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Creeping into Homes 203
of Ovid’s Metamorphoses rather than a medical source.26 However, palsy
or paralysis (B.5.77) was usually dened medically by loss of movement
or feeling in one-half of the body or in a particular limb (sometimes, but
less frequently, it can mean a visible tremor in the limbs or face, rather
more like modern palsy). Paralysis of the tongue accounted for inability to
speak. Paralysis was usually attributed in medical texts to viscous humours
clogging up or obstructing the exercise of the vegetative, sensitive or rational
powers. e miracle at Capernaum in which Christ heals the paralytic man
and tells him, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven’27 might well be at the forefront of
Langland’s mind here. Envye’s paralysis is to be understood allegorically as
an inability to seek forgiveness by confession (he does of course ‘confess’ this
inability – paradoxically, since true repentance would mean his hypocritical
personication would no longer exist).28 Envy and ill will are hard to digest,
and this accounts for Envye’s inability to eat as other men: ‘I myghte noght eat
many yeres as a man oughte’ (B.5.119). is metaphor is based medically on
an impairment of the rst digestion, that in the stomach. Pearsall’s edition of
the C text, which carries over the lines from B about failure to digest, suggests
that allegorically the inability to eat as other men amounts to ‘a kind of moral
constipation, which prevents him from taking communion properly’.
29
In the C version the cause of the swelling which made Envy wrathful is
located explicitly in the heart:
May no surge ne swete thinge aswage my swellynge
Ne derworth drynke dryue hit fro my herte (C.6.88–9)
Envye’s confession in C makes a connexion never made explicit in the B
version between the swelling caused by gall (B.5.83) and the heart ailments
which plague Haukyn the Actif Man (B.13.330–1, 334–42). Envye, we are
told, is gnawed within as if by a tailor’s shears (C.6.75), and this seems to recall
the eects of overproduction of bile as in the B version, although in B there is
no mention of acute pain. But the cause of this self-inicted condition is in C
attributed to black bile, rather than red choler, and this melancholy overcomes
him when he fails to gain the upper hand over others (C.6.78, B.13.334). But
the medical consequences of this excess of melancholy are quite dierent from
those mentioned in B.5:
26
As suggested by e Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman in ree Parallel
Texts, ed. W. W. Skeat, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1886), I, p. 105, referring to Ovid Metamor-
phoses bk ii, l.775: Pallor in ore sedet; macies in corpore toto.
27
Matthew 9. 1–8; Mark 2. 1–12; and Luke 5. 17–26.
28
Zeeman, Disruption, p. 315.
29
Piers Plowman, ed. Pearsall, p. 124, commenting on C.6.86–7.
204 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
And whan I may noght have the maistrie, swich malencolie I take
at I cacch the crampe, the cardiacle som tyme,
Or an ague in swich an angre, and som tyme a fevere (B.13.334–6)
Firstly, there is a cramp (‘the Crompe’ in C), a violent and involuntary
contraction of the sinews, usually a consequence of the brain being troubled by
noisome humours (presumably in this case melancholy). Secondly, sometimes
Envye is aicted by cardiacle, which is pain and/or palpitation or tremor in the
heart, the cause being a complexion unbalanced by the excess of melancholy.30
e next line introduces two more consequences: ague and fever.
Ague is dened as an acute fever of sudden onset and often great violence.
A quartan ague (attacking every third day) is one specically attributed to the
humour melancholy putrefying. is may be what Langland has in mind here. A
distinct second kind of fever is mentioned too. Fever tout court is simply dened
as an unnatural heat of the body and if it lasted a year, as Envye says here, it
should be reckoned a continuous fever. ese are usually attributed to humours
putrefying inside blood vessels. e humour choler putrefying in blood vessels
other than those of major organs (stomach, heart, liver, lungs) was thought to
cause continuous tertian (that is an attack every second day) fever. All these
eects on Envye’s health can be related back to the excess of melancholy by a
reader with as good a grasp of practical medicine as that of Langland.
31
Envye’s confession also embraces the remedies he has tried for his
condition (both the illnesses of B and C) and his experience of physic of
dierent kinds. Envye asks if the swelling of the heart caused by his gallbladder illness (B.5.121) might be treated by contraries, that is to say to try
sugar and sweet things to assuage the bitterness of the gall.32 He also raises
the question of trying diapenidion, a compound prepared by apothecaries
and bought ‘across the counter’. It is an electuary (a paste mixed with honey
or syrup) containing barley sugar (sugar boiled in decoction of barley). It is
therefore also sweet but classed ocially as a remedy whose quality is cold. In
medical sources, diapenidion is usually prescribed as a treatment for a cough
or lung complaints.33 Envye hopes that this remedy might drive swelling from
his heart, probably because he knows that things that work on the lungs will
also work on the heart, as is assumed in medical practica texts like those of
Bernard de Gordon and John Gaddesden. ese treatments are all credible
30
Norri, Dictionary, s.v. Cramp, Cardiacle.
31
Norri, Dictionary, s.v. Ague, Fever.
32
Hanna, Penn Commentary, p. 99. Following Skeat’s commentary Hanna draws at-
tention to the interrogatory character of these lines.
33
Norri, Dictionary, s.v. Diapenidion.
Creeping into Homes 205
responses to Envye’s condition in B, judging by the prescriptions formulated
in practical medicine texts. Envye also asks about spiritual remedies – would
shrift or shame work? Finally he asks, failing all else, must someone scrape out
my maw (‘whoso shrape my mawe?’ B.5.123). One medical meaning of maw
suggests this would involve scouring the internal cavity where organs like the
liver, gall-bladder and stomach are, rather than the stomach alone. But it is
34
more likely that this means scraping out the mouth.
is is still a drastic
measure, but such a desperate solution demonstrates Envye’s despair of a cure.
Only true contrition and God’s mercy could salve his soul (and thus his body
too) as his confessor Repentaunce tells Envye in response (B.5.124–5).
e C version includes the lines taken from B where Envye asks about
possible remedies for Envye’s internal condition (C.6.87–90), though
substituting a ‘derworth drink’ for diapenidion. e drink is quite possibly
intended as a reference to the precious waters made by distillation that had
become so fashionable in the fourteenth century as cure-alls, possibly even
to the quintessence made by multiple distillations of wine.35 e eect is to
keep up with medical fashion, but also to suggest a remedy that would pack
more of a punch than diapenidion, and one that works not by contrary (sweet
vs bitter) but by its specic form. Yet the most striking innovation of C is to
take over from the Haukyn the Actif Man passage in B.13. 330–1, 334–42
the ‘alternative’ to physic, or indeed to the ‘Lechecraft of oure lord’.36 at is
to say, in the C version (and in the Haukyn passage in B.13), Envye turns to
a witch or a cobbler of Southwark who peddles charms, instead of to physic
(C.6.81–5). Charms for fevers are commonly found in remedy books and even
in authoritative texts like those by Gilbertus Anglicus, John Gaddesden or
the surgery of John Arderne.37 ey came under the condemnation of the
Church only when they were used by empirics, as by the witch at Shoreditch,
Dame Emma, or by the cobbler of Southwark (B.13.340), not when they were
34
K. L. Walter, Middle English Mouths: Late Medieval Medical, Religious and Literary
Traditions (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 168–9, argues that what is meant here is a scrap-
ing out of the mouth (maw), a surgical procedure often used to treat dental and
mouth complaints, as Envye sins by use of insults and backbiting directed at others.
It is certainly true that scraping out the interior of the body would exceed the am-
bitions of a contemporary surgeon. See Norri, Dictionary, s.v. Maw, for surgery on
the guts.
35
See Chapter 4 on distillation and quintessence.
36
is is commonly assumed to mean spiritual medicine as opposed to physic. But
it could mean Lechecraft (medicine) from our Lord, i.e. medicines given by God
through nature to man for his relief.
37
See L. T. Olsan, ‘Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical eory and Practice’,
Social History of Medicine 16 (2003), 343–66.
206 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
prescribed by medical authority. Giving, as it were, the names and addresses of
these empirics suggests that Langland may have had real individuals in mind.
At the least, he wished to draw attention to the role of charms in healing.
Envye reports ‘But thorw a charme hadde Y chaunce and my chef hele’
(C.6.85), which suggests he had more faith in the powers of these empirics to
give relief than in rational medicine or penitence.
e detailed analysis of sicknesses and cures presented in Langland’s
discussion of Envye’s confession reveals a thorough acquaintance with the
discussion of practical medicine by the authors on this subject best known in
late medieval England. In the later C version of the text, Langland modied
his interpretation of Envye’s illness to incorporate a new range of signs,
implicating the humour melancholy and the heart as its associated organ,
which in the B version had been used to characterise Haukyn the Actif Man.
ese additions do not replace the earlier diagnosis featuring choler and the
gall-bladder but oer an alternative in the C version. As a Sad Vice, Envye
suers these complex ailments in his body as well as personifying one of the
deadly sins. As a friar who is also a confessor it turns out that the healer is
himself in desperate need of healing.
e friar as failed healer
In the nal passus of Piers Plowman, Langland gives the friars a central role
as potential salvers or healers of the English church. Immediately before the
friars are summoned by Conscience to the church’s defence in this passus, the
dreamer has seen Kynde (Nature personied) unleash a horrifying ood of
diseases on humanity through the inuence of the planets:
…feveres and uxes,
Coughes and cardiacles, crampes and toothaches
Rewmes and radegundes and roynouse Scalles
Biles and bocches and brennyng agues,
Frenesies and foule yveles …
38
Presumably, Langland is here reminding his readers of the scourge of the
Black Death as well as the specicity of human illnesses, delivered in the
form of an alliterative serial catalogue.39 Most of those exposed to illness are
38
B.20.81–5. Quoted in R. Gasse, ‘e Practice of Medicine in “Piers Plowman’”, e
Chaucer Review 39 (2004), 177–97 (p. 178).
39
ey are the ‘foragers’ of Nature, and perhaps harbingers of terrifying outcomes
like age and death (as suggested to me by an anonymous referee). See Barney, Penn
Commentary, p. 210.
Creeping into Homes 207
killed by this onslaught; the survivors are seized by panic and, pursuing bodily
relief, pay the character of Physic great sums for a useless cure (C.22.169–74).
However, Physic himself is aicted with paralysis by Elde (old age) and dies
within three days.40 e narrator Wille, in a sidebar passage, is aected with all
the ills of old age by Elde, losing his hair and his sexual potency. He is ready
to embrace death, but Kynde suggests that this state of bodily depletion and
extreme incapacity might be redeemed by his taking the opportunity to learn
love or charity, and that his bodily wants will somehow be taken care of in
this case. e signicance of this passage lies in the way in which the bodily
disposition which comes with old age may aect the passions. Langland’s
insight is informed by the medical doctrine which gives bodily complexions,
and the drying out of the body’s radical moisture, controlling inuence over
the passions – an insight held in tension with Langland’s volitional ethics of
salvation.41 With this hope armed, Kynde advises the narrator (and all) to
take refuge in the barn or castle of Unite, where Conscience calls on Clergy to
come to their aid in resisting the siege of Antichrist and the seven deadly sins.
e friars heed this call to help but most are seduced by Envy into pursuing
learning in the schools (as we saw in the previous section), rather than giving
succour to the wounded. Conscience then calls on a ‘leche’ (healer) to treat the
wounds of sin, which he does with a sharp salve. But some then ask for softer
treatments from a physician and surgeon, who turns out to be Friar Flatterer.
He presents himself at the gate of Unite, where the gatekeeper Peace asks
his name. e friar is identied by his companion (‘felawe’ or socius) as Sire
Penetrans Domos (creeping into homes), and Peace at rst refuses him entrance,
recalling that she had met the friar while he was acting as a healer at court:
…at a court there I dwelde,
And was my lordes leche – and my ladies bothe.
And at the laste this lymytour, tho my lord was oute,
He salvede so oure wommen til some were with childe (B.20.345–8)
40
B. 20.176–7. John Trevisa’s 1398 translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De propri-
etatibus rerum describes the eect of universal paralysis on the old in these terms:
Vniuersele palsye in alle men & namliche in olde men is vnnes curable, i.e. hardly
curable. Quoted in Middle English Dictionary, s.v Palesi.
41
Barney, Penn Commentary, p. 211, points to the way in which the bodily aictions
of old age may yield an escape from some kinds of sin (i.e. lust) and opportunity for
spiritual development. is argument is further developed in Zeeman, Disruption,
chap. 7 ‘Natural Entropy and Piers Plowman’. On age and radical moisture or ‘nat-
ural humiditye’, see, for example, Everest, ‘On Tarrying’, pp. 133–247.
Fig. . e friar ‘Sire Penetrans-domos’, from William Langland, Piers Plowman.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce , fol. v. Ireland, . He holds up a urine
glass with blue-grey contents. Above it the word ‘ypocrysy’ is prominent in the text.
Creeping into Homes 209
us all the tropes of sexual exploitation implicit in his name are borne out by
the friar’s previous actions as reported by Peace. Despite this, Hende-Speche
(good manners) prevails over Peace’s objections and the friar is admitted, since
he has a letter from a lord and a bishop’s licence.42 Conscience asks him to treat
Contricion, who is suering from the painful dressings to his wounds: Sire
Penetrans Domos begins by ‘groping’ Contrition (B.20.364)43 and then gives
him a (lenitive) plaster and prays for him, in return for payment of ‘a little
silver’. e eect is to make Contrition forget to be contrite, so that his plaster
or penance has the opposite eect to that it should. As Peace says
e frere with his phisyk this folk hath enchaunted
And plastred hem so esily [hii] dred no synne! (B.20.379–80)
Or in the C version:
e frere with his syk this folk hath enchaunted
And doth men drynke dwale, that they drat no synne (C.22.368–9)
‘Dwale’ is a drink that makes the patient insensible of pain, often used by
surgeons.
44
Immediately after these lines Conscience abandons the defence of
Unite and sets o as a pilgrim to look for Piers Plowman:
To seken Piers the Plowman, that Pryde myghte destruye,
And that freres hadde a fyndyng, that for nede atteren’ (B 20.383–4)
Conscience’s nal objective is to bring it about that friars have provision of
necessaries, so that they do not atter out of need. With an invocation of the
help of the Trinity in this quest, the poem ends.
As Rosanne Gasse has observed, Langland does not simply employ medical
metaphors to convey a spiritual crisis in the Church and the corruption of the
salvic power of true penitence.45 ere is no clear boundary between salving
the soul and the body set by Langland in Piers Plowman. Langland deals in
42
Hanna and Wood, ‘Mendicants’, pp. 226–8. Like Bel Accueil (Fair Welcome) in
Roman de la Rose, Hende-Speche is not as aware as he should be of the threat posed
here.
43
For Friar John’s similar ‘groping’, see above p. 197. Walter, Mouths, pp. 36–40
characterises ‘groping’ as touch, immediate and earthy, and foundational, but also
spiritual, following Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum. See also C.
Burnett, ‘e Superiority of Taste’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54
(1991), 230–8.
44
L. E. Voigts and R. P. Hudson, ‘A drynke þat men callen dwale to make a man to
slepe whyle men kerven him’, in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture,
ed. S. Campbell, B. Hall and D. Klausner (London, 1992), pp. 34–56.
45
Gasse, ‘Practice’, pp. 177–8.
210 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
terms of a body-soul composite that is characteristic of the human (not a binary
division of material vs immaterial), and each part of the composite considered
singly directly aects the other.46 e medical detail in the poem about ailments,
wounds, salves and plasters is extraordinary in its quantity and its specicity,
and the friar is identied as both physician and surgeon (B.20.316). In the only
illustrated copy of Piers Plowman (Bodl., MS Douce 104, dated to 1427), the
nal image on fol. 111v is of the friar, dressed in a brown habit and holding
up an urine glass, in the standard posture for a physician.47 e urine glass is in
the margin next to the line ‘Y am a surgien’, said the frere, ‘and salves can make’
(C.22.336). e urine in the glass is clearly dark blue in colour, that is to say
‘kyanos’ in terms of the standard twenty colours (like a good dark wine, as it is
usually captioned). is colour may indicate ‘a goute, a crampe in the veyne of
the hert, [or] a postume in the stomach’.
48
e sacraments of baptism, penance and Eucharist administered by the
priesthood (including the friars) are believed in Langland’s poem to have
direct eects on the health of the body as well as the soul. A good conscience
is clearly established as the basis of good health overall. Judged by these
standards, Sire Penetrans Domos turns out to be a poor healer, as well as a
poor confessor, undone by his mercenary peddling of remedies which are too
easy on the patient.49 But the secular physician to whom the people turn after
they are aicted with all the illnesses that Kynde (Nature) sends through
the agency of the planets is given no credit by Langland either. His reliance
on his medicines is just as mercenary as that of the friar, and, as a layman
without resort to the sacraments, he fails to attend to the soul’s wounds, and
so he cannot heal the bodies of his patients. e secular physician’s own nal
paralysis or palsy brought on by Elde (old age) is both a visitation on his
presumption as a healer and a damning verdict on the impotence of a purely
46
Walter, Mouths, p. 41.
47
Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 104, ed. D. Pears-
all and K. L. Scott (Cambridge, 1992); K. L. Scott, ‘e Illustrations of Piers Plow-
man in Bodleian Library MS Douce 104’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 4 (1990),
1–86; K. Kerby-Fulton and D. L. Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader:
e Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman (Minneapolis, 1999).
48
Piers Plowman, ed. Pearsall and Scott, p. lxxx. e caption supplied is from the
uroscopy diagram in BL, MS Sloane 7, fol. 59r.
49
Received medical wisdom was that, as the surgeon John Arderne put it, ‘Paynful
things passeþ sone when at the next followeþ glorious helthe’, i.e. no gain with-
out pain: Treatises of Fistula in Ano, Haemorrhoids, and Clysters; From an Early
Fifteenth Century Manuscript Translation, ed. D’A. Power, EETS OS 139 (Lon-
don, 1910), p. 22.
Creeping into Homes 211
secular kind of healing. Expensive drugs and ointments alone have no power
to stave o Elde or Death.
Langland’s nal image of Sire Penetrans Domos as the attering healer and
surgeon who gains entry to the barn of Unite, and corrupts instead of heals the
gathered church within, is exceptionally dark and threatens the future of the
‘Constantinian church’ in England.50 It is all the more potent for being placed at
the climax of this long dialectical poem. Yet it is also signicant that Langland
could envisage the gure of the friar as a potential source of healing, spiritual
and physical, in the rst place. One interpretation of the poem has insisted
that Langland’s object is to call the Franciscan order to reform and to reassert
a vision of true Christian poverty without exertion of authority or dominium.
It is a reminder of the urgency of the pursuit of apostolic perfection.51 Without
going so far as this, we can recognise that the failure of Friar Flatterer to save
the beleaguered English church in Piers Plowman is also an acknowledgement
of potential. Langland thought that the mendicants were the last best hope
of salvation and healing for the gathered church if they could somehow get ‘a
fyndyng’ that would relieve them of the need to atter.
After Piers Plowman
By the second half of the fourteenth century, the friars were very much a
part of the clerical landscape in England. eir convents were prominent
buildings in towns – and sometimes the focus of negative comment for their
magnicence. Despite the ravages of the Black Death, the numbers of friars
recovered quite quickly, even if the age of continuous expansion was over.
e friars were not begging for their bread any longer, so much as seeking
to attract the donations and bequests of lay citizens. ese citizens wanted
them to act as confessors, or to grant lay fraternity, or to allow burial within
the precincts of a convent or to say masses for the souls of the dead. It is not
surprising that regular monastics and parish clergy resented the competition
for lay patronage, though there were also many examples of collaboration
and friendliness between friars and other clergy, as well as rivalry.52 Anti-
50
For the Constantinian church, see Aers, Beyond Reformation?.
51
L. M. Clopper, ‘Songes of Rechelesnesse’: Langland and the Franciscans (Ann Arbor,
1997). See, however, the critique of this view in D. Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making
Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, 2004), chap. 5, ‘e
Sign of Poverty’.
52
A. L. Williams, ‘Relations between the Mendicant Friars and the Regular Clergy
in England in the Later Fourteenth Century’, Annuale Medievale 1 (1960), 22–95;
R. N. Swanson, ‘e ‘Mendicant Problem’ in the Later Middle Ages’, Studies in
212 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
fraternalism gained purchase in England in a way which focussed less on
issues of ecclesiology or conicts over rights and privileges than on the failure
of friars to live up to their professed ideals, and on exploitation of access to
the homes of those who sought confessors and healers.
Implicit in the representations of friars in literary works and popular
songs alike is ‘Physician, heal thyself ’ or as the Vulgate puts it: Medice, cura
te ipsum (Luke 4:23). e friar must confess his own sins before he hears the
confession of others, and must take his own medicine before he ministers to
lay folk. As we have seen, this imperative is not simply a matter of slipping
into metaphorical medical language. e connection between body and soul
was an active two-way ow, whereby health and salvation, sickness and sin,
were mutually causative. William Langland in Piers Plowman used allegory
to articulate these issues in a highly sophisticated way, both at the level of the
individual and at the level of the gathered English church. e gure of the
friar was central to Langland’s poem because he was emblematic of sickness
and healing, sin and salvation, at both levels. e hypocrisy attending friars
who did not live up to their vocation, but called on others to repent, who
pretended to heal but prescribed only medicines that indulged the weaknesses
of their patients, is at the heart of Piers Plowman.
53
Poems and prose written in what has been called ‘the Langland tradition’,
referencing the character of Piers Plowman, do not attempt to explore these
issues of healing and salvation with comparable subtlety. ey are mostly
anti-fraternal satires, using Piers or a similar gure as spokesman: Piers the
Ploughman’s Crede and Jack Upland are the best-known examples. In Piers
the Ploughman’s Crede, each mendicant order attacks the others in turn. e
corruption of friar confessors indulging lords and ladies who can pay well is
one of the questions posed by Jack Upland:
What power have ye to asoile lordis and ladies that ye ben confessouris
to ofsynnes that thei leven not, as pilinge of her tenauntis and lyvinge in
leccherie and glotonye and othere heed synnes, of whiche thei cecen not but
ben counfortid bi youre suraunce? (ll. 307–10)
Church History. Subsidia 11 (1999), 217–38; J. Greatrex, ‘Monks and Mendicants in
English Cathedral Cities: Signs of a Mutual Benet Society?’, in e Friar in Me-
dieval Britain: Proceedings of the 2007 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. N. Rogers (Don-
ington, 2010), pp. 97–106; more generally, W. A. Pantin, e English Church in the
Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1955) has still not been replaced.
53
Hypocrisy of the friars is explored by Zeeman, Arts of Disruption, pp. 112–17.
54
Six Ecclesiastical Satires, ed. J. M. Dean (Kalamazoo, 1992).
54