Very shortly before the commencement of syphilis, the dissolute manners of the English clergy, especially of the regulars, created such noise and commotion among the laity, that Pope Innocent VIII. sent in 1490 (a few years before the actual appearance of the disease) to Archbishop Merton, authorising him to admonish his abbots and priors that “by their lewd and dissolute lives they brought ruin upon their own souls, and set a bad example to others.” In obedience to this bull, the Primate sent monitory letters to the superiors of all convents and religious houses in his province, admonishing and commanding them, by the authority he had received from the Pope, to reform themselves and their subjects from certain vices, of which they were said to be guilty. The monitory letter that was sent on this occasion to the Abbot of St. Alban’s is published in Wilkins’s Concilia, vol. iii. p. 632. If that Abbot and his monks were stained with all the odious vices of which the Primate openly accuses them in this letter, they stood much in need of reformation. Some of these vices, says Dr. Henry, were so detestable that they cannot so much as be named in history. “You are infamous,” writes the Archbishop to the Abbot, for “simony, usury, and squandering away the possessions of your monastery, besides other enormous crimes.” One of these crimes was, that the Abbot had turned all the modest women out of the two nunneries of Pray and Sapwell (over which he pretended to have a jurisdiction), and filled them with prostitutes; that these nunneries were esteemed no better than brothels, and that he and his monks publicly frequented them as such. His Grace seems to have been well and accurately informed, for he even names some of these infamous women and their gallants. The monks, too, were at least as profligate as their Abbot, for they also kept their concubines both within and without the monastery.
When such was the scandalous life led by some of the clergy, we cannot wonder that, before the introduction of syphilis, Rabelais (himself at one time a monk) should apply to the gonorrhœal disease the very significant term of “rhume ecclesiastique;” or that, after the appearance of syphilis, this latter and greater malady should have spread speedily among all ranks, down from the clergy to the laity, and from the king to the churl, and should have become diffused by such stealthy but rapid steps over the countries of Europe, as to have at first been mistaken for a malady spreading itself, not by impure intercourse, but by general epidemic influences. And when we advert to the existing state of society in that age, and couple it with such notices as we have found in the Aberdeen records, we may surely (in despite of all that has been written to the contrary, both in ancient and modern times) reasonably doubt whether the laws regulating the propagation of syphilis in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were in any degree different from what we know them to be in the nineteenth century. The Aberdeen edict shows that three hundred and sixty odd years ago, or in 1497, the common mode of infection of the disease was precisely the same as all acknowledge it to be at the present day.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] From the Edinburgh Med. and Surg. Journal, No. 149.
[2] Study of Medicine, vol. i. pref. p. xxiii.
[3] See some learned notices regarding this strange species of mania (the wolf-madness or wehrwolf of the Germans) in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (edit. of 1804), vol. i. p. 13, and Heinrich Hase’s late work on the Public and Private Life of the Ancient Greeks, p. 17. Ploucquet, in his Literatura Medica, gives references to a number of articles and monographs on the subject under the word “Lycanthropia,” vol. i. p. 510.
[4] See particularly the Canon De Leprosis of Pope Alexander III. in the Monasticon Anglicanum, tom. ii. p. 365; and Semler’s Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ Selecta Capita, tom. iii. p. 170.
[5] The terms employed by Matthew Paris are quite precise. “Habent insuper Templarii in Christianitate novem millia Maneriorum; Hospitalarii vero novemdecim.” Anglor. Historia Major (ed. of 1644), p. 417. In referring to the subject under the word “Leprosaria,” Ducange states, “Dominus Matthæus Paris, Hist. Angl. p. 63, affirmat suo tempore fuisse Leprosarias 1900 (19,000?) in toto orbe Christiano.” See his Glossarium, Med. et Inf. Latinitatis, tom. iv. p. 126. At p. 63 of the Appendix to Paris, the institution of one hospital at St. Alban’s is referred to; but neither here nor elsewhere in his work can I find any allusion whatever to the existing number of leper hospitals in England, or in Christendom in general.
[6] Velley, Villaret et Garnier, Histoire de France, tom. ii. (ed. of 1770), p. 291.