Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (19 page)

Richard set about restoring its fortunes with a degree of ruthlessness. He confiscated the hand flour-mills the townsfolk were now using to grind their corn and had them set into the abbey floor. From then on they were once again forced to use the abbey's mill and – of course – pay for the privilege. At one stroke Richard had made the abbey solvent. But instead of using the money to rebuild the collapsed nave, he decided he would make something that would dominate the commercial life of St Albans.

He decided to build a clock.

The Church had originally established what were called ‘canonical hours'. These marked the times for praying and there were only four such hours during daylight and four for the night. The intervals between the hours varied according to the season. In summer the daylight ones were long and the night-time ones were short, and vice versa in winter. This was time as physically experienced on earth.

Economic growth had brought pressure from merchants and employees for more accurate timekeeping. It appears that by the thirteenth century the intervals between canonical hours no longer varied according to the seasons – many monasteries had moved over to fixed lengths. One of the effects of this change was that None – the hour for prayers originally said at the ninth hour of the day (mid-afternoon) – was displaced to midday, giving the English language the word ‘noon'.

However, laypeople were beginning to use time as measured by astronomers, who divided a day into 24 equal and unvarying hours. By the fourteenth century the Church found that its monopoly on time was being appropriated by townspeople who began to erect clocks on public buildings and in city squares. Control of timekeeping was passing from the Church to the merchant classes.

Richard intended to keep the Church in control – in St Albans anyway. And as he was more concerned with the life of the town than the life of the abbey, his clock used the lay system – not the canonical hours. It did not just give the time, but linked it into the whole of the cosmos; on the clock could be seen the phases of the moon and the times of eclipses.

The clock used the same geared mechanism as the much-hated abbey mill, showing that the mill was linked to the mechanisms of the heavens. By chiming every hour, instead of just for prayers, it took control of the working day of the town. From now on, it was the Church that would issue the time for town council meetings, for the opening and closing of markets, for the start and the end of each and every day of work.
*4

Richard's aim seems to have been to demonstrate the intellectual and technical superiority of the Church, and its scientific understanding, over mere commercial tradesmen. You could say his purpose was political. And yet he would doubtless have claimed it was religious. He was making God's universe visible.

We assume that science and religion are poles apart. But for the philosophers of the Middle Ages ‘science' would have no meaning unless it led to an understanding of God. This religious agenda applied to every branch of philosophy or learning. Even medicine.

WHAT WERE MEDIEVAL DOCTORS UP TO?

Today we expect but one thing from our doctors: to make us better. The medieval doctor was trying to do a lot more than that. He was taking care of the soul as well as the body. Unlike modern doctors he did not try to stop a patient dying at all costs . . . rather, if death seemed inevitable, he was duty-bound to try and help him or her die in the best possible way for their immortal soul.

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

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

T
HE 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 . . .