from the cuneiform inscriptions. But before studying the plant lore
therein contained, it may be as well to take a preliminary survey of
the four most important manuscripts.

The oldest Saxon book dealing with the virtues of herbs which we
possess is the _Leech Book of Bald_, dating from about A.D. 900-950.
Unlike some other MS. herbals of which only a few tattered pages
remain, this perfect specimen of Saxon work has nothing fragile about
it. The vellum is as strong and in as good condition as when it first
lay clean and untouched under the hand of the scribe--Cild by
name--who penned it with such skill and loving care. One's imagination
runs riot when one handles this beautiful book, now over a thousand
years old, and wonders who were its successive owners and how it has
survived the wars and other destructive agencies through all these
centuries. But we only know that, at least for a time, it was
sheltered in that most romantic of all English monasteries,
Glastonbury.[3] This Saxon manuscript has a dignity which is unique,
for it is the oldest existing leech book written in the vernacular. In
a lecture delivered before the Royal College of Physicians in 1903,
Dr. J. F. Payne commented on the remarkable fact that the Anglo-Saxons
had a much wider knowledge of herbs than the doctors of Salerno, the
oldest school of medicine and oldest university in Europe. "No
treatise," he said, "of the School of Salerno contemporaneous with the
_Leech Book of Bald_ is known, so that the Anglo-Saxons had the credit
of priority. Their Leech Book was the first medical treatise written
in Western Europe which can be said to belong to modern history, that
is, which was produced after the decadence and decline of the
classical medicine, which belongs to ancient history.... It seems fair
to regard it [the Leech Book], in a sense, as the embryo of modern
English medicine, and at all events the earliest medical treatise
produced by any of the modern nations of Europe." The Anglo-Saxons
created a vernacular literature to which the continental nations at
that time could show no parallel, and in the branch of literature
connected with medicine, in those days based on a knowledge of herbs
(when it was not magic), their position was unique. Moreover, the fact
that the Leech Book was written in the vernacular is in itself
remarkable, for it points to the existence of a class of men who were
not Latin scholars and yet were able and willing to read