The middle part of Wilts.- Naked-boys (q. if not wild saffron) about Stocton. (Naked-boys is, I suppose, meadow saffron, or colchicum, for I doe not remember ever to have seen any other sort of saffron growing wild in England. — J. Ray.)
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The watered meadows all along from Marleborough to Hungerford, Ramesbury, and Littlecot, at the later end of Aprill, are yellow with butter flowers.  When you come to Twyford the floted meadowes there are all white with little flowers, which I believe are ladysmocks (cardamine):  quaere of some herbalist the right name of that plant.  (Ranunculus aquaticus folio integro et multum diviso, C. Bankini.- J. Ray.) The graziers told me that the yellow meadowes are by much the better, and those white flowers are produc’t by a cold hungry water.
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South part. — At the east end of Ebbesbourne Wake is a meadowe called Ebbesbourne, that beareth grasse eighteen foot long.  I myself have seen it of thirteen foot long; it is watered with the washing of the village.  Upon a wager in King James the First’s time, with washing it more than usuall, the grasse was eighteen foot long.  It is so sweet that the pigges will eate it; it growes no higher than other grasse, but with knotts and harles, like a skeen of silke (or setts together).  They cannot mowe it with a sythe, but they cutt it with such a hooke as they bagge pease with.

At Orston [Orcheston] St. Maries is a meadowe of the nature of that at Ebbesbourne aforesayd, which beares a sort of very long grasse.  Of this grasse there was presented to King James the First some that were seventeen foot long:  here is only one acre and a half of it.  In common yeares it is 12 or 13 foot long.  It is a sort of knott grasse, and the pigges will eate it.

[The “Orcheston Grass” has long been famous as one of the most singular vegetable products of this country.  From the time of Fuller, who particularly mentions it in his “Worthies of England”, many varying and exaggerated accounts of it have been published:  but in the year 1798 Dr. Maton carefully examined the grass, and fully investigated the peculiar circumstances of soil and locality which tend to its production.  He contributed the result of his inquiries to the Linnæan Society, in a paper which is printed in the fifth volume of their Transactions.  Some comments on that paper, and on the subject generally, by Mr. Davis, of Longleat, will be found in the second volume of the Beauties of Wiltshire, p. 79.  That gentleman states that “its extraordinary length is produced by the overflowing of the river on a warm gravelly bed, which disposes the grass to take root and shoot out from the joints, and then root again, and thus again and again; so that it is frequently of the length of ten or twelve feet and the quantity on the land immense, although it does not stand above two feet high from the ground”.  Although the meadow at Orcheston St. Mary in which this grass grows is only two acres and a half in extent, its produce in a favourable season, is said to have exceeded twelve tons of hay.  Shakspere, to whom all natural and rural objects were familiar, alludes to the “hindering knot-grass”, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act iii. sc. 2.
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