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During her battle with illness, Lucy Ellis found solace in writing a novel about the mysterious death of Amy Robsart, the first wife of Robert Dudley, the man who came close to marrying Elizabeth I. As Lucy delves into Amy’s story, she also navigates the aftermath of her own experience that brought her close to death and the collapse of her marriage. After taking leave from her teaching job to complete her novel, Lucy falls ill again. Fearing she will die before she finishes her book, she flees to England to solve the mystery of Amy Robsart’s death.
I must go seek dewdrops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.
Shakespeare’s poem sang in her mind, opening the door to a vision of Amy in 1560. Her imagined Amy. Strolling alone in a golden meadow, she did not look a woman in her late twenties, but a fragile, too-slender, ill girl. A girl lost.
The real Amy Dudley must have lived long years of a lonely life, and years of pain. Lucy trembled. Not just physical pain. Amy Dudley must have felt so rejected in the last months of her life.
The faint apricot scent of cowslips wafted on the breeze. The cowslip meadow scene in her novel opened in Lucy’s mind. Amy had come to Oxford to visit friends. She had not seen Robert Dudley, her husband, for months. Drifting in the meadow with a light footfall, Amy clasped in one hand the green stem of a cowslip flower and in the other, a buttercup. She held the flowers before her like a sacred offering.
(SHADES OF YELLOW).
I have lost count of the moments when the act of writing and the words it births on the white page makes me ponder about what is actually going on. And there’s so much going on. First, there’s the magic of surrendering to writing. Then there’s experience of being channelled — of being a scribe to the voices in my head. Most of my writing grows from what I describe as my writing compost — the sum of everything I know and have experienced in life — but there are also magical moments in writing that have me floundering to understand what is going on in my subconscious, if not deepening my belief in ancestral memory.
I have now crafted something very different from my usual works of historical fiction. My story is about an Australian woman of British ancestry (like I am) who is writing a Tudor novel. Sounds biographical, doesn’t it? But while my life experience gives me plenty to tap into for this work, my character’s story differs from mine. And it differs by a lot.
My imagined Aussie Lucy is young and going through one of those challenging times in life that I can only describe as ticking off that writerly advice of placing our characters up a tree and then throwing stones at them. And in amid of writing this work, I found Lucy, then in England, seeing flowering cowslips here and there.
It was when I wrote ‘Amy held the flowers out before her like a sacred offering’ my curiosity became really aroused — and I disappeared down into a research burrow to find out more about cowslips.
I never expected to find cowslips (a name believed originating from the fact that they used to grow in pastures where cows grazed and left their calling card of cow pats) — so fascinating — or that they were indeed a sacred offering in ancient times. Druids believed in the magical powers of cowslips and used them for remedies — and also likely excellent remedies because both flowers and leaves are rich in vitamin C.
The Vikings offered cowslips to the goddess Freya, known as their Key Virgin. They also believed the flowers doubled as a key to Freya’s palace. This later led to Christians taking hold of this mythology and Freya changed into the Virgin Mary and cowslips gained the name of Our Lady’s Keys or Key of Heaven. Cowslips also have other names associated with keys, and magical keys too: St. Peter’s Keys (from a legend about the flowers growing where an annoyed St Peter dropped the keys of Heaven) and password, as well as being known as Palsywort, Cowslop, Fair Bells and Fairy Cup.
Considering the plant has been used to treat headaches, insomnia, spasms, cramps, asthma, coughs, bruising and even kidney problems, it is not surprising that the flower has a strong association with healing.
In Midsummer’s Night Dream, Shakespeare provides for us with insights into how people from his time viewed these beautiful bright yellow flowers, which long ago bloomed in spring and early summer in so many places in England:
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green:
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
must go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits: I’ll be gone;
Our queen and all her elves come here anon.
Wish for fairy treasure? Easy — just find a field of cowslips. If you find one, after decades when cowslips struggled for survival and cowslip fields became a rare sight to behold, regard the field as treasure indeed. Know any fairies who need to escape danger or bad weather? Cowslip bells offer them the perfect refuge. The flower bells even provide for fairies a cup to collect dew for their morning drink.
People once believed that wearing a bunch of cowslips helped keep you young. The flowers are a vital ingredient for a spell to improve one’s complexion. Which makes me wonder if the recipe Culpeper gives for a cosmetic made from cowslip flowers and distilled water may have originated from this spell. He writes:
‘Our city dames know well enough the ointment or distilled water of it adds to beauty or at least restores it when lost. The flowers are held to be more effectual than the leaves and the roots of little use. An ointment being made with them taketh away spots and wrinkles of the skin, sunburnings and freckles and promotes beauty; they remedy all infirmities of the head coming of heat and wind, as vertigo, false apparitions, phrensies, falling sickess, palsies, convulsions, cramps, pains in the nerves, and the roots ease pains in the back and bladder. The leaves are good in wounds and the flowers take away trembling. Because they strengthen the brains and nerves and remedy palsies, the Greeks gave them the name Paralysio. The flowers preserved or conserved and a quantity the size of a nutmeg taken every morning is a sufficient dose for inward diseases, but for wounds, spots, wrinkles and sunburnings an ointment is made of the leaves and hog’s lard’
Cowslips were used to celebrate the pagan festival of Beltane with its strong connection to fertility—which later evolved to Mayday celebrations when they decorated the May Pole with cowslips. It was common practice for people to grow or place cowslips from their doors to keep fairies out, as well as receive a fairy blessing on their home, and they also burnt cowslips on Mayday to keep fairies away.
I speculate that Beltane rituals are the reason farmers continued the practice of crush cowslip leaves to make a juice to brush on their cows’ udders to stop fairies and witches or anything just as annoying from stealing their milk. Farmers also believed cowslips protected their cows from fairies—as well as evil spirits and witches.
Unsurprisingly, with its connection to Beltane, it seems cowslips were once an ingredient in love portions. Children also bunched the flowers tightly into a ball (called a totsie), which they tossed, chanting “Titsy, totsy, tell me true, who shall I be married to?”
As an Australian, I was at first amazed to find cowslips appearing in my story. But the more I thought about it, and the more I discovered about cowslips, the more I delighted in including them. I wanted to write a story with an optimistic ending; what better flower — a flower once seen as the symbol for new life after months of winter and the ‘Healer of the World’ — for me to use?
Their existence in Shades of Yellow now makes far better sense to me. Cowslips are as much a part of my DNA as the springtime flower of the Australian wattle. With my DNA rooted in Britain for centuries, I confess that cowslips grow far deeply in my ancestral memory to play with in my storytelling. Or perhaps I am simply drawing from my unconscious mind long forgotten lines from my teenage love of reading Shakespeare:
Where the bee sucks, there suck I,
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry;
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
Whatever it is, writing is pure magic.
Sources:
Anne Mcintyre https://annemcintyre.com/2022/02/28/cowslip/
Himmelschlüssel Cowslip [3] - the awakening http://www.tirolerreine.at/en/varieties/cowslip.html
Do cowslips have magical qualities? https://jardindesign.org/2014/04/05/cowslips-primula-veris/
Cowslip (Primula veris) a Sacred Druid Herb https://southcowichanexplorer.wordpress.com/2016/03/17/fairy-bells-primula-veris-a-sacred-druid-herb/
Ultimate Guide to Cowslip Flowers (Primula veris) https://www.petalrepublic.com/cowslip-flowers/
Primula veris (officinalis) Cowslip https://www.alchemy-works.com/primula_veris.html
Anne Mcintyre https://annemcintyre.com/2022/02/28/cowslip/
Celebrating-the-cowslip-on-may-day-morning-in-the-witchs-garden https://www.gothichorrorstories.com/witches-garden/witch-garden-feature/witches-garden-plants/celebrating-the-cowslip-on-may-day-morning-in-the-witchs-garden/
Witchcraft and the Day-to-Day: Experiences of a London Witch
Himmelschlüssel Cowslip - the awakening http://www.tirolerreine.at/en/varieties/cowslip.html
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 Scene 1.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I
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