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Introduction 33
seen as interfering in the proper relationship of the parishioner to their
priest or bishop. In the fourteenth century, criticism often took the form of
literary attacks on the hypocrisy and self-serving manoeuvres of the orders
of friars, as they became an established, and increasingly wealthy, part of the
ecclesiastical landscape. Georey Chaucer cast a jaundiced eye on friars in
several of the Canterbury Tales. At the crudest level, such attacks might take
the form of popular songs about the sexual adventures of friars with the ladies
they counselled. At an innitely more sophisticated level, Piers Plowman, by
William Langland, explored the case of the friar ‘sick with envy’, using an
allegorical language of medical diagnosis to depict his ailment in extraordinary
detail. e friar as failed healer and corrupted confessor is central to Langland’s
description of the deadly weaknesses of the English Church of his day at the
climax of his great poem. By contrast, the fteenth-century imitations of Piers
Plowman are satires picking up some of the themes of the hostile dismissal of
four orders of English friars by the Lollards.
Chapter 7, ‘e Legacy of Friars’ Medicine’, turns to the fate of medical
writings by the friars in the century or so after the dissolution of the English
friaries. English academic physicians soon saw the practical value of a text like
the Tabula medicine, adapting it for use as a source of remedies. Practitioners
like omas Fayreford and the English royal physician John Argentein or
Argentine modelled their own handbooks on it. Similarly, the writings of
Henry Daniel OP were used and annotated by the academics, and a number of
sixteenth-century manuscripts testify to this. Roger Bacon OFM continued to
be taken seriously as a philosopher with inuence over contemporary practice
of astrology, alchemy and scientia experimentalis, while his popular reputation
developed as a necromancer whose tricks often failed. e coming of print
gave a new lease of life to friars’ medicine, whether in the form of new editions
of the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, or in the sixteenthcentury medical bestseller, is is the myrour or glasse of helthe, which was based
on a plague treatise by the mid-fteenth-century Dominican omas Moulton
or Multon. e astrological medical practitioner Simon Forman, working at
the end of the sixteenth century, unknowingly adopted the Tabula medicine
as the basis of his own medical manuscript handbook. His extensive medical
practice, revealed in his voluminous case notes, was an extension of what he
had learned from the Tabula medicine. In these ways, the friars’ medicine was
far from disappearing even long after the orders of English friars themselves
had been disbanded.
is Introduction began by suggesting that the active participation of
English medieval friars as medical practitioners and as authors or compilers of
texts on medicine has been overlooked. e purpose of the book is to recover
34 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
what we can learn about these activities, taking place over three centuries from
the 1220s onwards, and to restore the friars to their rightful place in the history
of health and healing over this period. e story does not end abruptly in
the 1530s, however, despite the dissolution of the friaries. e orders of friars
disappeared in England from the 1530s for centuries, but the inuence of their
medical writings and attitudes to healing did not. In particular, the attention
paid by authors like Roger Bacon OFM and Henry Daniel OP to astrology,
alchemy and to the collection of experimenta, kept their inuence alive. e
anonymous Franciscan Tabula medicine also continued to exert inuence long
after the origin of that compilation with the friars had been forgotten. More
generally, the writings of the friars on medical subjects, sometimes in the
form of remedy books, survived in manuscript as well as in print, and such
manuscripts were treasured and used by later practitioners. ese surviving
manuscripts are also the principal source of this book.
All the chapters of the book consider the entanglement of medicine and
religion from various points of view. e state of health of the friars themselves
was critically important to their active role as religious, their ability to perform
the evangelical and pastoral tasks prescribed by their constitutions and
solicited by popes and bishops. e rst responsibility of friars as healers was
to look after their own brethren. Reaching out beyond that to lay people the
friars found themselves acting as both confessors and healers. If the councils
and canons of the church set out the need to keep the two roles distinct and
stressed the priority of care of the soul over curing of the body, in practice at
the bedside of the sick or at the deathbed friars found themselves slipping
from one role to the other. is seems to have caused less friction in practice
than might have been expected, and regimens of healing and guides to right
living authored by the friars had signicant areas of overlap. Critics of the
friars might have argued that mendicants found it in their own interest to
‘creep into homes’ to solicit alms and legacies, but many lay people were happy
to pay for the services of friars, whether as healers or confessors. Chapter 1
begins with a vivid example of payment to a friar for a remedy.
1
Friars Practising Medicine
his chapter examines evidence for friars who practised medicine in
T
England, from the thirteenth through to the late fteenth century. e
evidence for individual practitioners is limited and scattered, and, with one
exception from 1477, dependent on the appearance of these individuals in
manuscript books. One text in particular, the Tabula medicine of 1416–25,
surviving in a handful of manuscripts, is crucial because the friar compilers
recorded the eectiveness of remedies tried out by various of their colleagues,
and in some cases mentioned the names of patients they treated successfully.
Earlier in the thirteenth century, we have two surviving manuscripts describing
remedies and treatments for the nobility by the Dominican John of St Giles.
Glimpses of individual practitioners who wrote their own manuscripts can be
found in the cases of the Franciscan John Bruyll and the Carmelite Richard
Tenet. Besides these details of practice, the letters of the Franciscan Adam
Marsh give us a more general picture of the need to make use of friars with
medical skills to tackle (chiey, but not exclusively) the eects of the strenuous
life of preaching, travelling and seeking alms, on their own brothers. A remedy
book from the fteenth century interweaves sections of medical texts and
illustrative stories into a fabric of recipes collected for the use of a Franciscan
house. In 1477 records of a lawsuit show the Franciscan Eryk de Vedica and
his superior trying to recover fees for treatment of a woman patient in London.
is is exceptional because it involved friars who went to law, but the kind of
treatment for fees carried out by Vedica was probably much more common
than this unique lawsuit might suggest.
e most famous of English friar practitioners in the later Middle Ages
was William Appleton or Appulton. He is unusually well documented in
administrative records and mentioned in chronicles, although the most
famous thing about him was his death at the hands of a mob on Tower Hill,
London, in the Peasants Revolt of 1381. Appleton was beheaded because of
his prominence in the service of John of Gaunt, principal target of the common
people. Gaunt was blamed for the military failures and nancial exactions
of the minority of Richard II. e earliest certain reference to Appleton in
John of Gaunt’s service dates to March 1373, when he was retained for life as
Fig. . Murder of William Appleton OFM in Tower of London, . From Jehan Froissart,
Chroniques de France et d’Angleterre, c. –. British Library, MS Royal E I, fol. r.
William is wearing the brown habit of a Franciscan.
Friars Practising Medicine 37
‘phisicien et surgien’. e grant was for good and faithful service rendered in
the past, as well as for the expected future. His contract made a very generous
allowance for forty marks a year in peacetime and double that in time of war.
In addition, Appleton was to be granted a living (bouge en court) appropriate
to a gentleman, clerk, esquire or chamberlain, for himself and two servants.
He was provided with livery for four horses and two grooms whenever he
attended the duke, and he could claim daily expenses while travelling on the
duke’s business. Provision for war service suggests that he accompanied Gaunt
on the ‘grande chevauchee’ in France in 1373 and may have been responsible
for looking after the sick and casualties there. On New Year’s Day 1381, John
of Gaunt gave Appleton and two other prominent courtiers each a silver-gilt
drinking vessel with a lid. After Appleton’s death that year, the guardian of the
London Greyfriars was given licence to dispose of what must have been his
considerable goods. His body was buried in a prestigious position in the Lady
Chapel there, with a memorial probably funded from those same goods he
left behind.1 On his tomb in the London Greyfriars, Friar Appleton was titled
miles, soldier or knight.
John Arderne, the English surgical author, mentions a single rival in the
practice of the operation for stula-in-ano. Arderne identies a Franciscan
who served with the Prince of Wales (the Black Prince) in Gascony and
Guienne, and then deceived many in London as to his ability to cure stulain-ano (a tunnel from the bowel, with an opening near the anus). e reference
to service in France with the Black Prince must be to the campaign of 1355.2
ere is no evidence connecting Appleton to that much earlier campaign in
France, though in other respects his credentials seem to t. e Franciscan
Tabula medicine of 1415–22 cites Appleton for his cures, as we shall see below,
but also mentions other friars who practised surgery as well as physic. One
of these might have been the friar Arderne had in mind. More plausibly
1
Talbot and Hammond, Medical Practitioners, pp. 382–3; H. E. Ussery, Chaucer’s
Physician: Medicine and Literature in Fourteenth-Century England (Tulane, 1971),
pp. 40–1, 46; C. Rawclie, ‘e Prots of Practice: e Wealth and Status of Med-
ical Men in Later Medieval England’, Social History of Medicine 1 (1988), 61–78
(p. 73); R. F. Green, ‘Friar William Appleton and the Date of Langland’s B Text’,
Yearbook of Langland Studies 11 (1997), 87–96; C. Rawclie, ‘Master Surgeons at
the Lancastrian Court’, in e Lancastrian Court. Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton
Symposium, ed. J. Stratford (Donington, 2003), pp. 192–210 (p. 196); C. Steer, ‘e
Franciscans and their Graves in Medieval London’, in e Franciscan Order in the
Medieval English Province, ed. M. J. P. Robson and P. Zutshi (Amsterdam, 2018),
pp. 115–58 (pp. 126, 135).
2
J. Arderne, Treatises of Fistula in Ano Haemorrhoids and Clysters, ed. D’A. Power,
EETS OS 139 (London, 1910), p. 3.
38 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
Richard Firth Green has suggested that Appleton was the original of the
friar surgeon in William Langland’s Piers Plowman.3 e friar in the poem
identies himself as a surgeon, who can make salves, and the character Peace,
in responding to the friar, recalls a previous meeting with one who ‘was my
lords leche and my ladies bo[th]e’, eight winters since. is specicity makes
it credible that Langland had a particular friar in mind. Appleton’s practice
of surgery and his standing with John of Gaunt were probably as well known
to Langland as to the chroniclers of the time. Since Peace suggests that the
friar she had met was a atterer, and had ‘salved’ women until some were with
child, Langland may have been hostile to Appleton, if not as violently as the
London common people.
So much for Appleton’s standing at court and contemporary reputation.
What can we say about the character of his medical and surgical practice?
We have evidence in the citing of Appleton as the source of many successful
remedies in the Tabula medicine and of one in the Liber de diversis medicinis.
Two copies of this last text contain a remedy attributed to ‘Ser Appilton’.
e Liber de diversis medicinis text dates back at least as far as the 1330s,
but it is only in fteenth- and sixteenth-century copies that the Appleton
remedy is found. One is the copy made by the Yorkshire gentleman Robert
ornton in the 1430s, now in Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91; the other
in Bodl., MS Rawlinson A 393, written by John Rede in 1529. Both copies
seem to derive from a common archetype connected to the Pickering family
of Oswaldkirk.4 Appleton’s remedy is appropriately surgical, ‘For werkyng
and gnawing of arme or of schankes’ (for aching and griping pain in the arm
or legs).5 Appleton prescribes plasters and oils regularly found in antidotaries,
and these are to be blended and warmed in the hand and then spread on a
piece of ‘fair lethir’ and applied to the painful part. In the Tabula medicine,
Appleton is credited with no less than ve successive remedies for treating
burns. Such injuries must have been very common in surgical practice. More
generally, the Tabula medicine makes him an authority on what to do in cases
of pain (Dolor). His plaster was to be made with sops of wheat bread, boiled
in milk and egg whites tempered with oil of roses, to which equal amounts
of opium and saron were added. is brought immediate relief. Pains in the
3
I will look at this passage from Piers Plowman in detail in Chapter 6.
4
G. R. Keiser, ‘Robert ornton: Gentleman, Reader and Scribe’, and J. Orlemanski,
‘ornton’s Remedies and the Practices of Medical Reading’, in Robert ornton
and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London ornton Manuscripts, ed. S. Fein
and M. Johnston (York, 2014), pp. 67–108, and 235–55.
5
e ‘Liber de diversis medicinis’, ed. M. S. Ogden, EETS OS 207 (London, 1938),
p. 47.
Friars Practising Medicine 39
joints or from gout and sciatica have their own specialised treatments. Also,
as might be expected of a surgeon, there are remedies for skin complaints,
carbuncles, boils, wens and the like.
Appleton may have specialised in hernia treatment, since three dierent
remedies are given on his authority. Under the heading Ruptura siphac (rupture
of the peritoneum), the most unusual remedy is the emplastrum veneris (plaster
of Venus). is required a pound (less than a pint in modern measure) of
the blood of a man of sanguine complexion, as well as a variety of spices and
minerals to make up a plaster. e plaster was good for ruptures, lesions and
wounds (rupturas plagas et vulnera). Plaster of Venus is not one of the common
compound medicines, and like the sanguis veneris John Arderne favoured in
treating wounds, the use of human blood was probably the mark of a special
treatment for high-status individuals. ere is a humbler alternative employing
more common ingredients, equivalent to the other rupture treatments authorised
by friar Appleton. Arderne’s sanguis veneris is in the form of an oil, rather than a
plaster, and does not share ingredients with Appleton’s plaster, except for the use
of human blood.6 It is a bit odd that Appleton calls his hernia remedy ‘plaster
of Venus’ as we might expect invoking Venus to mean taking female rather than
male blood, or to suggest some connection with sexual diseases. We know that
some friars liked to distil human blood to make medicines, but Appleton does
not suggest distillation.7 e shedding of blood was forbidden to clerics of higher
orders by canon law, but it seems that Appleton had no problem with ‘getting
blood on his hands’. If he did accompany John of Gaunt on the 1373 campaign,
he would have had plenty of exposure to battleeld surgery and wounds, and
access to a plentiful supply of human blood.
Appleton’s standing as John of Gaunt’s physician is reected in remedies
credited to his name. ree of them are treatments for fever, two for a putrid fever
(febris putrida), and one for a tertian fever. A drink to bring down the acute heat
of a putrid fever requires seed of the cooling plant eawort (psyllium) soaked in
rosewater overnight. To treat a cold tertian fever apply an ointment to the spine.
Appleton recommended treatments for other internal illnesses. His plaster for
disorders of the spleen or dropsy (ad spleneticos & hydropicos) was compounded
of powdered cow dung, bear’s foot (a plant), raw egg and sulphur. is is called
a ‘true secret’ of William Appleton. Eye conditions straddled the two domains
of physic and surgery. Appleton treated dierent kinds of eye complaint, usually
6
Arderne, Treatises, pp. 89–90; J. Norri, Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English,
1375–1550: Body Parts, Sicknesses, Instruments, and Medicinal Preparations (Lon-
don, 2016), p. 949.
7
P. M. Jones, ‘e Survival of the frater medicus? English Friars and Alchemy, ca.
1370–ca. 1425’, Ambix 65 (2018), 232–49.
40 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
with herbal concoctions left to stand for three nights in a dish without a cover,
and then he applied this with a feather to the eye at least twice a day (see the
entries for Oculi and Visus in the Tabula medicine). A bandage to manage redness,
swelling and tearful eyes (Lacrime) is more elaborate, perhaps something suitable
for the duke himself. Mix expensive gums and spices (dragon’s blood, sarcocolla
gum, aloes of Socotra, Armenian bole, gum Arabic, frankincense, mastic) with
bean and rye our, egg yolk, parsley juice and rosewater, then spread on a cloth.
Apply this bandage to both temples and to the forehead, and do not take it o
for two days. en remove with warm water and renew as needed.
In most respects, Friar William Appleton’s practice seems to accord with
what we would expect of a master surgeon like his contemporary John Arderne.
As a retainer of John of Gaunt, Appleton probably saw battleeld service, and
would have been familiar with manual surgery for wounds and amputations, as
well as standard peacetime procedures to treat burns, pains general and specic
to particular parts, skin complaints and hernias. Like Arderne he also treated
eye conditions. He lived up to his description as John of Gaunt’s physician
as well as surgeon – treating fevers, dropsy and spleen disorders. Sometimes
Appleton used ingredients suggesting a treatment reserved only for the most
noble patients, like the duke himself. Most of Appleton’s medicines, however,
would have been appropriate to treating his brother Franciscans or patients of
lesser standing. Only the ‘plaster of Venus’, requiring a pound of blood from a
man of sanguine complexion, hints at the kind of extraordinary remedy favoured
by Roger Bacon, going beyond the bounds of the physic taught by university
authorities, and employing ingredients of occult power (see Chapter 4 below).
Friar on friar medical practice: the letters of Adam Marsh
What we know of the medical practice of William Appleton does not suggest
conclusively that he ever treated other members of his order. But we do
have earlier evidence that there were Franciscans in England who treated
the illnesses of their brethren. is evidence is provided by the letters of the
well-born Oxford intellectual and administrator, Adam Marsh (c. 1200–59).
Adam features in the chronicle of omas (see Chapter 1), where we are
told that he made his profession as a friar in 1232 or 1233 at the convent
of Worcester.8 Before that Adam had incepted as a MA and held a rich
living at Bishopwearmouth, which was in his uncle’s gift. After becoming a
Franciscan Adam began a course in theology at the University of Oxford,
8
Fratris omae vulgo dicti de Eccleston de adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam, ed. A.
G. Little, 2nd edn (Manchester, 1951), p. 18, quoted in e Letters of Adam Marsh,
ed. and trans. C. H. Lawrence, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2006–10), I, p. xiv.
Friars Practising Medicine 41
which he completed after eight years of study, probably in 1242. He was the
rst Franciscan to incept as a Master in eology, and took over lecturing to
the Oxford Franciscans (the rst such lector was Robert Grosseteste, who
as bishop of Lincoln, became Adam’s mentor and friend). At Grosseteste’s
insistence, Adam accompanied him as his adviser to the papal Curia at Lyons
in the autumn of 1244, and he stayed over at Lyons during the meeting of the
general council of the church there the following year. On his way home in
the autumn of 1245, he was detained at Mantes, on the river Seine, nursing his
socius – his companion friar – who had been taken ill. is was the same fate
as was to befall William of Nottingham in 1254, as recorded by omas.9 But
Adam was luckier than William and survived the experience of nursing his
socius. Once back in England, Adam resumed his teaching in Oxford in 1246.
He gave this up for good in 1250 under pressure of the business thrust upon
him by Grosseteste, together with his superiors in the order, the archbishop of
Canterbury, the king, the queen, the Montfort family and others.
10
In the modern critical edition and translation of Adam Marsh’s letters by
C. H. Lawrence, he judges that they are the most important collection of
private letters produced in England before the fteenth century. e letters
were assembled by an unknown copyist, for an unknown purpose, between
ten and twenty years after Adam Marsh’s death in 1259. e letters cover
the years 1241 to 1259. In his letters, Adam deals often with the illnesses
befalling himself, his brother friars and his elevated connections among the
higher clergy or at court. As we have seen, he and his brethren sometimes
found themselves in the position of having themselves to provide medical
care to a socius. Adam also oered advice to other friars on health. He wrote to
Brother Robert of ornham, then custodian at Cambridge, suggesting that
the rigours of conventual diet would be relaxed for one of the friars there:
In accordance with a request to bestow charity, I hear that provision will
be made for the consolation of the so-much aicted brother [Philip of
London] by additional food on the greatest scale within the means of the
place and the community, so that God’s will may be observed and the needs
9
In Italy, see Fratris omae, ed. Little, p. 101.
10
is account is based on Letters, ed. Lawrence, I, pp. xiv–xvii. See also A. G. Little,
e Greyfriars in Oxford (Oxford, 1892), pp. 135–9. C. H. Lawrence, ‘Marsh, Adam
[Adam de Marisco] (c. 1200–1259), Franciscan Friar, Biblical Scholar, and Teach-
er’, ODNB, 23 September 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/
ref:odnb/95.
42 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
of the sick man met, and that consideration may be given in the Lord to
salutary examples for the brethren
11
e needs of the sick friar are to be met in accordance with God’s will. Close
observation of the course of fever was a matter for report, even if no relief
was to be expected. In February 1253, Adam wrote to Brother William of
Nottingham, provincial minister:
Our beloved Brother G. of London, who has suered a fourteenth attack
of [quartan] fever, after some relief from his troubled health, is at London
awaiting a genuine remedy from the mercy of our Saviour
12
But health was not left to fate. e ministrations of healers were called for.
Adam refers on occasion to secular physicians who treated patients of high
status. One such was Master Reginald de Stokes, whose medical services Adam
recommended to his friend, Bishop Robert Grosseteste, in the warmest terms.
Reginald was advanced in both arts and medicine, he claimed.13 In the same
letter, Adam also mentioned Master Peter de Alpibus, rector of Wimbledon,
and physician to the Queen, Eleanor of Provence, as a trustworthy courier.
14
Judging by Adam Marsh’s letters, medical treatment for friars was, whenever
possible, placed in the hands of those with specialist skills within the order.15
In 1250 Adam wrote to John of Parma, Franciscan minister general:
11
Letter 177. Letters, ed. Lawrence, II, pp. 422–3: cui sicut audio citra requisitionem
impendende caritatis ad fratris tam aicti solatium in subsidiis prouidetur victitan-
di, maxime quantum ad loci et societatis competentiam ita recommendare curetis,
dilectissimis patribus et fratribus uestris curam fratrum Londini agentibus, prout et
diuine voluntati serviatur, et inrmitatis necessitatibus subueniatur, et salutaribus
fratrum exemplis consulatur in Domino.
12
Letter 184. Letters, ed. Lawrence, II, pp. 444–5: Predilectus Frater G. de Lond-
inio quartam decimam quatarne perpessus accessionem, super uexamine ualetu-
dinis post alleuiationem qualemcunque Londini expectat a clementia Saluatoris
salutare remedium.
13
Letter 26: in artibus et in medicina provecto et experto. Letters, ed. Lawrence, I, pp.
62–3; BRUO, II, p. 1784; Talbot and Hammond, Medical Practitioners, pp. 269–70.
Reginald de Stokes was a regent master in Oxford in 1238. He is mentioned again
in another letter (I, p. 129) to Grosseteste of 7 March 1252.
14
Letter 26. Lawrence, Letters, I, pp. 64–5; Talbot and Hammond, Medical Practitioners,
pp. 244–5.
15
It is worth noting that by the 1240s at the latest the Franciscan order was interested
in recruiting from those studying medicine and civil law at universities, as well as
those studying theology or canon law. See N. Şenocak, e Poor and the Perfect: e
Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209–1310 (Ithaca, 2012), pp. 77–9.