Saffron, long since disappeared from local ken, is said to have been introduced to England from Palestine so early as the times of the Crusaders, and to have been brought over, originally a single bulb, hidden in a palmer’s staff. Its name is a corruption of the Arabic “sahafaran,” but to botanists it is _Crocus sativus_, the cultivated, as opposed to _Crocus agrestis_, the wild crocus. It was the supposed medicinal virtues of the plant that made it so much in request and so largely cultivated here in the latter part of the sixteenth century, when Fuller, writing of the town, speaks of it as one “which saffron may seem to have coloured with the name thereof.” Those old curative properties are now quite disregarded, but they were once considered potent. The very least of the benefits it conferred was the exhilaration of the spirits, so that the old proverb for a merry fellow was “He hath slept in a bag of saffron,” and Gerard, in his herbal, says: “The moderate use of it is good for the head, maketh the sences more quicke and lively, shaketh off heavie and drowsie sleepe, and maketh a man merrie.” But other and more convivial things have long been found to produce the same results. While it was thought to relieve hysterical depression, it was good also for the small-pox. Placed in bags under the chins of sufferers from that fearful disease, it was supposed to bring on the eruptions, and so quickly relieve the patients. Fuller gives very emphatic testimony to its virtues. “Under God,” he says, “I owe my life, when sick of the small-pox, to the efficacy thereof.” So beneficent a plant, of course, commanded a high price. In Fuller’s time saffron sold at £3 a pound, and in 1665, the year of the Great Plague of London, it rose to £4 1_s._ 10_d._ Those were, by consequence, the times of saffron adulteration. “No precious drug,” he says, “is more adulterated with _cartamus_, the inward pilling of willow,” and suggests that dealers should look carefully into the matter. Of its high qualities he was, as we have seen, fully convinced, but another proof he advances, is not, to a sceptical modern world, altogether conclusive. The Age of Faith is past, but it was current in Fuller’s era. _He_, at any rate, had the capacity for infinite belief, as we shall see. “In a word,” he sums up, “the sovereign power of genuine saffron is plainly proved, for the crocodile’s tears are never true, save when he is forced where saffron groweth (whence he hath his name of ‘croco-deilos,’ or the saffron-fearer), knowing himself to be all poison, and it all antidote.” The logical conclusion of this belief would have been that wholesale saffron-buyers should have kept a staff of crocodiles as (so to speak) tasters, and by their tears, or the want of them, have gauged the purity of those purchases.