Who (_i.e._, Iris), with thy Saffron wings upon my flowers, Diffusest honeydrops, refreshing showers.
Did this companion with the Saffron face Revel and feast it at my house to day?
I must have Saffron to colour the Warden pies.
No, no, no, your son was misled with a snipt-taffeta fellow there, whose villanous Saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his colour.
_All's Well that Ends Well_, act iv, sc. 5 (1).
Saffron (from its Arabic name, _al zahafaran_) was not, in Shakespeare's time, limited to the drug or to the Saffron-bearing Crocus (_C. sativus_), but it was the general name for all the Croci, and was even extended to the Colchicums, which were called Meadow Saffrons.[268:1] We have no Crocus really a native of Britain, but a few species (C. vernus, C. nudiflorus, C. aureus, and C. biflorus) have been so naturalized in certain parts as to be admitted, though very doubtfully, into the British flora; but the Saffron Crocus can in no way be considered a native, and the history of its introduction into England is very obscure. It is mentioned several times in the Anglo-Saxon Leech Books: "When he bathes, let him smear himself with oil; mingle it with Saffron."--_Tenth Century Leech Book_, ii. 37. "For dimness of eyes, thus one must heal it: take Celandine one spoonful, and Aloes, and Crocus (Saffron in French)."--_Schools of Medicine_, tenth century, c. 22. In these instances it may be only the imported drug; but the name occurs in an English Vocabulary among the Nomina herbarum: "Hic Crocus, A{ e} Safurroun;" and in a Pictorial Vocabulary of the fourteenth century, "Hic Crocus, An{ ce} Safryn;" so that I think the plant must have been in cultivation in England at that time. The usual statement, made by one writer after another, is that it was introduced by Sir Thomas Smith into the neighbourhood of Walden in the time of Edward III., but the original authority for this statement is unknown. The most authentic account is that by Hakluyt in 1582, and though it is rather long, it is worth extracting in full. It occurs in some instructions in "Remembrances for Master S.," who was going into Turkey, giving him hints what to observe in his travels: "Saffron, the best of the universall world, groweth in this realme. . . . It is a spice that is cordiall, and may be used in meats, and that is excellent in dying of yellow silks. This commodity of Saffron groweth fifty miles from Tripoli, in Syria, on an high hyll, called in those parts Gasian, so as there you may learn at that part of Tripoli the value of the pound, the goodnesse of it, and the places of the vent. But it is said that from that hyll there passeth yerely of that commodity fifteen moiles laden, and that those regions notwithstanding lacke sufficiency of that commodity. But if a vent might be found, men would in Essex (about Saffron Walden), and in Cambridgeshire, revive the trade for the benefit of the setting of the poore on worke. So would they do in Herefordshire by Wales, where the best of all England is, in which place the soil yields the wilde Saffron commonly, which showeth the natural inclination of the same soile to the bearing of the right Saffron, if the soile be manured and that way employed. . . It is reported at Saffron Walden that a pilgrim, proposing to do good to his countrey, stole a head of Saffron, and hid the same in his Palmer's staffe, which he had made hollow before of purpose, and so he brought the root into this realme with venture of his life, for if he had bene taken, by the law of the countrey from whence it came, he had died for the fact."--_English Voiages, &c._, vol. ii. From this account it seems clear that even in Hakluyt's time Saffron had been so long introduced that the history of its introduction was lost; and I think it very probable that, as was suggested by Coles in his "Adam in Eden" (1657), we are indebted to the Romans for this, as for so many of our useful plants. But it is not a Roman or Italian plant. Spenser wrote of it as--