Medicine, Care and Hospitals in Norman Realms

Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, people in the Norman worlds met illness through care at home, skilled practitioners, religious communities and charitable foundations. Treatment could involve preparing a compound, changing food and rest, or asking an experienced healer for help. Monasteries also connected bedside practice with medical books and prayer. The examples here come from Normandy, England after 1066 and southern Italy, whose institutions and networks had distinct settings.

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Practitioners and household care

Practical knowledge moved through people as well as books. Medical expertise could pass directly from an experienced practitioner to someone learning the work, and twelfth-century evidence includes both men and women in these roles. Near Throckenholt in the eastern English fenland, a woman treated feverish people after the hermit Godric’s death in the 1130s or 1140s. She put linked iron rings from his mail shirt into water and gave it to the sick to drink. The hagiographer says they recovered through Godric’s merits, presenting the woman’s treatment within a story of the hermit’s holiness.

Baldwin shows how court service could carry medical knowledge across the Channel. From northern France, he became a monk at Saint-Denis and then prior at Leberau in Alsace before coming to England in 1059 as a royal physician. He served Edward the Confessor, William I and William Rufus, and became abbot of Bury St Edmunds in 1065. His journeys with William I to Normandy connected a physician’s work to a moving court, while his later abbacy placed medical manuscripts and care inside an English religious house.

Remedies in a Bury manuscript

The British Library’s Sloane MS 1621 is a Latin medical book from the second quarter of the eleventh century, acquired by Baldwin before 1065. An antidotarium is a collection of compound remedies. This volume gathers recipes alongside prayers for dispensing and preparing medicine. Its recipe for oxymel, a mixture of vinegar and honey, is directed at chest pain; other folios contain headache remedies, plasters and poultices, and recipes for eye ailments. Folio 111 has a brief text on women’s urine. The instructions give different ways to prepare or apply treatments, from a drink to a dressing placed on the body.

Scribes at Bury added recipes to the continental book, and further material in a twelfth-century hand shows that the manuscript continued to grow. A section of medicinal prayers was also added in the twelfth century. The pages preserve a sequence of work: reading a formula, measuring ingredients, preparing medicine, applying or giving it, and invoking prayer as it was dispensed.

Salerno and learned medicine

Salerno, in southern Italy, was a major center of medical learning during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Gariopontus compiled the Passionarius there in the mid-eleventh century from ancient theoretical medical texts. A Bury scribe copied it between the late 1110s and the 1130s. Readers in the twelfth century added annotations and medical diagrams to the margins, signs of the book’s practical use at the abbey.

Texts also traveled between Normandy and England. In 1070–73, while prior of Bec in Normandy, Anselm asked Maurice, a monk of Bec then staying at Canterbury in England, to copy Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, a commentary and a short work on the pulse. These texts became part of the material later gathered in the Articella, a collection used in medical teaching. In letters from about 1073–77, Anselm described symptoms affecting two monks, Osbern and Lanfranc the Younger, who had come to Bec from Canterbury. He asked Archbishop Lanfranc to pass Lanfranc the Younger’s symptoms to the Canterbury physician Albert. The correspondence links the copying of medical texts with a request for a practitioner’s help for a named patient.

Care in the monastic infirmary

The Benedictine Rule gave an infirmary a defined place in community life. Chapter 36 directs the abbot to set aside a separate cell for sick monks and appoint a diligent attendant. Baths could be allowed when useful, and sick or weak monks could eat meat during recovery before returning to the community’s ordinary abstinence. Monastic practice also included regular bloodletting, based on humoral theory: the belief that health depended on bodily fluids remaining in proper balance.

At Bec, Eadmer’s account describes Anselm tending the brothers in the infirmary as well as responding to illness through correspondence. The arrangements called for people to bring food, watch the patient and carry out the abbot’s instructions.

Hospitals in Normandy and England

In Normandy, Rouen’s Hôtel-Dieu stood north of the cathedral in the canons’ cloister. It was founded in the eleventh century or earlier, probably by the archbishop and cathedral canons. In England, Archbishop Lanfranc established three foundations at Canterbury in the 1080s. St John’s served poor, sick and elderly people; St Gregory’s received the clergy of St John’s and elderly priests; and St Nicholas, at Harbledown west of the city, was a leper house for people living with leprosy.

Lanfranc had spent many years as a monk at Bec and then abbot at Caen before becoming archbishop. St Gregory’s soon became an Augustinian priory, while St John’s continued to serve its named groups. Outside Winchester, excavation at the hospital of St Mary Magdalen found timber structures beneath later twelfth-century masonry and a cemetery in which many burials showed signs of leprosy. Radiocarbon dating placed one skeleton between 890 and 1040, probably 970–1030, suggesting that the institution may have existed before the Norman Conquest.

Prayer, healing and religious communities

At Bury, Herman the Archdeacon’s late-eleventh-century miracles use precise medical vocabulary and refer to Hippocrates and Galen while recounting the reputation of St Edmund. The medical language gives these miracle accounts an educated register, while the narratives credit the saint with healing.