Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve.—Herrick.
A Bay-tree invites criticism, as it is certainly not a “herb,” but it is so often classed with some of them, especially with rosemary (to whom it seems to have been a sort of twin) that a brief extract from its interesting history must be made. Herrick’s verses show that both for weddings and decorations, rosemary and bays were paired together—bays being also gilded at weddings—and Brand quotes some lines from the “Wit’s Interpreter” to show that alike at funerals, they were fellows:—
Shrouded she is from top to toe,
With Lillies which all o’er her grow,
Instead of bays and rosemary.
And Coles says, “Cypresse garlands are of great account at funeralls amongst the gentiler sort, but rosemary and bayes are used by the commons both at funeralls and weddings.” Parkinson’s testimony is eloquent: “It serveth to adorne the house of God, as well as of man; to procure warmth, comfort, and strength to the limmes of men and women by bathings and anoyntings out, and by drinks, etc., inward: to season the vessels wherein are preserved our meates, as well as our drinkes; to crown or encircle as with a garland the heads of the living, and to sticke and decke forth the bodies of the dead; so that from the cradle to the grave we have still use of, we have still need of it.” No one could give higher praise to its natural virtues, but in other countries, it was endowed with supernatural ones. “Neyther falling sickness, neyther devyll, wyll infest or hurt one in that place where a bay-tree is. The Romans call it the Plant of the Good Angell.”[84] On the contrary, the withering of bay-trees was a very ill omen, and a portent of death. Canon Ellacombe says this superstition was imported from Italy, but it seems to have taken root in England. Shakespeare mentions it in Richard II., as if it were no new idea; and Evelyn tells us, as if he were adding a fresh fact to a store of common knowledge, that in 1629, at Padua, before a great pestilence broke out, almost all the Bay-trees about that famous University grew sick and perished.
Sir Thomas Browne deals with another belief: “That bays will protect from the mischief of lightning and thunder is a quality ascribed thereto, common with the fig-tree, eagle and skin of a seal. Against so famous a quality Vicomeratus produceth experiment of a bay-tree blasted in Italy. And, therefore, although Tiberius for this intent did wear laurel upon his temples, yet did Augustus take a more probable course, who fled under arches and hollow vaults for protection.” Sir Thomas is very logical.
It is not always clear when Laurel and when Bay is intended, because our Bay-tree was often called Laurel in Elizabethan days. For instance:—
And when from Daphne’s tree he plucks more Baies,
His shepherd’s pipe may chant more heavenly lays.
Intro. to Br. Pastorals by Christopher Brooke.
If one is airily told one may pluck bays from a laurel bush, it is impossible to know which is really meant, and a certain confusion between the two is inevitable. William Browne, who took, or pretended to take, seriously the view that bays could not be hurt by thunder, brings forward an ingenious theory to account for it. It is that “being the materials of poets ghirlands, it is supposed not subject to any of Jupiter’s thunderbolts, as other trees are.
“Where Bayes still grow (by thunder not struck down),
The victor’s garland and the poet’s crown.”