IV
DEATH AND DOCTORS
To read a medical dictionary is to marvel that any man should enjoy even brief intervals of health, there are so many delicate organs in the body and so many diseases lying in wait for them. Read the pronouncements of specialists on diet and the dangers which attend the eating of any food or the drinking of any liquid, and the marvel grows. Add the extraordinary facility with which accidents occur, and the margin between life and death becomes surprisingly narrow. The crew of a destroyer are habitually separated from the other world by about a quarter of an inch of steel. With most of us the partition is less obvious, less constant and uniform, but very nearly as thin in places. For any but the most hardened there must always be a feeling of pleased surprise upon emerging safely on the other side of Piccadilly Circus or the Embankment by Blackfriars. (It is true that in the latter case a paternal, not to say grandmotherly, Council has provided the unexciting alternative of a subway, but only leisurely athletes have the time or energy to descend and reascend those stairs.) The average City man is within inches and seconds of death every day, and it is only when the inches and seconds become fractional that he realises for the moment his insecurity of tenure. Which is just as well. Every age has its own dangers: we have the motor car, unwitting apostle of socialism in its brutal, individualistic disregard for the rights of others; mediæval man, I am inclined to think, ran most risk from the quick temper of his fellows.
From time to time, when some undesirable alien is arrested for stabbing an enemy or chance acquaintance who has annoyed him, the police-court magistrate before whom he is brought will comment, with patriotic pride, on the ‘un-English’ nature of the offence. And it is true that at the present time the Englishman as a rule emphasises his disagreement with his opponent by means of fist or hob-nailed boot rather than with a knife, but this was certainly not so in mediæval times. Call a man ‘a boor’ nowadays and you may get a black eye, but the results were more disastrous in the thirteenth century, as John Marsh found when he applied that opprobrious term to Richard Fraunkfee as they were walking back from church at Doncaster, for Richard promptly knifed him. Every man in those days carried a knife, dagger, anelace, or baselard, and produced it without hesitation if angered. Needless to say, the knife was much in evidence after harvest feasts, wakes, and especially visits to the tavern, for drunkenness has been an English vice since Fitz Stephen, in the twelfth century, spoke of ‘the inordinate drinking of fools’ as one of the two plagues of London. How far this failing was common to both sexes I do not know; casual references to women in taverns occur occasionally, but they might have been there as blamelessly as their descendants in a modern tea-shop, and, so far as I can remember, I have only come across one woman who met her death when drunk—a Yorkshire woman who fell down a well. At the same time, seeing that ‘the good wyf taugte hir dougter’ in the fifteenth century that ‘if thou be ofte drunke it falle thee to schame,’ it looks as if occasional excess might have been condoned. With the exception of drunkenness, the moving cause of the innumerable murderous assaults is rarely given, and it is rather curious that the only two cases which I have found of men quarrelling, with fatal results, over a woman both occurred at ironworks in Yorkshire in 1266.
‘... got his arms round a branch.’
Knives were not infrequently responsible for deaths without any evil intent on the part of their owners. In quite a large number of cases when boys were playing together a knife would fall out of its sheath and inflict a mortal wound. And then, if the owner were over twelve, he would have, theoretically, to go to prison and stay there till he received a formal pardon from the king for accidental manslaughter. I say ‘theoretically’ because in practice the culprit usually ‘fled,’ which, I suspect, meant that he went round the corner while the village constable carefully looked in the wrong place for him. An unusual incident connected with a knife occurred in Dorset in 1280, when a girl, clearing the table after dinner, picked up the tablecloth with a knife inside, and as she went out of the room tripped and fell so that the knife stuck into her. It was about the same date that a Suffolk peasant, William le Keu, flung a knife against the wall of his house and it bounded off and killed his infant daughter, lying on her mother’s lap in front of the fire. Why he should have thrown his knife at the wall does not appear, but people were always throwing things about and hitting inoffensive passers-by. For instance, a man would fling a rake or a flail at some chicken and hit his own child. Children, in fact, had an unhappy knack of coming round the corner with disastrous results to themselves, especially when their elders were playing quoits or pennystone down the village street. One of the most curious cases of what we may call an indirect accident was when two small boys went into an orchard to get apples; one of them threw a stone up into a tree, but instead of bringing down an apple it hit a stone that some one had thrown up long before, and this fell on his cousin’s head and killed him. Another case of the unforeseen happened in Nottinghamshire in the thirteenth century, when Richard Palmer was climbing a tree in a churchyard to take a crow’s nest. He was standing on a bough when suddenly it broke; but the result was not what might have been expected, for Richard got his arms round a branch and after hanging for a long time came down safely, but the broken bough fell on the head of a man standing down below, and ‘the dog it was that died.’