WEEDS AND WEEDING WOMEN, by Jane Borodale

© Valerie Hill

‘As oft as nede shall require it must be weeded, for else the wede woll overgrowe the hearbs.’ (Fitzherbert, 1532) 

This slovenly gardener (I mean me) has been taken by surprise. Lulled into a false sense of security by the lateness of spring, then just two days of sunshine, and suddenly the bare land is alarmingly green and bristling with a mass of creeping buttercup, ground elder, coltsfoot and bursts of dock and dandelion.

So I’m thinking about historical weeds. Our idea of what a weed is has changed, of course, over time. Many plants we now consider pests have been thought of in the medieval period (and earlier) as food or medicine. But some plants have always been more cosmopolitan, persistent and hungry than others, and they know no boundaries. 

© Valerie Hill

In his celebrated book Weeds (2010) Richard Mabey describes how the first Neolithic settlers in Britain brought seeds of corn poppy, charlock and wild radish inadvertently with their wheat and barley grains in 3500 BCE. Groundsel came with the Bronze Age. The Romans brought ground elder to feed their livestock. Rosebay willowherb started its journey here as a rare garden specimen in the 16th century that slowly, joyously escaped and by the 19th century was rampaging along the railway system, like Oxford ragwort. Nettles too have always followed the human trail, thriving in soil rich with our waste and decomposition and ash – on midden heaps and churchyards, and fields improved with manure from pond silt and grazing livestock. Weeds, like crop-methods, are evolving all the time – and keeping up.

'Burning Weeds', Alexander Mann (1853-1908)

How were they dealt with? In the larger Tudor gardens, weeders were most often poor women working for a few pennies a day. Historian C. Paul Christianson has studied 16th century accounts of the Bridge House garden in London, and in The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London, looks at records of the large numbers of female staff working there and at York Place and Hampton Court. He says that, ‘it was chiefly women, often at first noted in the accounts simply as “a weding woman” or “a pore widow to wede the gardeyn” who were employed,’ often for a pitiful per diem of 2d - 4d. Garden weeds were picked as now by hand, sometimes wearing three-fingered weeding gloves (presumably for protection against bramble, thistle and the rasping, prickly langue-de-boeuf). In the fields though, before hoeing became more widespread in England, cropweeds were tackled thus:

French miniature, c1180

‘Ye have a wedyne-hoke with a socket, set upon a little staffe a yard longe, and this hoke would be ground sharpe, both behind and before. In his other hand he hath a forked styke a yarde longe, and with the fork putteth the weed from him, and he putteth the hoke beyond the roote of the wede, putteth it to him and cutteth the weed fast by the earth.’ (Fitzherbert). 

The fields must have been continually dotted with labourers weeding along the rows, throughout the season. No spraying of herbicides to rely on then – yet according to the 20th edition of The Agricultural Notebook, modern weeds are as troublesome as they ever were. 

Cleavers © Valerie Hill

Cleavers (or goosegrass, or sticky willy, depending on where you're from) can cause a staggering 40 percent loss to a broad-leaved crop, and annual grass weeds such as blackgrass or wild oats in cereal crops as much as a quarter. Other major agricultural weeds in the UK currently include chickweed, Japanese knotweed, thistles and speedwell, and it’s fascinating to compare these species with the main weeds of Fitzherbert’s or Thomas Tusser’s medieval farmland. They would have grappled with our own familiar adversaries like dock, mayweed, cleavers and thistle. Still a major cropweed now, The Niewe Herball (1578) says of poor or wild oats for example that it is, ‘a hurtfull plant to the Rie as other corne.’ 

Field bindweed © Valerie Hill 

But Fitzherbert and Tusser class as pests some that we’d now consider wildflowers; such as knapweed, cornflower, corncockle and pink mallow. Dorothy Hartley mentions in 1979 how it is no longer the vetches ‘that pull downward’, but bindweed. 

It’s an age-old battle. Literally; many annual weed seeds can stay viable in undisturbed soil for startling tracts of time, waiting till conditions are right before germination. Geoffrey Grigson in The Englishman’s Flora (1958) has a great phrase; ‘plough up the old grass, and up comes the charlock, like a vegetable rat.’ Weeds are wily, tough as old boots, and can be very, very patient. Archaeological sites unearthing soil previously covered to some depth have suddenly bloomed with ancient varieties of plant that have lain dormant for as much as 2000 years – truly the living past.

Mayweed © Valerie Hill

The presence of weeds is confusing, too – because as well as being the enemy of the farmer and the tidy mind, they have individual virtues of their own. Whether or not they’re welcome is all about context. 16th-century Henry Lyte, who translated The Niewe Herball, was as much a gardener and husbandman with an estate to run, as he was a herbalist. So he would have understood the repetitive tedium of hand-weeding running grasses, horsetail or bittercress, and while recognising the virtues of any variety of plant he would also have known its nuisance. He says for example: ‘The roote of Rest Harrow or Petie Whin is long and very limmer, spreading under the earth, and doth often times let, hinder and stay both the plough and Oxen in toiling the ground’. However, ‘the barke of the roote taken with hony, provoketh urine and breaketh the stone’. Elsewhere he explains how darnel ‘is a vitious graine that cumbereth or annoyeth corne,’ and yet, ‘with pigions dung, oyle and linseed, boiled and layd plaisterwise upon wens doth dissolve and heale them.’ Bracken in the wrong place disrupts upland and hill grassland, but in the past was an important resource in its own right, for fuel and soap production.

Broad-leaved dock © Valerie Hill

I’m thinking that the process of writing is very much like weeding – it’s all about taking things out, for the good of the whole. Not just at the editing stage, (which is more like the final tidy-up before winter) but the whole way through writing a novel. It’s always about giving enough space to the significant idea or image, not letting it be choked with superfluous word-clutter or unnecessary infill. It’s a fight against those weeds/words of the subconscious, chattering mind that never shuts up; that never stops germinating, propagating, spreading sideways. Fields (or plots!) must be constantly gone over if they are to yield anything. Countless seedling ideas and thought-shoots ripped up and discarded before they get a hold, in order for a few to flourish… Hurrah for the weed-hook and the delete button, because the minute we stop weeding, the game’s over. At the best of times – we’re just keeping the wilderness at bay. Pretending that our thoughts are orderly, sequential, cultured, when really it’s a never-ending battle, above and below ground…

Jane Borodale’s novel The Knot is out in paperback with Fourth Estate - this Thursday! 

There are plenty of weeds in it.

Visit www.janeborodale.com

WITHY, by Jane Borodale

If an advertisement for the basket were ever needed – then surely this picture by Beuckelaer must be the one. This lady is strong! And her baskets! Just look at them; tough handled, sinewy, perfectly formed, smooth, and bursting with good produce. Hers is an affirmation of skilful basketry put to practical use.

Joachim Beuckelaer, (1533-1575), Woman Selling Vegetables

And (though at great risk of sounding like Prince Charles), I say bring back the basket – home grown, durable, long-lasting, as light as, well, wicker, and sustainable. In a world of rising sea-levels and reclaimed wetland returning to its natural state in the face of the cost of sea defences; wouldn’t it make perfect sense to say that dampness is in, with its accompanying willows and withy beds, and imported jute and hessian out of fashion.

Salix Purpurea, Otto Wilhelm Thome
1885

The Somerset Levels are now the only part of the UK where willow is grown commercially for basket-making, see Musgroves or Coates, but traces of previously widespread cultivation lie all over the country in place names containing ‘withy’, from Withypool, Hereford, to Withymead, Chingford. 

It’s the perfect material for everyday carrying or storage vessels, not to mention eel traps and lobster pots, cradles, hot-air balloon baskets, coffins, and fencing. Willow is also used for high grade charcoal for artists and gunpowder, and has potent medicinal qualities. It can last practically forever, (possibly why willow is associated with the dead in many cultures across the world?). For an example of wicker’s longevity, click here and then scroll down a little for an excavation image of rare Roman basket, discovered beautifully preserved in a waterlogged pit at Marcham in Oxfordshire, and accompanying description of its possible use as a ritual object. 

I was interested to read that this basket was made of extremely fine stripped willow, of a fineness not grown in this country today, because although many texts about willow talk about the coarseness of basketry in the past, due to the limitations of methods of growing, old herbals mention many different kinds of withy or osier – implying that there was growing in withy beds, as well as pollarding from the tree, in early times. (Pollarding being where the tree is cut back to the main trunk, and then the resulting supple fresh growth of shoots or withies harvested each year.)

The Basketmaker, Jan Luyken (1649-1712)

Last year I did a short basketry course because for various reasons I have an old basket maker at the heart of my novel The Knot, a blind woman called Widow Hodges, and I felt it was important to at least partially understand the process of what she does all day. It was very demanding – like maths with twigs, and very hard on the hands, both in terms of strength needed and the astringent nature of the twigs. (I produced, since you ask, a very uneven greenish basket of which I was inordinately proud, that does despite its wonkiness actually get used for tidying every day. It took months for the deliciously sharp, smoky, bitter smell of damp willow to disappear from the room where it lives.) The tools used by basket makers are very simple and haven’t changed much over the centuries; a picking knife, a bodkin, horn full of grease…

Seriously, for those of us living in damp places, withy beds must be the thing to invest in, for when oil runs out…?

ON OBSOLESCENCE, by Jane Borodale

Why do some things just disappear from normal use or parlance? What is it about certain objects or habits or words that makes them slip off the map – is it a temporary cultural amnesia that forgets to include them for a while, or is it more terminal than that?

Looking at the thesaurus throws up interesting historical equivalents for the word ‘obsolete’ itself: Stale (1562-), outworn (1565-), overworn (1581-1610), overgone (1654), lapsed (1822-1890), passed forth of use (1565), lain at a stand (1622), outplaced (1928), and this my favourite; out of ure (1553-a1600).

One pudding very much out of ure these days is a tansy. Even the inimitable Dorothy Hartley has nothing to say in Food in England about tansies – not even about their lengthy incarnation as Lenten cakes. Geoffrey Grigson at least gives them a mention but rather discouragingly says that they are not to be recommended.

But, presuming that obsolescences should be looked at individually on a case-by-case basis, I thought I’d share with you a rather slap-dash experiment I’m doing today in the spirit of historical investigation.

Having known theoretically what a tansy is for a while (one of my characters in THE KNOT, the florid Reverend Tope, enjoys one on p309, for example), in truth I didn’t know how it might taste beyond being a ‘bittersweet milky egg dish’. Nor did I really know if one should be making a tansy cake at all, as the herb does contain a powerful insecticidal substance called thujone that is highly toxic in excess. Too much tansy (the herb) causes abortion, venous congestion of the internal organs, and convulsions. But a moderate amount is apparently digestive and good against worms. I don’t have worms, but am still feeling mighty curious.

Just a small sprig, I say to myself, going out to the garden to pick a handful or two before it starts raining – it’s clearly in the dose. (NB. Am no expert but I definitely wouldn’t try the following recipe at home if pregnant.) Maybe this is why no-one makes them any more? It’s the Russian roulette of desserts. Or maybe they just taste bad. Gerard claims they ‘be pleasant in taste and good for the stomache, for if bad humours cleave thereunder, it doth perfectly concoct them and carry them off.’ The bad humours would be left over from the Lenten fasting, all that consumption of fish engendering moist and phlegmatic imbalances in the body. This reminds me that probably I should be doing this earlier in the year, when the leaves are young and tender, not just as the plant is coming into flower.

Well let’s see. I’ve chosen one of Hannah Glasse’s versions from her Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) because it sounds the most edible. I’m going to quarter the quantities below for the size of my dish, and will brazenly omit the spinach juice, because some other recipes didn’t have it (and there was none at the Co-op this morning):

To make a Tansey.

Take ten Eggs, break them into a Pan, put to them a little Salt, beat them very well, then put to them eight Ounces of Loaf-Sugar beat fine, and then a Pint of the Juice of Spinage. Mix them well together, and strain it into a Quart of cream; then grate in eight Ounces of Naples Bisket, or white Bread, a quarter of a Pound of Jordin Almonds, beat in a Mortar, with a little Juice of Tansey to your Taste; mix these all together, put it into a Stew-pan, with a Piece of Butter as large as a Pippin. Set it over a slow Charcoal Fire, keep it stirring till it is hardened very well, then butter a Dish very well, put in your Tansey, bake it, and when it is enough, turn it out on a Pye-plate.

Overall impressions:

1. The tansy juice, (which I’ve got by grinding a fair few leafy sprigs in a pestle and mortar with drops of water, then squeezed out into the cake mixture, leaving the fibres behind) is a disconcertingly dark green. It has an extraordinary aromatic, balsamic smell I could best describe as half mint, half flyspray.

2. It's not difficult to make. At all. Unless trying to photograph at same time.

3. I can report, now it has cooled down enough and having had my first suspicious mouthful (with no immediate ill-effects or venous congestion of the inner organs), then a greedy slice – that it is actually delicious. Somewhere between a cake and an omelette in texture, sweetly toffee-edged almost like a macaroon, and suffused with a hint of tansy flavour, albeit rather greeny-greyer in hue than one might hope for in a pudding, but yes, very good.

It’s no looker, this tansy, but all-in-all I’d say of late it has been maligned, ignored and almost lost for no reason at all. Will I make it again? Possibly; my smallest child adored it. I should add that the name of the tansy herb Tanacetum is from the Greek athanasia, or ‘immortality’. The name might refer to the old practice of packing corpses with tansy leaves to keep them preserved before burial, or maybe it’s just that in the long run some things never die, even so-called obsolete, outmoded, out-of-fashion puddings... 

What would you bring back from the brink?

"A GOOD THING THE MORE COMMON IT IS, THE BETTER IT IS" by Jane Borodale

I like to think that, amongst the flora growing down on the damp fields towards the river Cary and tucked away in the oldest hedges, there just might be weeds at Lytes Cary Manor that are descended from weeds that grew there at the time of botanist Henry Lyte.

A modest medieval house on the edge of the Somerset Levels owned now by the National Trust, it is not hard to picture Henry Lyte (c1529-1607) there working on his groundbreaking Herbal in his small, dark study, walking the estate for fresh air and studying the plants around him. His respect for the power and virtues of ordinary, everyday wayside plants is the inspiration for my novel THE KNOT, which pieces together known fragments of his life.

Largely forgotten now, his translation of Flemish naturalist Rembert Dodeons’s Cruydeboeck became the standard work on herbs in the English language during the latter part of the 16th century, and was hugely influential. Lyte called his translation The New Herball or Historie of Plants, and it was published in 1578. In folio, including almost 900 illustrative woodcuts by Leonhart Fuchs, it was the first comprehensive work to list every known plant in English.

With the sole exception of William Turner’s work (the radical Dean of Wells cathedral) who, living nearby and planting his own physic garden, must surely have provided encouragement and instruction, previous Herbals available at that time were in Latin or other European languages, never in English. Descended mostly from classical texts (Dioscorides, Pliny) they were inaccessible to the ordinary man or woman without an elite education. New herbals were becoming the cutting-edge medical manuals of their day, combining received wisdom of the ancients with a new emphasis on observation and study of the natural world. Communities engaged in this new scientific study came from a variety of backgrounds; apothecaries, scholars, aristocrats, explorers and merchants. Turner had produced an original work in English, but it was far from being a comprehensive study. Until Henry Lyte published his massive undertaking, no-one had compiled a list of all known plants in English. This itself must have required an in-depth understanding of botany, so that the finished work is far more than a straightforward word-for-word translation.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Henry intended his translation to be a step towards a more equal distribution of knowledge. It was a time when to translate into the vernacular tongue for the common man to understand was a political act – the Bible itself had only been translated into English within his lifetime. In the preface to the Herball, he states; Bonum, quo communius, eo melius & praestantius, translates this for us as, ‘a good thing the more common it is, the better it is.’ There is irony in the fact that Henry Lyte is so forgotten now, so ignored by posterity. His introduction to the Herball outlines, manifesto-style, how passionately he believed in open sharing of this medical expertise:

'My translation shall make this good and profitable Historie (which hitherto hath lien hid from many of my Countrymen, under the vaile of an unknowne language) familiar and knowne unto them.'

No doubt predicting the inevitable disapproval of the College of Physicians he adds rather pointedly that:  

'The good and vertuous Physition, whose purpose is rather the health of many, than the wealth of himselfe, will not (I hope) mislike this my enterprise, which to this purpose specially tendeth, that even the meanest (poorest) of my Countrymen, (whose skill is not so profound, that they can fetch this knowledge out of strange tongues, not their abilitie so wealthy, as to entertain a learned Physition) may yet in time of their necessitie have some helps in their owne, or their neighbors fields and gardens at home.'

I love his idea that the key to health might be readily available in anyone’s garden plots, on waysides, to anyone who could read in his (or her) mother tongue – and that this text enabled lay men and women to practice medicine, as well as providing clear description of the botanical features of the plants. It would have been invaluable for those unlicensed women practising as herbwives, and gentlewomen running their own stillroom at home to tend to ailments as they occurred both in the household and amongst the poor in the community who couldn’t afford the expense of a doctor.

Henry’s own personal copy of the French version of Dodeons, translated by Charles Lecluse, is in the British Library. Covered in notes in his tiny, immaculate hand, it feels like the closest we can get to hearing Henry speak for himself. His voice is in these notes – observations of local Somerset plants and plants seen in other men’s gardens, cross-references with points of interest gathered from other herbalists – Mattioli, Turner. There are smudges, doodles, marginalia. At the back are assorted notes about the estate, a recipe for horse medicine.

Other clues about his life at Lytes Cary exist. The garden bears no trace now of the layout of his own magnificent garden, but we know from John Aubrey’s 17th century writing that it contained ‘a good collection of plants for that age, some few whereof are yet alive’, and we know that ten years after Henry’s death there were ‘divers sorts of fruite growing at Lytescary’:

Apples, 3 skore, severall sortes

Pears and Wardens, 44 sorts

Plummes, 15 divers kynds

Grapes, 3 severall sortes

Cherries, 1

Wallnuts, 3

Peaches, 1

The Almond Tree

The Figge tree

The Quines tree

The Barbary tree

The Cornishe berrie

The Philbert trees

The black Bulleis

The Sloe

Most of his significant correspondence is lost. We know that there were letters from gentlemen and men of letters relating to the herbal, because his son Thomas mentions them in his commonplace book – only that they existed, not their content. But this commonplace book gives us instead extensive, tantalising glimpses into Lyte family life on the estate at Lytes Cary: the matters of tenancies and rents, taxes and payments of queensilver, personal disputes, trees cut down, acrimonious family lawsuits, ditch digging, hedge planting, land issues, windmills, hopyards and field names (Fatt Moor, Outdrove, the Gore, Swan’s Nest, Dame Christian’s Cross, Clay Furlong, the Ridgway). Thomas also mentions the existence of ‘physick notes, good against the new sweat and other good old remedies’ and then like gold dust for the novelist; ‘my father’s letters written in great anguishe of mynd’ and, ‘unkynd letters and worse dealings betwixt John Lyte (Henry’s father) and his son and heir.’ Looking at these and other documents and references I began to assemble together intriguing snippets, and realised there must surely be a novel in there. When I got to, ‘there went about a most vile report of the sicknes and death of the first wife of Henry Lyte, and likewise of himselfe, by the report of his owne father,’ I was convinced of it, that there was a premise.

Now that I’m done with writing THE KNOT I really miss Henry Lyte’s company, but definitely like to think there’s still something of his spirit up there amongst the weeds on the hill at Lytes Cary. Visit him if you’re passing…

Likewise if anyone happens to be passing Waterstones in Wells, Somerset tomorrow (Sat 23) I’ll be signing copies of THE KNOT between 11am-2pm – drop in and say hello, it would be lovely to see you.

On putting words into the mouths of the departed, by Jane Borodale

Popular myth has it that the hollow stalks of certain umbelliferous plants lead straight down to the place of the dead. I’m transfixed by this idea, that you might pour yourself through their narrow, jointed tubes, to arrive in the otherworld.


The virtues and dangers of individuals from the Umbelliferae family through history range from poison to plague cure – hemlock, fool’s parsley, water parsnip, lovage, alexanders, pepper saxifrage, sweet cicely, fennel, sanicle, angelica. These plants can be difficult for the unwary or careless to identify: see how similar they can look.

Hemlock Water-dropwort © Valerie Hill

Hemlock Water-dropwort © Valerie Hill

Hemlock Water-dropwort (not for nothing once called Dead Tongue, or Horsebane in Somerset) is so highly poisonous it could take you quickly to the otherworld in person, bypassing all metaphors. Mrs Grieve in her 20^th-century classic A Modern Herbal describes how in April 1857, ‘two farmer’s sons were found lying paralysed and speechless close to a ditch where they had been working. Assistance was soon rendered, but they shortly afterwards expired. A quantity of Water Hemlock grew in the ditch, where they had been employed.  A piece of the root was subsequently found with the marks of teeth in it, near to where the men lay, and another piece of the same root was discovered in the pocket of one of them.’

Angelica sylvestris © Valerie Hill

Angelica sylvestris © Valerie Hill

But the channel between worlds could go either way. In the 16^th century (when my new novel The Knot is set) the umbellifer Angelica archangelica with its fat, crisp, candiable stems and potent properties against the plague could actively help you return from the dead, offer you a hand back up those hollow stems. Henry Lyte’s Niewe Herball or Historie of Plants (1578) is one of many that points out how, ‘the late writers say, that the roots of Angelica are contrary to all poyson, the pestilence, and all naughty corruption of evill or infected aire.’

And I like to think of writing about the dead, too, as being a two-way possibility. On the one hand we take from them and give them voices they didn’t necessarily have and they have no say in the matter, yet there is also an obscure reciprocal kind of deal whereby the living pay attention to the dead for a while, warm up thoughts towards them, listen harder maybe? I like to think it is an acceptable practice, if the unwitting participant is approached with utmost diligence and respect and a certain kind of openness to unspoken things beneath the surface – resonances, textures, fragments of things left over from the past that might be so small that they can’t easily be pinned down into immoveable ‘truths’. Isn’t it this gap that historical fiction can animate so effectively?

Even as I write this I can see a tangle of metaphors emerging that I don’t quite mean. Words – like plants, weeds, umbellifers – can rapidly get out of hand, and paths to questions of identity are fraught with hazard…

Angelica sylvestris © Valerie Hill

Jane Borodale’s new novel The Knot is about the botanist Henry Lyte (c1529-1607) and his translation of an influential 16^th-century herbal.


Her website is here