The general explanation given of how the leek became the emblem of
Wales, and is worn on St. David's Day, is this: In 640 King Cadwallader
gained a complete victory over the Saxons, owing to the special
interposition of St. David, who ordered the Britons always to wear leeks
in their caps, so that they might easily recognise each other. As the
Saxons had no such recognisable headmark, they attacked each other as
foes, and aided in their own defeat.

There is a more poetic story. It is that St. David lived in the valley
of Ewias, in Monmouthshire, spending his time in contemplation:

'And did so truly fast
As he did only drink what crystal Hodney yields,
And fed upon the leeks he gathered in the fields,
In memory of whom, in each revolving year,
The Welshmen, on his day, that sacred herb do wear.'

St. David, however, died in 544, and therefore it is probable that the
leek was a common and favourite vegetable in Wales during his
lifetime--that is to say, more than thirteen hundred years ago. A still
more prosaic explanation of the Welsh emblem is sometimes offered. It is
that it originated in a custom of the Welsh farmers when helping each
other in a neighbourly way to take their leeks and other vegetable
provender with them. Now, as the word leek is from the Anglo-Saxon
_leac_, which originally meant any vegetable, it is probable enough that
the Saxons sneeringly applied the word to the Welsh on account of their
vegetarian proclivities. We cannot, of course, be sure that the leek was
worn as a badge in Cadwallader's time, but we have at any rate
Shakespeare's authority for concluding that it was worn by the Welsh
soldiers at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356.

The phrase 'to eat the leek'--meaning to retract and 'knuckle-under'--is
supposed to have originated in that famous scene in Shakespeare's Henry
the Fifth, where Fluellan the Welshman compels Pistol to swallow the
vegetable at which he had been expressing such abhorrence. But there is
earlier evidence that the leek was regarded as something ignominious in
England. Thus in Chaucer:

'The beste song that ever was made
Is not worth a leke's blade,
But men will tend ther tille.'

Without dwelling on the culinary uses of the onion tribe, which have
been exhaustively described by others, a few applications, not generally
known, may be briefly noted.

In olden times there was a famous ointment called Devil's Mustard,