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6
Creeping into Homes
his chapter will look at how friars who entered the home as confessors
T
and healers were depicted in literary and polemical sources. In the rst
section, I will consider the satirical attacks on friars, which centre on their
unprecedented access to homes and the temptations to which this access
gives rise. e sources are to be found in a wide variety of written materials,
from learned scholastic attacks on the mendicant orders, to encyclopedias,
sermons, poems (by the greatest English poets of the era), anonymous
lyrics and scurrilous squibs. e second and third sections will focus not on
surveying the eld as a whole but on close analysis of William Langland’s
great late fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman. Langland engages with
questions relating to the friars’ role in society and the impact of confession
on the mutual inuences of body and soul, at a much deeper level than the
satires allow. In section two, the personication of one of the seven deadly
sins in passus 5 of Piers Plowman, Envye, is closely linked to the character
of a friar, and the interrelationships of sin, bodily illness and confession are
explored in language which exploits Langland’s extensive knowledge of
practical medicine texts, as well as of the pastoral literature of confession. e
third section deals with the climax of Langland’s poem, in which the friar
is a central character presented allegorically as potential healer or leech of
the mortally wounded English church, but he is undermined in this salvic
role by the institutional and moral failings of the mendicant orders. e last
section of the chapter will consider the relation between the Piers Plowman
tradition and scholastic debates in the era of Lollardy.
Before discussing these ‘external’ criticisms of friars’ behaviour in the home,
we should remember that friars themselves were very much aware of the
temptations and dangers attached to their role as confessors. Friar omas
described the coming of the Franciscans to England (see Chapter 1), and his
account features a long description of the illnesses and attempted treatment of
Brother Solomon in the London house. He was rst healed of a gutta in his
foot by a visit to the shrine of St Eloy in Flanders. He went on subsequently to
high oce as guardian at the London Franciscan house and general confessor
to the city of London. omas continues his story:
194 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
But because he had begged the dear Jesus to cleanse him from his sins in
this present life, He sent him a gutta that attacked his spine, so that he
became hunch-backed and bent; moreover He sent him the hot dropsy and
frequently bleeding haemorrhoids until his death. But on the day before his
soul departed to Christ, sweet Jesus sent him such sorrow of heart that all
his former suerings seemed insignicant when compared with this trial,
and he did not understand the cause of his grief. So he called three friars,
who were his close friends and revealed his agony of mind, begging them
to pray earnestly for him. But while they were devoutly at prayer together,
the sweet Lord Jesus with holy Apostle Peter appeared to him, and stood by
his bed gazing at him. Instantly recognising the Saviour, Brother Solomon
cried out, “Lord have mercy on me! Have mercy on me!”. And the Lord
Jesus answered, “You have always begged Me to punish and purge you from
all your sins in this present life, so I have given you this present aiction,
especially since you have lost your rst zeal, and have failed to bring forth
fruits worthy of repentance as your vocation demands. Furthermore you
have dealt leniently with the rich when imposing penance.” And blessed
Peter added, “You know you have also sinned deeply in your judgement
of Brother John of Chichester, who died recently. Now, therefore, ask
God to grant you a death as holy as his.” So Brother Solomon cried out,
“Have mercy on me, sweetest Lord! Have pity on me, dear Jesus!” en the
Lord Jesus smiled on him, regarding him with so kindly a face that all his
previous anguish vanished, and he was lled with joy of spirit and complete
assurance of salvation.
1
1
De Adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam, pp. 13–14: Verumtamen quia dulcissimo
Jesu supplicaverat ut eum in praesenti a peccatis suis purgaret misit ei guttam quae
fregit spinam dorsi sui ita ut gibbosus et curvus eret; misit ei hydropisim calidam
et frequentem uxum haemorrhoidarum usque ad obitum suum. Postremo vero
pridie quam pergeret ad ipsum immisit ei dulcis Jesu tantum dolorem cordis cuius
tamen causam ignorabat quod omnes praecedentes passiones in respectu illius angustiae nihili aestimavit. Vocatis igitur tribus fratribus qui sibi specialiores erant indicavit eis agoniam animi sui et intente supplicavit quatenus pro statu suo instanter
orarent. Ipsis igitur in oratione unanimiter perseverantibus apparuit ei dulcissimus
Jesus Christus cum beato Petro Apostolo coram lecto suo stans et aspiciens in eum
ipse vero statim cognito Salvatore clamavit: “Miserere mei Domine, miserere mei.”
Et respondit ei Dominus Jesus: “Quia semper me rogasti ut in praesenti te plene
aigerem et purgarem, misi tibi dolorem praesentem et praecipue quia caritatem
tuam primam reliquisti et non fecisti ut decuit vocationem tuam dignos fructus
poenitentiae, et quia pepercisti nimis divitibus in iniungenda sibi poenitentia.” Et
addidit beatus Petrus: “Insuper scias te graviter peccasse in iudicando fratrem Johannem de Cicestria qui nuper obiit. Et nunc roga Deum ut det tibi talem nem qualem ipse habuit.” Et clamans frater Salomon dixit: “Miserere mei Domine
Creeping into Homes 195
ere is no bodily cure for Solomon this time, but at the end he is assured of
the salvation of his soul. Before this, he had been aicted with three illnesses
as means through which he was enabled to purge his sins. e vision he has
of Christ and St Peter, reported by omas, makes it clear what these sins
were. Solomon failed to assess and enforce penance on the rich, as was his
responsibility as confessor to the city of London. e presence of St Peter
in the vision represents the power given to the church by Christ to bind and
to loose and thus to confess sinners and decide on appropriate penance. But
St Peter told Solomon that, in addition to his failure as confessor-general,
he had been uncharitable in his judgement of his deceased brother John of
Chichester. Sickness, judgement, confession and penance are deeply entwined
in omas’s story.
Friars in late medieval English literature
ere is little or no explicit commentary in literary sources on friars practising
medicine inside people’s homes or even practising on lay people inside their
convents. is is no great surprise given the lack of a patient’s eye view of
medical practice in general. ere are satirical pictures of physicians, of course,
most of them grounded in the long tradition of treating them as moneyloving frauds.2 Chaucer’s Physician in the Canterbury Tales is the most famous
English portrait of a healer overfond of gold. But generic satires on physicians
do not pick out friars as practitioners of medicine. On the other hand, there are
literary satires on the orders of friars, and many of such satires focus on itinerant
friars’ getting into people’s homes as confessors. In William Langland’s Piers
Plowman, Friar Flatterer in the nal passus of the poem, identies himself as
Sire Penetrans Domos, that is, ‘Sir Creeping into Homes’.3 is access to homes
dulcissime miserere mei et dulcis Jesu”: qui subridendo respexit eum ita placido
vultu quod tota praecedens angustia evanuit et ipse spirituali gaudio repletus certis-
simam spem suae salutis concepit. See Jones, ‘Early Franciscans’, pp. 446–9.
2
e most famous text in this tradition is Francesco Petrarca, Invective contra medi-
cum; Invectiva contra quendam magni status hominem sed nullius scientie aut virtutis,
ed. F. Bausi (Florence, 2005); for visual commentary in the same vein, see P. M.
Jones, ‘Picturing Medicine in the Age of Petrarch’, in Petrarca e la Medicina. Atti
del Convegno di Capo d’Orlando, 27–28 giugno 2003, ed. M. Berté, V. Fera and T.
Pesenti (Messina, 2006), pp. 179–200, where animals act the part of physicians.
3
I am using for this chapter William Langland, e Vision of Piers Plowman: A Crit-
ical Edition of the B-text based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17 with selected
variant readings, an introduction, glosses, and a textual and literary commentary, ed. A.
V. C. Schmidt (London, 1987); William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Anno-
tated Edition of the C-Text, ed. D. Pearsall (Liverpool, 2014).
196 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
allowed a friar to persuade people in private to pay for his services or to make a
bequest, in return for such benets as indulgences, burial in a friary, memorial
masses or membership of a friars’ confraternity. is access to homes also gave
friars an opportunity to indulge their own gluttony with food and drink they
might be oered or their lust to gain sexual access to women while husbands
or fathers were absent from the house. is vein of satire was investigated by
4
Jill Mann in her classic study, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire.
I do not
propose to attempt to go over that ground again here.
Late fourteenth-century authors such as Chaucer, Langland and Gower
all practised in this vein of satire with an eye on the friars. ese satires drew
in turn on anti-mendicant writings from the thirteenth century, mostly of
Parisian origin. ey had their beginning in the reaction of the secular clergy
and masters of the University of Paris to the increasing prominence of the
Dominicans and Franciscans in the University from the mid-century onwards.
e refusal of the friars to follow the lead of the secular University masters,
when this meant that doing so came into conict with their own mendicant
constitutions, a refusal often supported by papal authority, gave further oence.
e most wide-ranging and consequential scholastic attack on the friars was
the De periculis novissimorum temporum (‘On the Dangers of Recent Times’) by
William of St Amour, written with the help of other masters of the University.
is work identied friars with the passage of St Paul in 2 Timothy 3, verse
6, which predicts that in the end times there will come those who ‘are the
kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women,
who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires’.5
e Latin Vulgate version of this passage gave Langland the name of his friar
Sire Penetrans Domos, who will prey on such gullible and lascivious women.6
Earlier in Piers Plowman, passus 5 (B version), the personied Wrathe selfidenties as a friar with access to bedrooms to hear women’s confessions (‘in
boure to here shriftes’ (B.5.139)). He was thus a potential sower of dissension
4
J. Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: e Literature of Social Classes and the
General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1973).
5
e origins of hostility to friars in William of St Amour and his contemporaries are
explored in P. Szittya, e Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton,
2014); G. Geltner, e Making of Medieval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, De-
viance, and Remembrance (Oxford, 2012). See also W. Scase, Piers Plowman and the
New Anticlericalism (Cambridge, 1989).
6
S. A. Barney, e Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman. Volume 5, C Passūs 20–22; B
Passūs 18–20 (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 242–3, on Sire Penetrans Domos.
Creeping into Homes 197
in the home, and quarrels between such invasive friars and the parish clergy of
such families were another consequence.
7
e author of the last part of the Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun, also drew
on the writings of William of St Amour. In the Roman de la Rose, there is a
long self-justifying speech by a friar identied as Faux Semblant.8 Chaucer’s
Friar Huberd in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Friar John
who appears in the Summoner’s Tale both share with Faux Semblant the
ability to atter, and to appear other than they really are, in order to gain their
ends. Chaucer in his General Prologue (CT, GP: 212–13) tells us that Friar
Huberd had arranged husbands for a great number of young women, paying
for the weddings himself (the implication being that he had seduced these
women). e dispute between the Friar and the Summoner, which comes at
the end of the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, establishes that each of
their own tales will be an attack on the way in which the other exploits access
to people’s homes for prot. So, Friar John, in the Summoner’s Tale, once he
has gained entry to omas’s home, sweet talks and caresses omas’s wife
and encourages her to indulge his appetite for food and drink. Friar John
goes on to tell omas, who languishes sick, that John and his convent have
been praying both for his salvation (CT, ST:1784–6) and for his health (CT,
ST:1945–7). When omas complains that giving gold to friars of all kinds
has done him no good, Friar John assures him of the value of his personal care
(and the remedy for his ills of giving to the convent’s building fund):
What nedeth yow diverse freres seche?
What nedeth hym that hath a part leche [healer]
To sechen othere leches in the toun? (CT, ST:1955–7)
Friar John then preaches omas a learned and hypocritical sermon on anger
as a deadly sin, only to be infuriated himself when omas’s donation to Friar
John to share with his convent turns out to be a fart.9 e Summoner’s Tale
7
R. Hanna, e Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman. Volume 2, C passūs 5-9, B passūs
5-7, A passūs 5-8 (Philadelphia, 2017), p. 107.
8
As translated in e Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford, 2008),
‘Romaunt of the Rose’, ll. 6135–7292. References to Chaucer will be keyed to this
edition. See G. Geltner, ‘‘Faux Semblants’: Antifraternalism Reconsidered in Jean
de Meun and Chaucer’, Studies in Philology 101 (2004), 357–80.
9
D. Aers, Beyond Reformation?: An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and
the End of Constantinian Christianity (Notre Dame, 2015), p. 117, remarks that
Friar John gropes both omas’s conscience and his anus in search of a reward
(Riverside Chaucer, p. 134).
198 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
blurs the boundary between sickness and sin, healing and salvation, with Friar
John satirised as false healer and confessor, as well as glutton and lecher.
10
e sudden eorescence of these literary satires on friars and their creeping
into homes had an immediate historical context in the anti-mendicant reaction
in England. e secular clergy, particularly parish priests in local churches, had
found themselves competing for donations and burial fees with the mendicant
orders and resented the apparently easy-going and self-serving penitential
practices of the friars as confessors. ese resentments were expressed in
writings like the Memoriale presbiterorum, probably the work of William
Doune, a cleric in the circle of Bishop John Grandisson of Exeter, writing
between 1337 and 1344.11 His attack on the friars as over-lenient confessors
predates the public preaching of Richard Fitzralph, archbishop of Armagh
(hence Armachanus), against the friars in London in the 1350s, but shares the
same themes.12 No doubt such critiques, and in particular, the controversy that
ensued after Fitzralph preached his sermons at St Paul’s, would have been
well known to the poets, Chaucer, Langland and Gower. We can also see the
eects of this propaganda assault in a massive encyclopedia compiled by James
le Palmer, written between 1360 and 1375. e Omne bonum (Every good
thing) was profoundly interested in natural history and medicine, but thirteen
articles on various religious subjects display an obsessive hostility to the friars,
worthy of the most aggrieved member of the parish clergy. ere is also an
article in Omne bonum on the Fratres mendicantes (Begging friars), longer than
any other article besides that on Christ, which was written by James le Palmer
as a separate pamphlet. is is a scathing attack on friars, and in particular on
their unlawful interference in what should be the work of parish clergy. e
reason for its rst writing he does not make explicit, but it had presumably
10
Similarly, in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, Chaucer compares a friar to an incubus on
a woman who takes her honour: D. Yamamoto, ‘“Noon Oother Incubus but He”:
Lines 878–81 in the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’, Chaucer Review 28 (1994), 275–8.
11
M. J. Haren, Sin and Society in Fourteenth-Century England: A Study of the Memori-
ale Presbiterorum (Oxford, 2000).
12
K. Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar and Primate: Richard FitzRalph in Oxford,
Avignon and Armagh (Oxford, 1981); M. J. Haren, ‘Richard FitzRalph and the
Franciscans: Poverty, Privileges, Polemic, 1356–1359’, in e English Province of
the Franciscans (1224–c. 1350), ed. M. J. P. Robson (Leiden, 2017), pp. 380–404.
Monastic religious like Adam Easton and John Uthred of Bolton also resented and
distrusted the friars: see verses comparing Franciscans to the wizard, Simon Magus,
for their practice of burning herbs, in P. N. R. Zutshi, ‘Adam Easton’s Manuscripts’,
in Cardinal Adam Easton (c. 1330–1397): Monk, Scholar, eologian, Diplomat, ed.
M. Wendling (Amsterdam, 2020), pp. 207–23 (p. 220), and J. I. Catto, ‘A Radical
Preacher’s Handbook, c. 1383*’, EHR 115 (2000), 893–904.
Creeping into Homes 199
to do with an intent to make a learned contribution to the anti-mendicant
controversy stirred up by Fitzralph.
13
As well as making an appearance in the lengthy literary works of Chaucer,
Langland and Gower, the sexual aspect of friars ‘creeping into homes’ surfaces
in anonymous verses and squibs. In English verse of the fourteenth and
fteenth centuries, we discover that friars have sex with lay women or nuns,
or get women pregnant, usually under cover of providing spiritual or medical
assistance. In several examples, the verse pivots from Latin to Middle English,
presumably to register the ‘learning’ of the voracious friars: ‘Fratres cum knyvis
goth about and swivet mennis wyvis’ (Brothers with knives wander about and
have sex with men’s wives).14 Another example of the same kind mixing Latin
and English: ‘lat a reer of some ordour/tecum pernoctare/odur thi wyfe or thi
dougtour/hic vult violare’ (Let a friar of some order stay the night with you,
and he wants to violate your wife or your daughter).15 As Jill Mann remarks,
for English versiers in this vein, friars seem to have been viewed as the
equivalent of the travelling salesman in modern folklore and ction. Friars and
nuns became a favourite topos in songs of the late fteenth and throughout
the sixteenth century. A member of King’s College, Cambridge, composed
a carol on ‘creeping into the nunnery’ which survives as wastepaper from a
binding to a King’s College book. It begins
ere was a frier of order gray
Inducas [lead [us]]
Which loued a Nunne full meny a day
In temptacionibus. [into temptations]
is fryer was lusty proper and yong
Inducas [lead us]
He oered the Nunne to lerne her syng …
16
13
James le Palmer, Omne Bonum; Szittya, ‘Kicking’, pp. 159–75.
14
BL, MS Harley 3362 fol. 47r; cited in Riverside Chaucer, p. 808. See also Histori-
cal Poems of the XIVth and XVth centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins (New York, 1959), p.
158, and Political Poems and Songs relating to English History, Composed during the
Period from the Accession of Edw. III to that of Ric. III, ed. T. Wright, 2 vols. (Lon-
don, 1859–61), I, pp. 264–8, for similar examples. A Latin couplet about women
who mourn one friar Andreas, who ‘stoned’ them during his life, is inscribed on
the outer cover of a manuscript of the religious works of John the Blind Audelay:
see H. Ryley, Re-Using Manuscripts in Late Medieval England: Repairing, Recycling,
Sharing (York, 2022), p. 106, Fig. 10.
15
Historical Poems, p. 165.
16
P. J. Croft, ‘e ‘Friar of Order Gray’ and the Nun’, e Review of English Studies
32 (1981), 1–16. See also S. Reynolds, ‘“Songes of the Frere and the Nunne”: An
200 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
Such sung versions of the friar and nun tales enjoyed a circulation that only
seems to have been enhanced by the coming of the Reformation. e friar’s
role as confessor of sins was his passport to the interior of the home or nunnery.
In William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the friar’s role is explored in
such a way as to blur the boundaries between the cure of souls and that of
bodies.17 Most often in the poem, friars appear as ‘faitours’, false beggars, and
are sometimes directly associated with the deadly sins like Envy, Wrath and
Sloth. eir advice when given to the dreamer of the poem is self-interested,
and they corrupt the giving of penance to the sinner with their mercenary
interest and their compliant attitude towards restitution (that is, payment for
sins ordered as a result of confession).18 But in the nal passus of the poem,
in which the clergy are called on by Conscience to help resist the attack of
Antichrist and the seven deadly sins on the body of the Church, the entry
of the friars proves critical to the collapse of resistance. It precipitates the
beginning of a new search for Piers Plowman, who in this passus is gured as
Christ’s representative on earth. It is important to examine the development of
the plot of this last passus in detail, as it goes to the heart of Langland’s analysis
of the role of friars in the contemporary church and their disastrous failing in
their role as healers. But before doing so, let us look closely at the friar not as
healer but as patient, when he is personied as one of the seven deadly sins
aicted by illness in passus 5 of the B version (passus 6 of the C version).
In the description of the ailments suered by Envye, Langland displays an
extraordinary depth of knowledge of dierent illnesses, their symptoms and
sequelae, suggesting a close acquaintance with contemporary medical texts.
Unrecorded Amorous Carol in a Cambridge Incunable’, Transactions of the Cam-
bridge Bibliographical Society 16 (2017), 297–307. e Latin words are, of course,
parodic of the Pater noster.
17
e overlap between spiritual guidance and regimens of health explored in Chapter
5 is of particular importance to Langland. See also R. Krug, ‘Piers Plowman and
the Secrets of Health’, e Chaucer Review 46 (2011), 166–81; and E. Salisbury,
Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry: Poets, Practitioners, and the Plague
(London, 2022), Chap. 2 ‘erapeutic Dialogue and Intersubjective Medicine in
Gower and Langland’.
18
R. Hanna and S. Wood, ‘Mendicants and the Economies of Piers Plowman’, in e
Friars in Medieval Britain: Proceedings of the 2007 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. N. J.
Rogers (Donington, 2010), pp. 218–38, show how penance is corrupted by friars
who are in the retinue of lords.
Creeping into Homes 201
e friar sick with envy
In the early stages of Piers Plowman, Langland’s focus is more on the health of
the individual body and soul than the institutional character of the Church. He
chooses to interrogate the relationship of sin with illness in the human body.
Here the healing potential of confession is broached as providing remedies
for both sin and bodily sickness.19 is is emphatically the case in passus 5 of
the B version (and passus 6 in the C version), in which the personications
of the seven deadly sins are each paraded and make their confession in turn.
Nicolette Zeeman describes these personications as the Sad Vices: sad
because, as they confess, their bodies respond to their sins with a strange
kind of natural subversion. Repeatedly, what might look at rst like purely
metaphorical sickness merges into and becomes a literal, physical evocation
of the sequelae of specic illnesses. e paradox of these confessions made by
the personied deadly sins is that in each case the personied sin confesses
that they have not previously taken the opportunity to make full confession
to a priest. Sin impacts directly on the body, which often physically suers as
a result. Failure to confess compounds that sin (an idea prevalent in pastoral
literature). Conversely, true penitence provides bodily relief and healing as well
as a spiritual cleansing from the consequences of sin.
is is seen most spectacularly in the case of Envye.21 In the B version,
Envye’s physical appearance and dress is described rst. e sleeves of his
coarse surcoat are those of a friar’s habit. Envye personied is thus at least part
friar. Envye is also displaying strongly marked physical signs of his condition:
20
He was as pale as a pelet, in the palsy he semed,
…
And as a leek that hadde yleye longe in the sonne
So loked he with lene chekes, lourynge foule.
His body was to-bollen for wrathe, that he boot his lippes (B.5.77, 81–3)
Envye’s pallor, paralysis or palsy, his shade of leek-green, emaciation, swelling
and susceptibility to anger are all related to his underlying bodily condition.
is condition is an excess of red choler in the gall-bladder, where in the
19
See also Chapter 5 for discussion of the relation of confession to healing.
20
N. Zeeman, e Arts of Disruption: Allegory and Piers Plowman (Oxford, 2020),
Chap. 8, ‘e Sad Vices’.
21
Langum, Medicine, has a valuable discussion of the physicality of Envye, pp. 106–
14 (Langland, pp. 112–14). See also V. Langum, ‘Medicine, Sin, and Passion in
Gower’, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 28 (2013), 117–30.
202 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
humoural system of medicine, red choler is stored after it has been generated
in the liver. ere is a verse couplet which circulated widely,
Cor cogitat pulmo loquitur fel commovet iram
Splen ridere facit cogit amare iecor
(the heart designs, the lung speaks, the gall-bladder moves to anger, the
spleen makes people laugh, the liver compels to love)
22
ese verses on the action of the principal organs inside the human thorax
were commented on by authorities on practical medicine well-known in
England, by Bernard de Gordon and John Gaddesden.23 As they explain, the
contents of the gall-bladder (Latin fel) stir up wrath, the most complexional of
the bodily signs on display in this Langland passage. It causes Envye to swell
up, ‘at al my body bolneth for bitter of my galle’ (B.5.118). He expresses
his wrath in words and deeds aimed at all those others whose good fortune
he resents. It is a surfeit of bile or red choler retained in the gall-bladder
that has unbalanced Envye’s complexion.24 However, there is an additional
medical scenario in which choler can become corrupted. is manifests itself
symptomatically as a leek-coloured green.25 is accounts for line 81 above
where Envye’s colour is compared to a leek left out in the sun.
Other signs are less easily assimilated to Langland’s central diagnosis of
the physical eect of gall or bile. e pallor and the palsy, for example, are
not readily accounted for if the gall-bladder is the source of the illness. It
may well be instead that the pallor (and emaciation) of envy is a recollection
22
L. orndike, ‘Unde Versus’, Traditio 11 (1955), 163–93 (p. 182). See also e Prose
Salernitan Questions, edited from a Bodleian manuscript (Auct. F.3.10): An Anonymous
Collection dealing with Science and Medicine Written by an Englishman c. 1200 With
an Appendix of Ten Related Collections, ed. B. Lawn (London, 1979), pp. 95–7.
23
Bernard de Gordon, Omnium aegritudinum a vertice ad calcem, opus praeclarissimum
quod Lilium medicinae appellatur, nunc denuo ab omnibus mendis, quibus scatebat,
repurgatum et septem particulis distributum (Paris, 1542), fol. 297v; John Gaddesden,
Rosa Anglica practica medicine a capite ad pedes (Pavia, 1492), fol. 93v.
24
Hanna, Penn Commentary, p. 98, cites the Franciscan sermon guide Fasciculus
Morum where envy is compared to jaundice arising from disordered heat of the
liver. But one of the causes of jaundice as stated, e.g. by Bernard de Gordon (lib. 6,
cap 6), is bad complexion of the gall-bladder – thus the unnatural heat of the liver
can be traced back to the complexional issues of the gall-bladder, as suggested here
by Langland.
25
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, lib. 4, cap. 10, describes choler as
manifesting in the patient by a green colour like the herb marrubium (horehound)
or porrus (leek); other medical authors like Bernard de Gordon and John Arderne
use the same terms.