FLEAS, by Jane Borodale

From Robert Hooke's Micrographia, 1665

My friend has fleas. Of course I mean that her puppy has fleas, because that’s what you catch at puppy-school, but they seem to be generously dispersed and multiplying about the house and it looks like a bit of a nightmare to me, endless washing and vacuuming, shaking of bedding, testing of proprietary brands of flea-zapper, not to mention all the jokes… By now it is the tail end of fleas that she is suffering from; the worst is over now that cold weather’s on its way and the halcyon days of prime flea-time are numbered…

G M Crespi, 'Searcher for Fleas', 1720s

Fleas in the past were a habitual problem for any householder. The Goodman of Paris, in 1393 when advising his new wife on the chief ways to keep a husband content (I should quickly say that my friend’s spouse took a day off work to assist with flea-warfare) suggested, ‘I beseech you thus to bewitch your husband … have a care in winter he have a good fire and smokeless and let him rest well and be well covered between your breasts. And in summer take heed that there be no fleas in your chamber, nor in your bed, the which you may do in six ways. If the room be strewn with alder leaves, the fleas will be caught thereon. If you have at night one or two trenchers [of bread] slimed with glue or turpentine and set about the room, with a lighted candle in the midst of each trencher, they will come and be stuck thereto…’

Hyssop (copyright Valerie Hill)

Strewing herbs, from the Middle Ages until the 18^th century, played a large and efficacious role in control of fleas and other vermin, mixed in with the rushes, reeds or straw that would have covered every earth or flagstone floor as a thick layer, in rich or poor households alike. Periodically the floors were swept clean of these rushes and herbs, which were then burned, ridding the household of many of the fleas and larvae that would have collected there. I don’t need to remind anyone in the North of England about rush bearing, which was a formal celebration of this ritual.

Thomas Tusser (1524-1580) listing twenty-one strewing herbs altogether in his instructional poem Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandry; includes costmary, cowslips, daisies, germander and winter savory.

‘While wormwood hath seed, get a handful or twain,

To save against March, to make flea to refrain:

Where chamber is sweeped, and wormwood is strown,

No flea, for his life, dare abide to be known.’

Fleabane (copyright Valerie Hill)

I imagine your strewing herb of choice would have been largely dictated by what you could get locally, or the type of environment you lived in. Those on sandy, well-drained soils might grow hyssop (Hyssopus officinalis); if you were in a marshy or clayish area then fleabane (Pulicaria dysenterica) would be handier to go out and pick by the wayside, or watermint (Mentha aquatica).

The Niewe Herball of 1578 says ‘Of Fleawurt, or Flebane … some hold, that if this hearbe whiles it is yet greene, be strowed in the house, that Fleas will not come not ingender where it is layd.’

Mint, with its volatile oils and sharply cooling aromatic pungency was also excellent against mice, which detest the smell and will not touch food that has either fresh or dried mint laid around it. Pennyroyal or pudding grass (Mentha pulegium) was brought to market by poor women to sell for a variety of uses, including specifically against fleas, and its effectiveness is clear, being used like this since antiquity. This is the Pulegium of the Romans, named by Pliny (pulex being Latin for flea). John Pechey in 1694 says of pennyroyal; ‘The fresh Herb wrap’t in a Cloth, and laid in a Bed, drives away Fleas; but it must be renewed once a week.’

Lady's bedstraw (copyright Valerie Hill)

The scent of other herbs lasts much longer than a week; foliage of the bedstraw family, such as Lady’s bedstraw (Galium verum, also known as fleaweed), and woodruff (Asperula oderata) contain asperuloside which produces coumarin; the leaves when freshly gathered have little scent at all, but when dried give out a sweet smell of newly-mown hay that can last for years. 

Sweet woodruff (copyright Valerie Hill)

Fleas do not, apparently, like coumarin at all, which is also in the pretty melilot (Melilotus altissima) another strewing herb. Mrs Grieve tells us that, in June, on St Barnabas day, bunches of box, woodruff, lavender and roses were traditionally put inside churches; fleas were clearly a problem in the house of God too. There are so many other kinds of potent, aromatic herbs used for strewing that I haven’t time to go into here, but a fleeting mention is due for meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria), well-known for being the favourite strewing herb of Queen Elizabeth the first.

Georges de la Tour, 'Woman Catching Fleas', 1630s

It would seem though, from these genre paintings, that sometimes direct action was the only way, and the only way to really kill a flea by hand is to crack it (sorry) between the nails. During an infestation this would have been rather laborious. With animals occupying human living quarters, cats and dogs running in and out, (rabbits hanging before skinning could have come into the kitchen crawling with fleas), and so on, I wonder whether every poor household struggled with fleas all of the time, especially in the warmer months.

Gerard ter Borch, 'Boy Ridding his Dog of Fleas', c1665

Even the toughest flea needs certain conditions to flourish; adequate warmth and humidity, plus delicious warm-blooded morsels (us, puppies) to feast on. Lucky, then, for my beleaguered friend up the hill, that the dark nights are drawing in now, and regular frosts should see off any laggardly critters. The bad news is that flea larvae can successfully over-winter in the house, to wake up in the warmth and vigour of the spring (another reason to burn your strewing herbs before the year is out). 

But I’ll leave you with one last image that shows how very intricate and time-consuming one’s flea-revenge could be…

WASHING LINEN IN PUBLIC: early modern laundry in a small household, by Jane Borodale

From 'Splendor Solis', 1531

For the last few days I’ve been preoccupied with the state of the weather. Any cloud scudding over the horizon, abruptly enfeebled sunshine or a bluster of wind could herald RAIN. We’ve run out of oil here at home, and this means that our stove is out of action and I’m missing it badly. It’s not so much the difficulty of being unable to cook (cup-a-soups were invented for moments like these, and Sunday lunch can be cooked on a fire outside). It’s not that the house is developing a dampish, bone-creeping kind of chill that reminds me of visiting decommissioned rural churches in winter, or caves… No. It’s that I can’t dry the darned washing unless conditions outside are exactly favourable.

So of course I’ve been thinking about the difficulties faced by women trying to maintain a supply of clean family linen in the past, and with a renewed respect for the vastly effortful nature of it. Laundry gets but a passing mention on the whole in contemporary accounts, for obvious reasons, but here’s a rag-bag of laundry thoughts gleaned from random corners. Some of the most ordinary domestic tasks in history seem shrouded in mystery, and laundry is no exception. But it now seems generally accepted that all but the very poorest kept the undergarments close to their bodies clean and freshly changed – the shirts and shifts and smocks and chemises known as small linen. It was the outer garments that were less frequently, if ever, washed. Brushed sometimes, shaken, sprinkled with a variety of powders and herbal mixtures, dabbed at with concoctions and remedies for stains (not enough space here today for talk of outerwear, nor bleaching, starch or indigo; maybe another time). But clean linen though, that was the sure and outward sign of a respectable housewife. Not everyone approved. Defoe complains that where ‘our grandfathers were content with shifting their linen perhaps twice a week, our nicer gentlemen have brought it to two clean shirts a day.’

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

Gervase Markham advises in The English Housewife (1615), ‘Let the housewife’s garments be comely, cleanly and strong’. In the kitchen ‘she must be cleanly both in body and garments’. And household linen such as bedsheets, napkins, towels and tablecloths were also to be spotless. William Harrison (1535-1593) comments in his ‘The Description of England’: ‘Our inns are very well furnished with napery, bedding and tapestry, especially with napery; for beside the linen used at the tables, which is commonly washed daily, is such and so much as belongeth unto the estate and calling of the guest. Each comer is sure to lie in clean sheets, wherein no man hath been lodged since they came from the laundress or out of the water wherein they were last washed.’

Jean-Francois Millet

How did they do it? Bucking with lye was done first. (Lye being of course an alkaline solution made from ash and water.) Dirty linen was loosely folded into tubs or troughs and the lye poured over, soaking the cloth, then emptied, sometimes repeatedly until the liquor ran clear. (Bucking tubs were often on a stand, and had a spigot near the bottom for draining easily into a low vessel underneath.) Then, linen was rinsed in fresh water and beaten with washing bats known as beetles or battledores (which look like modern cricket or ping-pong bats) to loosen the dirt, or paddled with feet. Soap wasn’t always used - for example William Harrison mentions in his ‘Descriptions’ how ‘in some places women do scour and wet their clothes with [swine’s] dung, as others do with hemlocks and nettles, but such is the savor of the clothes touched withal that I cannot abide to wear them on my body, more than such as are scoured with the refuse soap.’ No kidding.

From WH Payne's 'Microcosm', 1806

In England we were quite backward on the soap front – Spain and Italy were making fine soaps centuries before we’d even started basic commercial soapboiling. The cheapest sort here, unless you made it yourself, was soft and harsh ‘black soap’, stored in barrels and bought by the pound. Crown soap was a better quality of soft all-purpose soap – Benjamin Franklin has a recipe from his sister in England that sounds a bit too challenging and costly to be readily homemade: ‘eighteen bushels of ashes, one bushel of stone lime, three pounds of tallow, fifteen pounds of the purest Barbary wax of a lovely green colour and a peck of salt.’

Jean-Francois Millet, 'Les Lavandieres'

Once thoroughly cleaned by being beaten with beetles on rocks or boards at the tub in the yard or washhouse or river’s edge, linen was squeezed or wrung out, sometimes on posts, and then set to dry – usually on the open grass, or draped across bushes or hedges, or poles. Sometimes (particularly when inside or in great-house laundries), clothes horses were used, called variously wooden maids or maidens, washing horses or more poetically ‘winter hedges’. Pegs, apparently, didn’t appear till later, so windy gusts must have added a bit of frisson to drying days.

Skimming through rural, low-to-middling-status probate inventories on the shelf doesn’t provide much of a clue about predominant practice in individual households – whether they washed at home or in local rivers. I can see occasional appearances of wash-related things such as ‘one lie trowe [lye trough] praysed at 3s’ belonging to one John Weblie, husbandman, in 1639. There are a few other references, especially in inns, to large bucking tubs, bucking pots, baskets or closebucks (a bucket being a small bucking tub, funny how only the diminutive has stuck). In the inventory of the more well-to-do Samuel Codrington Esquire, 1709, ‘three washing tubbs’ appear in the barn, maybe not surprising, considering the quantity of ‘Linnen: two dozen and nine damask Napkins, two dozen of diaper Napkins, one dozen and tenn Huckaback napkins, five dozen and eleaven Flax napkins, eight tablecloths of the same, some old diaper napkins, eleaven diaper and damask tablecloths, two Holland Sideboard Cloths, three pairs and one sheet of Holland, four pair and one of Dowlas Sheet, seaven pair and one sheet of Flax, three coarse pair of Canvas sheets, five Canvas Bolster-Cases, two long Towells, eight pillow Cases and one large Callico Window Curtain…’

Paddling with feet etc - 17th century

The 18^th-century inventories sometimes list an ‘Ironing Box with clamps’, which took a slug of heated-up metal inside a cavity for smoothing linen under its base. (Other more primitive ironing tools still in use included sleeker stones or smoothers, which were round or mushroom-shaped handheld objects for polishing cloth, sometimes used in conjunction with wax.)

Daniel Ridgeway Knight, 'Washerwomen'

I can’t see a single reference in these inventories to washing beetles, paddles or bats, because low value items wouldn’t have warranted an individual entry, they were costed in a lump together at the end e.g. ‘the rest of the goodes left unpraysed’, or ‘all other Impellments of the house within and without’. Overall it’s hard to tell whether these are households that actually possessed designated washing equipment such as tubs with which they washed at home, or whether they had to walk (sometimes considerable distance) to running water where they could wash on the banks of streams, brooks or rivers, beating the clothes on rocks or boards, then lugging them, wet and heavy, all the way home again…

NB. Apologies for the inclusion of 19^th-century pictures: it’s just that they illustrate the basic equipment in action so clearly.

Jahn Ekenaes, 'Women doing laundry' 1891

And likewise this one, of women washing through holes in the ice, surely demonstrates near-heroic housewifely efforts necessary in the past. Even in a long winter, the need for clean small linen and bedsheets didn’t go away…

Which reminds me – it was the first frost here last night and there’s a definite turn of the year towards winter. Is that a black cloud banking threateningly behind those trees? It is? Ok I’m off – I’ve got linen to rescue.

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?

IN HIS OWN WORDS - DIARIST THOMAS TURNER, by Jane Borodale

It was hard trying to decide who, out of all the millions, might be my favourite person from the past – because apart from other considerations there is always the unbridgeable gap between who they actually were and what we have left of them. Diaries being possibly the nearest we can get to interior thoughts from the past – in the end I was torn between shopkeeper and diarist Thomas Turner, and Dorothy Wordsworth (intelligent, intriguing, influential sibling of William) – and (apologies, sisterhood) Turner won through on this occasion because I was more in the mood to be with him in Sussex.

In many ways Thomas Turner (1729-93) is the quintessential Mr Ordinary, Everyman, the man in the street. Literate, and having a pivotal role in the life of the village of East Hoathly in Sussex, he was at once shopkeeper, grocer, mercer, undertaker, tax-gatherer, writer of wills and accounts, overseer of the poor, churchwarden and more. But the remarkable or notable thing about him (in terms of posterity) is the diary itself. Two hundred and fifty years have passed since he began writing it, yet his character still jumps off every page; vibrant, busy, flawed, self-chastising, hypocritical, keenly-reading, drunken, generous, unhappily married.

The first surviving entry is soon after his marriage to Peggy Slater in 1754, when he was 24 years old, and the diary continues for the next 11 years, including the death of his wife and only child. The narrative finally breaks off just after the beginning of his second marriage, though he lived for another 28 years, fathering 7 children, and was buried in the churchyard at East Hoathly. The original manuscript is now held in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, but a third of it is readily available to all in an edition published by OUP and edited by David Vaisey - and what an extraordinary, detailed record of vernacular 18th century life it is. It was a fantastic resource for me while I was writing my first novel The Book of Fires, because he lived very close to the childhood home of my central protagonist Agnes. There is nothing so vivid as reading pages of actual living set down by actual people from the period you are spending your days and nights dreaming about.

It’s far too difficult to sum up Thomas Turner in a nutshell so – enough of my version of him – he can speak for himself:

“Sat. 17 July [1756].  In the morn after breakfast went down to Mr. French’s to get him to bring me from Lewes half oz. cauliflower seed, and when I came there, I found Mr. French, his servants, and Tho. Fuller a-catching of rats; so I stayed and assisted them about 3 hours, and we caught near 20.

Sun. 18 July … After churchtime my wife and I went up to Mr. Jos. Burges’s and drank tea there and stayed till between 9 and 10. But I think I never saw children humoured more to their ruin than theirs, Mrs. Virgoe’s excepted.

Thurs. 22 July … Mr. F. Elless and I walked down to the Nursery. My business was to get some money out of Edmund Elphick, but could not. Never, never was money so scarce as now. We came home about 8 o’clock. As we went along, we laid 1lb. of gingerbread concerning the length of the church field footway. I laid it were 38 rods, and he that it was not. So accordingly as we came home, we measured it and found it to be 39 rod and 3 feet, so that I won this great but innocent wager. This day Mr. Porter’s daughter was baptized by the name of Elizabeth.

Fri. 23 July.  In the morn Mr. French and the keeper drawed the pond before our door and made us a present of a brace of carp. Afterwards we went down to the church to take Peter Adams’s bond out of the chest in the church to ask Mr. Poole’s advice on it. We went into Jones’s and spent 5d. apiece. Dined on a piece of pork and peas with a baked beggar’s pudding.

Sun. 25 July. … This day I had a sailor at the door who asked charity (and whom I relieved), who could speak 7 tongues.

Mon. 26 July.  My brother came over in the forenoon. I also went down to Mr. French’s to take the measure of Sam for a hat. In the afternoon, wrote out Mr. John Vine’s bills. This night our servant sat up with Joseph Mepham. Read part of Hervey’s Theron and Aspasio. This day gave Dame Dan a pair of stock and hand cards on the parish account.

Thurs. 29 July.  Paid the gardener at Halland 8d. for 1 gallon of currants for myself and 1 hundred of walnuts for my mother … Mr. Coates informed us that Admiral Byng was arrived at Spithead where he was under an arrest for cowardice and misbehaviour in the Mediterranean relating to the losing of the Isle of Minorca.

Weds. 7 Sept.  Mr. Burges has a sister to keep his house, whose name is Jael, and I think the greatest oddity I ever saw. It’s her misfortune to be deformed by nature; i.e. squint-eyed, a great stammering in her speech, and very much on one side. But yet her greatest misfortune is in her unhappy temper, for she even appears to [be] so miserable that we may justly say she is poor in the abundance of riches…

Mon. 12 Sept. … After breakfast Mr. Burges and I went down again to talk with Osborne’s servant about her being big with child, but she would give us no satisfactory answer.

Sat. 17 Sept. … I am come to a resolution, as I am so continually almost troubled with the inflammation in my eyes, to leave off during life (unless anything very material should intervene) eating any sort of meat, unless sometimes a bit of boiled lamb, mutton, or veal, or chick, or any such harmless diet; as also to refrain from all sorts of strong liquor.

Sun. 18 July.  My whole family at church in the morn, that is, myself, wife, maid and 2 boys … we dined on a piece of boiled beef, a currant suet pudding and carrots.

Thomas Turner's house, East Hoathly.
Photo: Simon Harriyott

Tues. 25 July [1758].  Oh what a misfortune it is upon me my wife’s being lame again, but let me not repine, since it is the Divine will. This is the twenty-ninth day on which we have had rain successively.

Weds. 2 Aug.  I completed the reading of Gay’s Fables, which I think contains a very good lesson of morality; and I think the language very healthy, being very natural.

Sat. 5 Aug.  I came home in company with Mr. Elless, about ten; but, to my shame do I say it, very much in liquor.

Sun. 6 Aug.  Pretty bad all day, with the stings of a guilty and tormenting conscience.

Fri. 22 Feb. [1760].  Paid John Cayley 2s. for the rent of our 2 seats in the church. Paid Tho. Burfield 7s. 6d. for 1 dozen beehives received by him today. We dined on a chicken roasted, a piece of boiled pork and turnips. At home all day. Very little to do all day; a most melancholy time – my poor heart is almost sunk with trouble! Dame Durrant made my wife a present of a fat goose.

Mon. 3 Mar.  In the even wrote my London letters. My wife went down to Mr. Porter’s, their youngest child being very ill.

Tues. 4 Mar. … In the even went down to Mr. Porter’s, to take instructions for the funeral of their little boy, who dies this morning about 8.20, aged about 9 months.

Tues. 7 Oct. … Dame Durrant and Mrs. Virgoe drank tea with my wife, who is extremely ill. In the even there was a rejoicing at Halland and a bonfire for our armies under the command of General Amherst having taken Montreal and all Canada from the French. All the neighbours were regaled with a supper, wine punch and strong beer. Today sent Thomas Durrant to Brighthelmstone for Dr. Poole, who came to my wife in the even, who is prodigious ill. At home all day and thank God pretty busy.”

I’d love to go on and on transcribing Thomas Turner's voice but time is up. Visit my website www.janeborodale.com to carry on in the vein of 18th-century Sussex, or better still, come along to a fabulous Historical Fiction Day at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum near Chichester, on Sunday 5 August 2012, 10am-5pm. Speakers include Alison Weir, Maria McCann and Emma Darwin, and there are a few tickets still available for the day. More details on the Weald and Downland Museum site.

"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 Herballoutlines, 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.