Masculinity and medicine: Thomas Walsingham and the
death of the Black Prince
q
David Green
Harlaxton College, Harlaxton, Lincs, NG32 1AG, UK
Keywords:
Edward the Black Prince
Masculinity
Fourteenth Century
Thomas Walsingham
Disease
a b s t r a c t
This article examines the nature of the illness that plagued Edward
the Black Prince (1330–76) for the last nine years of his life and
caused his death. The prince’s premature death had profound
political repercussions and a discussion of his symptoms provides
a lens through which to examine late medieval attitudes to a wide
range of social, religious and medical issues. The prince’s symp-
toms, especially those described by Thomas Walsingham in his
Chronica maiora, suggest traditional explanations of his death are
incorrect. This article offers a number of varied but connected
medieval and symbolic interpretations as well as a consideration
of methodologies appropriate for analysing such material
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
I
Edward the Black Prince died on 8 June 1376, a week before his 46th birthday, and with him ‘the hopes
of the English utterly perished’.
His death, while far from unexpected, left a gulf in the English political
hierarchy that, arguably, remained until the reign of Henry V. The doddering Edward III ruled England
in name for a little over 12 months, and his successor, Richard of Bordeaux, was a boy of only 10 years of
age when crowned on 22 June 1377.
Richard II’s minority was marred by peasant unrest, and his
majority scarred by aristocratic rebellion. The reign culminated with the king’s deposition at the hands
of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke. In his turn Henry IV, although a fine ruler, was burdened with the
political and perhaps personal implications of the usurpation, and it would not be until 1415 and the
q For their help with various matters in the preparation of this article the author wishes to thank April Harper, Katherine
Lewis, Caroline Proctor, and the editor and anonymous reader of the Journal of Medieval History. Particular thanks are also due to
Bronach Kane for her generosity in sharing unpublished research, and Dr Patricia Grocott, Reader in Palliative Wound Care,
King’s College, University of London, for her help with a possible medical diagnosis of the Black Prince’s condition.
E-mail address:
1
The St Albans chronicle. The Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, vol. I: 1376–1394, ed. and trans. John Taylor, Wendy R.
Childs, Leslie Watkiss (Oxford, 2003), 37.
2
Richard II, born 6 January 1367.
Contents lists available at
Journal of Medieval History
j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e /
0304-4181/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jmedhist.2008.12.002
Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
vindication brought by Agincourt (the first victory of note in the Anglo-French war since Poitiers in
1356) that the English Crown sat securely and at ease once again.
How different then might things have been if the Black Prince had outlived his father? First, it
should be noted that even if he enjoyed good health it would not, in all probability, have been a long
reign. Edward would have been crowned aged 47, older by far than any monarch at his coronation in
the years between Hastings and Bosworth.
Nor is he likely to have been a fine statesman if judged by
the administration of the principalities of Wales and Aquitaine d although conditions in these areas were
not conducive to English government.
But his would have been a steadying influence in Edward III’s
declining years and his reign would have prevented the uncertainty brought by Richard’s minority.
Despite his limitations the Black Prince had great personal authority fashioned by his service in the
vanguard at Cre´cy, tempered at Poitiers, and confirmed on the field of Na´jera.
Such counterfactual exercises are rarely profitable. However, the implications of the prince’s death and
his long illness were profound, and the nature of his protracted disease, which had such repercussions, has
not been considered in detail. Such a task, however, raises numerous methodological problems since the
evidence, although limited, is open to many interpretations. Consequently, although various diagnoses of the
prince’s condition will be offered, this paper will focus on the reasons contemporary authors gave
for the prince’s condition in order to explain both his reputation and the ‘thought world’ in which they lived.
The prince fell ill during the Na´jera campaign of 1367 and, although we do not know what his
symptoms were, Henry Knighton, writing after 1378, tells us ‘so many of the English died in Spain of
dysentery [fluxu ventris] and other diseases that scarce one man in five returned’
to the principality of
Aquitaine. There is no doubt that the prince’s health was damaged during the Castilian expedition,
probably permanently,
and various authors have diagnosed his condition as amoebic dysentery,
but
we have few sources that substantiate this and it is unlikely that an individual would have survived
dysentery for nine years.
In recent times others have suggested dropsy and cirrhosis, or a combination
of these.
Chandos Herald who composed his verse biography of the prince’s life in the mid-1380s only
tells us that Edward was forced to take to his bed, ‘where he had scant cheer’, and returned to England
because of the malady that oppressed him.
Similarly the Anonimalle Chronicle, a continuation of the
Brut probably written in the last years of the fourteenth century at St Mary’s abbey in York, speaks of
a grievous malady, of the prince languishing in his bed, infirm and feeble.
Jean Froissart provides no
further details, as we might expect. It was a chivalric chronicler’s express intention to recount the
martial deeds of great men not the ailments of those carried to their last campaign on a litter d as the
prince was said to be at the siege of Limoges in 1370.
What then can be said for certain? The prince’s health began to fail while on campaign in Castile,
and it appears to have deteriorated steadily until January 1371 when Edward and his remaining family
3
Edward the Black Prince, born 15 June 1330; Edward III, died 21 June 1377. The oldest monarchs to come to the throne were
William the Conqueror, 38 or 39 years of age at his coronation, and Stephen (b. c.1092) who was probably 42 at his accession in 1135.
4
Guilhem Pepin, ‘Towards a new assessment of the Black Prince’s principality of Aquitaine: a study of the last years
(1369–1372)’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 50 (2006), 59–114; Richard Barber, Edward prince of Wales and Aquitaine. A biog-
raphy of the Black Prince (Woodbridge, 1978), 181–7, 207–14; David Green, Edward the Black Prince. Power in medieval Europe
(Harlow, 2007), 107–40; R.R. Davies, Conquest, coexistence and change. Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987), 398–402; R.R. Davies,
The revolt of Owain Glyn Dw
ˆ r (Oxford, 1995), 66–73.
5
Knighton’s chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G.H. Martin (Oxford, 1995), 194–5.
6
Maurice Keen, England in the later middle ages. A political history, 2nd edn (London, 2003), 260.
7
R.P. Dunn-Pattison, The Black Prince (New York, 1910), 265; Hubert Cole, The Black Prince (London, 1976), 182, 210 (‘a base
disease’); John Harvey, The Black Prince and his age (London, 1976), 113.
8
With reference to 1369 the anonymous author of the continuation to the Eulogium Historiarum, probably written c.1405,
noted ‘Et ipse coepit dysentaria graviter vexari’. Eulogium Historiarum, ed. F.S. Haydon, 3 vols (London, 1863), vol. 3, 334. I am
grateful to Dr Patricia Grocott for her advice on the medical implications of dysentery.
9
Micheline Dupuy, Le Prince Noir. E
´douard, seigneur d’Aquitaine (Paris, 1970), 245; Barbara Emerson, The Black Prince (London,
1976), 231. Dropsy or an oedema is the swelling of organs due to excess fluid.
10
Vie du Prince Noir, ed. Diana Tyson (Tu¨bingen, 1975), ll. 3877–80.
11
‘gysant en sa enfirmity’: The Anonimalle chronicle, 1333 to 1381, ed. V.H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), 92, 95.
12
Jean Froissart, Chroniques, ed. S. Luce, G. Raynaud, Le´on Mirot, Albert Mirot, 15 vols (Paris, 1869–1975), vol. 7, 244. So too,
incidentally, was Baldwin IV (the Leper) of Jerusalem, who died aged 23: Bernard Hamilton, The Leper King and his heirs. Baldwin IV
and the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge, 2000), 241–2.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
35
were forced to leave Bordeaux and return to England.
After landing he stayed several weeks at
Plympton priory (Devon) probably to recover his strength before continuing the journey to London,
which he reached only on 19 April. Thereafter Edward’s condition is difficult to trace. He does not seem
to have travelled much, but his health cannot have been consistently dreadful as he could contemplate
a campaign to France in the summer of 1372, and he did not formally return control of the principality
of Aquitaine to the king until the following November. In addition, he attended or made preparations to
attend the annual feasts of the Order of the Garter at Windsor on St George’s Day (23 April).
In these
last years he may also have developed a new interest in domestic politics, particularly the business of
parliament which grew increasingly restive as the war effort failed. There were also disputes with the
papacy, especially in 1373, in which the prince appears to have taken some interest. Indeed, accounts
of a great council called to consider papal demands for taxation, although fictitious in parts, indicate
the prince was still the man to whom the people turned to save England, especially now the king’s
health had also deteriorated.
However, their hope in him cannot have lasted long. References to the
prince’s activities in 1374–5 are almost non-existent, probably indicating he was seriously unwell for
much of this time. A charter dated February 1374 suggests he resided at his manor of Berkhamsted
(Herts), and in June 1375 he stayed at Kennington (Surrey), where a number of petitions were put to
him. He attended the opening of the Good Parliament in April 1376 but fell gravely ill soon after and
retired to Kennington once again. At the beginning of June he moved to Westminster and clearly did
not expect to live long. He conveyed his last wishes to his father and son (asking them to respect and
confirm numerous gifts and grants to servants and friends), made his will on 7 June,
and died at
three o’clock in the afternoon the next daydTrinity Sunday, the feast day for which he had particular
reverence.
II
Few sources, however, provide any discussion of the prince’s symptoms or explanation of his
premature death. For this it is necessary to turn to Thomas Walsingham who gave the most detailed
and intriguing account of Edward’s condition in the so-called Scandalous Chronicle, the name often
given to a section of his Chronica maiora. The Scandalous Chronicle, described as such mainly because
of the invective poured on John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, covers the years 1376–7. Composed very
soon after the events it describes, this part of the Chronica maiora was substantially altered after it
began to be circulated outside the St Albans monastic community.
In the Scandalous Chronicle,
13
Edward of Angouleˆme, the prince’s eldest son, died during the Limoges campaign, further disrupting the line of succession:
Michael Prestwich, The three Edwards. War and state in England, 1272–1377, 2nd edn (London, 2003), 5.
14
Barber, Edward, 228.
15
J.I. Catto, ‘An alleged great council of 1374’, English Historical Review, 82 (1967), 764–71.
16
A.P. Stanley, Historical memorials of Canterbury (London, 1906), 165–82.
17
Green, Edward the Black Prince, 167–8.
18
The major surviving manuscript is London, British Library [BL], MS Royal 13 E. IX which deals mainly with the period from
c 1390. The Scandalous chronicle, which marked the start of the contemporary phase of Walsingham’s history (1376–7), was
removed from the text and replaced with a shorter, more neutral account probably because a copy of the chronicle (now
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 462) was presented to Gaunt’s brother, Thomas of Woodstock, c.1395. The editors of the St
Albans chronicle reconstructed the original using BL, Cotton MS Otho C. II; BL, Harley MS 3634; and Bodleian, MS Bodley 316. See
St Albans chronicle, xxvii–xiii. The other modern edition, The Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham (1376–1422), ed. and trans.
David Preest and James G. Clark (Woodbridge, 2005), offers a translation of the most summary of the recensions of Wal-
singham’s narratives based on College of Arms MS Arundel VII; Corpus Christi College Cambridge, MS 195; Historia Anglicana,
ed. H.T. Riley, 2 vols (London, 1863–4); The St Albans chronicle, 1406–1420, ed. V.H. Galbraith (Oxford, 1937). The authorship of
and relationship between the various chronicles written at St Albans in the later middle ages remains much debated. However,
Walsingham was almost certainly the author of the Chronica maiora from 1376 to 1393 together with the retrospective section
beginning in 1272: St Albans chronicle, xxxv. See further V.H. Galbraith, ‘The ‘Historia Aurea’ of John, vicar of Tynemouth, and the
sources of the St Albans chronicle (1327–1377)’, in: Essays in history presented to Reginald Lane Poole, ed. H.W.C. Davis (Oxford,
1927), 379–98; V.H. Galbraith, ‘Thomas Walsingham and the Saint Albans chronicle, 1272–1422’, English Historical Review, 47
(1932), 12–30; G.B. Stow, ‘Thomas Walsingham, John Malvern, and the Vita Ricardi Secundi 1377–1381: a reassessment’,
Mediaeval Studies, 39 (1977), 490–7; G.B. Stow, ‘Bodley Library MS 316 and the dating of Thomas Walsingham’s literary career’,
Manuscripta, 23 (1981), 67–76.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
36
Walsingham described the medical condition he apparently believed the prince suffered in his
declining years and also provided a thorough report of Edward’s last hours.
Some aspects of the account are entirely conventional and corroborated by other sources. As
death approached, according to Walsingham and Chandos Herald, Edward commended his wife and
son to the care of the king, and called on the nobility of England to support the young prince. In
a similar fashion the Anonimalle Chronicler says the prince asked the nobility of England to care for
the kingdom, its laws and good customs.
The prince also gave consideration to the care of his
servants and friends. Walsingham noted Edward requested the king confirm various grants to
members of his household. According to records in the Patent Rolls and elsewhere these consisted
of 94 grants valued at £2927; 32 of these were new and made on his deathbed (5 June 1376).
Also, entirely properly, Walsingham, Chandos Herald, Froissart, and the Anonimalle Chronicler
noted the prince asked pardon of those people he had offended and died with his sins forgiven;
however, Walsingham provides much more detail than the others concerning these points. Inci-
dentally, these four authors all commented on the significance of the prince’s death on the feast of
the Trinity.
After recording his death the authors emphasised the prince’s military reputation. For Froissart,
Knighton and Walsingham, when this flower of the world’s chivalry died his courage and great deeds of
arms were remembered as the hallmark of his life.
For Froissart, the prince’s death was a cause for
mourning even in France, and prayers were said by King Charles V in the Sainte-Chapelle and by a great
many bishops, nobles and knights. Walsingham, by contrast, tells us that the French received news of
the death of this ‘Alexander [who had] attacked no nation which he did not defeat, and besieged no city
which he did not capture’
with joy and celebration.
Whether or not either account is true England certainly suffered a great loss when the prince died.
The era ended that had seen Cre´cy and Poitiers, and the line of succession while not broken was dis-
rupted. There was also a sense of poignancy such as might be felt in the death of any royal prince who
had shown such promise but had not had the opportunity to come into his inheritance. The death of
a leader with such a glittering military reputation, given the failing English position in France, only
intensified the sense of loss. Such a feeling had been evident in the demise of Richard I and would be
felt even more strongly after the loss of Henry V. The first was laid low, appropriately enough, in battle;
the second succumbed to dysentery and, according to Thomas Walsingham, weakened by years of
campaigning.
Such examples in the hands of certain chroniclers served to emphasise the transitory
nature of earthly power. This was certainly the case with Henry IV, the prince’s nephew and a man with
a reputation for great energy, who died aged only 46 after a vigorous military career. As with the Black
Prince there are few helpful accounts of Henry’s symptoms and any diagnosis of his condition must be
tentative.
The evidence thus far provides an entirely conventional portrait of the death of a royal or
nobleman with similarities to accounts of the deaths of important secular figures throughout the
middle ages. For example, according to William of Malmesbury, before his life ended Henry I (d.1135)
19
Anonimalle chronicle, 95.
20
St Albans chronicle, 32; Chris Given-Wilson, The royal household and the king’s affinity. Service, politics and finance in England,
1360–1413 (New Haven and London, 1986), 133; David Green, ‘The household and military retinue of Edward the Black Prince’, 2
vols (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Nottingham, 1999), vol. 1, 225–37.
21
See above and n. 19.
22
Knighton’s chronicle, 196–9; St Albans chronicle, 36–9; Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Luce, vol. 8, 224–5.
23
St Albans chronicle, 36–8. Walsingham was certainly fascinated with Alexander and later composed the Historia Alexandri
magni principis. However, in the revised version of the chronicle the prince was compared with Hector. James G. Clark, A
monastic renaissance at St Albans. Thomas Walsingham and his circle c.1350–1440 (Oxford, 2004), 191. Chandos Herald also
compared the prince with Alexander: Vie du Prince Noir, ed. Tyson, ll. 4100.
24
Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, ed. Preest and Clark, 445. ‘dysentaria vehementi’: Walsingham, Historia Anglicana,
vol. 2, 343.
25
Peter McNiven, ‘The problem of Henry IV’s health, 1405–1413’, English Historical Review, 100 (1985), 747; Carole Rawcliffe,
Leprosy in medieval England (Woodbridge, 2006), 44–5.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
37
made the effort to settle his earthly affairs, confessed his sins and received communion.
Christine
de Pizan, similarly, painted a portrait of an ideal death for Charles V of France (d.1380),
while the
Brut tells that Henry V (d.1422) also died a good death: he made arrangements in his will for the
good government of the nation and the education of his son.
One of the most celebrated accounts
of a secular death is that of William Marshal (earl of Pembroke and regent of England) given in the
biography written not long after Marshal’s death in 1219.
Like the Black Prince, William was aware
for a long time of the approach of death; he also recognised the need to put his affairs in order and
ensure his heirs and successors would care properly for his dependents and servants. Such fore-
knowledge of death (if precise) might be taken as evidence of sanctity but neither the Marshal nor
certainly the Black Prince were in this category.
Nonetheless, as Georges Duby famously showed,
Marshal’s biographer presented his slow death as a model for the Christian knight though William
himself is said to have bridled at the suggestion that he was about to die: even le meilleur chevalier
du monde found it difficult to confront his mortality.
This was, of course, not unusual psycho-
logically or for spiritual reasons: the final confession and the last rites were usually delayed until the
last possible moment.
The anointing of the body as part of extreme unction was greatly feared by
the laity; it marked the end of one’s material existence, so, if the patient recovered he would be little
more than a living corpse.
However, certain aspects of Walsingham’s account of the Black Prince’s death strike a discordant
note. According to the chronicler God gave Edward a long time to repent of his sins and he suffered
greatly for them. For more than five years ‘almost every month he suffered a discharge of both semen
and blood [which] rendered him so weak on many an occasion that his attendants very often thought
he had died.’
There are a number of possible explanations and diagnoses for this remarkable
description, and an analysis faces at least an equal number of methodological problems stretching
beyond the lack of corroborative evidence.
Certainly it is a description open to multiple interpretations and presents numerous difficulties in
recovering the meaning of the author.
To complicate the analysis, aspects of the subject matter
d
essentially sex and death d have been among the most vibrant and vigorously debated by recent
generations of scholars and have been subjected to a wide range of methodological approaches. Indeed,
26
William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum Anglorum, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols (London, 1889), vol. 2, 535–7. Portents and
earthquakes accompanied Henry’s death: ‘the elements manifested their displeasure at this great man’s last departure’. William
of Malmesbury, A history of the Norman kings (1066–1125), with the Historia novella, or History of his own times (1126–1142), trans.
John Sharp, ed. Joseph Stevenson (repr. Felinfach, 2000), 387–8.
27
Christine de Pizan, Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, ed. S. Solente, 2 vols (Paris, 1936), vol. 1, 182–92.
28
Brut, or The chronicles of England, ed. F.W.D. Brie, 2 vols (London, 1908), vol. 2, 429–30. For a consideration of Henry’s
sickness, probably contracted at the siege of Meaux in 1422, see Christopher Allmand, Henry V (New Haven and London, 1997),
169, 173–4. He notes that the condition sapped Henry’s formerly renowned strength and energy, and that contemporaries
attributed this to a chronic intestinal condition. It is possible he died of fluid loss or imbalance.
29
History of William Marshal, ed. A.J. Holden, trans. S. Gregory, David Crouch, 3 vols (London, 2004), vol. 2, ll. 17885 and
following.
30
No attempts were made to canonise Marshal or the Black Prince although equally unlikely candidates were the subjects of
determined campaigns including Edward II, Charles de Blois (d.1364) and Henry VI. See Andre´ Vauchez, Sainthood in the later
middle ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1997), 163 and n. 19, 166–7 and n. 31. For a discussion of the ‘sacralisation of the
suffering leader’ see Vauchez, Sainthood, 161.
31
Georges Duby, William Marshal. The flower of chivalry, trans. Richard Howard (London, 1986), 3–21. See also G. Duby,
Guillaume le Mare´chal, ou, le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris, 1984); David Crouch, William Marshal. Knighthood, war and
chivalry, 1147–1219, 2nd edn (London, 2002), 138–42; Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin kings, 1075–1225
(Oxford, 2000), 592–3.
32
Rosemary Horrox, ‘Purgatory, prayer and plague, 1150–1380’, in: Death in England. An illustrated history, ed. P. Jupp,
C. Gittings (Manchester, 1999), 96.
33
E. Duffy, The stripping of the altars. Traditional religion in England, c.1400–c.1580, 2nd edn (New Haven and London, 2005),
313.
34
Reuera toto illo tempore, fere singuilis mensibus, passus est utrumque fluxum, seminis uidelicet atque s[anguinis.] Que
infirmittates multotiens eum reddiderunt ita inualiduym, ut sepissime obisse a suis famulis cred[ebatur]. St Albans chronicle, 33.
35
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘History, historicism, and the social logic of the text in the middle ages’, Speculum, 65 (1990), 59, 61–2.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
38
it is a description for which the ‘linguistic turn’
might have been invented and so could be scrutinised
using numerous interpretative strategies from semiotics, deconstruction, and microhistories,
to thick
descriptions.
Following Hayden White the incident might be considered no more than a trope,
or,
following Habermas, some readings of the text may be considered ‘better’ than others.
Certainly
a sensitivity to language is of particular importance in this case, but given the nature of the language
involved it may prove particularly difficult to break out of that postmodern, eternally self-referential
linguistic circle.
No doubt in such circumstances Occam’s razor should be applied to the problem
d
the simplest solution is most likely to be correct. However, likelihood is not certainty and if we
accept the contention of Natalie Zemon Davis and others that multiple and mutually incomparable
‘truths’ may co-exist besides one another then it is necessary to consider a range of interpretations,
varied but connected, of Walsingham’s account of the Black Prince’s illness and death.
III
First, the ‘authenticity’ of the description must be questioned. Walsingham like many of his contem-
poraries peppered his work with prejudice, fantasy and stereotypes.
Furthermore, it is notable that in
the revised version of the Chronica maiora the account of the prince’s death is reduced and simplified
and no mention is made of his symptoms.
There is, however, no doubt that Walsingham was closely
associated with the royal family and remarkably well informed about events in and around London,
especially at this time given his detailed account of the Good Parliament. More particularly, the Black
Prince was well known personally in St Albans as a patron of the abbey and close friend of its abbot,
Thomas de la Mare (1349–96); according to Walsingham’s Gesta abbatum, the prince loved de la Mare
like a brother.
In addition, the prince’s wife, Joan of Kent, and members of their household were
36
For a recent summary of the influence of the ‘linguistic turn’ on historical techniques see Robert M. Stein, ‘Literary criticism
and the evidence for history’, in: Writing medieval history, ed. Nancy Partner (London, 2005), 67–87.
37
In Italy the microstoria sometimes took the form of a local or regional study but ‘came to take on the character of a non-spatial
concentration on a particular event or source in order to elucidate wider contexts.’ Michael Bentley, ‘Approaches to modernity:
western historiography since the Enlightenment’, in: Companion to historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London, 1997), 493. The
most famous example is Carlo Ginzburg, The cheese and the worms. The cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller (Baltimore, 1980).
38
Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture’, The interpretation of cultures. Selected essays
(New York, 1973), 3–30.
39
Hayden White, Metahistory. The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), xii.
40
Jurgen Habermas, Der philosophische diskurs der moderne. Zwolf vorlesungen (Frankfurt, 1985); Jurgen Habermas, The
philosophical discourse of modernity. Twelve lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1987). For an analysis of the
debate between Foucault and Habermas regarding the interpretation of sources and the significance of context see Ehrhard
Bahr, ‘In defense of Enlightenment: Foucault and Habermas’, German Studies Review, 11 (1988), 97–109.
41
Julia M.H. Smith, ‘Regarding medievalists: contexts and approaches’, Companion to historiography, ed. Bentley, 109: ‘Texts
deploy rhetorical strategies which display some meanings and conceal others.’ See also Spiegel, ‘History, historicism, and the
social logic of the text’, 77: ‘There is no way to determine a priori the social function of a text or its locus with respect to its
cultural ambience. Only a minute examination of the form and content of a given work can determine its situation with respect
to broader patterns of culture at a given time’.
42
Among numerous works see Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the archives. Pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century
France (Stanford, 1990). See also Lee Patterson, ‘On the margin: postmodernism, ironic history, and medieval studies’, Speculum,
65 (1990), 89: ‘The question is no longer ‘‘Is it true?’’ but ‘‘Does it work?’’
43
For discussion of the ‘methodological challenge of extracting historical data from [chronicles which] at first glance contains
all the features of a fairy-tale’ see Sophia Menache, ‘Chronicles and historiography: the interrelationship of fact and fiction’,
Journal of Medieval History, 32 (2006), 333 and n. 1; and for a wider discussion Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles. The writing of
history in late medieval England (London, 2004), 2–20.
44
St Albans chronicle, 976–8; Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, trans. Preest and Clark, 27. For further discussion of the
various recensions of the Chronica maiora see n. 19 above.
45
Thomas of Walsingham, Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani, ed. H.T. Riley, 3 vols (London, 1867), vol. 2, 375–8.
Regarding the prince’s intervention in a dispute between St Albans and Canterbury see Walsingham, Gesta abbatum, vol. 2, 390,
403–4; A history of Canterbury cathedral, ed. Patrick Collinson, Nigel Ramsay and Margaret Sparks (Oxford, 1995), 100–1. For
further links between the prince and St Albans see The register of Edward the Black Prince, 4 vols (London, 1930–3), vol. 4, 508.
On Thomas de la Mare see David Knowles, The religious orders in England (Cambridge, 1955), vol. 2, 39–48; James G. Clark, ‘Mare,
Thomas de la (c.1309–1396)’, in: Oxford dictionary of national biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford, 2004);
online edn <
(2007), accessed 13 November 2008.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
39
patrons of the abbey and joined a confraternity there in 1376.
And in 1396 Richard II wrote to
Boniface IX expressing a desire to follow the example of his father who bore ‘a special affection for the
said monastery’.
Finally, although he almost certainly did not visit the prince himself, Walsingham
took much of his information from eyewitnesses and included the testimonies of some major public
figures in his chronicles. These provided him with politically sensitive stories for more than 40 years, so
it is not impossible that he recorded the truth or at least what he believed to be true.
The implication in Walsingham’s account is that the prince was, in some way, menstruating, which
although highly implausible suggests a number of possibilities and comparisons.
It was not
uncommon, for example, for contemporaries to believe that Jewish men menstruated. Such a concept
d
that the wicked were stricken by God with a flux of blood or a bleeding anus d had a long
history.
In late antiquity Jews and heretics were believed to suffer in this way, perhaps because the
heresiarch Arius was said to have died of an intestinal prolapse,
perhaps because of the manner of
Judas’ death. Consequently Jewish men menstruated, according to some only on Good Friday,
according to others every month. This idea had been corroborated in the thirteenth century by texts
from the Crusader States which restated the belief that Jewish men menstruated as punishment for
their role in the death of Christ.
Such a concept had not only theological validity but also medical and scientific support. A flux of
blood was often associated with melancholy,
and Jews were believed to be inherently melancholic
because they suffered from an excess of cold, wet humours and the morbid influences of Saturn. In
turn, melancholy was believed to encourage haemorrhoidal bleeding in all men, Jew and Gentile,
a condition seen by some physicians as analogous to menstruation. The male Jewish blood flux was
therefore attested and explained both medically and theologically.
46
For membership of the St Albans confraternity see BL, Cotton MS Nero D.VII, ff. 128v–30v; for an illustration of royal
benefactors of St Albans abbey see BL, Cotton MS Nero D.VII, ff. 6v–7. Joan maintained her late husband’s friendship with Abbot
Thomas and made a supplication to the pope on behalf of St Albans: Walsingham, Gesta abbatum, vol. 2, 151–5; Colin Platt, The
abbeys and priories of medieval England (London, 1984), 205. Nigel Loryng, the prince’s chamberlain, was a benefactor of the
building of a cloister there: G.F. Beltz, Memorials of the most noble Order of the Garter (London, 1841), 65-8. Robert Knolles,
a Cheshire condotierre often in the prince’s service, was also a patron, and Robert Walsham, the prince’s confessor, gave the
abbey 400 marks: Platt, Abbeys and priories, 205; Victoria county history. Hertfordshire, vol. 4 (Westminster, 1914; repr. London,
1971), 396.
47
Calendar of entries in the papal registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal letters, vol. 4 AD 1362-1404, ed. W.H. Bliss
and J.A. Twemlow (London, 1902), 293.
48
Clark, Monastic renaissance, 35–6, 179, 258–60. Walsingham had access to formal information from court and parliament, as
well as informal data from eye-witnesses and less authoritative rumours and speculative accounts: see, for example, his reports
on the ‘malevolence’ of Alice Perrers.
49
‘A passionless expulsion of masculine seed [. . .] might well be described as ‘‘quasi-menstrual’’’ Dyan Elliott, Fallen bodies.
Pollution, sexuality, and demonology in the middle ages (Philadelphia, 1999), 27.
50
Menstrual blood was often described as monstrum d an unnatural thing or event d so it is not surprising that it became
associated with anti-semitism: Bettina Bildhauer, ‘Blood, Jews and monsters in medieval culture’, in: The monstrous middle ages,
ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Cardiff, 2003), 91 and n. 53.
51
Gregory of Tours, The history of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1974), 135, 309: ‘Arius [. . .] emptied out his
entrails through his back passage [. . .] This smacks of heresy’. The way he ‘met his end shows just how perverse and wicked
[his] sect [was].’ Gregory probably took the story from Eusebius of Caesarea, ‘Life of Constantine the Great, and oration in praise
of Constantine’, in: Nicene and post-Nicene fathers. A select library of the Christian church, 2nd ser. vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff and
Henry Wace (New York, 1890), ch. LVII: ‘For suddenly an abscess appeared in the secret parts of his person, followed by a deeply
seated fistulous ulcer; and these diseases fastened with incurable virulence on the intestines, which swarmed with a vast
multitude of worms, and emitted a pestilential odor.’
52
Irven M. Resnick, ‘Medieval roots of the myth of Jewish male menses’, The Harvard Theological Review, 93 (2000), 248–9.
53
Or, inversely, an excess of blood could lead to melancholy sickness: Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Friz Saxl,
Saturn and melancholy. Studies in the history of natural philosophy, religion and art (London, 1964), 13.
54
Peter Biller, ‘A ‘‘scientific’’ view of Jews from Paris around 1300’, Micrologus, 9 (2001), 137–68; Peggy McCracken, The curse
of Eve, the wound of the hero. Blood, gender and medieval literature (Philadelphia, 2003), 102–4. See also Willis Johnson, ‘The myth
of Jewish male menses’, Journal of Medieval History, 24 (1998), 273–95, who provides various additional examples of ‘symbolic,
scatological deaths’ and traces a number of themes d betrayal, heresy, wicked kingship, etc. d that became associated with
anti-semitic ideas, although he suggests this link became reinforced later than has traditionally been thought. See also David S.
Katz, ‘Shylock’s gender: Jewish male menstruation in early modern England’, The Review of English Studies, 50, (1999), 440–62.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
40
Two possibilities follow from this. First, it might be construed that the prince suffered divine
punishment, as menstruation was one of the clearest manifestation of sin. It is significant that many
saints’ bodies did not produce bodily fluids: Elizabeth of Spalbeck, for example, did not produce saliva
or mucous, and Lutgard of Aywieres did not menstruate.
Second, the association of bleeding with
melancholy may be relevant. There were good reasons for the prince to be melancholy, not least the
disastrous English position in the Hundred Years War which re-opened in 1369 and saw the French
recapture almost everything gained in Edward III’s glory years. Additionally, the later middle ages saw
the revival of certain Aristotelian ideas about the positive aspects of melancholia. William of
Auvergne (d.1249) had noted that ‘all highly gifted men were melancholics’, and melancholia had the
benefit of separating men from the turmoil of the world and the distractions of physical pleasure,
allowing them to focus on spiritual development.
Given the unlikelihood that Walsingham received detailed information concerning the prince’s
symptoms, despite his London and court connections, it is probable that he drew on various topoi to
explain the prince’s decline and death. His choice depended on his opinion of the prince and his
purpose in describing his death in this manner. There were numerous authorities on which Wal-
singham may have depended for his description d historical, classical and biblical d but these are
difficult to pin down because of Walsingham’s remarkable erudition and familiarity with an
extraordinary number of authors and texts. Additionally, because he tended to paraphrase, re-
organise and simplify his material, it is not always easy to establish his precise sources and
influences.
Potential sources for the account may be found among descriptions of Edward’s royal predecessors,
many of whom were recorded as dying from ruptures and gastric complaints often resulting in
‘discharges’ and the swift corruption of the body. Orderic Vitalis recorded that William the Conqueror
died of an internal rupture, and noted the almost immediate putrefaction of his corpse. The body of
Henry I, according to Henry of Huntingdon, also decayed quickly and with grotesque results: the king
had suffered from a chill in his bowels and sudden convulsions, exacerbated by his taste for lampreys.
In 1154 King Stephen died following a sudden and violent seizure of the bowels, although like the Black
Prince he was able to receive the sacraments.
King John’s death was also attributed to dysentery
brought on by his gluttony.
Such examples compare closely with Adam Usk’s description of the
protracted death of Henry IV, said to have been caused by infection and the ‘rupture of the internal
organs’.
According to some, Henry IV inherited his condition from his father, John of Gaunt, who was
said to have passed ‘putrefaction [. . .] from his rotting genitals’.
Usk certainly considered Henry’s
condition a divine punishment, and this like earlier descriptions may have tapped into classical or
biblical traditions. The most notable of these is the death of King Antiochus discussed in the Second
Book of Maccabees. Following his victory over the Jews and attempt to convert them forcibly to
55
Caroline Walker Bynum, The resurrection of the body (New York, 1995), 221–4.
56
Pietro d’Abano revealed similar opinions in a commentary on Aristotle’s Problemata (1310): Pietro de Apono, Exposito
problematum Aristotelis (Mantua, 1719); Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, Saturn and melancholy, 68-73.
57
Clark, Monastic renaissance, 176–86, 188. The St Albans library catalogue has been lost so it is impossible to say whether
Walsingham could have found all his sources at the abbey. Several of the following examples are drawn from Michael Evans, The
death of kings. Royal deaths in medieval England (London, 2003), 13, 7, 53, 56, 61–2, 69–70, 74.
58
Henry, archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum. The history of the English people, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway
(Oxford, 1996), 490–2.
59
‘The king was suddenly seized with a violent pain in his stomach, accompanied by a flow of blood, as had happened to him
before, and after he had taken to his bed [. . .] he died.’ The historical works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols
(London, 1879–80), vol. 1, 159.
60
Ralph de Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stephenson (London, 1875), 183–5.
61
‘The infection which for five years had cruelly tormented Henry IV with festering of the flesh, dehydration of the eyes, and
rupture of the internal organs (carnis putredine, oculorum ariffacione et interiorum egressione), caused him to end his days’:
The chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997), 242–3. See also D. Biggs, ‘The politics of
health: Henry IV and the Long Parliament of 1406’, in: Henry IV. The establishment of a regime, 1399–1406, ed. D. Biggs and
G. Dodd (York, 2003), 185–202; McNiven, ‘Problem of Henry IV’s health’, 757.
62
Thomas Gascoigne, Loci e libro veritatum, ed. J.H. Thorold Rogers (Oxford, 1881), 137; Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 45.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
41
paganism the king was struck down with excruciating pain in his bowels followed by a hideous skin
disease accompanied by an ‘intolerable stench’.
The imagery of disease and putrefaction, often caused by sin, was commonly employed and came to
have particular resonance in the later middle ages as the ‘cult of Death’ developed, with its cadaver
effigies, transi memorials, and vivid depictions of mortality.
The Danse macabre showed or described
Death personified dancing with a number of partners drawn from the whole social hierarchy: the
earliest known use of the term is in a poem of 1376.
The image of the Three Living and Three Dead
had probably been introduced to England in the thirteenth century through the poems of Baudoin de
Conde´. This emphasised the role of death as the great social leveller but the arrival of the Black Death
provoked a change of emphasis and number. Later medieval treatments of the subject became
increasingly shocking and graphic.
Royal deaths, therefore, were often used to emphasise the fragility of secular power, earthly beauty,
and the brevity of life. It was a theme the prince also chose to stress on his tomb upon which he
demanded the following epitaph should be written:
Mais je sui ore poeuvres et cheitifs.
Parfond en la terre gis.
Ma grande beaute´ est tut alee.
Ma char est tut gaste´.
(But now a caitiff poor am I,
Deep in the ground lo here I lie.
My beauty great is all quite gone,
My flesh is wasted to the bone.)
The text upon which the epitaph was based was not new, nor was the theme d sic transit gloria mundi
d
but such ideas and images grew in strength and number throughout the later medieval period.
If Walsingham’s description of the Black Prince’s condition was not a concept borrowed from the
historical past and influenced by post-plague conditions then there are a number of other possibilities.
The author’s reference to a discharge of both semen and blood [fluxum seminis videlicet atque sanguinis]
does not appear to have immediate biblical, patristic or hagiographical antecedents. The phrase is not
found in the collected works of the Patrologia Latina, the Golden Legend, or in the Vulgate. The text,
however, suggests he suffered two separate discharges and numerous references may be found to
a flow of blood and several to a discharge of semen. Most of the former (naturally) involve women. The
most famous of these is the miracle of a woman cured of a flux of blood [profluvio sanguinis] from which
she had suffered for 12 years after touching the hem of Christ’s garment as he went to tend Jairus’
daughter.
Other examples found in the Golden Legend collection include Euthicia, mother of St Lucy,
63
2 Macc. 9:1–29. Among other rulers punished for wickedness was Herod the Great (for the murder of the Innocents): he
suffered fever, incessant pain, inflammation, worms in his testicles, a horrible smell and irregularity of breath: Josephus, The
Jewish war, ed. and trans. G.A. Williamson (Harmondsworth, 1959), 110. Emperor Galerius suffered in a similar fashion: Lac-
tantius, On the death of persecutors, ed. and trans. J.L. Creed (Oxford, 1984), 33: 1–8. My thanks to Michael Evans for these
references.
64
Philippe Arie`s, The hour of our death, trans. Helen Weaver (London, 1981), 119–23.
65
Sophie Oosterwijk, ‘Of corpses, constables and kings: the Danse macabre in late medieval and Renaissance culture’, Journal
of the British Archaeological Association, 157 (2004), 62–7.
66
Horrox, ‘Purgatory, plague and prayer’, 93–4; Colin Platt. King Death. The Black Death and its aftermath in late-medieval
England (Toronto, 1996), 151; Paul Binski, Medieval death: ritual and representation (London, 1996), 135.
67
Diana Tyson, ‘The epitaph of the Black Prince’, Medium Ævum, 46 (1977), 98-104. The earliest known version of the text,
a variant of the Siste viator theme, is the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alphonsi (d.1110).
68
For further discussion see Green, Edward the Black Prince, 163–5.
69
Mark 5:25–34; Luke 8:43. The condition has been diagnosed as hypermenorrhea (an abnormally prolonged menstrual
flow), which can produce anaemia. Although by curing the woman Christ overturned Levitican taboos, Christian communities
stigmatised menstruating women. Aquinas, for example, attempted to separate the Virgin from various sources of pollution
including menstruation, and William of Auvergne emphasised the corrupting influence of the menstruating woman. He also
‘aligned women and their polluting potential with the diabolical realm’. Elliott, Fallen bodies, 3–6. Menstrual blood was
commonly believed to be used in witchcraft and for demonic rituals.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
42
who was cured after suffering from the bloody flux for four years, and St Peter Martyr who healed
a man who had ‘voided blood six days continually’.
Such conditions had clear spiritual connotations. Illness was usually construed as indicative of the
general spiritual malaise of humanity, or the consequence of divine punishment of an individual. The
manifestation of sin as illness often took the form of various ‘discharges’ and had a long history with
biblical origins. According to Mosaic law a person was to be considered unclean if subject to any
natural (that is, connected with reproduction) or unnatural discharge of fluid from the body:
Leviticus prescribed ‘the law of him that hath the issue of seed [fluxum seminis], and that is defiled by
copulation’.
The law stated: ‘The man that hath an issue of seed shall be unclean’;
and stipulated
‘the man from whom the seed of copulation goeth out, shall wash all his body with water; and he
shall be unclean until the evening.’
In Leviticus, the subject of commentaries by Walafrid Strabo
(d.849), Hrabanus Maurus (d.856), and William of Auvergne amongst others, consideration of
seminal emissions is followed by prohibitions on menstruating women suggesting a correlation
between the two.
A biblical association also existed between such discharges and leprosy,
which emphasises
the link between illness and sin and, more particularly, between the Black Prince’s complaint and
that attributed to Henry IV.
According to Mosaic law both conditions might require a blood
sacrifice or guilt offering before the sufferer was cleansed.
Leprosy was certainly considered
divine punishment often for an act of sacrilege or disrespect to the Church. As a manifestation of
sin this ‘spiritual deformity would leave its mark on the body as well as the soul.’
A condition
such as that from which Walsingham claimed the prince suffered may have had similar
connotations.
However, given that Walsingham proceeded to applaud the prince’s many victories it seems
unlikely he considered him a suitable target for divine retribution. But then, as in some of the examples
given above, a difficult death could follow a relatively virtuous life. It was, nonetheless, a life that ended
in bed-ridden inactivity which prevented him defending England’s lands in France. Walsingham noted
the abrupt contrast between Edward’s enfeebled condition and his triumphs at Cre´cy, Poitiers, Na´jera
and (perhaps surprisingly) Limoges. Hence, it may be that he wished to impugn the prince’s mascu-
linity, as he would later comment on those Knights of Venus (rather than Bellona) who attended
Richard II’s chamber. Might the prince have, in some sense, lost his male identity along with his health
and his ability to fight?
In the prince’s case, he may have failed as a man and a potential ruler on two counts: his loss of
physical prowess and of self-control, in addition to the menstrual implications of his condition.
First, as Jacques de Vitry (d.1240) said of Jewish men: they have ‘become unwarlike and weak, even
as women, and it is said they have a flux of blood every month.’
Similarly in the fourteenth
century Nicholas of Lyre in his Postilla on the Glossa ordinaria stated a flux of blood was associated
70
Jacobus de Voraigne, The Golden Legend or Lives of the saints, trans. William Caxton, ed. F.S. Ellis, 7 vols (repr. London, 1931),
vol. 2, 130; vol. 3, 146.
71
Lev. 15:32.
72
Lev. 15:2.
73
Lev. 15:16.
74
Lev. 15:19–27.
75
Levitican proscriptions regarding ‘discharges’ directly followed those on leprosy. Another connection can be seen when
King David cursed the house of Jo’ab, asking God that it never be without ‘one that hath an issue of seed discharge, or that is
a leper’: II Kings 3:29. Also see McNiven, ‘Problem of Henry IV’s health’, 748–9.
76
There is no evidence to suggest the prince suffered from leprosy although the widespread ulceration common to sufferers
of the lepromatous strain often led to symptoms perhaps similar to his, namely dysentery, renal failure, oedema and diarrhoea:
Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 2.
77
Lev. 5:15; 6:30; 14:12–14.
78
Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 48, 52.
79
Derek Neale, ‘Masculine identity in late medieval English society and culture’, in: Writing medieval history, ed. Partner, 179.
80
Libri duo quorum prior orientalis sive Hierosolymitanae alter Occidentalis historiae nomine inscribitur, ed. F. Moschus (Douai,
1597; repr. Farnborough, 1971), 159–60. See also Resnick, ‘Medieval roots of the myth of Jewish male menses’, 259.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
43
with a soft and effeminate individual [homo mollis et effeminatus].
In the fifteenth century Jean
Gerson compared men’s non-seminal discharges with menstruation, perhaps following from
Levitican ritual requirements which treated certain male conditions like female bleeding.
Second, rulership was effective only when active and vital; secular power required a demonstra-
tion of masculinity and political prowess.
As a consequence the English royal court experienced
something of a crisis in 1376–7: the Black Prince (the heir apparent) crawled towards death;
Edward III, now old and feeble, dominated by a woman, was no better than a slave.
The future
king, no more than a child, would doubtless be governed by his mother, or worse his ‘wicked
uncle’.
Such concerns continued in the new reign. After Richard acceded to the throne, on several occasions
Walsingham stated the king was ‘just a boy’, innocent and too weak to protect his people.
Later he
criticised the royal household for its pacifism, weakness and femininity, most famously in his allegation
that Richard II’s household knights were better suited to the bedchamber than the battlefield.
Meanwhile, the king’s effeminacy explained his weakness as a ruler. It may have been for this reason
that, as Christopher Fletcher has argued, Richard proposed a campaign to France in 1386 so he might
win ‘honour and manhood’.
Perhaps when Richard’s father lost the principality of Aquitaine he also
lost something of his manhood.
In a similar fashion, the prince’s condition may be viewed as analogous to a nocturnal emission as
discussed by such luminaries as Gregory the Great, John Cassian, Augustine, and, in the later middle
ages, John of Freiburg, John Nider and Jean Gerson. It, too, suggested effeminacy since such ‘involuntary
pollution posed a severe challenge to masculine pretensions’.
Similarly, the unintentional spilling of
blood was emasculating: male blood should be spilled voluntarily and in public, it should be a praise-
worthy act, undertaken in defence of right and honour. By contrast women bled involuntarily, privately
and shamefully.
Such an emasculation, however, need not be viewed in a wholly negative fashion. Indeed, it may do
Walsingham an injustice to consider his writing in such polarised terms. He could convey multiple
meanings, just as he might be forthright and direct. The possibility of emasculation provides a case in
point. The prince’s emasculation (if so it was) need not (only) convey the conclusion of a military career
81
Cited by Elliott, Fallen bodies, 6–7.
82
Lev. 15; Elliott, Fallen bodies, 28, 179 n. 74.
83
Katherine J. Lewis, ‘Edmund of East Anglia, Henry VI and ideals of kingly masculinity’, in: Holiness and masculinity in the
middle ages, ed. P.H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff, 2004), 165–6; Vern L. Bullough, ‘On being a male in the middle ages’
in: Medieval masculinities. Regarding men in the middle ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis, 1994), 34.
84
St Albans chronicle, 58.
85
W.M. Ormrod has emphasised the gendered roles of kings and queens in later medieval England and evaluated various
political crises in this context: ‘Monarchy, martyrdom and masculinity: England in the later middle ages’, in: Holiness and
masculinity, ed. Cullum and Lewis, 174–91.
86
St Albans chronicle, 127, 155.
87
‘Alas! Oh land, which formerly produced men respected of all at home and who inspired fear abroad, now spews up
effeminate men [effeminatos], objects of ridicule among the enemy and of common talk among their fellow citizens!’ St Albans
chronicle, 704. Walsingham noted the rumour that Richard II and Robert de Vere had an ‘impure relationship [familiaritatis
obscene]’: St Albans chronicle, 798. Vere, Simon Burley, Michael de la Pole, and Richard Stury were described as ‘knights of Venus
rather than Bellona, showing more prowess in the bedroom than on the field of battle’: St Albans chronicle, 812–15; and during
Despenser’s crusade Thomas Trivet was said to have acted ‘like a woman in childbirth’: St Albans chronicle, 684–5. A number of
these references, Walsingham’s attitude to Richard II’s household, and the general social and political climate are discussed by
W.M. Ormrod, ‘Knights of Venus’, Medium Ævum, 73 (2004), 290–305. He argues convincingly that the ‘knights of Venus’
comment is more likely to be a reflection of political inadequacy rather than a direct reference to sexual preferences, although
making clear that Walsingham believed moral laxity contributed to political failure. Walsingham’s fellow chronicler, John
Wheathamstead ‘shared his disgust for the rising incidence of ignoble and effete habits among the higher nobility’. Clark,
Monastic renaissance, 262.
88
Christopher Fletcher, ‘Manhood and politics in the reign of Richard II’, Past and Present, 189 (2005), 7–8, 35–6. La quarte
enchesone et la darrein, pur conquerre honour et humanite, which Fletcher translates as manhood: Chris Given-Wilson,
‘Richard II: parliament of 1386, text and translation’, The Parliament Rolls of medieval England, ed. Chris Given-Wilson et al.
(CD-ROM, Leicester: 2005), item 1.
89
Gre´goire le Grand, Dialogues, ed. Adalbert de Vogu¨e´, trans. P. Antin, 3 vols (Paris, 1978–80), vol. 3, IV.50; Elliott, Fallen bodies,
27.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
44
but suggest the stripping away of an aristocratic, military identity, allowing him to make the necessary
spiritual preparations to ensure the salvation of his soul.
IV
There are, of course, alternative interpretations. The first is bound up with the esteem in which the
prince was held in his later years and national expectations of his reign as Edward IV. Several works of
political prophecy concern the prince: according to Geoffrey le Baker, Edward was ‘the Boar of Corn-
wall’,
an appellation with clear Arthurian overtones. In the ‘Bridlington’ prophecy, the prince is the
gallus, the Cockerel, during whose reign England will be victorious in all things: he will be the new
Arthur who ensures the integrity of the English Crown and will take the throne of France from
a grateful people. In fact a royal title would prove insufficient: the prince was worthy to be an emperor,
which is an indication of the great hope Edward inspired in the author and perhaps among the pop-
ulation at large in the early 1350s.
As a consequence and despite his long illness there is little surprise
that the country was shocked and dispirited by the prince’s premature death.
As the prince’s
condition had worsened, so too had the state of the country; as the prince’s health declined England
became, figuratively speaking, a wasteland.
In various Arthurian romances the Wasteland is ruled by the ‘Fisher King’, the guardian of the Grail,
who had been incapacitated by a wound that would not close and which reflected (or caused) political
and economic devastation and the sterility of his kingdom. The king, entirely incidentally, is usually
described as dressing in black. Although an unlikely source for his account, Walsingham’s chronicle
writing may have been inspired by certain romances.
In Chre´tien de Troyes’ Perceval or Conte du graal
(c.1190) the wound is said to be between the Fisher King’s thighs,
and in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
Parzival (c.1210), in which the king is named, Anfortas, crippled by God in his pride, is wounded in the
scrotum; his wound is festering, stinking, and he is unable to stand, ride, walk, or even lie down.
An
intriguing connection between this and another possible interpretation of the prince’s symptoms
discussed below is found in Virginia (1494) by the Arrezan author, Bernardo Accolti. Borrowing from
the Fisher King tradition and Decameron III, 9: the protagonist says his ability to defend the kingdom is
threatened by his medical condition d a fistula.
However, as mentioned above, given Walsingham’s other comments, a wholly negative interpre-
tation of the prince’s symptoms seems unlikely. Therefore, a more probable explanation of Walsing-
ham’s account is that it should be read as an entirely orthodox description of the possible symptoms
a man in the Black Prince’s state of health might suffer. Bleeding was beneficial, indeed necessary;
90
For possible comparisons with clerical gender identities see Allen J. Frantzen, ‘When women aren’t enough’, Speculum, 68
(1993), 467; A.E. Oliver, ‘Battling bishops: late fourteenth-century episcopal masculinity admired and decried’, in: Medieval East
Anglia, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 2005), 272–86; John H. Arnold, ‘The labour of continence: masculinity and
clerical virginity’, in: Medieval virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Cardiff, 2003), 102–18; Patricia H.
Cullum, ‘Learning to be a man, learning to be a priest in late medieval England’, in: Learning and literacy in medieval England and
abroad, ed. Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout, 2003), 135–54; Patricia H. Cullum, ‘Clergy, masculinity and transgression in late
medieval England’, in: Masculinity in medieval Europe, ed. Dawn M. Hadley (London, 1999), 178–96.
91
Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynebroke, ed. E.M. Thompson (Oxford, 1889), 152.
92
Lesley A. Coote, Prophecy and public affairs in later medieval England (York, 2000), 30–1, 124, 127–8, 130–3, 141–4.
93
For further contemporary reflections on the Black Prince’s life see The sermons of Thomas Brinton, bishop of Rochester,
1373-1389, ed. Sister Mary Aquinas Devlin, 2 vols (Camden 3rd ser., 85–86, London, 1954), vol. 1, 74–9; vol. 2, 354–7. For further
comments on Sermon 78 (Apud Roffam pro Domino Edwardo Principe Wallense), based on Psalm 112 see Sister Mary Aquinas
Devlin, ‘Bishop Thomas Brinton and his sermons’, Speculum, 14 (1939), 333; R.M. Haines, Ecclesia Anglicana. Studies in the English
church of the later middle ages (Toronto, 1989), 209.
94
Similarly, Henry IV’s illness was sometimes construed as symbolic of a malaise in the body politic, and Pope Alexander III
viewed the spread of disease through the body of Baldwin the Leper as mirroring Saladin’s advance into the Crusader States:
Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 45, 54 and n. 44. See also Vauchez, Sainthood in the later middle ages, 161–2.
95
Clark, Monastic renaissance, 181.
96
Le roman de Perceval: ou, Le conte du Graal, ed. William Roach (Geneva, 1956), ll. 3092, 3508–16.
97
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. A.T. Hatto (Harmondsworth, 1980), 123, 126–7, 244–5, 249, 392.
98
McCracken, Curse of Eve, 99; B. Cosman, ‘All’s well that ends well: Shakespeare’s treatment of anal fistula’, Diseases of the
colon and rectum, 41 (1998), 919-20.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
45
bloodletting was an important medical practice to be undertaken periodically. Various guides were
written giving a programme for a monthly regimen of bloodletting, some provide information on the
most auspicious and perilous days to take blood from a patient,
and the phrase ‘with an effusion of
blood’ [cum effusione sanguinis] was commonly used in texts on phlebotomy.
Bloodletting, of course, required medical intervention. If unavailable the body might let blood
naturally so as to release corrupted humours. According to humoural theory a close association existed
between bloodletting and menstruation since, according to no less an authority than Albertus Magnus
(d.1280), both processes purged the body of poisons.
According to such theories, all human emis-
sions d nosebleeds, menstruation, sweating, lactation, haemorrhoidal bleeding, and seminal
emissions d were bleedings, so all bleedings were analogous. Indeed, not only were they simply
analogous, the substances themselves were basically the same.
All body fluids were believed to be
processed forms or by-products of blood, in accordance with the Aristotelian idea that blood is the
basic substance concocted into different fluids by body heat. But blood and semen were particularly
close to one another in humoural theory, and semen was often viewed as the male equivalent of
menstrual blood.
‘Thus, it would not be far-fetched for a medical writer to refer to a man
menstruating or lactating.’
And a number of examples of regular bleeding from various parts of the
body in men can be found in the medieval and early modern periods.
For example, according to
Roger de Barone, the twelfth-century medical encyclopaedist, some men suffer a ‘haemorrhoidal flux
each month, some four times a year, some once a year. This flux ought not to be restrained because it
cleans the body of many superfluities.’
Hence bleeding, in whatever form, provided a means for the evacuation of superfluous or harmful
matter. In a male, surplus blood would be removed naturally or via medical assistance. Since blood
accumulated at a steady rate the evacuation had to take place at more or less regular intervals. A
menstrual haemorrhagia in a male was therefore simply a bleeding that occurred every month: it did
not necessarily imply comparison with female menstruation, except in so far as they were both
bloodlettings.
There are various additional medical interpretations of Walsingham’s description of the prince’s
symptoms. Semen could be used as a general term to indicate a variety of bodily matter, so if the prince
99
Linne R. Mooney, ‘Diet and bloodletting: a monthly regimen’, in: Popular and practical science of medieval England, ed. Lister
M. Matheson (East Lansing, MI, 1994), 245–62.
100
Pedro Gil-Sortes, ‘Derivation and revulsion: the theory and practice of medieval phlebotomy’, in: Practical medicine from
Salerno to the Black Death, ed. Luis Garcı´a-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge, 1994),
113 and n. 12. The phrase, of course, was also used in other contexts: see ‘A great effusion of blood’. Interpreting medieval violence,
ed. Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Theiry and Oren Falk (Toronto, 2004).
101
Charles T. Wood, ‘The doctor’s dilemma: sin, salvation, and the menstrual cycle in medieval thought’, Speculum, 56 (1981),
723–4.
102
‘There was a tendency to see all emissions as practically interchangeable pollutions’: Elliott, Fallen bodies, 21.
103
Monica H. Green, ‘Flowers, poisons and men: menstruation in medieval western Europe’, in: Menstruation. A cultural history,
ed. Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie (Basingstoke, 2005), 67, 69.
104
Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The female body and religious practice in the later middle ages’, in: Caroline Walker Bynum,
Fragmentation and redemption. Essays on gender and the human body in medieval religion (New York, 1991), 220. See further
Johnson, ‘Myth of Jewish male menses’, 290: ‘in medieval medical theory, menses and haemorrhoidal bleeding were func-
tionally interchangeable. Both were normal purgings of melancholy blood.’
105
Periodic bleeding from nose, fingers, penis, or anus (haemorrhoidal bleeding) was common according to Martin Schurig,
writing in 1729. Cited by Michael Stolberg, ‘Menstruation and sexual difference in early modern medicine’, in: Menstruation. A
cultural history, ed. Shail and Howie, 90.
106
Green, ‘Flowers, poisons and men’, 60. Similarly, ‘Saturnine or splenetic men who did not have regular haemorrhoidal fluxes
were condemned to suffer blockages in their spermatic vessels’: Cathy McClive, ‘Menstrual knowledge and medical practice in
early modern France, c.1555–1761’, in: Menstruation. A cultural history, ed. Shail and Howie, 80–1.
107
Stolberg, ‘Menstruation and sexual difference’, 91, 95, 97. See also Green, ‘Flowers, poisons and Men’, 51–64, esp. 61. For
further discussion of menstruating men see Gianna Pomata, ‘Menstruating men: similarity and difference of the sexes in early
modern medicine’, in: Generation and degeneration. Tropes of reproduction in literature and history from antiquity to early modern
Europe, ed. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (London, 2001), 109–52.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
46
did succumb to a virulent strain of dysentery during the Na´jera campaign it may be these symptoms to
which Walsingham referred.
And perhaps the author, when he described the emissions occurring
almost monthly, merely wished to indicate that the prince suffered regularly from such symptoms.
However, as mentioned above, an individual is unlikely to have survived chronic amoebic dysentery for
such an extended period of time (approximately nine years). Alternatively, if viewed as a single
discharge, the symptoms may indicate chronic urethritis, often caused by a sexually transmitted
disease,
or haematospermia, usually caused by small blood vessels bursting and leaking blood into
the seminal fluid. There is the possibility in this condition of prostate disease or cancer. Another
possibility is that Walsingham was describing the symptoms of gonorrhoea, a condition said by
contemporaries to entail frequent involuntary seminal emissions without sexual arousal, resulting in
pallor and weakness.
A further option is a fistula, which is an abnormal connection between an
organ, vessel, or intestine, and another structure leading to an abscess that might result in some of the
prince’s symptoms. This is a possibility for two additional reasons, one specific, one general. The first
lies in Edward’s links with the noted surgeon John Arderne (1307–99) the author of Treatises of fistula in
ano; haemorrhoids, and clysters, written, as the author put it, in 1376, ‘the year when the strong and
warlike prince was taken to God’. The manuscript includes the prince’s arms of peace, the ostrich
feathers, alongside a description of treatment for this condition.
The second (general) reason lies in
the prince’s military career: military campaigns during the Hundred Years War, especially those
conducted on horseback, must have produced many cases of ischiorectal abscess which led to fistula.
Arderne, from Newark, probably studied in Montpellier and worked in London from 1370. He
certainly had links to members of the prince’s household (such as his treasurer, Henry Blackburn),
perhaps to the prince himself,
and he may have participated in various military campaigns.
Arderne was something of a self-publicist and likely to emphasise any royal connections; although
presumably this was not a condition the prince would wish to have broadcast. Additionally, if Edward
did perish from the condition, no doubt Arderne would not wish it known he had been his doctor.
Such conditions were common and could be suffered in various parts of the body. Charles V of
France suffered from a fistula on his hand.
There is also mention of a thoracic fistula among the
108
Biblical examples of dysentery with which Walsingham would have been familiar are found in Acts 28:8, and 2 Chronicles
21:15 and following. Amoebic dysentery when severe or prolonged can be complicated by the prolapse of the rectum or large
intestine.
109
I am very grateful to Patricia Grocott for her suggested diagnosis of chronic urethritis, and regarding the life expectancy of
an individual suffering from dysentery.
110
Soranus, Gynacology, trans. Owsi Temkin (Baltimore, 1956, repr. 1991), 168-9; Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset,
Sexuality and medicine in the middle ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Oxford, 1988), 148–50. Gonorrhoea is defined as ‘an
involuntary emission without concupiscence’. Joan Cadden notes the difference between pollutions (nocturnal emissions) and
gonorrhoea (involuntary emissions): Meanings of sex difference in the middle ages. Medicine, science and culture (Cambridge,
1993), 26–7.
111
John of Arderne, Treatises of fistula in ano, haemorrhoids and clysters, ed. D’A. Power (London, 1910), xii, xxvii, 13; C.H. Talbot
and E.A. Hammond, The medical practitioners in medieval England. A biographical register (London, 1965), 111–12. It is not certain
who tended the prince medically in his later years. The prince’s Register provides evidence only up until 1365 and household
accounts thereafter are very limited. The following medical men were recruited in the prince’s youth and travelled with him on
military campaign: Adam; Adam de la Poletrie (Talbot, Hammond, Medical practitioners, 3–4, 6); John Gadesden (London, The
National Archives, SC10/1/16; Barber, Edward, 22, 93). Master William Blackwater may still have been in service in 1376: Register
of Edward the Black Prince, vol. 4, 94, 117, 208, 309, 454; Barber, Edward, 153; Talbot, Hammond, Medical practitioners, 385–6;
Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and society in later medieval England (Stroud, 1995), 110.
112
J. Beynon and N. Carr, ‘Master John of Arderne: surgeon of Newark’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 81 (1988), 43. In
1420 Henry V was stricken with haemorrhoids after attempting to relocate the relics of St Fiacre. Whether or not divine
intervention played a part, this too must have been a condition suffered regularly by the knightly classes in the Hundred Years
War: Allmand, Henry V, 153.
113
A John of Arderne received a land grant from the Black Prince, but the name was common and a definite association cannot
be made. For example, John de Ardern, chaplain, was involved in a legal matter concerning property in Wycombe in 1351:
Register of Edward the Black Prince, vol. 4, 20.
114
Peter Murray Jones, ‘Arderne, John (b.1307/8, d. in or after 1377)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography, ed. Matthew and
Harrison <
, accessed 17 November 2008. Arderne cured a fistula in ano suffered by Adam, 2nd
baron Everingham while on campaign with Henry of Grosmont in Gascony: Peter Murray Jones, ‘John of Arderne and the
Mediterranean tradition of scholastic surgery’, in: Practical medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, 295–6 and n. 17.
115
Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Reynaud, vol. 9, 280–1.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
47
stories told on the third day in Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353)
which provided a source for Shake-
speare’s All’s well that ends well. It is worth noting, given the peculiarity of the prince’s symptoms, that
Arderne himself commented that fistulae could penetrate to the testicles and the physician claimed to
have healed Geoffrey le Scrope’s chaplain of such a condition.
There is no evidence Walsingham consulted Arderne’s work although there certainly were medical
texts in the library at St Albans. These included Avicenna’s Canones medicine, which contains a detailed
consideration of the humors; Constantinus Africanus’ Viaticum peregrinantis provided a translation
from Arabic of Ibn-al-Jazzar’s medical guide containing a discussion of sexual problems including
gonorrhoea, nocturnal emissions and hypermenorrhea.
Finally, De viribus herbarum, usually attrib-
uted to Odo of Meung, detailed treatments for anal prolapses and menstrual complaints.
There can be no sure diagnosis of the prince’s symptoms even if Walsingham’s description was certain
to be accurate. There is no question, however, that male bleeding, from whatever source and in whatever
form, was considered an important, indeed necessary process in the removal of excess fluid and for
washing away superfluities and impurities. This process might also have spiritual connotations and may,
in this context, have been used as a means of emphasising the prince’s repentance from sin d just as his
body was rejecting corruption, so too was his soul. The shedding of blood was a process that both purged
and cleansed, which may have been a necessary precursor to full repentance before death.
Because a period of repentance was necessary for salvation, mors improvisa (sudden death) was
greatly feared and divine forewarning of the hour of death greatly desired. The hope was that one did
not die in sin, one needed to die well. One should cast off the shackles of the material world, distribute
one’s goods, especially to the poor, and, most of all, one should take the opportunity to repent and
receive the last sacraments. Great importance was attached to the necessity of proper preparation for
death.
Therefore, in the Black Prince’s case, a long period of preparation could be considered an
advantage not a punishment. Serious illness prior to death was often viewed as providing an oppor-
tunity for reflection and self-reproach. In this fashion Matthew Paris, Walsingham’s predecessor and
the man who provided a model for his own chronicle, recorded the death of one Richard Suard. Suard
(or Siward), ‘seized by an incurable paralysis, took to his bed in a desperate state, hoping, through God’s
beneficence, that the sufferings of a protracted death [protractae mortis] might wash away his former
sins so that he could more expeditiously migrate to eternal life’.
If this was so in the prince’s case the question of the nature of his sins remains. These are not
specified, but he had surely committed some wickedness to merit such punishment.
A number of
possibilities suggest themselves. These include the prince’s marriage to Joan of Kent, a match ques-
tioned by Simon Islip, the archbishop of Canterbury, since she was a woman with a colourful past
whom Adam Usk later described as ‘given to slippery ways’.
This might also account for the perhaps
feminised connotations of the prince’s symptoms since there was an enduring belief that too much
116
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G.H. McWillliam (Harmondsworth, 1972, repr. 1987), 304–5.
117
John of Arderne, Treatises of fistula in ano, 14.
118
Ibn Al-Jazzar on sexual diseases and their treatment, ed. and trans. Gerrit Bos (London and New York, 1997), 33–5, 44–5,
250–3, 270–3. In a case of hypermenorrhea, a woman’s ‘feet will be swollen, her food will only be slightly digested, she will not
have an appetite, her body will be withered, and dropsy will befall her.’
119
Clark, Monastic renaissance, 148. In De viribus herbarum, among the plants considered, garlic was used to cure spitting of
blood and anal prolapses as well as other conditions; nettles and nettle seeds might prove efficacious in purulent wounds and
bleeding; and mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) assisted with menstruation complaints. Gerrit Bos and Guido Mensching, ‘Macer
Floridus: a Middle Hebrew fragment with Romance elements’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 91 (2000), 21.
120
Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The body of Christ in the later middle ages: a reply to Leo Steinberg’, in: Bynum, Fragmentation and
redemption, 100 and n. 50; Walker Bynum, ‘The female body and religious practice’, 215; Peter Brown, ‘The decline of the empire
of God: amnesty, penance and the afterlife from late antiquity to the middle ages’, in: Last things. Death and the Apocalypse in the
middle ages, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman (Philadelphia, 2000), 46.
121
Arie`s, The hour of our death, 108; Duffy, Stripping of the altars, 310–11; Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin kings,
591–2.
122
Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H.R. Luard, 7 vols (London, 1880), vol. 5, 2; Chronicles of Matthew Paris, trans. Richard
Vaughan (Gloucester, 1984), 130.
123
Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin kings, 592. ‘For he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap
corruption’: Galatians 6: 8.
124
lubrice vite dedita: Chronicle of Adam Usk, 62–3.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
48
heterosexual sex encouraged effeminacy.
Walsingham later in the chronicle took considerable
delight in describing Joan as ‘used to luxury, and hardly able to move about because she was so fat’.
Alternatively, might the prince’s own military activities have brought about divine displeasure? In
various campaigns he deliberately targeted the peasantry, those least able to defend themselves.
During the grande chevauche´e (1355) perhaps 500 towns and settlements were attacked and burned,
and Walsingham himself wrote of the whole population of Limoges in 1370 being put to fire and the
sword.
More probably, might Walsingham have associated the prince with John Wyclif? Certainly
many of the so-called Lollard knights were members of his household, and Edward may have been
personally acquainted with the heresiarch.
Or might it have been the prince’s pride, as expressed in
his great expenditure on clothing which occasioned such divine animosity?
Whatever their nature, the long suffering of his last years suggests Edward’s sins must have been
considerable, and such an opinion is reinforced later in Walsingham’s account when John Gilbert, the
prince’s confessor and bishop of Hereford, was forced to sprinkle holy water to drive away devils before
the prince could confess fully and ask God for forgiveness. This occurred ‘because it is evident that [he
had] offended God and many fellow men’.
According to this reading Edward of Woodstock, although
respected as a military leader, perpetrated some wicked deeds which resulted in a long and perhaps
unnatural illness followed by demonic possession from which only holy intervention could free him.
But then rather than an unusual death, or indicative of a particularly iniquitous life, this account of
the prince’s last moments may be read as an entirely conventional demise. During the Ordo visitandi
(usually performed at the deathbed) a priest would hold a crucifix before the dying person, to comfort
him and drive away evil sprits that lay in wait for the soul. He would then ask seven questions to ensure
the Devil could not take advantage of any sins or incorrect beliefs, and because any unconfessed sins
would be made public at the Last Judgement.
Indeed, the moment of death was a reflection, in
miniature, of the Last Judgement.
According to the Ars moriendi, composed in the fifteenth century as
a commentary on the Ordo visitandi, the priest should exhort the sick person to put faith in Christ and
repent; he would interrogate him to see if he abjured heresy and wished to die in the true faith. The
priest would inquire whether he recognised his own sinfulness, if he put his trust in Christ, if he forgave
any who had wronged him, and if he would beg forgiveness from those he had wronged.
125
Richard Firth Green, ‘The sexual normality of Chaucer’s Pardoner’, Medieavalia, 8 (1985), 351–8; Richard Firth Green,
‘Further evidence for Chaucer’s representation of the Pardoner as a womanizer’, Medium Ævum, 71 (2002), 307–9. Alice Perrers
was said to have sapped Edward III’s vitality through sexual activity: St Albans chronicle, 46.
126
St Albans chronicle, 751.
127
Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, vol. 1, 311. However, he later described Limoges as a victory to count alongside Cre´cy and
Poitiers.
128
Green, Edward the Black Prince, 14, 22–3, 73–4, 176–82; W.M. Ormrod, ‘In bed with Joan of Kent: the king’s mother and the
Peasants’ Revolt’, in: Medieval women. Texts and contexts in late medieval Britain. Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan
Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn Diamond, Ann M. Hutchison, Carol M. Meale and Lesley Johnson (Turnhout, 2000), 277–92;
Joanna L. Chamberlayne, ‘Joan of Kent’s tale. Adultery and rape in the age of chivalry’, Medieval Life, 5 (1996), 7–9; K.P. Wen-
tersdorf, ‘The clandestine marriages of the Fair Maid of Kent’, Journal of Medieval History, 5 (1979), 203–31.
129
Register of Edward the Black Prince, vol. 4, 467; Green, Edward the Black Prince, 118–19; Margaret Wade Labarge, Gascony.
England’s first colony, 1204–1453 (London, 1980), 149; Jacqueline Murray, ‘Hiding behind the universal man: male sexuality in
the middle ages’, in: Handbook of medieval sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (New York and London, 1996),
133–4.
130
‘‘‘And because it is evident that you have offended God and many fellow men, you should first ask for God’s pardon, and
secondly the pardon of all whom knowingly or unknowingly you have offended.’’ He [the prince] replied, ‘‘I truly wish this.’’ The
bishop then said, ‘‘It is not sufficient merely to say ‘I wish this’; but as you have the power to express it in words, you should
expressly ask for pardon.’’ But his only reply to this was, ‘‘I wish this.’’ This happened many times, so the bishop said, ‘‘I think
some evil spirits are present which are obstructing his speech and preventing him being able to express his wishes in words.’’
So taking up a sprinkler, he sprinkled holy water over the four corners of the house in which the prince was lying. It was
amazing!’ St Albans chronicle, 35–6. Gilbert, as the prince’s candidate, served as bishop of Bangor and later became bishop of St
David’s: Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1300–1541 (Hereford Diocese), ed. Joyce M. Horn (London, 1962), vol. 2, 2.
131
Christopher Daniell, Death and burial in medieval England, 1066–1550 (London, 1997), 36.
132
It had long been believed that demons attacked the soul on its journey to heaven, seeking to claim it on the strength of
unatoned sins. This marked, according to Peter Brown, ‘the last stage in the drama of the perpetual battle with sin’: ‘Decline of
the empire of God’, 42.
133
Duffy, Stripping of the altars, 314–15.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
49
Evident in Walsingham’s account is the belief which lay behind these deathbed interrogations that
the Devil would take advantage of the weakened state of dying sinners to try and make them fall into
heresy, superstition, or cause them to lose faith.
Consequently, rather than a punishment for an
especially immoral life, Walsingham’s description of the prince’s last years and final moments can be
read as a conventional and indeed plausible account.
Walsingham shows the long, patient acceptance
of infirmity and pain, the disposal of material possessions, the requests for care to be shown to his wife
and son, the arduous struggle with the Devil whom he eventually overcame prior to a final repentance.
Certainly the account need not imply the prince was especially sinful. After all Job had not been a wicked
man and yet as he said, God ‘hath wounded my loins [. . .] and hath poured out my bowels on the earth’.
More pertinently, Job’s experience showed that God ‘poureth contempt upon princes’,
and on occa-
sion He might ‘oppress the work of [His] own hands, and help the counsel of the wicked’.
Furthermore, as mentioned above, such a protracted death could provide beneficial spiritual
preparation since disease might be a means by which individuals were tested and purified.
Indeed,
in some (few) situations, ‘bodily fluxes, such as blood and tears, were seen as signs of God’s presence
and means to union with him’,
in part because Christ’s sacrifice had been made and was
commemorated in blood. Hence, Bernard of Clairvaux and others drew a sharp distinction between
a corrupt body and corrupt soul: disease might well be a divine gift since a life of pain and rejection
could bring one closer to God.
Abbot Thomas de la Mare suffered terribly in his later years d
Walsingham described humore noxio, and humor virosus et putridus.
And Julian of Norwich requested
bodily sickness ‘to the death’ and suffering of the body and soul ‘with all the terror and turmoil of the
fiends [] because [she] hoped it might be to [her] benefit when [she] died’. Because suffering allowed
one to comprehend something of Christ’s passion
Julian of Norwich said she ‘longed to be on [her]
deathbed, so that [she] might in that sickness receive all the rite of Holy Church, that [she] might
[her]self believe [she] was dying and that everyone who saw [her] might believe the same’.
The
timing of the incident in the prince’s case may also be significant. The Feast of the Trinity, when Edward
died, fell on the first Sunday after Pentecost when the liturgical calendar resumed ordinary time after
Easter. Therefore, a parallel could be drawn between Christ’s sacrifice and the prince’s suffering, which
reached its peak during Lent.
Given Walsingham’s political and personal predilections a positive gloss should probably be applied to
his account of the Black Prince’s death. It is, however, impossible to be certain of Walsingham’s attitude to
the Black Prince, in part, because such an extraordinary range of influences shaped the author’s chronicle:
theology, philosophy, history, music, and classical literature, both prose and poetry. And while his primary
intention as a historian was to produce an account suitable for ethical and moral instruction he also had ‘a
134
The dying person could: 1) sin against hope by succumbing to despair on account of their sins; 2) sin against charity by
refusing to accept their condition and attacking those who helped them; 3) forfeit salvation by believing in their own good
deeds rather than the redemptive power of Christ; 4) reject Heaven by clinging to the goods and relationships of the present
world. Duffy, Stripping of the altars, 316–17.
135
A way in which a chronicler understood ‘factual’ truth accorded with ‘the degree to which it was believed to be plausible;
that is, the extent to which it corresponded to other comparable truths.’ Given-Wilson, Chronicles, 3.
136
Job 16:14.
137
Job 12:21.
138
Job 10:3.
139
The cult of ‘St’ Job flourished in the later middle ages: Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 56–7. See also 1 Peter 1:6–7: ‘you shall greatly
rejoice, if now you must be for a little time made sorrowful [. . .]. That the trial of your faith (much more precious than gold
which is tried by the fire) may be found unto praise and glory and honour at the appearing of Jesus Christ.’
140
A.C. Spearing, ‘Introduction’, in: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of divine love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (London, 1998), xv.
Even if we were to accept a more outlandish theory, the Grail guardian’s wound was a purifying wound, an act of grace as well
as a punishment: McCracken, Curse of Eve, 100.
141
Rawcliffe, Leprosy, 55.
142
Walsingham, Gesta abbatum, vol. 3, 403.
143
‘For, as the sufferings of Christ abound in us; so also by Christ doth our comfort abound. Now, whether we be in tribulation,
it is for your exhortation and salvation [. . .] as you partake in our suffering, so shall you partake in our consolation.’ 2 Cor. 1:5–7.
144
Revelations of divine love, 3–4 (short text), 43 (long text).
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
50
prurient interest in popular and seditious material’.
There is also no doubt that the symptoms from
which the prince suffered were associated with sin, moral failing or divine displeasure more often than
not, and it has been argued that ‘the potent metaphors of female pollution were used (in all but a unique
case) to feminise and discredit those perceived as spiritually suspect.’
This does seem unlikely in the
Black Prince’s case, given the context in which the piece was written and Edward’s personal connections to
St Albans. However, a connection with the abbey did not necessarily result in Walsingham’s support.
Walsingham’s greatest loathing was reserved for Wyclif and Lollardy, and some of those he sought to
expose as ‘Lollard knights’ were close associates of Abbot de la Mare and members of the St Albans
confraternity. They included Lewis Clifford, William Montague, John Clanvowe and Richard Stury
and,
incidentally or not, all of them were also members of the Black Prince’s retinue.
Two final examples serve to show the problems in understanding Walsingham’s motivations for his
description of Edward’s symptoms and his attitude more generally to the prince of Wales. The first
concerns the last years and death of Edward III; the second, the symptoms attributed to Abbot de la
Mare. The king died in circumstances not unlike those suffered by his son a year previously. After
a lifetime of military triumphs Edward III died disgusted by what he had become through the malign
influence of Alice Perrers. Suffering, as many of his predecessors had done, from some sort of bowel
complaint the king was, for a time, struck dumb and barely had the opportunity to repent. Walsingham
was hopeful but not entirely certain that God was likely to be beneficent.
His opinion of the Black
Prince does not appear so condemnatory but it may be viewed in a similar fashion.
By comparison, there is no question that in Walsingham’s mind, despite symptoms which might in
some circumstances indicate divine punishment, Thomas de la Mare was destined for redemption and
paradise. Walsingham recorded that the abbot suffered for seven years with frequent emissions of
urine and several times of blood in great quantities [frequenti et difficili emissione urinae, et alioquotiens
in sanguinis maxima quantitate].
Clearly in this situation earthly sickness was a prelude to salvation
and, indeed, an indication of divine favour. Although Walsingham is by no means as unequivocal in his
admiration for aspects of the prince’s character, Edward’s symptoms may have formed an earthly
purgatory so as to expedite his progress to Heaven.
As the man responsible for the triumphs at Cre´cy, Poitiers and Na´jera, whom Walsingham portrayed
as standing almost alone against the loathsome John of Gaunt through the machinations of the Good
Parliament, the symptoms attributed to the Black Prince should probably be viewed in a positive light;
however, an element of doubt remains. Any sort of medical diagnosis of those symptoms must, simi-
larly, remain tentative, even if it could be proved he truly suffered in the manner Walsingham described.
Some form of amoebic dysentery, however, does seem unlikely given the extended length of the
prince’s illness and his symptoms’ suggestive regularity. Rather it is possible Walsingham deliberately
offered a range of meanings in a chronicle that manages to be didactic, scatological, prejudiced, learned,
prurient, and devout. Given the Black Prince’s mixed reputation, this seems entirely appropriate.
Dr David Green lectures in medieval history and British Studies at Harlaxton College. He has written extensively on the career,
life (and now death) of Edward the Black Prince. His recent publications include ‘Lordship and principality: colonial policy in
Ireland and Aquitaine in the 1360s’, Journal of British Studies, 47 (2008); and Edward the Black Prince. Power in medieval Europe
(Harlow, 2007).
145
James G. Clark, ‘Thomas Walsingham reconsidered: books and learning at St Albans’, Speculum, 77 (2002), 832–60; Clark,
Monastic renaissance, 179, 187.
146
Elliott, Fallen bodies, 6. The exception was, of course, Christ. Julian of Norwich wrote of Christ as a mother: Revelations of
divine love, Long text chs 52, 57. See further: Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as mother. Studies in the spirituality of the high middle
ages (Berkeley, 1982); Robert Mills, ‘Jesus as monster’, in: Monstrous middle ages, ed. Bildhauer, 28–54. Consequently, although
the flux of blood could be used to feminise and discredit those perceived as spiritually suspect, for Julian of Norwich, Christ’s
woundless bleeding showed he was born to suffer and was symptomatic of his redemptive qualities. Liz Herbert Macavoy,
‘Monstrous masculinities in Julian of Norwich’s A revelation of divine love and the Book of Margery Kempe’, in: Monstrous middle
ages, ed. Bildhauer, 58.
147
Clark, ‘Thomas Walsingham reconsidered’, 850 and n. 119.
148
Green, Edward the Black Prince, 176–81; John Davis, ‘Joan of Kent, Lollardy and the English Reformation’, Journal of Eccle-
siastical History, 33 (1982), 225–33.
149
St Albans chronicle, 116–20.
150
Walsingham, Gesta abbatum, vol. 3, 404.
D. Green / Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 34–51
51
Document Outline
Wyszukiwarka
Podobne podstrony:
Barthes The Death of the Author
Gene Wolfe The Death of Doctor Island
Adams, Robert Horseclans 08 The Death of A Legend
lament for the death of owen roe oneill
Anne McCaffrey Planet Pirates 2 The Death Of Sleep
David Irving Accident the Death of General Sikorski
Rachmaninoff Wild On the Death of a Linnet, Op 21 No 8
WoolfVirginia 1942 The Death of the Moth and other essays
1967 Accident The Death of General Sikorski
The Death of Jack Hamilton
Barthes The Death of the Author
Gene Wolfe The death of Dr Island
Robert Adams Horseclans 08 The Death of A Legend (v1 0) (html)
the death of jerome of prague
Michael Scott Secrets of the Immortal The Death of Joan of Arc[1]
The Death of Dr Island Gene Wolfe
The Death of Grass John Christopher
Orzeczenia, dyrektywa 200438, DIRECTIVE 2004/58/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of
Death of a Salesman Analysis of the Character Willy
więcej podobnych podstron