Western Medieval Manuscripts : Legal texts

Western Medieval Manuscripts

A writ is a form of legal instrument or instruction, issued by a court or other authority, that requires the addressee(s) to act or refrain from acting in a particular way. They are - in F.B. Wiener's memorable phrase - the 'seed-bed of the common law': that is, the system of law that emerged from judicial ruling rather than from statute. The earliest legal text-books in England were in large part commentaries on writs, each usually referred to eponymously: 'Glanvill', the Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regum Anglie attributed to Ranulf de Glanvill (d. 1190), chief justiciar of England; and 'Bracton', De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae attributed to Henry Bracton (d. 1268), an ecclesiastic and justice of the assize. As the common law grew, so did the number of writs, and registers of increasing size were made in ever greater number, in order to provide lawyers with indispensible reference guides to a vast store of legal precedent. Registers of writs were therefore practical books, but that did not preclude their decoration or ornamentation. Evidently, the present manuscript was the source of some pride to whomever commissioned its production, since they chose to expend additional money on having it decorated. It is preceded by a 'Kalendarium', essentially a table of contents listing the writs covered across forty-six chapters, ornamented by coloured and pen-flourished initials, and paraph marks in the alternating red-blue sequence typical of late medieval manuscripts. The first page of the register proper opens with a large historiated initial R, inside which Richard II is depicted, enthroned with crown and sceptre. This begins the text of the first of a group of writs of right, which was issued in Richard's name at Westminster on 4 March 1381/82. Writs of right concern the restoration of property to its rightful owner, and the two parties concerned here were John de Burton, cleric, and Robert de Faryngton. Smaller, illuminated initials mark the beginnings of each chapter throughout the rest of the manuscript. The manuscript was included in the Curious Cures project on account of the two medical recipes that are found on its final leaf, both copied by the same fifteenth-century hand. The first is 'A good medicine to avoyde flewme and corrupcion out off thi stomoke', and recommends skinning a year-old cat, leaving the hair on the outside and tawing the inside (a process that would involve soaking it in a solution of alum and salt). This side should then be anointed with 'an oyle that is called oleum ciriacum'. '[L]ay it to thi stomoke and let it be sewed to thi dowbelet and it shall hele the.' In her recent study of Middle English medical recipes (2022), Hannah Bower has identified other examples of plasters being integrated into one's clothing by way of application: attached to cloth and sewn together 'in þe manere of a dublet' for wearing around the body (cf. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.1.65, f. 252v). Such analogies, she concludes, reflect the domestic spaces in which remedy books were increasingly used. Gilbertus Anglicus, in his Compendium medicinae, repeatedly used similes as diagnostic aids, and comparisons also appear in uroscopy texts (both Latin and Middle English), and these stylistic influences were absorbed into medical information conveyed in the common language. The second recipe was intended 'to sharpe a mannys witts whan thei be dull in labour'. One can imagine medieval lawyers, wearied by the demands of their clients or the travails of business, and burdened with paper- and parchment-work, being sorely in need of a stimulant. 'Take rede vyneger whan thu gost to thi bedde and let rubbe the hert of thi fote [i.e. the middle] and thyn ankleys with a lynyn clowte be a fyre and chanfe it well till it have dronke up half a saweser full and that shall make thi wittes sharp and freshe.' Modern-day readers are no doubt grateful for the ubiquity of tea and coffee. Dr James Freeman Medieval Manuscripts Specialist Cambridge University Library