The Nine Herbs Charm is a 10th century Anglo-Saxon healing spell, recorded in Old English in a manuscript called the Lacnunga — meaning 'remedies' — which is held in the British Library today as Harley MS 585. It names nine hedgerow plants, gives each one a specific power, and instructs the healer to chant the charm three times over each herb and three times over the patient's mouth, ears, and wound. The plants were then ground together, mixed with old soap and lye, and applied as a salve. It is, in other words, both a poem and a recipe — and neither part was considered to work without the other.
The charm is extraordinary for several reasons, and the most extraordinary of them is something that appears halfway through it, almost casually, as though the scribe saw no contradiction at all.
The eldest of worts
Mugwort is the first herb addressed in the charm, and the way it is addressed tells you everything about the status this plant held in Anglo-Saxon England. The Old English opens: Gemyne ðú, mucgwyrt, hwæt þú ámeldodest — 'Remember, Mugwort, what you made known.' It continues: Una þú hattest, yldost wyrta — 'You were called Una, eldest of worts.'
Eldest of worts. Not the most potent, not the most beautiful, not the most rare — the oldest. The first herb. The one that was here before all the others, and the one whose power comes from that primacy. The charm gives it might for three and against thirty, power against poison, power against infection, and power against what the Old English calls 'the loathsome foe roving through the land.'
The plant itself is not rare or dramatic. Mugwort — Artemisia vulgaris — grows on every roadside in Britain, on field edges, in hedgerow banks, on disturbed ground and waste places. Its silver-backed leaves are distinctive once you know them, but most people walk past it daily without a second glance. The Anglo-Saxons saw something different in it entirely.
Flying vile things
The Nine Herbs Charm operates on a theory of disease that is alien to us now but had its own internal logic. The Anglo-Saxons understood illness as something caused by invisible, malevolent entities, things that flew through the air and entered the body, making you sick. The Old English phrase for these forces translates roughly as 'flying vile things,' and the charm names its nine herbs as weapons against them.
This sounds like superstition until you remember that the germ theory of disease, the understanding that illness is caused by microscopic organisms transmitted through the air and through contact — was not established until the 1860s. The Anglo-Saxons were a thousand years early on the mechanism and wrong about the nature of the agents, but the instinct that disease was carried through the air and could be combated with specific preparations was, in its broad strokes, correct. They had the shape of the thing, if not the detail.
The nine herbs were the front line against these flying vile things. Mugwort first, then plantain (which they called waybread, the plant of the road), lamb's cress, betony, chamomile, nettle, crab-apple, chervil, and fennel. Each one addressed by name in the charm, each one given a specific power and a specific role in the defence. The charm was not a vague appeal to nature ,it was a targeted, plant-by-plant deployment against named enemies.
Then Woden took nine glory-twigs
Here is the part that makes scholars stop and pay attention. The Lacnunga is a Christian document, written by monks, in a Christian context. And yet halfway through the Nine Herbs Charm, without warning or apology, it invokes Woden — the pagan god, the All-Father of the Germanic tradition, the Old English form of the Norse Odin — by name.
The passage, in Robert K. Gordon's translation, reads: 'A snake came crawling, it bit a man. Then Woden took nine glory-twigs, smote the serpent so that it flew into nine parts.'
This is one of only two surviving references to Woden in all of Old English poetry — the other is in the Exeter Book. And it appears here, in a medical document, in a monastic manuscript, in a charm that was meant to be chanted aloud while grinding herbs into a salve for a sick person. The monks who wrote it down knew exactly who Woden was. They included him anyway
The reason, as far as scholars can determine, is that the charm was a working spell — it was effective, or believed to be effective, and its effectiveness depended on the invocation of the god who had first established the power of the nine herbs. Woden, in the myth embedded in the charm, was the one who smote the serpent and divided it into nine parts with his nine glory-twigs. Each twig may have been inscribed with a rune representing one of the nine sacred herbs. The monks understood that removing Woden from the charm would break it — would sever the connection between the words, the herbs, and the healing. So they left him in.
The old knowledge was too useful to abandon. That is perhaps the most important sentence in the entire history of British folk medicine — and it applies as much to the hedgerow in 2026 as it did to a monastic scriptorium a thousand years ago.
A recipe that is also a poem
The charm ends with practical instructions that are entirely recognisable as a recipe, which is part of what makes it so remarkable — it sits with one foot in poetry and the other in the still-room. All nine herbs were powdered, mixed with old soap, made into a paste with apple pulp and lye, and combined with boiled fennel. The resulting salve was applied to wounds, infections, or venomous bites.
But the preparation was not enough on its own. The charm had to be sung — three times to each herb individually, and three times over the patient's mouth, ears, and the wound itself. The words were considered part of the medicine. Without the chanting, the herbs were just plants. With it, they were weapons against the flying vile things that roamed the land in the dark.
This is the thing about the old plant knowledge that modern herbalism sometimes forgets — it was never just chemistry. The relationship between the healer, the plant, and the patient was mediated by language, by ritual, by the specific words spoken at the specific moment of preparation. The Nine Herbs Charm is the most complete surviving record of that relationship in the English language.
Mugwort at Midsummer
Mugwort was traditionally gathered at Midsummer — the summer solstice or the eve of St John's Day, the 23rd of June — which is now less than two weeks away. It was one of the plants hung over the door for protection during the longest night, alongside St John's Wort, elder, and vervain. The timing of gathering was considered part of the medicine — a plant gathered at its peak of power was different from a plant gathered out of season.
If you want to find mugwort on the lane near you, look for a tall, upright plant with deeply divided leaves that are dark green on top and distinctively silver-white on the underside. The silver backing is the easiest identification feature — turn the leaf over and it's unmistakeable. It grows on roadsides, field margins, waste ground, and hedgerow banks across Britain. You have almost certainly walked past it.
Mugwort features in the July Almanac zine — which I'm writing and illustrating now with Midsummer approaching. The eldest of worts, still growing on every roadside and hedgerow across Britain