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The Beech Tree

Name. In treating of this tree, you must understand that I mean the green mast beech, which is by way of distinction from that other small rough sort, called in Sussex the smaller beech, but in Essex horn-bean. I suppose it needless to describe it, being already too well known to my countrymen.

Place. It groweth in woods amongst oaks and other trees, and in parks, forests, and chases, to feed deer; and in other places to fatten swine. Time. It bloometh in the end of April, or beginning of May, for the most part, and the fruit is ripe in September.

Government and virtues. It is a plant of Saturn, and therefore performs his qualities and proportion in these operations. The leaves of the beech-tree are cooling and binding, and therefore good to be applied to hot swellings to discuss them; the nuts do much nourish such beast as feed thereon. The water that is found in the hollow places of decaying beeches will cure both man and beast of any scurf, scab, or running tetters, if they be washed therewith; you may boil the leaves into a poultice, or make an ointment of them when time of year serves.

BEANS.

Both the garden and field beans are so well known that it saveth me the labour of writing any description of them. Their virtues follow. Government and virtues. They are plants of Venus, and the distilled water of the flower of garden beans is good to clean the face and skin from spots and wrinkles; and the meal or flower of them, or the small beans doth the same. The water distilled from the green husks, is held to be very effectual against the stone, and to provoke urine. Bean-flower is used in poultices to assuage inflammations arising from wounds, and the swelling of women's breasts caused by the curdling of their milk, and represseth their milk; flour of beans and fenugreek, mixed with honey, and applied to felons, boils, bruises, or blue marks by blows, or the imposthumes in the kernels of the ears, helpeth them all, and with rose leaves, frankincense, and the white of an egg, being applied to the eyes, helpeth them that are swollen or do water, or have received any blow upon them, if used with wine. If a bean be parted into two, the skin being taken away, and laid on the place where the leech hath been set that bleedeth too much, stayeth the bleeding. Bean flower boiled to a poultice with wine and vinegar, and some oil put thereto, easeth both pains and swelling of the scrotum. The husks boiled in water to the consumption of a third part thereof, stayeth a lask; and the ashes of the husks made up with old hog's grease, helpeth the old pains, contusions, and wounds of the sinews, the sciatica and gout. The field beans have all the aforementioned virtues as the garden beans.

Beans eaten are extreme windy meat; but if after the Dutch fashion, when then are half boiled you busk them and then stew them, (I cannot tell you how, for I never was cook in all my life) they are wholesome food.