The woman having lost the name of wife together with her faith, went to a traiterous Physitian, who had killed a great many persons in his dayes, and promised him fifty peeces of Gold, if he would give her a present poyson to kill her Husband out of hand, but in presence of her husband, she feined that it was necessary for him to receive a certaine kind of drink, which the Maisters and Doctours of Physicke doe call a sacred potion, to the intent he might purge Choller and scoure the interiour parts of his body. But the Physitian in stead of that drinke prepared a mortall and deadly poyson, and when he had tempered it accordingly, he tooke the pot in the presence of the family, and other neighbors and friends of the sick young man, and offered it to his patient.
To further the efficacy of potions, and also to act as indirect yet acknowledged reinforcements, aischrological and scatological allusions and references were frequent accompaniments of the actual act of imbibing the philtre.
Omar Khayyam, the wise old tentmaker, eulogized, in the Rubaiyat, food and love and wine in the memorable lines:
A loaf of bread,
A jug of wine
And thou, beneath the bough,
Were paradise enow.
The medieval Latin songs of the Goliards, the wandering students of the European universities, are full of paeans to drink and its amatory effects. Love and wine are inextricably mixed together in riotous and rollicking friendship. Everyone, exclaims one chant, is drinking: man and maid, master and serf, the sick and the healthy, young and old: