My granny often said “curiosity killed the cat” – it was one of many ways she would close down a conversation just as it was getting interesting. As for me I seemed to leak curiosity from every pore and so it was a push-back I knew well. The campervan has many virtues but its fatal deficiency is that I can only take very few books with me and so the real research begins when I get home, and this time I came home with a question – “why Gypsywort?”. Many plant names reference a particular use – like butterbur, milkwort, pilewort, fleabane; or a place – Jersey, Argentine, Cheddar- I could go on for pages – but gypsywort unusually references an ethnic group. Why’s that? I wondered.
I’ve got a dozen or more herbals of various vintage on my shelves, and so I soon discovered that the plant is well recognised as a dye (black, grey or blue ). It’s also known as a treatment for thyroid problems, diabetes and as a sedative. It’s also very potent (dangerous when used carelessly – before you ask). My copy of Gerard doesn’t even mention it – not all modern versions are complete, and none of the others suggest anything other than medicinal uses and occasionally as a dye. So I turned, as I always do with any question of plant names, to Geoffrey Grigson’s wonderful encyclopaedia of English folk names – “The Englishman’s Flora” where the true reason leaked out like effluent .
The story that gipsies [sic] stain themselves with Lycopus europaeus runs from one book to another, beginning with Lyte’s translation of Dodoens , 1578: ‘The rogues and runagates, which name themselves Egyptians, do colour themselves black with this herb’.
And so it goes on; half a page of bilious historical references to gypsies without a shred of evidence that they ever dyed their skin. The word ‘runagates’ caught my ear; so very close to ‘renegades’ its almost a homophone. Unusually, Grigson doesn’t list any alternative names but in the US and elsewhere it’s known as Bugleweed, and in some places water horehound – surely worth adopting here. True Gypsies, Romanies, wouldn’t need to dye their sin because they have naturally darker sin. It’s said that they ultimately came from India – who knows?
Anyway, it’s a lesson in how deeply embedded racial and ethnic prejudice can be even in a remote subject like herbal medicine or field botany. So – with reference to my previous post – even if Gypsies did use gypsywort they only shared it as a herbal medicine with the world and his wife, (even pale skinned rabble rousing populists) and it grows on the sides of canals and rivers because (like me) they find it a very congenial place to be.