In the year 812, the Emperor Charlemagne issued a decree.

It covered the administration of royal estates across the Frankish empire — their grain yields, their livestock, their accounting practices. Buried in the middle of this administrative document, in a section that most medieval historians have treated as a footnote, is a list of plants — the Capitulare de Villis.

Seventy-three species. Herbs, vegetables, trees, and medicinal plants. Ordered by an emperor who understood, through the lens of the most sophisticated medical system of his age, that the health of an empire began in its gardens.

That list is called the Capitulare de Villis. And it has been sitting, largely unexamined by practicing herbalists, at the intersection of history, medicine, and garden design for twelve hundred years.

I moved to a 170-year-old stone farmhouse in the Creuse region of France. I began restoring the kitchen garden. And I started reading the Capitulare de Villis not as a historian, but as a clinician — asking the question the Capitulare de Villis was originally written to answer: which plants does a household need, and why?

What I found changed how I think about plant medicine entirely. Not because the Capitulare contains secrets that modern herbalism has missed — though there are some genuinely surprising things in there — but because it represents something we have almost entirely lost: a complete, coherent, clinically sophisticated framework for matching plants to people, not symptoms to compounds.

This is the series hub for At Charlemagne’s Behest. Everything I publish about the Capitulare, Carolingian medicine, and constitutional herbalism will live here. You can use it as a starting point, a reference, or a map to navigate the growing body of content this project is generating.

But first — the Capitulare de Villis itself. And the system it was built on.

Table of Contents

The Document: What the Capitulare de Villis Actually Is

The Capitulare de Villis et Curtis — to give it its full title — is one of the most fascinating administrative documents of the early medieval period. Issued around 812 CE under Charlemagne, it is a set of instructions for the managers of the royal estates (villae) of the Frankish empire: how to maintain them, what to grow, how to account for produce, and what to deliver to the imperial court.

Most of the Capitulare de Villis is concerned with what you would expect from a 9th-century administrative decree: grain stores, pig counts, the proper management of fishponds, the responsibilities of estate managers toward the emperor’s messengers. Important for historians. Not particularly interesting to an herbalist.

Chapter 70, however, is different.

Chapter 70 is the plant list. It specifies, by name, every plant that must be grown on every royal estate. And it is this chapter that has become the primary historical record of early medieval European horticulture and plant medicine.

What the Capitulare de Villis Contains

The 73 entries in Chapter 70 include:

Medicinal herbs used in Galenic clinical practice (sage, wormwood, fennel, lovage, fenugreek, iris, horehound, and many others)
Culinary plants that were simultaneously understood as medicinal (fennel, mint, parsley, dill, coriander)
Aromatic plants used in both medicine and the household economy (rosemary, lavender, costmary)
Dye plants (weld, woad)
Food crops (various legumes, root vegetables, and greens)
Fruit and nut trees specified for the estate orchards

The Capitulare de Villis is written in a mixture of Latin and Old High German vernacular names, which has made some identifications uncertain and kept botanical historians productively busy for two centuries. For most of the major medicinal species, however, the identification is secure.

Who Wrote It and Why

The Capitulare was almost certainly not written by Charlemagne himself — he was famously illiterate for much of his reign, though he worked hard to remedy this later in life. It was produced by the scholars and administrators of his court, most likely under the direction of his principal advisor Alcuin of York, who oversaw the Carolingian Renaissance: the systematic effort to recover and preserve classical learning after the disruptions of the preceding centuries.

The medical dimension of the plant list almost certainly reflects the influence of the court physicians, who were working within the Galenic-Arabic medical tradition transmitted to Western Europe through the great translation projects of the 8th and 9th centuries. The core framework — humoral medicine, planetary herbalism, constitutional typing — had been systematized by Galen in the 2nd century CE, elaborated by the Arabic physicians (particularly Ibn Sina, who would codify it definitively in the 11th century), and was the standard medical curriculum of Charlemagne’s era.

When Charlemagne’s court specified that every estate must grow sage, fennel, and wormwood, they were not making culinary suggestions. They were implementing a health policy derived from a clinical system with five centuries of documented use behind it.

Historical Note The Capitulare de Villis is preserved in a single manuscript, now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Latin text has been edited and published by historians, but there is no English-language clinical herbalism commentary on the full plant list as a medical document — which is exactly what this project aims to provide.

The Medical System: Galenic Constitutional Medicine

To understand why the Capitulare de Villis plant list matters — not just historically, but clinically — you need to understand the medical system it was built on.

Galenic medicine is named for Galen of Pergamon, the 2nd-century Greek physician whose voluminous writings became the foundation of Western medical practice for over fifteen hundred years. His system synthesized the four-humor theory of Hippocrates, the elemental philosophy of Aristotle, and centuries of clinical observation into a coherent framework that was, for its time and for many purposes, extraordinarily effective.

The framework has three interlocking parts: the humors, the temperaments, and the qualities. Understanding how these three interact is the key to understanding why any given plant was chosen for the Capitulare list.

The Four Humors

Galenic medicine understood the body as governed by four fundamental fluids — the humors — whose balance determined health and whose imbalance produced disease:

Blood (Sanguis): warm and moist. Associated with spring, air, the heart, and the liver. Excess blood produces warmth, redness, full pulse, and conditions of heat and surplus.
Yellow Bile (Cholera): warm and dry. Associated with summer, fire, the gallbladder. Excess produces inflammation, acidity, and sharp, burning conditions.
Black Bile (Melancholia): cold and dry. Associated with autumn, earth, the spleen. Excess produces hardness, depression, obstruction, and slow, chronic conditions.
Phlegm (Phlegma): cold and moist. Associated with winter, water, the brain and lungs. Excess produces dampness, mucus, sluggishness, and diffuse, undefined conditions.

Health was eucrasia — good mixture. Disease was dyscrasia — bad mixture. The physician’s task was to identify the dyscrasia and prescribe accordingly: not to suppress symptoms, but to restore balance.

This is not primitive biochemistry. It is a systems-level model of constitutional terrain — one that modern functional medicine and terrain-based herbalism have been quietly rediscovering for decades.

The Four Temperaments

Every person was understood to have a dominant constitutional temperament derived from their humoral balance. These were not personality types in the modern pop-psychology sense — they were clinical categories describing how a person’s body characteristically behaved, what conditions they were prone to, and what interventions were most appropriate for them.

Sanguine: warm and moist. Good circulation, sociable, resilient, but prone to excess and inflammatory conditions when out of balance.
Choleric: warm and dry. Energetic, decisive, and driven, but prone to inflammatory conditions, acidity, and burnout.
Melancholic: cold and dry. Methodical, deep-thinking, and precise, but prone to obstruction, depression, and chronic slow conditions.
Phlegmatic: cold and moist. Receptive, empathic, and enduring, but prone to lymphatic sluggishness, fluid retention, and diffuse, hard-to-name conditions.

A person’s temperament was not their fate — it was their starting point. The goal was not to change the temperament but to manage it skillfully: to support its strengths and address its constitutional vulnerabilities before they became pathology.

Planetary Herbalism: The System That Connects Chart to Plant

The third layer of the Galenic framework — and the one that connects astrology to medicine in a way that is clinically meaningful rather than merely symbolic — is planetary herbalism.

In this system, every plant was assigned a planetary ruler based on the observed correspondence between its qualities and the planetary archetype. A Jupiter plant was warm, expansive, and beneficial to the liver — mirroring Jupiter’s expansive, benevolent qualities. A Saturn plant was cold, dry, contracting, and preserving — mirroring Saturn’s qualities of limitation, preservation, and time. A Venus plant had affinity for the reproductive system, the kidneys, and the experience of beauty as a genuine therapeutic agent.

The planetary assignment of an herb was not poetic metaphor. It was a clinical classification system — a way of grouping plants by their action profiles and constitutional affinities so that a physician could quickly identify which plants were appropriate for which patient.

The connection to astrology comes through the constitutional reading: a person’s dominant planetary signature — derived from their natal chart — indicated which plants were most likely to resonate with their terrain. A person with a strong Jupiter signature benefited from Jupiter herbs. A person with a problematic Saturn — too much Saturnine quality in their constitution — needed either Saturn herbs (to work with the excess) or counter-planetary herbs (to balance it).

This is not astrology as prediction. It is astrology as a diagnostic and constitutional mapping tool — one that Charlemagne’s court physicians were using fluently when they compiled the Capitulare de Villis plant list.

And it is the tool I used, in the first episode of this series, to identify which plants in the Capitulare are most directly mine.

The Garden: A 170-Year-Old Gaden in the Creuse

The physical context of this project matters. I am not working with the Capitulare as a purely textual exercise.

I live in the Creuse — one of the least-populated departments in France, in the heart of the Massif Central. The region was part of the Frankish empire. The landscape that Charlemagne’s administrators were trying to organize, to make productive, to keep medically supplied — this is that landscape, or something very close to it. The same granite. The same wet springs. The same summers that are warm but not scorching, the same winters that are grey and long and damp.

The townhouse I am restoring was built around 1855 — not medieval, but old enough to have been built by people whose relationship to medicinal plants was still fundamentally pre-industrial. The kitchen garden I am developing will be laid out in a tradition that runs, with modifications, back through the centuries to exactly the kind of monastic and estate garden culture the Capitulare was designed to govern.

The At Charlemagne’s Behest Garden Project

The project has a specific goal: to recreate the full Capitulare de Villis plant list — all 73 species where identification is secure, and the best available candidates where it is not — in the kitchen garden and surrounding garden of this property.

This is not a museum exercise. I am not recreating a 9th-century garden for display purposes. I am growing these plants because I intend to use them — clinically, in my own kitchen, and as the living material for this content series.

Every plant I add to the Capitulare beds gets its own documentation: historical identification, Galenic profile, clinical use, what I observe growing it in this specific terroir, and how it connects to the constitutional medicine framework described above.

The garden is, in that sense, a 21st-century clinical herbalism research project conducted according to 9th-century design principles.

Growing Note Several of the Capitulare plants were already growing on this property when I arrived — including a large, deeply rooted sage plant in the corner of the kitchen garden that I did not plant. I have no idea how long it has been there. The land holds its own memory.

Why France, Why Here, Why Now

I am often asked why an American clinical herbalist ended up in rural France. The short answer involves a combination of deliberate decision-making and the kind of life-reshaping events that require you to start over somewhere completely different.

The longer answer is that traditional European plant medicine — the lineage I was trained in, that runs from the Greek physicians through the Islamic Golden Age through the medieval monasteries through the early modern herbalists — is still alive in France in ways it is not alive in the United States. Not in hospitals or medical schools, but in the landscape. In the markets. In the way people here still talk about plants as if they have agency and personality, not just pharmacological profiles.

The Creuse is not a sophisticated region. It is not Provence or the Loire Valley or any of the places that appear in lifestyle magazines about French country living. It is rural, agricultural, occasionally difficult, and deeply itself. It is exactly the kind of place where the Capitulare was meant to be implemented: a productive estate, growing what it needs, embedded in a landscape that has been shaped by human hands for two thousand years.

I find that context indispensable for this work. You cannot fully understand a document about estate gardens by reading it in a library. You understand it by getting your hands in the same kind of soil the Capitulare de Villis was written about.

Why This Matters Now: The Rediscovery of Constitutional Medicine

I want to be direct about something: I am not a medievalist. I did not build this project out of nostalgia for the past or a romantic attachment to everything old. I built it because the medical framework the Capitulare was built on — Galenic constitutional medicine — works. And modern research is increasingly confirming why.

The Problem with the Symptom-Compound Model

Contemporary Western herbalism, particularly in its popular form, has largely adopted the pharmaceutical model of medicine: you have a symptom, you find a plant with a compound that addresses that symptom, you take the plant. Echinacea for immune support. Ashwagandha for stress. Turmeric for inflammation. The herb becomes a green drug.

This model is not useless — but it misses most of what traditional plant medicine was actually doing. And it produces exactly the kind of results you would expect from treating a person-shaped problem with a compound-shaped solution: inconsistent outcomes, surprise failures, and a persistent sense that something more fundamental is being missed.

Constitutional medicine starts from a different question. Not: what compound does this symptom require? But: what kind of person is this, and what does their terrain need to return to balance? The plant is chosen for the person, not for the symptom. The same plant may be right for one person and wrong for another presenting with identical symptoms — because the terrain is different.

This is the question Charlemagne’s physicians were answering when they compiled the Capitulare. And it is the question I find myself returning to, over and over, in clinical practice.

What Modern Research Is Confirming

The research on constitutional medicine and individualized treatment responses is growing. The concept of the microbiome — the vast ecosystem of microorganisms that shape our immune function, our neurological health, our metabolic patterns, and our response to everything from food to drugs to herbs — is essentially a modern rediscovery of terrain medicine.

The research on circadian biology confirms what Galenic medicine knew: the body is not a static machine but a dynamic system governed by cycles, and interventions timed to those cycles are dramatically more effective than interventions applied uniformly.

The emerging field of pharmacogenomics — the study of how genetic variation affects drug response — is discovering what constitutional herbalists have observed clinically for centuries: people respond differently to the same substance based on their underlying biology.

Every generation rediscovers what the Galenic physicians knew, usually by a more expensive and complicated route. The Capitulare plant list represents what that knowledge looked like when it was translated into practical garden design. I find it endlessly instructive.

This is not an argument for abandoning modern medicine or modern research. It is an argument for taking seriously the clinical knowledge encoded in a thousand years of European herbal practice — including in a 9th-century emperor’s list of estate plants.

The Clinical Herbalist’s Responsibility

I want to be honest about what I am doing in this project and what I am not doing.

I am a clinical herbalist. I worked with individual clients in a clinical setting. I took a history. I assessed constitutional type. I created individualized protocols. I followed up. I adjusted. This project — the garden and this site — is not a substitute for that kind of work.

What it can do is give you the conceptual framework to understand how constitutional plant medicine works, to start recognizing your own terrain, and to begin thinking about the plants in your life as an ecosystem rather than a collection of individual compounds.

If you want to go deeper — to apply this framework to your own constitution, to work through the Capitulare list with your own chart and terrain in mind — that is precisely what the membership tiers at @thelittleoldlady_101 are designed for. The Archives tier, in particular, is where I do case-based constitutional teaching in live Q&A format. That is where the clinical depth lives.

The Capitulare Plant List: A Clinical Reference

The following table gives the full Capitulare de Villis medicinal plant list — the herbs that were chosen for their clinical value, not their culinary or agricultural function — with their classical Galenic planetary rulership, the constitutional types they primarily address, and a brief note on primary therapeutic use.

This table will be updated as each plant receives its own dedicated post in this series.

Latin Name	Common Name	Planet	Constitution	Primary Use
Salvia officinalis	Sage	Jupiter / Saturn	Phlegmatic, cold-damp	Warming, drying, preserving; the quintessential phlegmatic corrective
Ruta graveolens	Rue	Sun / Mars	Cold, sluggish	Warming, stimulating, emmenagogue; strong action, respect required
Mentha spp.	Mint	Venus / Moon	Hot, agitated	Cooling, digestive, boundary-clarifying for the phlegmatic
Apium graveolens	Wild Celery	Mercury	Cold, damp	Diuretic, digestive, lymphatic; classic cold-terrain herb
Levisticum officinale	Lovage	Saturn	Damp, sluggish	Warming digestive, diuretic; structures and directs stuck fluids
Foeniculum vulgare	Fennel	Jupiter	Cold, phlegmatic	Warm, carminative, lymph-moving; the quintessential Jupiter herb
Tanacetum vulgare	Tansy	Saturn / Venus	Damp, sluggish	Bitter, astringent, anti-parasitic; strong Saturn-Venus action
Absinthium	Wormwood	Saturn	Damp, excess phlegm	The great Saturnine regulator; bitter, drying, anti-parasitic
Trigonella foenum	Fenugreek	Jupiter	Cold, dry	Warm, moist, mucilaginous; for cold dry constitutions needing moisture
Iris germanica	Iris / Orris	Jupiter / Moon	Cold, phlegmatic	Root used; lymphatic, expectorant; for cold damp conditions
Marrubium vulgare	Horehound	Mercury	Cold, damp, lung	Bitter, expectorant; classic cold-lung constitution herb
Rosa spp.	Rose	Venus	Hot, inflammatory	Cooling, heart-affinity, grief medicine; beauty as therapy
Lilium spp.	Lily	Moon / Venus	Hot, agitated	Cooling, protective, boundary-supporting
Rosmarinus officinalis	Rosemary	Sun / Jupiter	Cold, phlegmatic	Heating, clarifying, circulatory; rekindling cold constitutions
Cucumis sativus	Cucumber	Moon	Hot, inflammatory	Cooling, demulcent; classic Moon herb for hot terrain
Melissa officinalis	Lemon Balm	Jupiter / Moon	Choleric, nervous	Warm, calming, heart-lifting; Hildegard’s great joy herb
Coriandrum sativum	Coriander	Saturn / Mercury	Hot, inflammatory	Cooling, digestive, anti-inflammatory in its seed form
Anethum graveolens	Dill	Mercury	Cold, sluggish	Carminative, warming to digestion; directs downward and outward

This is a partial list of the medicinal herbs specifically. The full 73-plant Capitulare list including food crops, dye plants, and trees will be published as a dedicated reference post in this series.

The Series: All At Charlemagne’s Behest Content

Everything published under the At Charlemagne’s Behest banner — posts and reference materials — is indexed here. This page is updated as new content publishes.

Posts & Videos

Episode / Post	Status
PILLAR POST — At Charlemagne’s Behest: The Capitulare de Villis and the Lost Science of Constitutional Plant Medicine (this post)	● LIVE
EP. 1 — My Birth Chart & Charlemagne’s Garden: Finding My Plants in the Capitulare de Villis	● LIVE
EP. 2 — Sage: The Complete Galenic Profile (Salvia officinalis from the 9th century to the clinic)	○ LIVE
EP. 3 — Wormwood: Saturn’s Great Regulator (Absinthium in Carolingian Medicine and Modern Practice)	○ FORTHCOMING
EP. 4 — The Phlegmatic Constitution: A Complete Diagnostic Guide	○ FORTHCOMING
EP. 5 — Fennel: A Jupiter Herb in a Saturn World	○ FORTHCOMING
EP. 6 — Hildegard’s Bridge: From Charlemagne to the 12th Century (and what was lost between)	○ FORTHCOMING
REFERENCE — The Full Capitulare de Villis Plant List with Botanical Identifications	○ FORTHCOMING
REFERENCE — Reading Your Constitutional Type: A Clinical Herbalist’s Framework	○ FORTHCOMING

Bookmark this page and return as new posts publish. Archives tier members at https://youtube.com/@thelittleoldlady_101 receive first access to new content and join the live Q&A sessions where constitutional herbalism case teaching happens in depth.

Go Deeper: The Membership Tiers

This site is the public-facing dimension of a larger body of clinical teaching. If the constitutional medicine framework described in this series resonates with you — if you want to learn to apply the Capitulare de Villis to your own terrain, your own garden, and your own clinical thinking — the membership tiers are where that happens.

The Kitchen Garden — $4.99/month

Season-by-season conversation about what I am growing in the Capitulare garden, why, and how I am thinking about the medicinal function of each bed. Plant profiles, growing notes, and the ongoing record of recreating a 9th-century plant list on a 19th-century farm in 21st-century France.

For: gardeners, plant-curious people, those building their own medicinal herb knowledge through growing.

The Stillroom — $9.99/month

Preparations. How I am processing the Capitulare plants as they come off the garden — tinctures, infused oils, vinegars, decoctions, and the older preparation forms that the medieval herbalists used and that are still worth knowing. Clinical notes on what I observe. The intersection of the traditional and the practical.

For: practicing herbalists, students, and serious home apothecaries.

The Archives — $19.99/month

Monthly live Q&A. This is where clinical judgment happens in real time — case-based teaching, constitutional typing, the kind of nuanced herbalism conversation that does not fit in a written post. This is where I answer the question: given what I know about your constitution and your terrain, which Capitulare plants are yours, and how would you use them?

For: clinicians, advanced students, and anyone who wants the full depth of constitutional herbalism as a working framework.

All three tiers will be accessible at youtube.com/@thelittleoldlady_101. The garden is open. Come in.

A Note on Method

I want to close this pillar post with something that I think is important to say plainly.

I am a clinical herbalist with over twenty years of practice. I am not a medievalist, a Latin scholar, or a professional historian. What I bring to the Capitulare de Villis is not philological expertise — there are academic specialists who do that far better than I could — but clinical experience with the plants themselves and with the constitutional medicine framework the Capitulare de Villis was built on.

My reading of the Capitulare is not a historian’s reading. It is a practitioner’s reading. I am asking: what did these people know, and how do I know they were right? The answer I keep arriving at is that the best evidence for the validity of a clinical system is whether the Capitulare de Villis produces results in the clinic. And this one does.

I will make errors of historical detail in this series — I already have, and I will catch some of them and miss others. I welcome corrections from people who know more than I do about the medieval period, about Carolingian Latin, about the botanical identifications in the manuscript.

What I will not be corrected on is the clinical dimension. I know these plants. I know these constitutions. I know how to match them. That knowledge comes from two decades of practice, not from this document — but this document, read properly, confirms it at every turn.

That is why Charlemagne’s behest still matters. The garden endures. So does the medicine.