A manuscript of exceptional interest is one describing the virtues of rosemary which was sent by the Countess of Hainault to her daughter Philippa, Queen of England, and apart from its intrinsic interest it is important from the fact that it is obviously the original of the very poetical discourse on rosemary in the first printed English herbal, commonly known as Banckes's herbal. Moreover, in this MS. there is recorded an old tradition which I have not found in any other herbal, but which is still current amongst old-fashioned country folk, namely, that rosemary "passeth not commonly in highte the highte of Criste whill he was man on Erthe," and that when the plant attains the age of thirty-three years it will increase in breadth but not in height. It is the oldest MS. in which we find many other beliefs about rosemary that still survive in England. There is a tradition that Queen Philippa's mother sent the first plants of rosemary to England, and in a copy of this MS. in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, the translator, "danyel bain," says that rosemary was unknown in England until the Countess of Hainault sent some to her daughter. The only original treatise on herbs written by an Englishman during the Middle Ages was that by Bartholomæus Anglicus, and on the plant-lover there are probably few of the mediæval writers who exercise so potent a spell. Even in the thirteenth century, that age of great men, Bartholomew the Englishman ranked with thinkers such as Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. He was accounted one of the greatest theologians of his day, and if his lectures on theology were as simple as his writings on herbs, it is easy to understand why they were thronged and why his writings were so eagerly studied, not only in his lifetime but for nearly three centuries afterwards. A child could understand his book on herbs, for, being great, he was simple. But although his work _De Proprietatibus Rerum_ (which contains nineteen books) was the source of common information on Natural History throughout the Middle Ages, and was one of the books hired out at a regulated price by the scholars of Paris, we know very little of the writer. He spent the greater part of his life in France and Saxony, but he was English born and was always known as Bartholomæus Anglicus.[39] We know that he studied in Paris and entered the French province of the Minorite Order, and later he became one of the most renowned professors of theology in Paris. In 1230 a letter was received from the general of the Friars Minor in the new province of Saxony asking the provincial of France to send Bartholomew and another Englishman to help in the work of that province, and the former subsequently went there. We do not know the exact date of _De Proprietatibus Rerum_, but it must have been written about the middle of the thirteenth century; for, though it cites Albertus Magnus, who was teaching in Paris in 1248, there is no mention of any of the later