Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Crowfoot
Names. Many are the names this furious biting herb hath obtained; it is called frog's foot, from the Greek name barrakion, crow-foot, gold-knobs, gold-cups, king's-knob, baffiners, troil-flowers, polts, locket-goulions, and butter-flowers.
Abundant are the sorts of this herb, and to describe them all would tire the patience of Socrates himself; therefore I shall only mention the most usual. Description. The most common crowfoot hath many dark-green leaves, cut into divers parts, in taste biting and sharp, and blistering the tongue; it bears many flowers, and those of a bright resplendant yellow colour. I do not remember that I ever saw any thing yellower. Virgins in ancient times used to make powder of them to furrow bride beds. After the flowers come small heads, somewhat spiked and rugged like a pineapple.
Place. They grow very common every where; unless you turn your head into a hedge, you cannot but see them as you walk.
Time. They flower in May and June, even till September. Government and virtues. This fiery and hot-spirited herb of Mars is no way fit to be given inwardly, but an ointment of the leaves of flowers will draw a blister, and may be so fitly applied to the nape of the neck, to draw back rheum from the eyes. The herb being bruised, and mixed with a little mustard, draws a blister as well and as perfectly as cantharides, and with far less danger to the vessels of urine, which cantharides naturally delight to wrong. I knew the herb once applied to a pestilential rising that was fallen down, and it saved life even beyond hope; it were good keeping an ointment and plaister of it, if it were but for that.