7 - The Sources for Plant Names in Anglo-Saxon England and the Laud Herbal Glossary

Summary

Anglo-Saxon England inherited a large body of medicinal plant lore from classical antiquity. Although Latin medical texts provided much useful information to the Anglo-Saxons, they also presented numerous problems not encountered by their original audiences. Two of the greatest problems, identification of the Greek and Latin plant names and access to non-native plant species, were both mentioned by Cyneheard, Bishop of Winchester, in a letter written shortly after 754 to Lull, Bishop of Mainz: “We have some medical books, but the foreign ingredients we find prescribed in them are unknown to us and difficult to obtain.” Even if foreign plants could be acquired and in some cases cultivated in English herbal gardens, there remained the problem of interpreting which plant species was referred to in the various herbal descriptions or recipes. This problem had clearly existed for the original audiences of these texts too, as both Pliny and Dioscorides, for example, give numerous alternative names for the plants they discuss, and after the passage of time, such variants only multiplied. For a speaker of a Germanic language like Old English, with his or her own set of names for plants from an entirely different geographical region, the difficulty of identifying the plants named in the sources would have been far greater.

Bilingual glossaries of plant names were one aid in dealing with this linguistic difficulty. As will be shown below, the earliest versions of these seem to be Greek-Latin glossaries, but they must have existed for numerous other languages as well; those with Old English glosses existed from at least the late seventh century. Such lists present myriad problems for modern plant name scholars, both those interested in the medicinal use of particular plant species and those interested in identifying the Old English names of modern plant species. The Latin and Greek names are hopelessly garbled, different Old English names are often assigned to a single Latin or Greek term, or one Old English term is found as a gloss for numerous apparently different plants.

The difficulty of making sense out of such problems is well known and has been summed up clearly by Charles Singer in his 1961 introduction to Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England:

Many plant-names have come down continuously from Anglo-Saxon to modern times but the tradition of the plants that the names present is usually uncertain and unreliable.