CULPEPER'S COMPLETE HERBAL

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, frank-incense, 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 they are half boiled you husk them and then stew them (I cannot tell you how, for I never was a cook in all my life) they are wholesome food.