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.
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Of Shepheards Purse
The Description. 1 The leaves of Shepheards purse grow up at the first long, gashed in the edges like those of Rocket, spred upon the ground: from these spring up very many little weake stalkes divided into sundry branches, with like leaves growing on them, but lesser; at the top whereof are orderly placed small white floures: after these come up little seed vessels, flat, and cornered, narrow at the stemme like to a certaine little pouch or purse, in which lieth the seed. The root is white not without strings.
The Place.
These herbes doe grow of themselves for the most part, neere common high waies, in desart and untilled places, among rubbish and old walls. The Time.
They floure, flourish and seed all the Summer long.
The Names.
Shepheards purse is called in Latine, Pastoris bursa: in French, Bourse de pasteur ou Cure: in English, Shepheards purse or scrip: of some, Shepheards pouch, and poore mans Parmacetie: and in the North part of England, Toy-wort, Pick-purse, and Case-weed.
The Vertues.
Shepheards purse staieth bleeding in any part of the body, whether the juice or the decoction thereof be drunke, or whether it be used pultesse wise, or in bath, or any other way else.