The story
- Latin · borrowed fromvaldē bona“very good”
- English todaybaldmoney
Apparently a corruption of Latin valdē bona (“very good”) (a plant mentioned in Leonhart Fuchs's Great Herbal). Earliest forms seem to come from an intermediate, unattested French form baudemoine (modern French baudremoine) and by analogy to the plant name agrimony.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.