like water; red bile or choler, hot and dry like fire; and black bile, cold and dry like earth. Hence, depending on which humour predominated, there were four ‘complexions’ or, as we might say, temperaments: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic. According to this school, good health depended upon a balance of humours. Analysis of a patient’s urine, always bearing in mind their age and sex, was seen as a reliable guide to the balance of their humours and, thence, their health. On this subject a translation by Constantine the African of a treatise by a ninth-century North African-Jewish physician known as Isaac Judaeus was regarded as the authoritative book and remained so until the sixteenth century. When one of Henry I’s doctors, Faricius, abbot of Abingdon, was proposed as a candidate for the see of Canterbury, there were churchmen who opposed him on the grounds that they did not want an archbishop who had been accustomed to examining women’s urine. And, indeed, he was not appointed.
Many prescriptions recommended in the books of the time are simple enough, and not always dressed up in the pretentious Galenic theoretical language that John of Salisbury found so objectionable. Mugwort in wine, for example, was advised for the woman who had problems with menstruation. Steambaths were good for those who suffered from obesity. A swollen penis could be alleviated with a marshmallow compress.
For deafness: take the fatty residue of fresh eels that appears after cooking them, the juice of honeysuckle, and houseleek, and a handful of ants’ eggs. Grind them together and strain them. Mix the result with oil and cook it. After cooking, add vinegar so that the mixture penetrates better, or wine if preferred. Pour this into the healthy ear and stop up the afflicted ear. Have the patient lie upon their good side. In the morning take care to avoid a draught.
The confident tone of medical textbooks is noteworthy, grounded on the assumption that most conditions can be treated without recourse to miracles or magic. And miracle stories themselves suggest that most people shared this confidence in doctors. No theme in them is more common than that the saint healed when doctors had failed – which indicates that people went to the doctors before they went on a pilgrimage.
CHAPTER 5
Family Strife
We have completely remitted and pardoned to all any ill will, grudge and rancour that have arisen between us and our subjects .
Magna Carta, Clause 62
T he turbulent family life of the royal dynasty into which John was born would be familiar to viewers of television soap operas. Love, hatred and the desire for wealth or power are commonplace emotions, capable of complicating the lives of all families. The greater the wealth and power at stake the more intense the love and hatred is apt to be. The political successes and failures of John’s parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, of his brother Richard the Lionheart, and of John himself were all, to a greater or lesser extent, bound up with sex, love and sibling rivalry.
Sex, love and war were the three great themes of the songs and romances of the age, of the stories on which John would have been brought up. The fabliaux treated sex with exuberantly bawdy humour. In one story a peasant is granted four wishes; when he allows his wife to have the first one, she wishes for him to be equipped with ‘extra pricks’ all over his body. Noblemen and noblewomen liked to think they were capable of finer feelings than this, of fin amor , usually referred to today as ‘courtly love’.
The fashionable poetry of courtly love occasionally celebrated the joys and sufferings of platonic love, the kind of love that theologians envisaged in paradise when, as they put it, ‘genital contact held no greater thrill than the clasp of a hand’. But far more frequently authors such as Hue de Rotelande (Rhuddlan) or the brilliant poetess Marie de France – who dedicated her songs to King
Many prescriptions recommended in the books of the time are simple enough, and not always dressed up in the pretentious Galenic theoretical language that John of Salisbury found so objectionable. Mugwort in wine, for example, was advised for the woman who had problems with menstruation. Steambaths were good for those who suffered from obesity. A swollen penis could be alleviated with a marshmallow compress.
For deafness: take the fatty residue of fresh eels that appears after cooking them, the juice of honeysuckle, and houseleek, and a handful of ants’ eggs. Grind them together and strain them. Mix the result with oil and cook it. After cooking, add vinegar so that the mixture penetrates better, or wine if preferred. Pour this into the healthy ear and stop up the afflicted ear. Have the patient lie upon their good side. In the morning take care to avoid a draught.
The confident tone of medical textbooks is noteworthy, grounded on the assumption that most conditions can be treated without recourse to miracles or magic. And miracle stories themselves suggest that most people shared this confidence in doctors. No theme in them is more common than that the saint healed when doctors had failed – which indicates that people went to the doctors before they went on a pilgrimage.
CHAPTER 5
Family Strife
We have completely remitted and pardoned to all any ill will, grudge and rancour that have arisen between us and our subjects .
Magna Carta, Clause 62
T he turbulent family life of the royal dynasty into which John was born would be familiar to viewers of television soap operas. Love, hatred and the desire for wealth or power are commonplace emotions, capable of complicating the lives of all families. The greater the wealth and power at stake the more intense the love and hatred is apt to be. The political successes and failures of John’s parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, of his brother Richard the Lionheart, and of John himself were all, to a greater or lesser extent, bound up with sex, love and sibling rivalry.
Sex, love and war were the three great themes of the songs and romances of the age, of the stories on which John would have been brought up. The fabliaux treated sex with exuberantly bawdy humour. In one story a peasant is granted four wishes; when he allows his wife to have the first one, she wishes for him to be equipped with ‘extra pricks’ all over his body. Noblemen and noblewomen liked to think they were capable of finer feelings than this, of fin amor , usually referred to today as ‘courtly love’.
The fashionable poetry of courtly love occasionally celebrated the joys and sufferings of platonic love, the kind of love that theologians envisaged in paradise when, as they put it, ‘genital contact held no greater thrill than the clasp of a hand’. But far more frequently authors such as Hue de Rotelande (Rhuddlan) or the brilliant poetess Marie de France – who dedicated her songs to King
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