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Introduction: Herbal

No will of our Author has been found at Somerset House, but it seems improbable that he acquired wealth, and the printer of the Herbal may have been more successful than the compiler. (Our authority for the life of Gerard is Dr. Benjamin Daydon Jackson, who in 1876 privately printed Gerard's catalogue of his garden plants, with a memoir of Gerard, notes on the plants, references to the Herbal, and the addition of modern names; to which source the present Editor is indebted for many of these notes, as for those in the Appendix. He gratefully acknowledges also as a source of information and inspiration Miss Eleanour Sinclair Rohde's books, especially The Old English Herbals (1922), with valuable Bibliographies, treating of many manuscript herbals from the tenth-century Leech Book of Bald, and the chief English printed herbals from the fifteenth century) For a glimpse of the man himself, we have but to turn to his half-length portrait engraved by William Rogers, facing page one of his Herbal, of which a photogravure reproduction adorns our own title-page; we shall observe that he holds a branch of the potato plant. Beneath are his own arms, those of the City of London and of the Company of which he was Master. A variant of this portrait, engraved by Io. Payne, appears on the title-page of the Johnson editions of 1633 and 1636.

III.

Sources of the Herball.

GERARD has been harshly judged for failing to acknowledge the source of his Herbal's inspiration; but the day of his work is so far distant, and the circumstances of its production are so little known, that we may choose to ignore what critics have said, in our thankfulness. for his own share of the work. Plagiarism was rife in those days, and we do not find Shakespeare making acknowledgement of the originals of his plays. The Herbal owes its charm to our Author; for throughout are his own undoubted observations, allusions to persons and places, and a deal of the contemporary folk-lore he collected, the whole richly seasoned by his sense of humour, whether patent or lurking slyly between the lines.

The history of the "Historie" runs thus: John Norton, Queen's printer, had commissioned a Dr. Priest, a member of the College of Physicians, to translate Dodoens's Pemptades (1583) from the Latin into English, but the translator dying before the completion of his task, the unfinished work came by some means into Gerard's hands. He altered the arrangement of the herbs into that of I'Obel in his Adversaria, referring but casually to Priest's labours with the remark that his work had perished with him.

No fewer than eighteen hundred illustrations adorned the Herbal. The wood blocks used by Tabernaemontanus (Bergzabern) in his Eicones (1590) with some others were procured from Frankfort by Norton; a few were supplied by Gerard, among which was the first published cut of the "Virginian" potato. Gerard misapplied many of the figures, and caused so much confusion in the early chapters of the Herbal, that James Garret, a London Apothecary, directed the printer's attention to the point, and I'Obel was invited to correct the work, and by his own account did so in a thousand places, until stopped by Gerard, who declared that the work was sufficiently accurate, and that his censor had forgotten the English language.