The Wacky World of Woad

Woad was “for ages the main source of blue dye in Europe,” Richters herb catalogue says somewhat shyly. It was certainly known to the ancient Britons. Prior to battle, they dyed themselves blue from head to toe and thus attired fought stark naked.

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Isatis tinctoria is a modest plant of the cabbage family from western and central Europe. Hardy in southern Ontario, woad is a biennial. Seed sown in spring, germinates easily grows all summer, the foliage disappearing for the first winter. The following spring it emerges once again to flower, set seed and then dies for good. The tribes that opposed Julius Caesar’s first landing on the southeast coast of England in 44 B.C. scared the heck out of his battle-hardened legionnaires. They certainly would not have thought of fighting naked. But the Catuvellauni under their King Cassivelaunus, may have been onto something. Clothing driven into wounds from sword and spear thrusts tended to cause blood poisoning, which meant almost certain death before modern antibiotics. And interestingly, as well as a dye, woad has a long history as a medicinal plant. Recent research has confirmed this. Woad contains 20 times more of an anti-cancer chemical than its cousin broccoli. Whether woad would have helped protect against the notorious wet English weather is open to doubt. The Roman Tacitus who visited over a century after Caesar wrote that “the climate is objectionable, with frequent rains and mists . . . Crops are slow to ripen, but quick to grow – both facts due to one and the same cause, the extreme moistness of the land and sky.” Other tribesmen much further to north in modern Scotland also used woad on their bodies. In fact, the name we know them by, Picts, comes from the Latin Picti, meaning “the painted men.” The original inhabitants of Scotland, like some present-day entertainers and others, were much given to tattooing themselves with woad. Some scholars though think that Picti is a Latinized form of some native word which has been lost to us. Not so though the Scotti, a people originally from the north of Ireland who invaded the western part of the land to which they gave their name after the Romans and long before Mel Gibson’s movie Braveheart. There they also fight blue in the face, if not with cold. It only remains to note that the people of Scotland went on to choose the thistle as their national emblem and then invented the kilt.

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