The Tudor medicine cabinet
If you became ill in Tudor times, your first port of call would be the garden. Medicinal herbs were administered externally or internally, in a variety of forms and often with other herbs in carefully measured amounts.
Some of remedies have been found by modern science to be effective, while others appeared to have worked but probably the patient recovered despite the use of the herb. Some were highly poisonous and their use may have led to many deaths.
Herbs for carpets
Tŷ Mawr would have been a very busy farmstead. The main living room would have had a mixture of smoke from the fire, cooking smells, animal smells, and a myriad of other, earthier smells.
Before its stone floor was installed, Tŷ Mawr would probably have had a beaten earth floor painted in casein, which comes from milk, and is rather pungent when wet.
People covered the floors with rushes or reeds (or woven mats of reeds or rushes), which were strewed with sweet smelling herbs such as lavender, marjoram, tansy, meadowsweet and rue. Not only did these herbs help disguise the smell, but many helped control fleas, other insects and bacteria.
Colouring herbs
Dyeing herbs were used to colour fabrics. Alkanet (Anchusa officinalis) roots produce a red dye, the seed pods of woad (Isatis tinctoria) yield a blue dye and Dyer’s weld (Reseda luteola) provided a yellow dye.
Culinary herbs
Culinary herbs were grown for flavouring sauces and meat and included borage, sage, thyme, rosemary, parsley and chives.
