Western Medieval Manuscripts : Abridgement of Statutes

Western Medieval Manuscripts

This manuscript contains an abridgement of statutes from the reign of King Edward III (reg. 1327–1377), written in Latin and French. A single medical recipe was added in the 15th century to some blank space after the end of the Statute of Ireland: entitled 'To remove a blemish in the eye' ('Ad delendam maculam in Oculo'), it prescribes a herbal remedy comprising 'þynroske', 'lushes', red fennel, celandine, rosemary, sage and other plants, which were to be crushed together and tempered with breast milk from a woman who has given birth to a male child. This concoction should then be wrung through a linen cloth and applied to the sore eye.It is not unusual to find such cures in manuscripts that otherwise have no medical contents. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that legal manuscripts were a frequent repository for this kind of information, with several other examples included among the corpus covered by the Curious Cures project. For example, <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02994/1'>Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 2994</a> - a legal compendium comprising the Novel Tenures, the Natura brevium and various other standard texts, owned and partly written by Edward Cushyn (fl. 1512) - contains a collection of fifteen remedies for gout. <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-07912/1'>Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 7912</a> - a legal commonplace book compiled by Sir Edmund Jenney (d. 1522) and members of his family - has recipes to purge excess phlegm or choler, cures for breathlessness ('schortnes of wynd') and the pestilence, and a 'gargarison for the fumys in the head'. <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-EE-00001-00003/1'>Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee.1.3</a> - principally a copy of Common Pleas entries compiled by Simon Elryngton of Hackney (d. 1481/85) - has recipes for a plaster to stop aches, laxatives and costives, cures for quartan fever, migraine and burns. Similarly, <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-EE-00005-00018/1'>Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee.5.18</a> - a compilation of Readings and other legal texts copied wholly or largely by Walter Atwell (fl. c. 1520), lawyer of Staple Inn - also includes a mnemonic about stranguary, diarrhoea and dysentery and a recipe for purging the humours, both attributed to the apothecary John Cokkys (d. 1475).Rather than attributing this pattern to lawyerly hypochondria, a more likely explanation is that medieval legal practitioners were literate men, had parchment or paper and pen to hand, and were accustomed to writing useful information down: in all of the above manuscripts, the recipes were copied into blank space around the legal texts that formed their principal contents. These notes might be prescriptions they had received from medical practitioners or which were recommended to them by acquaintances. As professionals, lawyers also possessed the means to pay for medical treatments, though the fact they troubled to record them suggests that they or their households may have tried to make the formulations themselves. In the case of MS Kk.6.6, one can easily imagine a medieval lawyer suffering from sore eyes as a consequence of poring over the necessities of legal bureaucracy in poorly lit surroundings. Dr James Freeman Medieval Manuscripts Specialist Cambridge University Library