Cloves in Bald’s Leechbook
This article has also been posted on my Patreon — patreon.com/Before1500. I’ve posted it here as well because there are already so many clove-related stories on this site, and it feels a little incomplete without this one. I’ll be posting the next post here as well, which will be on Cloves in Medieval Iceland. This piece came about thanks to the assistance of Dr. Conan Doyle (Twitter: @FontesMedicorum), who pointed me in the direction of the manuscript and text some time ago.
When did a word for ‘clove’ first appear in the English language? In the sixteenth century? No: We know there are references to cloves in medieval English texts. In the Paston letters? In Chaucer? In the Land of Cokaygne? No, no, and no. In fact, the oldest English word for cloves appears in a text written in the ninth century.
The text in question is Bald’s Leechbook, a medical compendium written in Old English and preserved in a single ninth-century manuscript — London, British Library, Royal MS 12 D XVII. The Leechbook is thought to have been put together in Winchester in the reign of Alfred the Great, whose famous educational reforms may have had something to do with the creation of the manuscript. The text includes recipes and prescriptions for all sorts of ailments and descriptions of many common and uncommon ingredients. At least one of the recipes — a remedy against stye, bacterial infection of the eyelid — has been tested in a laboratory in recent years and been found to be somewhat effective.
What I’m interested in is of course this aforementioned mention of cloves. Cloves only came, after all, from five tiny islands in Maluku (‘the Moluccas’) in what is now the far east of Indonesia — far closer to New Guinea and even Australia than the Eurasian mainland — and their appearance in early medieval European texts is therefore inherently noteworthy.
That Bald’s Leechbook mentions cloves is not an accepted fact. The Cambridge geographer R. A. Donkin, who wrote an excellent book on the medieval trade in eastern Indonesian spices (Between East & West, Philadelphia, 2003), went so far as to say that the ‘Anglo-Saxon Leechbooks of the ninth century are silent’ on the subject of cloves (p.120) and that he could find nothing in Bald’s Leechbook to support the claim of M. L. Cameron, who edited the text of the Leechbook, that some of the materia medica in it came from Maluku (p.136n.120):
‘Cameron (1990, Bald’s Leechbook, p.7) lists the Moluccas among the regions from which spices were imported, but I can find nothing to support this.’
Donkin further claims that the earliest reference to cloves in a text ‘of English provenance’ is from c.1100, in the Canterbury Class Book (Cambridge University Library, MS Gg. 5. 35, f.429v). He includes an image of the relevant page from this work in Between East & West (p.119).
I suppose at this point I’m something of a maven on this topic and I’m convinced that cloves are mentioned in Bald’s Leechbook. So let’s look at the section of text in which the relevant word appears and then I’ll argue the case. I’ve put a digital image of the text from the manuscript below (section xli on f.40r — Figure 1), followed by a transcription and a translation into modern English. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll probably be convinced that the ingredient in question is indeed clove, but I’ve added some arguments below the text in case you need more persuading.
Wiþ innan onfealle næglæs hatte wyrt suþerno sio bið god to etanne wiþ innan onfelle on nihtnestig.
‘For internal swellings, there is a southern herb called ‘nails’. It is good to eat fasting [i.e. on an empty stomach] for internal swelling.’
So: here we have a herb or spice (wyrt) which is good for the tummy. It comes from somewhere to the south. Its name means ‘nails’ (næglæs).
That’s a clove!
The common medieval Latin name for ‘cloves’ was gariofilus, and that’s the name we tend to find in other European texts of the early Middle Ages — in Carolingian texts older than and roughly contemporary with Bald’s Leechbook. But names for ‘clove’ based on the obvious resemblance between cloves and nails are also common in medieval European texts. Other Germanic languages use or used cognates of Old English næġl with the meaning ‘clove’: Early New High German Nägell, Middle Dutch naegel, Middle Danish gørfærs naghlæ, Old Icelandic geroforsnaglá. The metaphor is also found in languages outside the Germanic family, including medieval Greek μουσχοκάρφια (‘musk nail’); Old Czech hrzebiczek (‘little nail’); Old East Slavic гвозникы ‘cloves’ (modern Russian гвоздика, from гвоздь); medieval Hungarian zeg fiw (modern szegfű — ‘nail grass’); and Chinese 丁香 (‘nail fragrance’). In the Romance languages we find two popular words for ‘clove’, one coming from the aforementioned Latin gariofilus (of uncertain ultimate origin) and the other from clavus ‘nail’: Portuguese cravo, Spanish clavo, and French clou, the latter of which was borrowed in Middle English, whence ‘clove’.
I would therefore suggest that if we come across a herb or spice named ‘nail’ in a text from medieval Afro-Eurasia, we are probably dealing with a clove.
One might object that these could not be cloves on the grounds that cloves could not be found in Europe in the ninth century. That is simply not the case. In fact, cloves appear by name in a fair few European texts written before the ninth century, including works by Paul of Aegina, Alexander of Tralles, Theophanes the Confessor, and Anthimus, physician to Theodoric the Great (454–526). It is clear from the Anthimus’s work in particular that spices like cloves could be found in western Europe even after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. As noted above, there are quite a few references to cloves (under the name gariofilus) in Carolingian-era texts from continental Europe. One might also point to even earlier references to cloves in the works of Pliny and Galen.
Finally: are cloves good for one’s insides? Certainly that wasn’t an uncommon opinion in the Middle Ages, and not just in Europe; the Mamluk-era Egyptian encyclopaedist al-Nuwayri included cloves in a recipe for a ‘Jam that Strengthens Sexual Appetite and the Stomach’ (in Elias Muhanna’s translation of his Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition — Penguin, 2016, pp.223–224). Hildegard of Bingen’s Liber simplicis medicinae (aka the Physica — C.xxiiii) says that
Et qui singultum patitur, garyophyllum frequenter manducet.
‘He who suffers from hiccups should eat cloves frequently.’
There are many such references — but I’ll rest the case here. It seems to me that there is no better referent of næglæs than ‘cloves’ and that Bald’s Leechbook contains the oldest surviving reference to spices from Maluku in English or, indeed, in a text from England.
Thanks again to Dr. Conan Doyle, who suggested that these næglæs were cloves before I even took note of the text.
A. J. West — Lisbon, 2022.
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