As with a vast number of other botanicals, Mrs. M. Grieve’s A Modern Herbal (1931) gives extensive coverage, suggesting it for many an affliction while noting that it had been used to repel the larvae of clothes moths.
Mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris, is said to have received its common name from having been used to flavour drinks such as beer before the introduction of hops, such beverage being drunk from mugs. As late as the closing years of the 19th-century it was still to be found as a substitute for tea in southwest England. Further north, in Scotland, highlanders used the young shoots as a potherb and the leaves smoked as a substitute for tobacco.
