Herbs for the Mediaeval Household for Cooking, Healing and Divers Uses

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943 - 64 p.«What is an herb?" the scholar Alcuin is said to have inquired of his pupil Charlemagne. The reply was "The friend of physicians and the praise of cooks". This conversation may be apocryphal and not very profound and perhaps even a little ungrammatical but nevertheless Charlemagne's definition of mediaeval herbs is as succinctly true as any that can be found in the herb books today. Charlemagne must have known quite a lot about herbs — or at least one of his advisers did — for he included among his instructions to the royal stewards a list of seventy-four herbs which were to be planted in the imperial gardens.