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Creeping into Homes 213
Friar Daw’s Reply, ostensibly the work of a Dominican, is a point by point
rebuttal of the criticisms of the friars voiced by Jack Upland. e polemical
character of these vernacular poems and prose is reminiscent of the sort of
doctrinal disputes between Wyclites and orthodox academics that took place
in Oxford and London (the Wyclites were just as hostile to friars as Richard
Fitzralph, the archbishop of Armagh, had been). Fiona Somerset has argued
that the Upland series might well have originated in exactly that scholastic
milieu and points out that William Woodford OFM took the trouble to
respond directly to the questions raised by Jack Upland, showing that such
vernacular works were read and taken seriously in academic circles. What is
more, many of Woodford’s arguments are similar to those addressed by the
Carmelite Richard Maidstone to one John Ashwardby, supposedly a Wyclite,
who delivered vernacular sermons against the friars in the mid-1380s.
55
ese debates are some distance removed in tone and subject from
anonymous verses about the doings of friars and nuns, mentioned at the
beginning of this chapter, as well as from Langland’s allegorical exploration of
the friars, with reference to salvation and healing. All these forms of writing
are linked together, however, by worries over how the friars exploited their
special access to confessants and patients in the household, so characteristic of
this late medieval period.
Conclusion: hypocrisy and healing
English friars were able to access the household to an extent other clergy
could not. eir mission to confess and to heal, whether serving the nobility as
retainers or paying calls on humbler establishments, provided opportunities to
‘creep into homes’ which aroused suspicion and envy. eir critics, whether other
clergy or laymen, suspected these opportunities were exploited for nancial
or sexual prot. Above all, it was the friars’ hypocrisy that came under attack.
e sins the friars identied in their confessants were but a pretext for them
55
D. Lawton, ‘Lollardy and the Piers Plowman Tradition’, Modern Language Review
76 (1981), 780–93; C. Von Nolcken, ‘Piers Plowman, the Wyclites, and Pierce
the Plowman’s Creed’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988), 71–102; e Piers
Plowman Tradition, ed. H. Barr (London, 1993); E. Doyle, ‘William Woodford,
O.F.M. (c. 1330–1400): His Life and Works, Together with a Study and Edition
of his “Responsiones contra Wiclevum et Lollardos”’, Franciscan Studies 43 (1983),
17–187; F. Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval Eng-
land (Cambridge, 1998), Chap. 5; K. Ghosh, e Wyclite Heresy: Authority and the
Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge, 2002). On Richard Maidstone OC, see ‘e
Debate between Maidstone and Ashwardby’, ed. V. Edden, Carmelus 34 (1987),
113–34, and Chapter 5 above.
214 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
to indulge their own greed and sexual opportunism. Criticism of the friars in
contemporary literary sources and popular song might be ribald and jocular, or
satirical, or denunciatory, but it came back always to the charge of hypocrisy. e
splendour of the churches of the friars, the large footprint of the friaries within
English towns, and close relations of friars with the powerful, served only to
emphasise the contrast between the foundational ideology of mendicancy and
the protable realities of the friars’ transactions with their lay clients.
is chapter has also made a case study of two aspects of the treatment of
friars in Piers Plowman by William Langland. e rst deals with the friar
as patient. Langland’s poem is exceptional in the depth of its exploration of
the physical and spiritual sickness of the emblematic friar, its command of
the diagnostic language of contemporary medicine and its attention to the
predicament of the confessor who cannot heal himself because he is unable
to confess his own sins. e second focusses on the friar as healer. At the
climax of the poem, Langland identies ‘Friar Flatterer’ (a false healer in the
literal sense) as the agent who betrays the unity and safety of the English
Church. At the same time, Langland suggests that if mendicant friars could
only be relieved of the need to prot from their confessants, and consequently
to atter them, the central failure at the heart of their healing mission to the
laity might be removed. e medicine of the friars is fully realised as a central
part of an allegory of the predicament of the English church.
7
e Legacy of Friars’ Medicine
hat legacy did the medicine of the friars leave in England? e
W
three centuries after the 1220s in which the friars and their houses were an
integral part of the civic landscape in England. is disruption in which the
personnel were dispersed, the remaining possessions of the friars seized and
the very buildings taken over by private individuals or pulled down for stone
to build elsewhere was catastrophic and nal. e libraries of books and
the records kept in the muniments of the friaries were scattered, and only a
few books remain testifying to their previous ownership by friars.1 Attempts
under Queen Mary I to re-found friaries as part of the restoration of the
Catholic faith came to nought. Of monastic foundations, those medieval
hospitals which had developed a medical role were more likely to survive
than other kinds of house (for example, St Bartholomew’s Hospital in
London). e inrmaries of the friars, however, were not spared. It might
appear at rst sight then that the medicine of the friars was swept away
with the rest. But this is not the whole picture. Some medical manuscripts
compiled and owned by friars did survive and found new secular users, even
after the advance of print technology had seemed to make manuscripts
themselves redundant. Print in fact also helped the medicine of the friars by
giving widespread circulation to texts which might otherwise have been lost.
In this way, it enabled access for readers who would never have been able to
read them in the heyday of the friars.
the survival of signicant medical texts and manuscripts in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. e works of Roger Bacon and Henry
Daniel found in manuscripts were prized by collectors both before and
after the dissolution of the friaries. Most of these texts travelled not in
the guise of historical relics of earlier ages but were valued for practical
purposes and repackaged in print, as if they were the work of contemporary
dissolution of the friars’ houses in 1537–8 marks an end to the
is chapter explores the legacy of the friars in medicine. It considers
1
R. Sharpe, ‘Dissolution and Dispersion in Sixteenth-Century England: Under-
standing the Remains’, in How the Secularization of Religious Houses Transformed the
Libraries of Europe, 16th–19th Centuries (Turnhout, 2022), pp. 39–66.
216 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
secular authorities. e new medium of print made it possible for some
texts by friars to nd new readerships, as happened in the case of omas
Multon’s is is the myrour or glasse of helthe and Bartholomaeus Anglicus,
On the Properties of ings. is chapter also explores how a purchaser of
one of the surviving manuscripts of the Tabula medicine in Oxford in 1574,
Simon Forman, made friars’ medicine central to his medical practice. He
did not acknowledge or even know that this was the case. e manuscript
in question was cited against him in attempts by the College of Physicians
of London to drive Forman out of practice, though again in total ignorance
of its origin. rough Forman’s personal charisma as a healer and through
the detailed casebooks he kept of his practice, he in turn inuenced the
medical practice of the Anglican priest Richard Napier. Between the two
of them, they treated and documented thousands of cases in late sixteenthand early seventeenth-century England, as has been revealed by the work
of the Casebooks project.2 eir religion was not that of the friars, but their
medicine contained much that would have seemed familiar to friars in the
elds of astrology, alchemy and medical experimenta. Paradoxically it may be
that it is through the surviving casebooks of Forman and Napier that we can
best understand the kind of encounter between healer and patient that was
characteristic of the friars and their clients.
But before getting to these questions of survival of ideas and practices
into a post-mendicant era, it will be illuminating to take account of what
was happening to friars’ medicine in England in the last century before the
Reformation. We have already seen in the case of Eryk de Vedica (1477) in
Chapter 1 that the purchase of medical services from friars could be licensed,
and that a friary might go to law to claim fees owed. e developments I focus
on in this chapter can be accounted for under two rubrics, both concerned
with the spreading inuence of friars’ medicine. First, we need to consider the
development in the fteenth century of an exchange of information between
the friars and university practitioners of medicine. e Franciscans began to
record the cures of well-known secular physicians in their own compilation, the
Tabula medicine. Reciprocally, some of the most prestigious English doctors at
court, trained at English and Italian universities, can be shown to have adapted
the medicine of the friars for their own use in practice. Secondly, we need to
consider the role of the friars in bringing medicine to a new lay readership. By
extending their commitment to charitable translation of Latin medicine into
English, and by providing gentry households with medical vade-mecums, the
2
e Casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a Digital Edition,
ed. L. Kassell, M. Hawkins, R. Ralley, J. Young, J. Edge, J. Y. Martin-Portugues and
N. Kaoukji, https://casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk/, accessed 19 April 2023.
The Legacy of Friars’ Medicine 217
friars cultivated readers outside their own convents. is second development
was given a sharper focus by the recurrent challenge of epidemic disease in the
fteenth century, primarily of bubonic plague and the sweating sickness. e
friars repurposed older plague texts to satisfy the urgent contemporary demand
for advice to lay households in time of pestilence. ese developments, allied
to print technology, ensured that friars’ medicine was already having an impact
outside the friaries in the years before the dissolution. In fact, the dissolution
does not mark a clean break in the history of friars’ medicine, as might at rst
have been expected.
Physicians and the Tabula medicine (1416–25)
As we saw in Chapter 1, there are many references in the Tabula medicine
to remedies proved by friars, mainly Franciscans but with a few Dominicans
too. ere are also remedies attributed to university physicians. Many of
these are not part of the original text but have been added in the spaces
deliberately left blank in the early manuscripts for just such additions. Yet
even in the original layer of the text, we meet with ‘magister John Malvern’,
credited with a remedy for pain in the back under the heading Dorsum.
Malvern, who died in 1422, was a successful royal physician based in London,
previously a chaplain of Balliol College, Oxford, and possibly MD as well
as a Doctor of eology.3 References to university-trained practitioners
become more frequent in the material added to the text of the Tabula
medicine. One manuscript, Cambridge, Jesus College, MS Q.G.12, has an
astrological nativity in the endpapers dated 1428, suggesting that it was an
early copy of the text. In the spaces between the original entries and in
the margins of the manuscript are many additional remedies, expanding the
original text considerably. Two prominent physicians are repeatedly named.
e rst is omas Duncan, who incepted in medicine in February 1429,
while a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Even before that, he was already
physician to Edmund Mortimer, 4th earl of March, who was retained at
court by both Henry IV and Henry V, and who died in Ireland in 1425. One
of several remedies credited to magister omas Duncan in the Jesus College
MS is a variant on the well-known laxative, the Pulvis Walteri.
e second physician whose name appears even more frequently than
Duncan’s attached to the added remedies is Gilbert Kymer. He became
4
3
C. Rawclie, ‘Malvern, John (d. 1422), physician’, ODNB, 23 September 2004, ac-
cessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17910; Talbot and Hammond, Medical Practitioners, pp. 166–7.
4
Talbot and Hammond, Medical Practitioners, pp. 340–1 (omas Duncan).
218 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
an Oxford MD about 1423, and it was as physician to Duke Humfrey of
Gloucester that he built up his long clerical career (he died in 1463 as dean
of Salisbury). In 1424, Kymer composed a regimen of health for Duke
Humfrey; other writings by him on alchemy seem to have been lost. His role
in alchemical research in response to the crisis in the health of King Henry
VI was addressed in Chapter 4. But his inuence was felt beyond the royal
court and the University of Oxford. Sometimes Kymer’s name appears in
the added remedies in the Jesus College manuscript of the Tabula medicine
as Gilbert Kymer, sometimes as G. K. or even as K., sometimes as the duke
of Gloucester’s physician. He is credited amongst many other things with a
powder for pestilence, and we are told that with ‘fetid pills’ he cured Duke
Humfrey of paralysis. Whoever added the remedies attributed to omas
Duncan and Gilbert Kymer in this manuscript was evidently familiar with
the kinds of physic practised at court in the second quarter of the fteenth
century and happy to credit these well-known physicians with successful
cures based on their own remedies.
5
Conversely, eminent English physicians of the fteenth century were
interested in the Tabula medicine, and the medicine of the friars began to
appear in their writings and practice. We know that physicians owned or had
access to copies of the Tabula medicine. Some blank folios used as endleaves
to an Italian manuscript of Galen, owned by Roger Marchall MD, one of the
richest London physicians, were used by him to copy three entries from the
Tabula medicine. is extract is now part of Cambridge, Gonville & Caius,
MS 98/50.6 Just as in the original text, Marchall left spaces for later additions.
Another Tabula medicine manuscript seems to have been owned at one time by
the Oxford physician John Cokkys, whose name is interpolated at two points
in the manuscript (one of them a remedy for jaundice (Ictericia)).7 A century
5
P. M. Jones, ‘Mediating Collective Experience: The Tabula Medicine (1416–
1425) as a Handbook for Medical Practice’, in Between Text and Patient: The
Medical Enterprise in Medieval & Early Modern Europe, Micrologus’ Library
39, ed. F. E. Glaze and B. K. Nance (Florence, 2011), pp. 279–307 (pp. 287–
8); F. M. Getz, ‘Kymer, Gilbert (d. 1463), Dean of Salisbury and Physician’,
ODNB, 23 September 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/
ref:odnb/15820.
6
For Marchall as owner and annotator of a wealth of medical manuscripts, see
L. E. Voigts, ‘A Doctor and His Books: e Manuscripts of Roger Marchall
(d.1477)’, in New Science out of Old Books. Studies in Manuscripts and Early Print-
ed Books in Honour of A.I. Doyle, ed. R. Beadle and A. J. Piper (Aldershot, 1995),
pp. 249–314.
7
P. M. Jones, ‘Cokkys, John (d. 1475), Medical Practitioner’, ODNB, 23 September
2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/45761; Talbot and
The Legacy of Friars’ Medicine 219
later, this same manuscript was bought by the astrologer physician Simon
Forman. A third manuscript, BL, MS Sloane 403, inserts many remedies
attributed to William Hatteclye, MD, diplomat and royal physician to both
Henry VI and Edward IV, who died in 1480.8 Clearly this Tabula medicine
text was circulating amongst a cohort of physicians, educated at Oxford
and Cambridge, and employed at court or by noble householders. For the
physicians it was an accessible source of proven remedies to which their own
favourite treatments could be added.
e best example of the way in which the Tabula medicine became a
source of medical knowledge and inspiration to practice for physicians is
aorded by John Argentine or Argentein (c. 1443–1508), a royal doctor in
the reigns of Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII, who ended his career
as provost of King’s College, Cambridge. He began his medical studies as
a fellow of King’s College, but later studied in Ferrara in 1473–6, where
his main source of medical information seems to have been the Franciscan
convent there. He copied extracts from the Tabula medicine into his personal
notebook (now Bodl., MS Ashmole 1437) around 1476–7. He began this
book by copying out long extracts from pseudo-Lull De secretis nature (see
Chapter 4, pp. 135–6), a foundational work on the distilling of quintessences
for medicinal purposes. He continued by going through the Tabula medicine
systematically extracting the remedies that interested him. He copied the
illness headings from Tabula medicine on separate pages of his own book and
below them copied selected remedies from the text. For instance, under the
heading Vulnus (wound), Argentine copied out Friar Robert Winstanton’s
long recipe for the distillation of human blood to be used as a healing agent.
In the space left on each page, he added remedies of his own or derived
from other sources, very much in the spirit of the original Tabula medicine
manuscripts. e notebook would have provided remedies he could use for
his own practice. He may well have treated Prince Arthur (1486–1502),
eldest son of Henry VII, who was Argentine’s patient until his early death,
with remedies from taken from this notebook (and thus ultimately from
the Tabula medicine). Amongst his other manuscripts, Argentine also kept
a book of astronomy to which he added his own astrological notes, now
Gloucester Cathedral Library, MS 21. It seems that Argentine’s medical
practice was heavily inuenced by his astrological and alchemical interests,
Hammond, Medical Practitioners, pp. 134–6.
8
R. Horrox, ‘Hatteclye, William (d. 1480), Physician and Diplomat’, ODNB, 23
September 2004, accessed 14 April 2023; https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/12603;
Talbot and Hammond, Medical Practitioners, pp. 398–9.
220 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
and both these interests were stimulated by his contact with friars in Italy, as
much by his teacher at King’s College, William Hatteclye.
9
At a humbler level, there is evidence that the Tabula medicine was known
to the West Country healer omas Fayreford. Fayreford kept a medical
commonplace book, organised separately under medical and surgical
headings, very much like Argentein’s, though not so closely modelled on the
alphabetical order of illnesses as the Tabula medicine and Argentein’s book.
Under one heading Pedes (feet), Fayreford does make explicit reference to the
Tabula medicine, showing that it was one of his many sources for remedies.
He attributes the text of the Tabula medicine to the Franciscans. At another
place Fayreford says that an ointment for ssures in hands and feet, which he
calls ‘a better remedy’, comes from a text by Franciscans.10 Fayreford had also
been to Oxford (though not pursuing a medical degree it seems) and knew
some of the local medical authorities there. e fruits of his medical learning
as applied to practice were a collection of experimenta and charms, assembled
from practical medical texts and surgeries, word of mouth recommendation
from his own patients and other practitioners, and textual collections of secrets
like those of the friars.
11
Heirs and annotators of Henry Daniel
Both of Henry Daniel’s works, the Liber uricrisiarum and the Herbal, were
refashioned by the author. In the case of the Liber uricrisiarum, this gave rise
to so-called alpha and beta versions, but also manuscripts showing evidence
of dierent combinations of the two versions.12 e Herbal is found in two
manuscripts representing dierent ways of organising the text. ere is
then no standard authorial version of either of Daniel’s works. Once these
works began to circulate in the fteenth century, short excerpts of the Liber
uricrisiarum are found inserted into medical miscellanies. Conversely, the
longer versions of the Liber uricrisiarum attracted supplementary material in
9
For more on John Argentein, his manuscripts and his cures, see Jones, ‘Alchemical’;
P. M. Jones, ‘Argentine, John (c. 1443–1508), Physician and College Head’, ODNB,
23 September 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/642;
Jones, ‘Mediating’, pp. 300–1; D. E. Rhodes, John Argentine: Provost of King’s: His
Life and his Library (Amsterdam, 1967).
10
BL, MS Harley 2558, fol. 148v: contra ssuras manuum et pedum ut dicunt fratres
minores.
11
P. M. Jones, ‘Harley MS 2558: A Fifteenth-Century Medical Commonplace Book’,
in Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays, ed. M. M. Schleissner
(New York, 1995), pp. 35–54; Jones, ‘omas Fayreford’, pp. 156–83.
12
Harvey, ‘Textual Layers’, pp. 87–107.
The Legacy of Friars’ Medicine 221
Latin and English, in prose and verse. Short astro-calendric additions were
popular, as well as texts on doctor-patient interactions, herbal terminology,
bloodletting and plague. e intention seems to have been to make the text
more useful as a compendious guide to practical medicine, and usefulness
was also promoted in the case of BL, MS Egerton 1624, by the addition
of a detailed index. Supplementing or reorganising the text in dierent
ways did not end in the fteenth century: a sixteenth-century hand in BL,
MS Sloane 1721, adds material on urine colours but also abridges selected
parts and modernises the language of Daniel’s text. Abridgement is the
most characteristic adaptation of Daniel’s lengthy text. ree complete
copies survive of a seventeen-chapter abridgement (about a tenth of the
alpha version), which may be the earliest such adaptation. A certain Friar
Narborough, probably a Franciscan, was responsible for the so-called ‘Book
of Narborough’ in New Haven, Yale Medical School, Cushing-Whitney
Library, MS 45, dated internally to 1442 and written in English. e most
signicant change in this version of the Liber uricrisiarum is the addition
of a fourth book, Narborough’s ‘Passionary’, a practica in head-to-toe order.
None of this remedy material is found in Henry Daniel’s text. Narborough
also moves material around within the three books on urines and reduces
Daniel’s prolixity. e most inuential of all the versions of the Liber
uricrisiarum, because it was the most widely read, is that found printed as
e Iudycyall of Vryns ( Judgement of urines), printed twice in 1527.13 e
reviser of the text has removed many of the longer digressions and generally
updated the language of the original. e result focusses more on uroscopy
than on tangential subjects, and in language that would be more familiar to
a sixteenth-century reader.
14
In the case of Daniel’s Herbal, the entry for Anthus/antha or rosemary
includes a short treatise which achieved considerable popularity in fteenthcentury England as an independent text. In BL, MS Additional 27329, the
treatise is inserted within Daniel’s entry for rosemary:
Here beginneth þe litil boke of þe vertues of rosemaryn & norsching þerof,
qwich litil book þe scole of Salerne wrote & sent to þe duchesse of Henaud,
& sche sent þe copie to hir dogther, Quene of Angelond (Here begins
the little book of the virtues of rosemary and its cultivation; the school of
Salerno wrote and sent it to the Duchess of Hainault, and she sent a copy
to her daughter Queen (Philippa) of England)
13
STC 2, 14836 and 14836.3.
14
is account is based entirely on Tavormina, ‘Heirs’, pp. 108–32.
15
BL, MS Additional 27329, fols. 16r–81r.
15
222 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
is claim about the origin of the treatise is plausible as an account of how
the treatise (and rosemary itself) might have reached England, even if such
name-dropping was a frequent way of promoting an instructional text.
Although the Latin original has not been identied, it must have contained
just the kind of medical herbal information that Daniel would have wanted
to translate and include in his Herbal. ere are a wide range of medical
uses claimed for rosemary, and it is also said to keep the machinations
of devils and spirits at bay. e same information about the origin of the
treatise on rosemary is found in the colophon of an independently circulating
version of the treatise identied in twenty-one manuscripts. ere was also a
similar treatise in verse on rosemary, most likely again based on Daniel, and
itself preserved in seven manuscripts. e Herbal itself only exists in two
manuscripts but we can see that the rosemary treatise ‘escaped’ into a much
wider circulation. Judging from the frequent appearances of recipes using
rosemary in fteenth-century remedy books, and its high reputation as a cureall, Daniel’s treatise was widely read and used. Somewhat surprisingly neither
prose nor verse texts of Daniel found their way into print. is was probably
because a dierent treatise on rosemary began to circulate in England in both
Latin and Middle English soon after Daniel’s translation, and this short and
simpler text came to eclipse Daniel’s version in both manuscript and print by
the sixteenth century.
16
Many surviving Henry Daniel manuscripts show signs of annotation by
owners. e Henry Daniel website yields some valuable information about
the varieties of annotation.17 CUL, MS Gg.3.29 appears to have been owned
sequentially by two sixteenth-century apothecaries, both named David
Harris, who lived on the ‘Bridge at Bristol’ and practised medicine there, as
well as collecting medical books as collateral from Portuguese and Spanish
physicians who needed to borrow money. Gloucester, Cathedral MS 19 was
owned in the seventeenth century by another father and son, both named
Henry Fowler. Although the younger Fowler became a physician, whereas
his father was the Rector of Minchinhampton, it is the father who has left
16
J. H. Harvey, ‘Mediaeval Plantsmanship in England: e Culture of Rosemary’,
Garden History 1 (1972), 14–21; M. Mäkinen, ‘Henry Daniel’s Rosemary in MS
X.90 of the Royal Library, Stockholm’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 103 (2002),
305–27; G. R. Keiser, ‘Rosemary: Not Just for Remembrance’, in Health and Heal-
ing from the Medieval Garden, ed. A. Touwaide and P. Dendle (Woodbridge, 2008),
pp. 180–204.
17
See Henry Daniel Project, https://henrydaniel.utoronto.ca/urines/audience/#Late_
Medieval_and_Early_Modern_Audiences/, accessed 19 April 2023; Tavormina,
‘Heirs’, p. 126, n. 3.