“For gold in physik is a cordial,”
had not neglected to pore over the works of “Gatesden.”
With lesser book-knowledge but an equal ingenuity, the wandering herbalist was not so advantageously known: he could not, like the royal physician, rely on his good reputation and his “bouche en court” to make his patients swallow glow-worms, rub them with beetles and crickets, or give them “seven heads of fat bats”[236] as remedies. The legislator kept his eye on him. In the country, like most of the other wayfarers, the man nearly always found means to escape the rigour of the laws; but in towns the risk was greater. The unhappy Roger Clerk was sued in 1381 for the illegal practice of medicine in London, because he tried to cure a woman by making her wear a certain parchment on her bosom. Though such a nostrum could not possibly be more hurtful than the use of fat bats, he was carried to the pillory “through the middle of the city, with trumpets and pipes,” on a horse without a saddle, his parchment and a whetstone round his neck, unseemly pottery hanging round his neck and down his back, in token that he had lied.[237]
Uneasy at the increase of these abuses, Henry V issued in 1421 an Ordinance against the meddlers with physic and surgery, “to get rid of the mischiefs and dangers which have long continued within the kingdom among the people by means of those who have used the art and practice of physic and surgery, pretending to be well and sufficiently taught in the same arts, when of truth they are not so.” Henceforth there would be severe punishments for all practitioners who have not been approved in their speciality, “that is to say, those of physic by the universities, and the surgeons by the masters of that art.”[238] The mischief {189} continued just as before; which seeing, in order to give more authority to the medicine approved by the State, Edward IV, in the first year of his reign, erected the Company of Barbers of London using the faculty of surgery, into a corporation.[239]
The Renaissance came and found barbers, quacks, empirics, and sorcerers continuing to prosper on British soil, and still the subject of song, satire and play. John Heywood’s Pothecary is a lineal descendant of Rutebeuf’s herbalist; he sells a wonderful Syrapus de Byzansis, and advertises it in such a way that, anything that happens, he is right:
“These be the thynges that breke all stryfe
Betweene mannes sycknes and his lyfe;
From all payne these shall you delever
And set you even at reste for ever.”[240]
Henry VIII deplored the hold those men kept on the common people, and on some of their betters too; he considered it his duty to enact new rules. “The science and connyng of physyke and surgerie,” said the king in his statute, “to the perfecte knowlege wherof bee requisite bothe grete lernyng and ripe experience, ys daily within this Royalme exercised by a grete multitude of ignoraunt persones, of whom the grete partie have no maner of insight in the same nor in any other kynde of lernyng; some also can no lettres on the boke, soofarfurth that common artificers, as smythes, wevers, and women boldely and custumably take upon theim grete curis and thyngys of great difficultie, in the which they partely use sorcery and which-crafte, partely applie such medicine unto the disease as be verey noyous and nothyng metely therfore, to the high displeasoure {190} of God . . . and destruccion of many of the kynge’s liege people, most specially of them that cannot descerne the uncunnyng from the cunnyng.”[241] The examples above have shown how difficult it must often have been to “descerne” between them.