Memory Stick

'These worts shall serve for a lung salve, bone wort and brownwort, betony and a strawberry plant, southernwood and hyssop, sage and savine and rue, agrimony and hazel, quitch, mead wort, pellitory.' 

Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England: Being a Collection of Documents, for the Most Part Never Before Printed, Illustrating the History of Science in this Country Before the Norman Conquest,

The strange places that an unassuming little herb can take you. It appears like this, on roadside verges, late-season, every year, but year-to-year I have to look it up to remember its name. Strange, because I love the word; you would think it would stick in the memory. Maybe next year - and maybe it really will, because one of the plant's names is 'sticklewort', which I suspect is just an elision of 'sticky wort. Everything i have read about it emphasises how its hairy seed cases stick to anything that touches them - maybe even memory

So do you know which of the list in the first paragraph it actually is? Aren't those words dripping with the sense of an ancient, pungent English country garden, somewhere in the liminal space between kitchencraft and witchcraft: betony...hyssop...rue...pellitory...mandrake - oh no, that one is missing

It is in fact agrimony. The name sounds as if it should mean something like 'sweet music of the fields', so I dug about trying to find its origins, and this wonderful reference turned up. The splendidly titled book was written by an academic Victorian polymath, Thomas Oswald Cockayne, who got a top degree in mathematics, became a clergyman, and then developed an interest in Old English writings - as it was spoken and written before the Norman conquest, which would be almost entirely unrecognisable to us. This excerpt is one of the things he collected 

The real meaning of 'agrimony' is uncertain. The best guess I found, from a source I don't really trust, is that it derives from a greek word meaning 'healing to the eyes'. In general, it has a history as a medical herb, recommended for treating just about anything, including, according to one passage I read, 'musket wounds' (should you ever need to know) 

A Greek origin is at least consistent with its scientific name, Agrimonia eupatoria. Eupator was the nick-name of a Greek warrior-king, Mithridates, who was much taken with agrimony, and documented its many supposed healing powers, so his name was applied to the plant. Stuck on to it, in fact