Bodily and spiritual health

We seem to have wandered a long way here from the Plantagenet court, and yet in many respects it is in the court and its literature that we come closest to the medieval understanding of bodily or spiritual health. For the health of their souls, kings, from Henry I onwards, had their own personal confessors: Henry I’s became the first bishop of Carlisle. For the health of their bodies they had physicians, the best of them either foreign trained or at least adopting foreign sounding names. Many centuries before the establishment of any sort of National Health Service, kings such as Henry II were making grants to monasteries specifically ‘for the health and wellbeing of my realm’. The king’s interventions in the treatment of particular diseases were amongst the most remarkable ways in which royal authority was articulated. Both Edward the Confessor and Henry II ‘touched’ for the king’s evil, claiming that by the mere laying on of their hands they could cure the disfiguring skin disease later diagnosed as ‘scrofula’. By the late thirteenth century, the King’s touch was being marketed on an almost industrial basis, with as many as 1,000 individual sufferers being brought before King Edward I each year for healing.

This connection between skin diseases and royalty was itself perhaps derived from the particular obsession displayed in the Biblical book of Leviticus (Chapter 13) which required the identification and exclusion of those suffering from what in the Latin Bible was described under a catch-all term definition as ‘leprosy’. Leprosy in the Middle Ages was a term applied to a wide variety of pathologies, from severe psoriasis to full-blown Hansen’s disease, the bacterial infection that afflicts today’s clinically diagnosed lepers. Since it was believed to be a highly contagious punishment for sin, particularly for sexual misconduct, and since it was disfiguring, with the loss of fingers and toes, destruction of the nasal cartilage, hoarsening of the voice and progressive deformity, leprosy was feared. What is more surprising is the degree of specialist care devoted to its sufferers. In the twelfth century, there was an increasing tendency not only towards the segregation of those with Hansen’s disease, revealed from the skeletons of large numbers of those buried in leper hospitals, but to the regulation and, in so far as was possible, amelioration of their affliction. Where lepers in Anglo-Saxon England seem to have received no specialist care, at least 320 leper hospitals were established in England between the Norman Conquest and 1250, many of them founded by the King. The gathering of alms for such houses became a regular social obligation, again frequently supported by the King. When collecting alms, lepers were permitted to carry a wooden clapper or rattle. This was not done in the Hollywood sense, in order to frighten away the public from the possibility of contagion or the ‘unclean’. Rather, the leper’s wooden rattle distinguished this particular group of alms-seekers from the clergy ringing bells to summon the faithful to Mass or to announce that the consecrated host was being carried through the streets.