by Alan Ereira
But doctors of the Middle Ages had an even higher goal. It was no less than to return the human body to the state of perfection it had enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. And the means by which they would do this was through their version of the philosopher’s stone: the elixir of life.
For us, medicine is mechanical chemistry, one chemical interacting with another, with the patient as an anonymous vessel – the retort within which this interaction takes place. From a medieval perspective, this is a recipe for disaster. The basic question a medieval patient needed to ask was ‘Why me? Why now?’; and the cure for the illness, if there was one, would depend on the answer.
Just as natural philosophers relied on Aristotle for a basic understanding of the physical world, medieval doctors looked to another ancient Greek – Galen – for ideas about the human body. In both cases the connection to classical philosophy came through Islamic scholars and was eagerly taken up by enquiring Christian researchers.
At the centre of Galen’s medicine was a belief that health depended on the delicate balance of four vital fluids or humours: blood produced by the heart, phlegm produced in the brain, black bile from the liver and yellow bile from the gall bladder. It was believed that the individual mixture of these humours in each person determined their characters. This implied the need for different treatments for different sorts of people – even at different times of the day (an idea which has had some renewed life with the study of biorhythms).
Within this framework there was a complex world of plant knowledge, much of it used very successfully within its limits, comparable to what the Amazonian Indians, for example, know today. In fact, a considerable amount of medical knowledge that was dismissed as old wives’ tales in later, more ‘rational’, ages has subsequently been found to be extremely useful. One of the most famous examples is the use of willow bark for patients with fever, which was thought to be unscientific for many years but resulted in the development of aspirin . . .
The old word for a healer was ‘leech’, and the same word was applied to the bloodsucking worm doctors used to take blood from patients who were deemed to be ‘too sanguine’. The common medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, remained a popular instrument of treatment until the late nineteenth century – in fact, French doctors imported 41.5 million leeches in 1833 alone, and the poor little thing became an endangered species. The medical profession lost interest in bleeding as a cure for illness, but has recently realized the usefulness of a creature that produces natural anticoagulants and anaesthetics in its saliva, so that patients bleed readily and generally feel nothing. Today, doctors have begun to use leeches again, particularly after microsurgery, and they are even being farmed commercially for use in medicine. It is likely that there is more to be learnt from the medical practitioners of the past.
MEDIEVAL MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS
During the Middle Ages medical science was, like other branches of knowledge, experimental. At the site of an old monastery at Soutra Aisle, south of Edinburgh in Scotland, some remarkable detective work has uncovered new evidence of just how skilled some of the medieval practitioners were.
Dredging through the ‘blood and shit’ pits on site, archaeologists have discovered sets of seeds used in herbal preparations. These reveal a wealth of medical knowledge that has been lost to us. For example, a plant called tormentil was used to treat intestinal worms; it contains tannic acid, on which current treatments for worms are based. And juniper was used to promote contractions when giving birth.
Our belief that anaesthetics are a modern invention is shown to be quite wrong. Among the finds are several natural anaesthetics, such as opium, black henbane and hemlock. It had been thought that it was impossible to grow opium in Britain’s climate – but the monks clearly found a way. One of the major discoveries was a heel bone with deep ridges that look like evidence of a club foot. It is believed that the foot must have been amputated – and an anaesthetic compound was found only 3 inches away.
We like to believe in the idea of progress – and it helps to think that we know more than people did in the past. But, arguably, we have a strange form of medicine which seems to extend human life while creating its own wreckage. Hospitals actually cause disease while curing it. In 1997 the Lancet published a study*5 showing that just under 20 per cent of hospital patients in the United Kingdom experience some adverse event because of being in hospital. It found that the likelihood of this increased by 6 per cent for each day of hospitalization. Hospital-acquired infections alone kill nearly twice as many people in the UK as die on the roads.*6
In the United States medical treatment is the third highest cause of death (iatrogenic death) after cancer and heart disease. So, despite our undoubted progress in understanding the chemistry and biological structure of the body, and great advances in the techniques of medical intervention, we are not exceeding the achievements of medieval doctors as much as we might expect. In their terms we are doing worse, because the objective of their care was not necessarily to save the body (which would, of course, be wonderful) but to help save the soul by allowing patients to know the hour of their death, and prepare for it. This was itself a genuine medical skill and, again, one that depended on seeing the patient as a human being.
No-one ever found the philosopher’s stone or the elixir of life – otherwise they’d still be here to tell us about it – but this doesn’t mean we can dismiss the Middle Ages as a period of superstitious ignorance. The determination to insist on a major shift in thought around the time of Newton has done a great disservice to our understanding of the past.
It was medieval philosophers who argued that revelation was to be found hidden in nature, and uncovered by experiment. This was the true scientific revolution. And it was Newton’s age that was the great age of superstition. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that people started to believe that human beings could make a pact with the Devil and thereby gain supernatural powers.
When Roger Bacon thought about the future he believed it was easily possible that the world would very soon be completely transformed. He foresaw ships guided by one man, moving ‘with greater swiftness than if they were full of oarsmen . . .’; mechanical lifts and cranes; devices ‘whereby, without bodily danger, a man may walk on the bottom of the sea or of a river . . .’; high-powered magnification; artificial flight; and that ‘a car shall be made which will move with inestimable speed, and the motion will be without the help of any living creature . . .’.
That was 750 years ago. What took us so long?
Partly, our ignorance about our own past.
CHAPTER SIX
KNIGHT
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THE YEAR: 1278. THE PLACE: open country near Le Hem, in Picardy. A court is assembled; the field is laid out for a tournament and splendidly bedecked ladies are watching from a platform. At their centre is a queen, none other than King Arthur’s wife, the lady Guinevere. Alongside her is an even more surprising figure: the Lady of Courtesy.
A herald in full finery has proclaimed that Queen Guinevere requires all who want to pursue love in arms to appear before her; and before they can join her court they must joust. Now seven identically dressed knights appear and surrender themselves to the queen, saying they have been defeated by the knight with a lion. The knight in question then arrives with his lion and seven damsels, Guinevere’s ladies, whom he has rescued from the seven knights in a week-long quest.
The drama of the knight errant, riding around the countryside in shining armour rescuing damsels in distress, was being played out as courtly theatre – by real knights. Was chivalry ever anything more than an entertainment? Was anyone ever motivated by such pure and noble sentiments that they set off every morning looking for distressed damsels and dragons in need of killing? How did they make a living?
How did the lives of the knights play-acting at Le Hem relate to the kind of chivalric story they were performing?
The reality of knighthood – like reality
for all people living medieval lives – was in a constant state of flux throughout the Middle Ages. Concepts of knighthood changed and the perception of what knights were, and what they should be doing, also changed. The only thing that remained constant was that the idea of chivalry was never what we mean by the word today.
Behind the fantasy is a story of violence: of the desire of young men to experience, and get rich and famous through, its practice; and the attempts of society to construct a context in which that violence could be channelled or contained.
It was an effort that was doomed to failure. By the end of the Middle Ages writers looked back and lamented that the golden age of chivalry had passed. In 1385 a French monk wrote:
. . . these days all wars are directed against the poor labouring people and against their goods and chattels. I do not call that war, but . . . pillage and robbery . . . warfare does not follow the rules of chivalry or of the ancient custom of noble warriors who upheld justice, the widow, the orphan and the poor . . . And for these reasons the knights of to-day have not the glory and the praise of the old champions of former times . . .
Tree of Battles
But had the golden age of chivalry ever existed at all?
WHAT WAS A KNIGHT?
Anglo-Saxon knights did not fight on horseback. But Europe’s nobility did and after the Norman conquest in England the word ‘knight’ was also understood to mean a horse-warrior.
William the Conqueror rewarded his victorious followers with grants of the land they had just conquered. They did not own the land – the ownership was still in William’s hot and sticky hands. Every one of those whom he rewarded simply held their land directly or indirectly from him, and the price they paid was military service. His immediate companions became hereditary ‘tenants-in-chief’; eight of them held half the land in England. They were obliged to provide a total of about 5000 warriors when called on by the king, and these warriors were men ‘enfoeffed’ as their sub-tenants.
Sub-tenants held their land as a ‘knight’s fee’ and had to serve on campaign under their feudal superior for a fixed term each year. A knight was ‘dubbed’ – made into a knight – by being presented with his weapon and baring his neck to his feudal superior, who declined to behead him and instead briefly rested a sword on his shoulder. As in the rest of western Europe, the knights formed a military caste, whose rights of lordship were paid for with the duty of military service. They were required to finance the cost of the horses, armour and entourage for that service, conventionally understood to be for forty days a year. William’s particular contribution to the practice of feudalism was to ensure that all landholders swore fealty directly to him, rather than just to their immediate overlord. This put the King of England directly at the head of all the military tenants of the land.
It took two more generations for ‘knighthood’ to signify the profession of arms. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says when William wanted to dub his son Henry a chevalier, horse-warrior, in 1085 he made him a ridere. Henry’s coronation charter speaks of tenants holding land not as knights but ‘per loricam’, as wearers of chain mail.
This was a kingdom designed as a machine for war, its warriors sustained by the obligatory service of the peasantry.
The main thing knights had to have in common was the ability to fight. They were warriors first and foremost, and violence was, for them, a way of life. They listened to stories of exciting brutality, a genre that continued for centuries in tales like the thirteenth-century romance Havelok the Dane:
There might men well see boys all beaten
And the ribs broken in their sides
And Havelock on them well avenged.
He broke their arms, he broke their knees,
He broke their shanks, he broke their thighs.
He made the blood come running down
To the feet right from the crown;
For there was not a head he spared
The ability to beat another man to a pulp or cut him to bloody pieces was not only a requirement of knighthood – it was one of its ideals. Richard the Lionheart, for example, was celebrated amongst the knightly class for his ability to chop his victims’ skulls down to the teeth. For everyone who was not a knight, this was a bit of a problem. How could you control these dangerous young men – especially now they were in charge? How could you channel their testosterone culture into areas that were less destructive to society? The answer that emerged was to try to invent a code of behaviour by which the knightly class must govern themselves – or, rather, to adapt the code of behaviour that the knights themselves were already developing.
Men on horseback, chevaliers, now dominated much of Europe. And the code of conduct of these men – and indeed their whole culture – became known as ‘chivalry’.
The snag was that chivalry meant different things to different people.
KNIGHTS’ CHIVALRY
Knights themselves had no doubts what chivalry meant. It meant learning how to fight, making money, and winning fame and honour. For Anglo-Norman knights of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the perfect role-model was William Marshal. He was the first medieval layman (other than a king) to be the subject of a biography, which was completed some seven years after his death in 1219. Unlike the biographies of saints, it was not in Latin but in French, to be understood by men like himself.
William became hardened to the perils of battle at the ripe old age of five. His father, John the Marshal, had rebelled against King Stephen in 1152, and the king had laid siege to his castle. During the siege William’s father handed him over as a hostage. Stephen had no scruples about using five-year-old hostages, and at one point put the boy into a siege catapult and threatened to shoot him over the castle walls, unless John the Marshal gave himself up.
William’s father is reported to have shouted back that he didn’t give a hoot about the boy since he possessed ‘the hammer and the anvils to make more and better sons’. William clearly knew what it was to have a tender, loving man as a father. Stephen, his bluff called, let the boy live.
John died when William was about 16, and didn’t leave him a penny. William was thus faced with the familiar dilemma of every younger son from a landed English family: join the Church or learn to become a knight.
We do not know how long William struggled with his problem, but the time could probably have been measured in seconds rather than hours. He had a cousin in the town of Tancarville in Normandy who ran a sort of military academy. The prospect of free tuition and board and lodging was too good to resist. William removed to Normandy and spent the next three years training for the military life. Horsemanship, handling weapons, getting fit, learning how to kill and make money – it was all part of the soldier’s calling.
William was eventually dubbed a knight by his cousin, and was at last equipped to earn a bit of ready cash. The neat thing was that he didn’t even have to go to war to do this. There was plenty of money to be made on the tournament circuit.
He teamed up with a business partner, Roger de Caugie, and together they embarked on the tourneying circuit, agreeing to split the proceeds between them. They were spectacularly successful. In one ten-month period the Marshal-Caugie team captured and put to ransom 103 knights. This was, of course, education in the school of hard knocks – after one tournament William’s helmet was so battered he couldn’t take it off. He was awarded the prize but no-one could find him. Eventually he was discovered with his head on the blacksmith’s anvil having the dents hammered out of his helmet, and there a woman of noble birth presented him with his prize: a wondrous fish – a pike over 6 feet long!
William Marshal didn’t just get rich; he also achieved that other aim of chivalry: fame. In fact, he went about this quite methodically and employed a servant by the name of Henry Norreis to go around promoting his celebrity. Indeed, it has been suggested that William’s biography itself was all part of what became a family programme of self-aggrandizement. The cost of the biography was underwritten by Wi
lliam’s eldest son, and the author (a certain ‘John’) ‘might well have been one of those heralds-of-arms who arranged the jousts on the tournament grounds, identified the protagonists by their insignia, and by singing their exploits boosted the reputation of the champions.’*1 William’s own skill at self-promotion was clearly considerable. Like many a young knight he caught the attention of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was generous enough to ransom him when he was captured and imprisoned by a nobleman who had killed his uncle. William then served Eleanor’s husband, Henry II.
His biographer stresses first and foremost William’s dedication to ‘prowess’, skill and courage in fighting. Secondly he emphasizes William’s loyalty – dutifully serving Henry II, Richard the Lionheart, King John and the child-king Henry III.
As a young man William did the proper knightly thing and went on crusade, during which he somehow managed to greatly magnify his reputation – even though in July 1187, about two months before William came back from Palestine, Saladin destroyed the entire fighting force of the kingdom of Jerusalem.
He then returned to Henry’s service, and his loyalty certainly paid off. The king rewarded him with the hand of Isabelle de Clare, the most eligible heiress in the country with oodles of land and her very own castle! William generously took it over for her – nowadays it’s called Chepstow.
The landless William had become a man of property. It was every knight’s dream come true. He was famous as a warrior and was one of the richest men in England. At his funeral, the archbishop of Canterbury himself described him as ‘the best knight in the world’. Fame, money and God’s approval – chivalry could not get better than that if you were a knight.
However, we must never forget that what medieval knights meant by chivalry was not what we might mean. For them, the key thing was that it ennobled the cult of violence that they pursued. Chivalry introduced an etiquette for violent contact between knights that is reflected in the stories they loved to listen to in the twelfth century.