CULPEPER'S COMPLETE HERBAL

GARDEN TANSY

Description. Notwithstanding this is originally the same plant with the former, yet this differs widely in taste and flavour, and should never be preferred to that; however where that is not to be had, this may be used in its place. This is a low plant, which never rises up to stalk, but creeps upon the ground, emitting fibres from the joints, by which it roots in the earth, and spreads abroad very much: the leaves are made up of several pinnæ set opposite; each being about an inch long, and not half so braod, serrated about the edges, and having several small pieces among them like agrimony, covered over with a shining silver-colour down: the flowers grow at the joints, on long foot-stalks of five yellow leaves like cinquefoil The root is slender, with many fibres of a dark brown colour.

Place. It grows in gardens, and botanicle plantations.

Government and virtues. Dame Venus was minded to pleasure women with child by this herb, for there grows not an herb fitter for their use than this is; it is just as though it were cut out for the purpose. This herb bruised and applied to the navel, stays miscarriages: I know no herb like it for that use: boiled in ordinary beer, and the decoction drank, doth the like; and if her womb be not as she would have it, this decoction will make it so. Let those women that desire children love this herb, it is their best companion, their husbands excepted. Also it consumes the phlegmatic humours, the cold and moist constitution of winter most usually affects the body of man with, and that was the first reason of eating Tansies in the spring. At last the world being over-run with popery, a monster called Superstition perks up his head; and, as a judgement of God, obscures the bright beams of knowledge by his dismal looks; (physicians seeing the Pope and his imps selfish, they began to be so too) and now forsooth Tansies must be eaten only on Palm and Easter Sundays, and their neighbour days: at last, superstition being too hot to hold, and the selfishness of physicians walking in the clouds; after the friars and monks had made the people ignorant, the superstition of the time was found out, by the virtue of the herb hidden, and now it is almost, if not altogether, let off. Surely our physicians are beholden to none so much as they are to monks and friars; for wont of eating this herb in spring, makes people sickly in summer: and that makes work for the physician. If it be against any man or woman's conscience, to eat Tansy in the spring, I am as unwilling to burthen their conscience, as I am that they should burthen mine; they may boil it in wine and drink the decoction, it will work the same effect. The decoction of the common Tansy, or the juice drank in wine, is a singular remedy for all the griefs that come by stopping of the urine, helps the stranguary and those that have weak reins and kidneys. It is also very profitable to dissolve and expel wind in the stomach, belly, or bowels, to procure women's courses, and expel windiness in the matrix, if it be bruised and often smelled unto, as also applied to the lower part of the belly. It is also very profitable for such women as are given to miscarry. It is used also against the stone in the reins, especially to men. The herb fried with eggs (as it is the custom in the Spring-time) which is called a Tansy, helps to digest and carry downward those bad humours that trouble the stomach. The seed is very profitably given to children for the worms, and the juice in drink is as effectual. Being boiled in oil, it is good for the sinews shrunk by cramps, or pained with colds, if thereto applied.