by Richard Sugg
Thirdly: if your bones survived such disturbances unmolested, then there was still a good chance that they might be shifted to a more general and anonymous home – namely, one of the charnel houses used for the storage of older human remains. In 1633, commenting on the medically valued moss of the human skull, one writer noted that, ‘this kind of moss is found upon the skulls or bare scalps of men and women, lying long in charnel houses or other places, where the bones of men and women are kept together’.174 Although these were less common in some places after the Middle Ages, in France (notes Philippe Ariès) ‘probably until the seventeenth century or so, the skulls came right up to ground level, where they were mixed with bones and pebbles’. Even in the early nineteenth century Gabriel Le Bras could still see, in Brittany, ‘behind the railing of the clerestory … bones piled in heaps’, while ‘outside the church one walks by rows of moss-covered skulls that follow the … passerby with empty eyes’.175 In London there was ‘an ossuary and chapel in the churchyard of old St Paul’s and in St Bride’s in Fleet Street’.176
In later decades, as we have seen, usnea continued to be taken seriously as a stiptic by Boyle and others. Indeed, it was so much in demand that as late as 1758 a visitor to the Chelsea physic garden of the apothecaries could have seen ‘laid … in a mossy corner … pieces of human skulls, that the moss from the ground may creep over’ them.177 Although the writer who tells us this was sharply disdainful of usnea, he clearly implies that at around this time either an apothecary or physician was trying to artificially encourage the growth of skull-moss.
In this kind of environment, many of those wanting bones or skulls may have found that there was no need to resort to the plundering of actual graves and coffins. But it seems that some did. For Edward Bolnest, the Paracelsian physician we met in chapter two, stated very candidly in 1672 that for his oil of bones you should use ‘the bones of a man which hath not been buried fully a year’, making sure ‘to cleanse them well from the earth and dry them’.178 In these few quite unembarrassed words there is a good deal of implicit detail. To know that the bones were from a corpse less than one year old, Bolnest or his supplier must have robbed a marked grave.179 Once obtained, these bones were damp and dirty. They had come from the earth, and it seems that they had come from someone too poor to have a coffin (or at least any very durable coffin).
Warfare and Massacres
If you asked one historian, they might tell you that in Europe the seventeenth century was the century of the scientific revolution. For another, it might be the century of political reinvention; for yet another, the era of the witch craze. But perhaps most of all, on the European continent this was a century of almost perpetual war. That categorisation indeed runs back through much of the sixteenth century, from the Protestant Reformation which sparked and sustained almost all of the major conflicts and slaughters after 1530, through to the persecution of Protestant minorities shortly after the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685. The bulk of these conflicts naturally occurred on the continent, with France, the Netherlands, and Germanic states feeling the force of religious strife most severely.
What did this mean for the supply of human bodies? In France in 1558 (writes Penny Roberts) a Huguenot man was beaten to death by Catholics while in prison. The jailor thrust him into a shallow grave in an area used for disposing of rubbish. With his feet visibly sticking out of the earth, the dead man fell prey to other Catholics, who repeatedly stabbed and slashed at his legs. After an unsuccessful attempt of friends to re-bury him, this man’s corpse was presently reburied by Catholics, ‘“in a place where everyone was accustomed to urinate and defecate”’.180
Ironically, even efforts to bring peace to the two embittered Christian factions could produce monumental slaughter. In August 1572 there was an attempt to unite French Protestants and Catholics by the strategic royal marriage of the Protestant Henri de Navarre with the Catholic Marguerite de Valois. With an unusual number of Protestants assembled in Paris to celebrate the wedding, political and religious tensions broke loose. In the early morning of 24 August the slaughter of the French Protestants began. The event known as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre probably claimed over 5,000 Protestant lives, with the violence lasting several days, and being spontaneously repeated in the provinces as the news spilled out of the capital.181 Ambroise paré, the royal surgeon who was thought by some to be Protestant, is said to have survived the slaughter only by the intervention of his patron, Charles IX, who locked him in a wardrobe during the massacre. It may be, then, that one of the most strident opponents of corpse medicine only narrowly escaped being pounded up in an apothecary’s mortar himself.
In July 1601, the new century quickly marked out its identity when the Spanish began the siege of Ostend. This became known as one of the bloodiest battles of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish, and was one of the longest sieges in history by the time the town finally gave way in September 1604. A contemporary account translated in that same year by the English Protestant Edward Grimeston tells of how, on 17 October 1601, ‘the enemies shot very furiously with their fiery bullets and stones into the town’. That night, entering a space called ‘the half moon, which is beyond the gullet before the bridge’, the Spanish ran into a trap. Bombarded with cannon fire and musket shot, all the besiegers in this sally were quickly slain. And it was at this point that ‘the surgeons of the town went thither … and brought away sacks full of man’s grease which they had drawn out of their bodies’.
There is little doubt that part of the motivation for this impromptu liposuction was pure hatred. As we will see in chapter four, the inhumanity of the two Christian factions could run to worse excesses than this. Even as the surgeons dragged back their wobbling sacks, other townsfolk were rummaging amidst the debris of sundered ‘arms, legs and hands’, where they found ‘much money upon the dead men, and garments of good price’, along with ‘perfumed gloves’.182 We will also learn in a few moments that some of the surgeons or onlookers may have felt a keenly precise sense of poetic justice as they saw the fat carved out of the still warm bodies on the ground. Yet, whatever basic ideological fury simmered through this surgical assault, it was also underpinned by one very simple pragmatic rationale: the Ostenders were besieged by the most powerful nation in the world, and human fat was held to be a prime agent for the treatment of wounds.183 In this sense, practical utility and moral justice dovetailed with seamless ease.
The practical impetus for this attack suggests that it may well have been standard practice in such conflicts both before and after Ostend. In the Netherlands alone there was no shortage of these. The period from 1568 to 1648, in which the Dutch rebelled against the invading Spanish, was known as the Eighty Years War. In November and December 1572, with the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre fresh in the minds of Protestants, all the citizens of Zutphen and Naarden were slaughtered by the Spanish. From 11 December that year the city of Haarlem was besieged, holding out for seven months until 13 July 1573.
In October 1576 the English poet George Gascoigne was in Antwerp when its siege ended, marked again by mass murder of civilians and by looting. The ‘heaps of dead carcasses which lay at every trench’ were so commonplace a sight that Gascoigne barely troubled to describe them (just briefly mentioning that in many places they were piled up beyond the height of a man). The same went for ‘the huge numbers, drowned in the new town, where a man might behold as many sundry shapes and forms of man’s motion at time of death, as ever Michelangelo did portray in his tables of Doomsday’. On the Thursday following the Spanish entry, a count of Antwerp’s dead ran to 17,000 men, women and children.184
On 29 June 1579 the Spanish finally ended another siege, outside Maastricht, entering whilst the ravaged town’s defenders were briefly sleeping. To say that only around 400 of an original population of some 30,000 survived, and that the looting went on for three days gives us just the most cursory sense of the sufferings endured by the citizens.185 We get a more vivid idea of the hatred an
d ferocity at stake when we hear of the Dutch pouring boiling water into the tunnels used by the encroaching Spanish. In this case many Spaniards were also slain during the siege, with 500 alone killed in one moment, when one of their own mines exploded prematurely by the city walls.
Within the struggle fought by the Dutch, perhaps the most bitter European war of all time occurred. From 1618 to 1648, the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics produced a proportionally higher loss of population than World War Two.186 Although estimates vary, even a conservative view puts the German death toll at 25 per cent of its pre-war population. Some go as high as 35 or even 40 per cent: a drop from around 18 million to 12 million inhabitants.187 In one district in Thuringen, only 627 of the original 1,717 houses were still standing by 1649, and only 316 families could be found to occupy them.188 In 1635, just over halfway through this conflict, we hear of how, in Bavaria, ‘the living were nothing near able to bury the dead’, whilst ‘rats and mice devoured their carcasses, most horrible to behold’.189 Even those who were buried could be easily disinterred – possibly to feed starving citizens, possibly by animals, or by looting soldiers.190 In the following year the Englishman William Crowne was travelling through Germany with the Earl of Arundel in early May, passing ‘a poor little village called Neunkirchen’, now deserted and with one house still burning. Early next morning they found the church plundered and desecrated, and ‘a dead body scraped out of the grave’.191
Whilst British Protestants waited avidly for news of these struggles to reach them, they remained relatively isolated from the direct sufferings of the Wars of Religion. The Civil War changed all this for around five years, and at times the degree of hatred between the two sides (again sharply inflected by religious divisions) must have rivalled that seen on the continent. It was certainly believed by some Royalists in later decades that Charles I had been dissected after his execution, and we can imagine that the thousands of bodies lying on the battlefields of Naseby and Marston Moor may have undergone broadly similar indignities.192 There was clearly no shortage of unburied corpses for any who were ready to trade in them. After the Battle of Edgehill on 23 October 1642, Richard Baxter, ‘being at Alcester, went to see the ground and some unburied bodies’.193 The Battle of Marston Moor on 2 July 1644 was the worst conflict of the Civil War, and the largest ever to occur on British soil – an apocalyptic clash which left some 8,000 soldiers dead. Bodies were so hastily and thinly covered with earth that their stench (according to a writer of 1676) ‘almost poisoned them that passed over the moor’; while ‘at Kendal, a place near adjacent, the bell for six weeks together never ceased tolling for the inhabitants who were poisoned and infected with the smell’.194
Ireland
The relatively peaceable character of life on English soil in the early modern period seems to have thrown especially great importance on one nearby source of corpse materials. We have seen that skulls and bones were probably not so hard to come by, and the writings of Paracelsians suggest that human flesh could also be obtained by those who wanted it. But there was one other substance evidently much less common in England. This was the moss of the human skull – something much prized by Boyle and certain colleagues in the 1670s and 80s, and perhaps generally acceptable to those who would baulk at using more obviously cannibalistic medicines. Skull-moss could – as one author implied – be obtained from charnel houses. But the most popular source indeed seems to have been a skull which had lain unburied – and which, for many authors, had also suffered a violent death. We might imagine that, after 1649, there were a fair number of such skulls strewn about, particularly in more remote areas of the north and Scotland. Yet it appears that these themselves were either unsuitable, or insufficient to meet overall demand.
We have heard Francis Bacon, some time before his own death in 1626, suggesting that usnea could be obtained from the ‘heaps of slain bodies’ lying unburied in Ireland. Bacon’s high profile in social and political life leads us to think that he would have known if moss-covered skulls were already being imported when he wrote. What we have here, then, is a suggestion, and clear evidence that Ireland already contained many unburied corpses in the earlier seventeenth century. Although Bacon himself does not seem to have been to Ireland, he was a close friend of the Earl of Essex (who was fighting the Irish in 1599) and in 1608 he wrote a treatise on the settlement of the country.195 Knowing Bacon’s respect for reliable evidence, we can assume that his knowledge of these heaps of corpses came from Essex. I have argued throughout this chapter that corpse medicines were often derived from bodies alienated, in various ways, from ordinary humanity – distant, most of all, from you (whether you were merchant, thief, apothecary, physician or patient). In many ways, the Irish perfectly fulfilled this criterion in the minds of the English.
Both mental attitudes and physical treatment of these supposed rebels (whose country had in reality been invaded and settled by their more powerful neighbours) amply confirm this. The Irish were intrinsically backward, degenerate, and inferior. In 1610 the poet and lawyer Sir John Davies could be heard asserting in a letter that if the Irish ‘“were suffered to possess the whole country … they would never (to the end of the world) build houses, make townships or villages, or improve the land as it ought to be”’.196 This perennial excuse for oppression and colonisation was rather ironically countered by the fact that during the sixteenth century men such as the governor Sir Henry Sidney could be found vigorously burning up to twenty-four miles of Irish corn in one go.197 In the minds of certain other Englishmen, their Celtic neighbours were not so much substandard as subhuman.198 The historian Keith Thomas tells of a mid-seventeenth-century English captain whose soldiers slaughtered an Irish garrison. Having inspected the enemy casualties, the captain went on to claim that several of the Irish dead had tails a quarter of a yard long. This being doubted, forty soldiers came forward to confirm the story on oath.199 Come the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish may have shed their tails; but the writer Charles Kingsley could still describe them, after a brief visit, as ‘human chimpanzees’.200
Recalling the frequent savagery of the continental wars of religion at this time, we must also recall that, however confused and impressionistic English prejudice might have been in many respects, there was one very clear and definite basis for such hostility. To the geographical distance of Ireland we must add the cultural distance which thrust the country into a still more remote corner of the Protestant imagination. For most Englishmen, the native Irish were not only generally alien, but quite specifically Catholic. It must surely have been this which was uppermost in the mind of the Quaker George Fox when he visited the country in 1669. The moment he landed, Fox was struck by the impression that ‘“the earth and the very air, smelt with the corruption of the nation”’.201
In many cases this kind of social or religious prejudice must have been responsible for the inhumanity with which the Irish were treated.202 From the opening of the sixteenth century, the corpses described by Bacon were piling up across the Irish countryside. On 19 August 1504, at the Hill of the Axes near Knockdoe, eight out of nine of the Irish battalions of Ulick Burke were killed by Gerald Fitzgerald (then governor of Ireland).203 By the time of Sir Henry Sidney, the Irish may have been looking back with wistful nostalgia to those days of honest manly warfare. In 1566 – writes Rory Rapple – one Humphrey Gilbert was sent out ‘to assist … Sidney, the lord deputy of Ireland, in the campaign to defeat Shane O’Neill’.204 On 2 June 1567 O’Neill was treacherously murdered by the McDonnells (who were themselves prompted by English offers of reward). After an initial burial O’Neill’s body was exhumed, and his severed head preserved in salt so that it could be thrust on a pole outside Dublin castle.205
The English soldier Thomas Churchyard, who served under Gilbert, left a particularly memorable account of Gilbert’s dealings with the Irish.206 He told of how Gilbert ordered ‘that the heads of all those which were killed in the day, should be cut off from their bodies, and
brought to the place where he incamped at night’. There, they were ‘laid on the ground, by each side of the way leading into his own tent: so that none could come into his tent for any cause, but commonly he must pass through a lane of heads’. By this means, Churchyard explained, Gilbert aimed to ‘bring great terror to the people, when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk, and friends, lie on the ground before their faces, as they came to speak with the said Colonel’. Although Churchyard perceived that some would think this cruel, he unembarrassedly praised Gilbert’s rule as one which brought unprecedented order to the country.207
Other tactics used by Gilbert were cited with seeming approval. Whenever he ‘made any … inroad, into the enemy’s country’ he unfailingly ‘killed man, woman, and child, and spoiled, wasted, and burned’ to ‘the ground all that he might’. This, Gilbert stated, was done so that no remaining family would be able to assist or support the rebels, even by anything so much as tending farms or milking cattle.208 Whilst we can already well imagine that the most grief-stricken relative never tried to bury anything from the highway of heads outside Gilbert’s tent, we can now also further see just how so many bones and skulls came to lie untouched in the hills and fields of Munster. All too often in Gilbert’s time, there was not a soul left to bury them.
If Gilbert (who was knighted for his troubles in 1570) used his powers of martial law with particular savagery, there seemed to be little greater humanity by the time that he left that same year. In October 1573, for example, ‘an Irish servant shot and killed’ the son of English settler Sir Thomas Smith. The servant’s body ‘was subsequently boiled and fed to the dogs’.209 Individual attitudes aside, the general picture itself notably deteriorated in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. From 1594–1603 England and Ireland were openly at war, with the Battle of Kinsale on the Cork Coast, on 24 December 1601, claiming between 1,000 and 2,000 Irish lives.210