STUNG by nettles? Rub the rash with a dock leaf. Who doesn’t know that? And it appears it was always so. The Anglo-Saxon chronicles of the late 9th century recorded it. In 1386, in Troilus and Creseyde, Chaucer quoted an ancient charm to be recited as the leaf was applied: ‘Netle in, dokke out.’ Folk practice and herbal advice down the centuries confirmed the idea and it was surely no coincidence that nettle and dock so often grew in close proximity. The efficacy of the dock leaf in countering the chemicals released by Urtica dioica may be dismissed by modern pharmacology (the rubbing action may be what matters most), but generations have sworn by it.
Relief from nettle stings was only part of a wider medicinal bounty apparently offered by dock leaves. Their virtue was declared in Bald’s Leechbook, a 9th-century collection of ancient medical lore (a manuscript of it is held by the British Library), as a remedy for ‘water-elf sickness’, an ancient expression that covered skin eruptions including chicken pox, measles and ergot poisoning (‘leech’, a dismissive word supposedly based on the use of the slimy annelid for bloodletting, derives from laece, Anglo-Saxon for doctor).
Bald’s text declares: ‘I have wreathed round the wounds the best of healing wreaths, so the baneful sores may neither burn or burst, nor find their way further, nor turn foul and fallow, nor thump and throb, nor be wicked wounds, nor dig deeply down: but he himself may hold in a way to health.’
Denne historien er fra July 28, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra July 28, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
