V

MEDIAEVAL NATURAL HISTORY--TREES


The seventeenth book of the "De Proprietatibus" deals with the
properties of plants. The sources from which Bartholomew derives his
information are Aristotle and Albertus Magnus' Gloss on the "De
Vegetalibus," Albumazar, Pliny, Isaac on Foods, Hugo, and the
Platearius. The text professes to deal with those trees and plants
alone which are mentioned in the Gloss, but many others are
incidentally mentioned, and we are thus enabled to learn the chief
food-stuffs of our ancestors. The cereals of the time are wheat,
barley, oats, and rye, just as at present; but the dinner-table of the
day had neither turnip, cabbage, nor potato, and supplied their place
with the parsnip, cole, and rape. Garlic, radishes, and lettuce were
widely used, the former being valued in proportion to its power of
overcoming any other odour. Flax seems to have been widely grown, and
rushlights were then a luxury.

The subject of trees and plants does not so readily lend itself to
fables as some other parts of natural history, but we refer the reader
to the accounts of aloes, pepper, and mandragora as a specimen of the
tales told, as our author says, "to make things dear, and of great
price."

Aloes is a tree with good savour, and breedeth in India, and sometime