In other cases, the circumstances under which a particular plant appears in England are often very suspicious.  Take the instance of the belladonna, or deadly nightshade, an extremely rare British species, found only in the immediate neighbourhood of old castles and monastic buildings.  Belladonna, of course, is a deadly poison, and was much used in the half-magical, half-criminal sorceries of the Middle Ages.  Did you wish to remove a troublesome rival or an elder brother, you treated him to a dose of deadly nightshade.  Yet why should it, in company with many other poisonous exotics, be found so frequently around the ruins of monasteries?  Did the holy fathers—­but no, the thought is too irreverent.  Let us keep our illusions, and forget the friar and the apothecary in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’

Belladonna has never fairly taken root in English soil.  It remains, like the Roman snail and the Portuguese slug, a mere casual straggler about its ancient haunts.  But there are other plants which have fairly established their claim to be considered as native-born Britons, though they came to us at first as aliens and colonists from foreign parts.  Such, to take a single case, is the history of the common alexanders, now a familiar weed around villages and farmyards, but only introduced into England as a pot-herb about the eighth or ninth century.  It was long grown in cottage gardens for table purposes, but has for ages been superseded in that way by celery.  Nevertheless, it continues to grow all about our lanes and hedges, side by side with another quaintly-named plant, bishop-weed or gout-weed, whose very titles in themselves bear curious witness to its original uses in this isle of Britain.  I don’t know why, but it is an historical fact that the early prelates of the English Church, saintly or otherwise, were peculiarly liable to that very episcopal disease, the gout.  Whether their frequent fasting produced this effect; whether, as they themselves piously alleged, it was due to constant kneeling on the cold stones of churches; or whether, as their enemies rather insinuated, it was due in greater measure to the excellent wines presented to them by their Italian confreres, is a minute question to be decided by Mr. Freeman, not by the present humble inquirer.  But the fact remains that bishops and gout got indelibly associated in the public mind; that the episcopal toes were looked upon as especially subject to that insidious disease up to the very end of the last century; and that they do say the bishops even now—­but I refrain from the commission of scandalum magnatum.  Anyhow, this particular weed was held to be a specific for the bishop’s evil; and, being introduced and cultivated for the purpose, it came to be known indifferently to herbalists as bishop-weed and gout-weed.  It has now long since ceased to be a recognised member of the British Pharmacopoeia, but, having overrun our lanes and thickets in its flush period, it remains to this day a visible botanical and etymological memento of the past twinges of episcopal remorse.