Did you
wish to remove a troublesome rival or an elder brother, you treated him
to a dose of deadly nightshade. Yet why should it, in company with many
other poisonous exotics, be found so frequently around the ruins of
monasteries? Did the holy fathers--but no, the thought is too
irreverent. Let us keep our illusions, and forget the friar and the
apothecary in 'Romeo and Juliet.'
Belladonna has never fairly taken root in English soil. It remains, like
the Roman snail and the Portuguese slug, a mere casual straggler about
its ancient haunts. But there are other plants which have fairly
established their claim to be considered as native-born Britons, though
they came to us at first as aliens and colonists from foreign parts.
Such, to take a single case, is the history of the common alexanders,
now a familiar weed around villages and farmyards, but only introduced
into England as a pot-herb about the eighth or ninth century. It was
long grown in cottage gardens for table purposes, but has for ages been
superseded in that way by celery. Nevertheless, it continues to grow all
about our lanes and hedges, side by side with another quaintly-named
plant, bishop-weed or gout-weed, whose very titles in themselves bear
curious witness to its original uses in this isle of Britain. I don't
know why, but it is an historical fact that the early prelates of the
English Church, saintly or otherwise, were peculiarly liable to that
very episcopal disease, the gout.
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