman to whom the plant belonged would not hear of picking a flower.
“Best leave it—best leave it,” she had said. I thought her churlish for the moment, and then thought no more about it; but the same evening, whilst we were at dinner, a blossom of the single peony was brought in to me on a salver, and I was told that little Betty, old widow Hodgkis’s granddaughter, had run up from below the Edge “to pleasure me.”
Granny, said the child, had told her that “you’re welcome to it, and that, bein’ as it is there, was no ill-luck.”
On being pressed to explain, the child had answered, “Us dursn’t pick that blow early, but granny says, picked at night, peonies be as safe as Job Orton in his shop, but in noontime ’tis only suckin’ gulleys as wud pick ’em.” For some moments I could not get the reason out of the little maid, but at last, when we were alone, she whispered to me. “’Tis along of the ecalls. If one war to see yer in the day, madder yer’d be than a tup at Bridgenorth fair, and blind, behappen.”
There is also in Shropshire a lingering belief that the seed of the single peony has magic powers to soothe and quiet women. A young widow, who had lost her husband in an accident connected with the blasting of the lime rock, obtained sleep by drinking a tea made from the seeds, I was assured.
THE PHYSICIAN OF THE GODS
“My Jane,” her mother said, “couldn’t sleep nohow before. It was rocks, and falls in darkness, and screams all the time with her, let her do what she would. Her got fair tired of physic, nothing the doctor gave her seemed to bring peace, or to padlock her tongue. Then came Jill Shore,” I was told, “as lives halfway up the heights of Tickwood. A witch some counted her, and her made my Jane lie down, and her charmed her with verses and made her drink a draught of peonina seed. And Jane her fell asleep, like a lamb beside its dam, and her slept, and slept, and woke up reasonable and quiet, and for all she was mortal sad, she was a decent soul again, and gave up screeching and tearing out her hair, and screaming out things not fit for a decent body to say.”