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Flax-Weed, or Toad-Flax

Description. Our common flax-weed hath divers stalks full fraught with long and harrow ash-coloured leaves, and from the middle of them, almost upward, stored with a number of pale yellow flowers, of a strong unpleasant scent, with deeper yellow mouths, and blackish flat seed in round heads. The root is somewhat woody and white, especially the main downright one, with many fibres, abiding many years, shooting forth roots every way round about, and new branches every year.

Place. This groweth throughout this land, both by the way sides, and in meadows, also by hedge-sides, and upon the sides of banks, and borders of fields.

Time. It flowereth in summer, and the seed is ripe usually before the end of August.

Government and virtues. Mars owns the herb: In Sussex we call it gall-wort, and lay it in our chicken's water to cure them of the gall; it relieves them when they are drooping. This is frequently used to spend the abundance of those watery humours by urine, which cause the dropsy. The decoction of the herb, both leaves and flowers, in wine taken and drank, doth somewhat move the belly downwards, openeth obstructions of the liver, and helpeth the yellow jaundice; expelleth poison, provoketh women's courses, driveth forth the dead child, and after-birth. The distilled water of the herb and flowers is effectual for all the same purposes; being drank with a dram of the powder of the seeds of bark, or the roots of wall-wort, and a little cinnamon, for certain days together, it is held a singular remedy for the dropsy. The juice of the herb, or the distilled water dropped into the eyes, is a certain remedy for all heat, inflammations, and redness in them. The juice or water put into foul ulcers, whether they be cancerous or fistulous, with tents rolled therein, or parts washed and injected therewith, cleanseth them thoroughly from the bottom, and healeth them up safely. The same juice or water also cleanseth the skin wonderfully of all sorts of deformity, as leprosy, morphew, scurf, wheals, pimples, or spots, applied of itself, or used with some powder of lupines.