“Bringing Down the Courses”: Fennel, Angelica and Abortifacients in Early Modern England

by Dorothea Dickerman

“Madam,

I sent yesterday of my water to my Lord for my Lady Oxford. Methinks there is some doubt made of it  . . . . There is nothing in it but such as is daily eaten & drunken . . . .the fennel and the angelica water can be vomited out . . . I can say no more. But I would be as sorry that my Lady of Oxford should miscarry as if she were five times my daughter . . . . giving but a spoonful, if life were in the body, for it should disperse straight and comfort the vital spirits.”

-Thomas Smith to Mildred Cecil, November/December 1574, Lansdowne 19/50, ff. 116-17

This letter from Sir Thomas Smith to Mildred Cooke Cecil was written in response to a letter – not extant –  from her to him.  What is clear is that Mildred, Anne Cecil Vere’s mother, had expressed “some doubt” about two of the ingredients in Smith’s “water” that her son-in-law, Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford had received from Smith and given to his wife to cure a medical condition: fennel and angelica water. We know because they are the only two ingredients Smith specifies in his apologetic response trying to sooth Mildred’s concern, if not alarm, over those ingredients. He assures her those specific ingredients can be “vomited out”.

My research has led me to conclude that in the early modern age and back into ancient Rome and Greece, these substances were used as abortifacients. I expressed my opinions based on my research in The Roar of the Mouse: Anne Cecil de Vere & What She Tells Us About Shakespeare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNnPPnQjLPU&t=1047s , and in a recent Blue Boar episode, Hidden Treasures in Old Letters.

As I have not previously made a statement about my research, sources and reasons for my conclusion, this article serves that purpose, as well as a short explanation of why it is important to understanding Oxford’s character and some of the writings of Shakespeare. A list of my sources, which differ from and greatly expand those recently cited by others, is at the end of the text.

Some researchers have relied on Sujata Iyengar’s Shakespeare’s Medical Language Dictionary (also called“The Arden Shakespeare Medical Dictionary”), a specialized dictionary focused on medical, anatomical, pathological and physiological language in Shakespeare’s works. This book, however, does not serve as a comprehensive herbal or pharmacopoeia for all historical early modern medical knowledge. It lacks dispositive evidence that fennel and angelica water were used as abortifacients.

A more forthcoming source is John Gerard’s The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, in which the word “abortion” appears only once: in connection with gladdon, another herb: “It profiteth being used in a pessairie [a medical device inserted into the vagina] to provoke the terms and will cause an abortion.” (Gerard, 54). This is an important sentence, not because of its reference to gladdon, but because it illustrates a rare early modern use of the word “abortion” with one of its much more common euphemisms, “provoke the terms.”  Gerard demonstrates that  it was understood that “provoking the terms” or causing menstrual bleeding in a woman will, if she is pregnant, “cause an abortion”.

Euphemistic Language for Abortion

For reasons of law, church doctrine, and social propriety, early modern authors tended to avoid the dangerous word “abortion” altogether. Instead, they relied on consistent euphemisms—phrases such as “to bring down the courses,” “to provoke women’s terms,” or “to procure women’s flowers”—to describe remedies that today would be called “abortifacients”, a word which came into use in the 19^th century.

What is not readily apparent to modern readers scanning for the word “abortion” and its related forms becomes plain once the idioms for “abortion” are understood. Canonical English herbals and pharmacopoeias repeatedly ascribed precisely such properties to both fennel’s giant relatives (Ferula species, yielding galbanum and asafoetida) and to angelica preparations, including distilled angelica water.

Nicholas Culpeper in The Complete Herbal (1652, Project Gutenberg) writes that butter-bur, when taken with angelica “provokes urine and women’s courses” (9). About fennel, Culpepper says “It helps to bring down women’s courses” (73). The same with butcher’s broom which “helps . . .women’s courses”. (36)  Such language linking the two herbal substances cited in Smith’s letter to Mildred Cecil shows that “provoke[ing] “ or “bringing down” “women’s courses” was a standard euphemism for abortifacient action. Culpepper (Internet Archive) also lists angelica, along with other known abortifacients (including rue, mints, pennyroyal and savin) as effective to “heat the womb”, yet another euphemism for causing menstrual flow and abortion.  (262, 263). Culpeper did not omit listing those substances as abortifacients; he listed them in the language his readers would understand.

Alex Gradwohl in his paper “Herbal Abortifacients and their Classical Heritage in Tudor England” explains that Greco-Roman texts were more explicit. He confirms that even though they relied on the ancient texts:

Tudor herbalists encountered the problem of how to discuss abortifacients: classical authors’ frank descriptions of abortive herbs would have been quite unacceptable for sixteenth-century England. In order to include the information of their sources and provide as comprehensive a guide as possible, writers disguised the abortive uses of herbs. Plants that ancient authors claimed would abortum facit were listed as helpful in bringing on delayed menstruation, aid a difficult child birth, expelling the afterbirth, and, more rarely, drawing out a dead child. Within the Tudor texts, these maladies were merely a guise. All of these uses were legally and morally acceptable, as well as legitimate medical complaints, yet still conveyed the same end result as an abortion. (Gradwohl, 50).

When Dr. Richard Masters reports to Burghley on March 7, 1575 that Anne had requested of him some “medicines ad mensus promotiones”, he also used a euphemism for an abortifacient (a medicine to promote the mensus), albeit in dignified Latin that Burghley would clearly understand. (Lansdowne 19/83, ff.181-2). Master’s description of Anne Cecil’s demeanor in this, her second attempt to acquire an abortifacient, her wan, thin face, tears and despair, can be explained, not as anemia, but as severe anxiety and desperation typical of any woman who is trying to end a pregnancy that has progressed to its fifth month. Anne’s child, Elizabeth, was born four months later.

Fennel and Its Relatives

While culinary fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) was primarily valued for digestion, its giant relatives were notorious for their uterine activity. The most famous was silphium, an extinct North African plant in the Ferula family, celebrated by Greeks and Romans as a contraceptive and abortifacient (Riddle 43–44). Early modern English herbals, drawing on Dioscorides and Galen, attributed the same properties to galbanum and asafoetida, gums from related giant fennels. When Culpeper confirmed that fennel was used as to “bring down the women’s courses”, he situated fennel’s extended family squarely in the long tradition of herbal abortifacients known to classical and early modern readers alike.

Angelica Water and Distilled Remedies

Angelica (Angelica archangelica) was a popular herb in both apothecaries’ shops and household receipt books, often prepared as a cordial in distilled water. In addition to Culpeper‘s (Internet Archive) including angelica on his abortifacient list to “heat the womb” quoted above, he further explains that “a water distilled from the root” was “much more effectual” than from the leaves and specifies its gynecological action: “It procureth women’s courses” (20).

Knowledge, Secrecy, and Women’s Medicine

Abortifacient knowledge circulated in a climate of moral danger and legal restriction. In Elizabethan England, abortion was considered a sin, and after “quickening” it could be prosecuted as a felony. This legal and religious framework explains why physicians and herbalists consistently wrote euphemistically. It also meant that much of the practical knowledge remained women’s medicine—handed down orally among mothers, midwives, and neighbors, many of whom were illiterate.

Receipt collections such as The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight (1677) include recipes “To provoke Terms” (142), and demonstrate that for ordinary readers in  an early modern household, “provoking terms” and “bringing down courses” were polite ways to signal abortifacient remedies.

We also see such terminology in household manuscript recipe books, where remedies are frequently labeled simply “To provoke the terms” or “To bring down the flowers” (echoes of Ophelia’s bouquet) with no further gloss. For example, Folger MS V.a.453 (a seventeenth-century collection of “Receipts for Physick”) records: “To stop their flowers, let women take of pennyroyall, savin, and rue …” without any mention of pregnancy or abortion.¹  “A bath to break the flowers” and “flowers to bring down” also appear there (442). These terse headings relied on shared knowledge: any early modern woman encountering them would have understood the intended effect.

Because most women did not read English, let alone read Latin and Greek, this oral and manuscript tradition was crucial for transmission. Practical instruction often passed by word of mouth—between midwives, mothers, and neighbors—using these euphemisms as a common code.

What makes the Cecil–Smith episode distinctive is that both Mildred Cooke Cecil and Thomas Smith were fluent in Latin and Greek and deeply trained in medicinal remedies and the classics; as was Anne Cecil’s husband, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford who received (and perhaps requested) Smith’s “water” and delivered it to his wife. All three individuals could read Dioscorides, Galen, and Soranus and the other classic herbalists whom John Riddle discusses  in his Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient world to the Renaissance (1992)).  According to Gradwohl, these ancient texts plainly describe fennel derivatives, silphium, asafoetida, and angelica-like herbs as emmenagogues and abortifacients.

When Smith prepared his mixture for Anne Cecil containing angelica water and fennel, Mildred would have immediately grasped the implication because, unlike most women, she did not need oral tradition.  She had direct access to the classical medical texts in the original languages. Her likely furious response may be reasonably surmised from the content and tone of  Smith’s apologetic letter.

Most telling is that Oxford and Anne did not go to Mildred to prepare a remedy to cure Anne’s problem, but to Smith, indicating that they did not want Mildred to know about it.

“Miscarry” and “Life in the Body”

Smith’s defense betrays his awareness. In his letter he insists: “I would be as sorry that my Lady of Oxford should miscarry as if she were 5 times my daughter … Giving but a spoonful, if life were in the body, for it should disperse straight and comfort immediately the vital spirits.”

“Miscarry” sometimes refers to general misfortune. But it more specifically refers to the loss of a pregnancy. Smith provides that specificity with his words “if life were in the body” meaning an unborn life within Anne. Smith’s words “if life were in the body” make clear that he intended the more specific meaning of “miscarry”, betraying his and Mildred’s awareness that his elixir was an abortifacient.

Modern Perspectives

Modern historians and physicians confirm this long tradition. John Riddle’s Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (1992) establishes at length the continuity of plant-based abortifacients, especially all species of giant fennel and its relatives, from antiquity into the early modern age. Rebecca Rupp, writing for National Geographic in August 2016, explains how women across history used herbs like silphium and fennel to control fertility, underlining the persistence of this knowledge despite its suppression. Gina Kolata’s 1994 article “In Ancient Times, Flowers and Fennel for Family Planning” published in the New York Times  also explores such practices. Contemporary medical literature likewise records the same association: the Journal of Medicine and Life (Nov.–Dec. 2021) notes that “the plants with the emmenagogue effect are … fennel (Foeniculum vulgare)” and warns of the therapeutic limits and dangers of such use (Ionescu et al. 749). “Emmenagogue” is the descendant of “provoke the courses”, “bring on women’s flowers” and other terminology that has masked abortifacient practice for centuries.  The effects of modern midwives’ use of various Angelica Genus on uterine contractions  in a 1992 study by Abigail Puk and others of Bethel University resulted in their conclusion that “All Angelica species, when tested at similar concentrations, produced contractive forces greater than that of the tissue’s own spontaneous mobility.” (31)

Conclusion and Why It Matters to Oxford and Shakespeare

The difference between my opinion and others’ on whether fennel and angelica water were understood as abortifacients in early modern England appears to rest (i) on the sources we consulted, and (ii) on my broader search for evidence of use of fennel and angelica water using early modern euphemisms for abortifacients in ancient, early modern and modern texts. The evidence from herbals, pharmacopoeias, manuscript recipe books, and modern scholarship that I researched all converge on the same point: both plants were known to “provoke courses,” a phrase understood then—as now—as the induction of menstruation and, when pregnancy is present, abortion.

For Thomas Smith to prepare such a mixture for Anne Cecil was entirely consistent with his (and Oxford’s) classical learning. For Mildred Cecil, a woman known for her ancient Greek and Latin and skill with elixirs of her own, to erupt in fury over fennel and angelica shows that she, too, knew precisely what was at stake. Smith’s use of the terms “miscarry” and “life in the body” virtually confirm this interpretation.

Smith’s letter evidences that before Oxford left for the continent, he and Anne sought Smith’s “water” laced with the known abortifacients fennel and angelica; and that Anne’s mother Mildred, another skilled herbalist, was alarmed at those ingredients. In Masters’ letter, we also have evidence of the common use of euphemisms for abortifacients. After Oxford left the country, Anne attempted to secure another abortifacient through Masters, who described her request to Burghley in a euphemism.

With the knowledge that fennel and angelica water were widely known in early modern texts as abortifacients, these two letters invite us to contradict centuries of attempted character assassinations of Oxford. We must conclude either (i) that Oxford was a “monstrous” husband who had sex with his wife, then denied paternity and sought to abort his own child and future heir, or (2) that Oxford told the truth when “openly in the presence chamber” before he left, he declared that if Anne were pregnant, it was not by him (Lansdown 19/83, ff.181-2) and that he was dealing with an enormously difficult situation.

It is important to weigh Oxford’s reputation for truthfulness against that of Henry Howard, one of Oxford’s bitterest enemies. Howard and Charles Arundel later heaped slanders and lies onto Oxford, trying to save themselves from treason charges by claiming Oxford was treasonous and immoral. They weren’t successful.  In January 1576, while Oxford was abroad and could not publicly deny it, Howard wrote Burghley claiming that Oxford had told Howard that Oxford had slept with Anne Cecil at Hampton Court. At the time, Burghley was desperate for some evidence he could put in his file on that very point.  For his own and Burghley’s benefits, Howard provided it, and Burghley kept it.

Henry Howard and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford cannot both be right on this factual point. But only Anne and Oxford knew for certain who was lying.

The evidence provided above indicates that both Anne and Oxford were distraught over Anne’s pregnancy and wished to end it. What possible reason could there be for such a situation? Surely, the pair would have welcomed a child, especially a boy who would become the next Earl of Oxford. Perhaps Shakespeare told us why.

In 1594, Shakespeare wrote a masterpiece about the “de-flower-[ing]” (348) rape of a faithful wife in Lucrece. Although he begins retelling Lucrece’s tale by closely adhering to Ovid’s and Livy’s versions, Shakespeare abandons the classics at about his poem’s midpoint and inserts a stunning 842-line original soliloquy for “Lucrece” in which she herself describes her rape and her rapist.(Lucrece, 747-1589) If Lucrece as victim represents Anne, the whole episode with Smith’s “water” becomes explicable.

I hope that my research on the abortifacient qualities of fennel and angelica, their known use as such in early modern England and Thomas Smith’s letter to Mildred Cecil have cleared some doubts about Oxford’s character and provided new perspectives on the use of fennel and angelica water as abortifacients in early modern England and on the identity of the historical model for that faithful, violated wife in Lucrece.

Works Cited and Consulted for Fennel and Angelica as Early Modern Abortifacients

Anon. The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery. London, 1675. Early English Books Online.

Culpeper, Nicholas. The Complete Herbal. London, 1652. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49513.

Culpeper, Nicholas. The Complete Herbal: To which is now added, upwards of One Hundred Additional Herbs, with a Display of Their Medicinal and Occult Qualities. Project Gutenberg 2015. Internet Archive.

Folger Shakespeare Library. Receipt Book [manuscript], V.a.452. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

Gerard, John. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London: John Norton, 1597. Internet Archive.

Gradwohl, Alex. Herbal Abortifacients and their Classical Heritage in Tudor England. 2013. University of Pennsylvania, Penn History Review 20.1 (2013)  Penn Repository, repository.upenn.edu/bitstreams/3cba27f1-9274-4919-a676-e9bc46bb638e/download.

Ionescu, C. A., et al. “Phytotherapy in Obstetrics: Therapeutic Indications, Limits, and Dangers.” Journal of Medicine and Life, vol. 14, no. 6, Nov.–Dec. 2021, pp. 748-755.

Kolata, Gina. “In Ancient Times, Flowers and Fennel for Family Planning”. The New York Times, March 8, 1994.

Puk, Abigail, et al. “The Contractile Effects of Various Species of the Angelica Genus on Isolated Uterine Tissue of Mus Musculus”. BIOS, Vol. 92, No. 2 (2021) pp. 31-39.

Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Harvard UP, 1992. Internet Archive.

Rupp, Rebecca. “Fennel: Multitasking Vegetable, Ancient Birth Control.” National Geographic, Aug. 2016.

Shakespeare, William. The Oxford Shakespeare: The complete Sonnets and Poems.  Edited by Stanley Wells, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Notes

1. Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.452, fol. 39v.