Just had a phone call from Anna Bunney, Curator of Public Programmes at the Manchester Museum, asking for a picture of the mistletoe pollen from Lindow Man’s stomach. Anna said Lindsey in the Herbarium (the Manchester Museum is one of the few museums still to maintain a Herbarium with dedicated staff) had written an information sheet on mistletoe, which I’ll add to the blog. We seem to have been getting quite a few hits on this subject recently. This is what Lindsey wrote:-
More than any of the evergreens, the mistletoe has inspired fascination throughout history. Held in esteem for its medicinal and magical properties. Many traditions and customs have arisen from the beliefs in the power of the mistletoe, but the kissing origins remain obscure. Druids used the plant as an aphrodisiac and in Scandinavian tales it symbolises peace and love.
Until the arrival of Christmas trees, the kissing bough held centre stage at Christmas when a berry was plucked with each kiss until none were left.
Sprig of replica mistletoe as used in "The Verdict" schools session about Lindow Man
Viscum album is the most common mistletoe in Europe. In Britain it can be found in southern areas of England and Wales. It’s a parasitic evergreen shrub that grows high up in the branches of old trees. The plant extracts its essential mineral nutrients and water by sending out roots into the bark of the tree it grows on. The most popular host is the apple tree, although it is not unusual to find it growing in lime, ash, hawthorn and other trees with soft bark. With the gradual decline of the apple industry in England it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find home-grown mistletoe. Most of the mistletoe in shops comes from Brittany or Normandy in France.
The real stuff: mistletoe from Aymestrey gathered Christmas 1883 from the Manchester Museum Herbarium collection (Em 482884)
An interesting link with the Lindow Man exhibition emerged recently on the subject of mistletoe. Conflicting reports about the future of the plant appeared in some newspapers last weekend. The Mail on Sunday (7/12/08 p.51) is looking forward to a bumper native crop of mistletoe because of the combination of last year’s mild winter and the recent cool, wet summer. In previous years the mistletoe has had to be imported from France.
Louise Gray in The Daily Telegraph Weekend (6/12/08 p22) is less optimistic. Although the plant is safe this year because of the favourable climatic conditions, longer term the plant is at risk of dying out because of changes in farming practice over the last fifty years. Over half of the apple orchards where the plant has thrived in the past have been uprooted. The cutting of female plants, which carry the berries, has not affected the poisonous male plants, which continue growing and eventually kill their hosts. Some of the male plants should be cut as well. It’s a question of reviving lost techniques in order to ensure the future of this fascinating plant. Jonathan Briggs, ecologist and mistletoe expert, who was interviewed in the Telegraph, said that home-grown mistletoe could disappear in 25 years. Mistletoe is strongly associated with a sense of local identity and is an important part of the economy of Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire and Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire. The latter is the home of the annual mistletoe festival. Mistletoe is part of our culture and we should not allow it to die out, said Briggs.
This reminded me that J.D.Hill, who I interviewed at the British Museum last summer as part of the Lindow Man project, talked about the archaeological significance of mistletoe in the Lindow Man discovery. Several grains of mistletoe pollen were found in Lindow Man’s digestive tract when his body was examined at the British Museum in the 1980s.
Grains of mistletoe pollen found in Lindow Man's intestine
J.D. said that unlike tree or grass pollen, which is spread by the wind, mistletoe pollen is picked up by birds and other animals and transferred to other plants to fertilise them. For pollen to be in Lindow Man’s stomach it must mean that part of the mistletoe plant was in the meal he was given shortly before his death. Does this imply that this took place late in the autumn/early winter when there are berries or the early spring when the plant has its flowers? J.D. argued it can’t have been accidental. He also told me that since the discovery of Lindow Man a complete mistletoe plant has been discovered still attached to an oak trunk at a site called Wardey Hill, in the fens of Cambridgeshire. When this was first found, the plant specialist thought it was just accidental but the plant was found at the entrance in the ditch of this Iron Age site. This is a place where we would expect to find ritual deposits and in fact this seems to be confirmed by the fact that there are human remains around the entrance to this site as well. This is another example of mistletoe for prehistoric Britain and arguably it’s from a ritual context said J.D.Hill.
Visitors to the Lindow Man exhibition at the Manchester Museum can see a late 16th century Herbal in Emma Restall Orr’s section. The book is open at the pages dealing with mistletoe and visitors can read about mistletoe’s properties. It would be sad to think that the 2000 year old tradition of using mistletoe might disappear because native plants are not being managed sustainably.
