Wild Navew
Description. This is a much less plant than the garden navew, having a long slender whitish sticky root, full of fibres at the bottom: the lower leaves are less, and much jagged, and round at the ends. The stalks are smooth, and beset with the like smaller leaves. The flowers and seed are much alike. Place. It is common on ditch-banks.
Time. It flowers in June, and then very much resembles the turnip above ground.
Government and virtues. Andromachus Junior, in his account of the theriaca, prefers the seed of the wild sort before the garden, as of a hotter nature. The plant which is cultivated on some parts of England under the names of rape and cole-seed, is this, raised by culture, to something like the figure of the garden navew, the field culture giving it a middle aspect between the two. From the seed is made rape oil, and it is called rape-seed; but the careless herb-folks often sell turnip-seed to people who enquire for this. OXLIP.
Description. The great oxlip seems to be an intermediate plant between the cowslip and primrose, both of which it resembles in many degrees as to its appearance; and its virtues, by analyzation, are found to be the same, Goverment and virtues. It is a plant of Venus, and in good against disorders of the nerves. The root has the principal virtue; the country people boil this in ale, and give it for giddinesses of the head with success. The juice of the plant, mixed with vinegar, is also used to snuff up the nose against head-achs. It is less violent than the juice of the primrose root, and answers the same purpose very well.
OATS, Are so well known that they need no description.
Government and virtues. Oats fried with bay salt, and applied to the sides, take away the pains of stitches and wind in the sides of the belly. A poultice made of meal of oats, and some oil of hays put thereunto, helpeth the itch and the leprosy, as also the fistulas of the fundament, and dissolveth hard imposthumes. The meal of oats boiled with vinegar, and applied, taketh away freckles and spots in the face, and other parts of the body.