Tracing the journey of Mediterranean and Eastern herbs and wisdom brought by Romans to the UK, Christina Stapley unveils the Italian herbal influence on British herbalism and cuisine.
The four-hundred-year occupation of Britain by the Roman army is well known and many people would say that their legacy was one of straight roads, bath houses and Hadrian’s Wall across the north. There is, however, a living legacy in the Mediterranean herbs that arrived with the troops for medicine in their hospitals and for cookery. The best-known herbs which have remained in household use across the centuries were all brought from Italy, and this Italian herbal influence transformed the British culinary experience.
Sage (Salvia officinalis), garlic (Allium sativum), rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus) and thyme (Thymus vulgaris) are all powerfully antibacterial and digestive and were used partly for that reason. Marjoram (Origanum majorana), spearmint (Mentha spicata), fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) and rue (Ruta graveolens) were more introductions (1). Lovage (Levisticum officinale), caraway (Carum carvi), aniseed (Pimpinella anisum) and cumin (Cuminum cyminum) are also on lists written in ink on thin sheets of wood, recovered from the fort of Vindolanda, on Hadrian’s wall (2).
Archaeological insights into Roman medicine

The medicinal legacy also included knowledge of the classical humoral system of the Greeks, which spread into the wider population. We have glimpses of Roman medicine even from a Celtic temple of healing at Lydney where one of several stone stamps used to label eye ointments was found (3). These gave the name of the Roman oculist (eye doctor) and of the salve, including ingredients, such as frankincense (Boswellia sacra), quince (Cydonia oblonga), myrrh (Commiphora molmol), opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), fennel or saffron (Crocus sativus) (4). The Roman trade routes covered the known world, and spices as well as more exotic herbs were sold in shops that appeared in the towns that became Roman civitas. Recent archaeology has added greatly to our knowledge of the integration of Romano British life (5).
We have knowledge of medical recipes from the collection of Scribonius largus, a surgeon who spent time along Hadrian’s Wall in the first century (6). Having made a number of these in historical workshops, there are some surprising inclusions of ingredients that are backed by modern research; one being The most surprising pine nuts ground with rose petals and poppy seeds to treat an ulcerated kidney. We have made this recipe several times and I was intrigued and followed up on why the pine nuts. Modern research I found supported it (7).
Similar recipes appear in Celsus De Medecina written in Rome at the same period (8). Lastly, herbs continued to grow near the Roman forts as we find mentions of herbalists still gathering them centuries later from along the wall.
The influence of Christianity
The legacy of Roman introductions of herbs, vegetables and trees is possibly the only Italian influence most people are aware of. There is so much more. Christianity also came with followers among the multicultural Roman army, but the real influence of the Church of Rome begins with the conversion of King Aethelbert of Kent in 597 CE. The first monastery was built in the following year and a school established in 670 CE in Canterbury.
There is evidence from some of the later pupils that medicine was one of the subjects taught there (9). Although the Church subsequently put care of the soul before care of the body in disease, there was ecclesiastical copying and exchange of medical manuscripts and exotic herbs during the Anglo-Saxon period. As a consequence, we find references to Roman and Greek sources being consulted in the Leechbooks (10).
The translation and travel of texts
In 1095, a long-established teaching hospital with an already high reputation in the busy port of Salerno, Italy, became the base hospital for crusaders. Some men returned home to England with prescriptions, and new herbal knowledge. Others with a taste for oranges experienced at Jaffa, also sugar and Asian spices, which were then increasingly imported often on Venetian galleys into Southampton (11).

Many years ago, I visited Salerno, where among other English students, Gilbertus Anglicus, mentioned in Chaucer,’s Canterbury Tales, trained as a physician (12). There, in the museum, is a manuscript, copies of which were kept in Cathedral libraries in England, the Antidotarium of Nicolai. Salerno is associated with the translations of Greek, Jewish and Arabic medical texts by Constantine the African, a monk at the nearby Abbey of Montecassino in the 11th century.
Following his work, it was to be Avicenna’s interpretation of Galen that would be taught to physicians in the Universities of Europe (8). The Medieval Health Handbook, the Tacuinem Sanitatis, is adorned with vivid Italian illustrations. The original manuscript is thought to have been translated into Latin based on the work of an Arabian physician, Ibn Botlan who lived in the 11th century. There are several copies held in different European countries.
The brightly coloured illustrations accompany the slightly adapted Arabic Tacquim or tables of humoral advice. Fennel is listed as warm and dry, as useful for eyesight, milk and urine flow, and flatulence. Cautions are given of danger from slow digestion, which is remedied by chewing slowly and informed that fennel is suited to be eaten in winter — for those who are old, or have cold temperaments. This pattern of advice is followed for herbs, such as sage (Salvia officinalis), marjoram (Origanum majorana), mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), dill (Antheum graveolens), garlic (Allium sativum) and elecampane (Inula helenium). The illustration of mandrake inevitably includes a dog, supporting the caution that it was not safe for a person to dig the plant out of the soil, a dog must be used. Other illustrated features included foods — such as eggs, wheat, dates, pasta, olive oil and meats — clothing fibres, activities, people chatting and expressing strong emotions s, as well as environmental influences — the winds from south, east, west or north (13).
Advice on how to live a healthy life was brought back to England also by pilgrims and in the time of Elizabeth I, her godson, Sir John Harington translated the Regimen Sanitatis into English (14). His love of fun shows brilliantly in the playful poetic presentation of the different humoral types of person and medicinal properties of foods and herbs. It is an excellent aid to herbal students learning healthy living in the humoral system.
Avicenna’s interpretation of Galen was used in Continental Universities. This also informed the training of English and Irish physicians as there seems to have been little enthusiasm for the subject of medicine at Oxford, where in 1303 there was one master with a handful of students (9). More went to Montpellier, Padua or Bologna. In Italy, where there had already been close ties to Arabic ways when the first official European formulary, the Florentine Nuovo Receptario Composito of 1498, was compiled (15). This was by a committee of physicians who co-operated with apothecaries in Florence in producing this work, as they both belonged to the same guild, the arte dei medici e speziali. Many Italian states followed (15)..
With thanks to King Henry VIII
Italian regulation of medicine then was far more developed than the confused multiplicity of practices and freedoms in England. Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. He was very interested in medicine and formulated his own herbal recipes to treat his chronic leg condition. One of his physicians, Thomas Linacre had graduated in Padua and been impressed by the control exercised by the Collegium of Physicians and training of apothecaries, who took examinations set at Salerno in order to practice. Although Henry VIII signed the letters patent, Thomas Linacre has been seen as the real founder of the Royal College of Physicians (9).
The foundations of modern herbalism

The London Pharmacopoeia was still a century away, but again the trail of inspiration has taken us back to Florence. The power of physicians to repress unlearned practitioners and examine stocks of apothecaries and druggists relates to herbs, yet Thomas Linacre and others learned of herbs from Dioscorides Materia Medica. Their physical contact with plants was limited to their dried state in the apothecary shop. Luca Ghini, who had previously taught practical medicine at Bologna, promoted the idea of a separate lectureship of materia medica.
Invited by Cosimo I, grand duke of Tuscany to Pisa, he was appointed to teach and demonstrate medicinal simples in 1539. At Pisa he founded the first botanic garden there for direct observation and perfected the hortus siccus of pressed, dried specimens of plants as a teaching aid (16).
The hortus siccus was later known as the herbarium, an aid to plant identification which I teach herbal students today at the School of Herbal Medicine in pharmacognosy class. I also take them annually to the herbarium founded in 1621 at the University of Oxford, to see early samples of herbs from the botanical garden. Some are still with fresh colours, from the hills around Bologna, capturing how the Italian herbal influence lives on.
References
- Alcock JP. Food in Roman Britain. Tempus; 2001.
- Bowman AK. Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier. The British Museum Press; 2003.
- Wilson R. A Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain. Constable; 2002.
- Scullard HH. Roman Britain Outpost of the Empire. Thames and Hudson; 1979.
- Bedoyere G. Roman Britain A New History. Revised edition. Thames & Hudson; 2013.
- Bernhold JM, editor. Scribonii Largi Compositiones Medicamentorum. Scholar Select; originally 1786.
- Takala R, Ramji DP, Choy E. The Beneficial Effects of Pine Nuts and Its Major Fatty Acid, Pinolenic Acid, on Inflammation and Metabolic Perturbations in Inflammatory Disorders. Int J Mol Sci. 2023;24(2):1171. Published 2023 Jan 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms24021171
- Spencer WG, translator. Celsus De Medecina II Books V-VI. Harvard University Press; 1989.
- Stapley C. A History of Plant Medicine. Ancient Greeks to the Modern Day. Aeon Books; 2024.
- Pollington S. Leechcraft. Anglo Saxon Books; 2000.
- Labarge MW. A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century. Eyre & Spottiswoode; 1965.
- Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Penguin Classics; 1975.
- Arano LC, editor. The Medieval Health Handbook. Tacuinem Sanitates. George Braziller; 1976.
- Harington SJ. The School of Salernum. Regimen Sanitatis Salerni. Edizioni Saturnia Roma; 1957.
- Nuovo Receptario Composto Dal Famossisimo Chollegio Degli Eximii Doctori Della Arte. Firenze. Facsimile. Gyan Books (distributor).
- Bellorini C. The World of Plants in Renaissance Tuscany. Routledge; 2016.