The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (50 page)

A licence is a different sort of qualification, granted not after training but after acquiring sufficient practical experience. Practitioners can obtain one from the College of Physicians or a university, but the great majority are licensed by a bishop. Surgeons may also be recognised officially by joining a city’s company of barber-surgeons, membership of which is attained by serving an apprenticeship and passing an examination.
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However, in the south-east only just over half of all the physicians and surgeons are licensed, university-trained or have served an apprenticeship. In the West Country and in the north, even fewer practitioners are qualified.
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You will also notice that there are many part-time ‘physicians’, men who combine their medical work with other occupations. William Clowes, a professional surgeon, is rather disparaging of such amateurs. In his book on syphilis he expresses astonishment at how medicine and surgery are abused by ‘painters … glaziers … tailors … weavers … joiners … cutlers … cooks … bakers … chandlers … tinkers, toothdrawers, pedlars, ostlers, carters, porters, horse-gelders, horseleeches, idiots, apple-squires, broomsmen, bawds, witches, conjurers, soothsayers, sow-gelders, rogues, rat-catchers, renegades and proctors of spittle-houses, with such other like rotten and stinking weeds’.
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In Elizabeth’s reign every full-time apothecary and surgeon is based in a town, and so are most licensed physicians. This has led some modern historians to presume that you cannot get medical help in
the country.
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Don’t believe them. Norwich has at least seventy medical practitioners (one for every 200 people in the city), and Canterbury has about forty (one for every 125 citizens), so it is certainly much easier to obtain medical help in an emergency if you live in a town; but surgeons and physicians do travel out to see their patients in rural areas. In the case of Canterbury’s physicians, about half their business lies outside the city.
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In addition, sick people send friends or servants to the apothecaries in towns to pick up medicines, just as we do today. In rural counties in the north and the West Country, however, where practitioners are much scarcer, people travel far further for medical help. They are also more inclined to make do with the medical knowledge in the community.
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Will any of these people actually be able to help you if you fall ill? Given the widely accepted ideas about the humours of the body, the positions of the stars, the eagerness with which a surgeon will bleed you, and the seriousness with which a physician will look at and sniff your urine, you may doubt it. However, you should not ignore the fact that the popularity of medicine is increasing with enthusiasm, not decreasing with cynicism. Faced with a serious illness, large numbers of people will pay substantial amounts of money for medical help. On average a physician in 1600 will receive 13s from a wealthy client and 10s from a less well-off one. An apothecary will charge 20s and 8s respectively, the less-prosperous patients being prescribed cheaper medicines. These are large sums of money by most people’s standards, and they show that people put faith in their physicians. Those that survive serious illnesses such as typhus and smallpox, and have the scars of their pustules treated successfully, will tell you that it is money well spent.
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Whether you will agree is likely to depend on what you are prescribed. If you are suffering from gout and a physician prescribes colchicum, you are likely to be satisfied: the same remedy is still in use today. You are in good hands if he gives you aniseed for gastric wind or a cough; again, this remedy is still in use today – as are many herb-based medicines from the period. However, you will be less pleased if, at great cost, he tells you to take powdered Egyptian mummy (
mummia
): this is every bit as dubious as Horman’s unwashed sheep wool. And as for Sir Hugh Plat’s remedy of ‘the powdered skull of a man killed in war’ as a cure for tertian fever – I would seek a second opinion. In fact, seek it from the Stratford physician John Hall for an emetic
infusion and syrup of violets, which is what he uses to cure the poet Michael Drayton of the same disease.
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When it comes to surgery you can expect more accurate knowledge. As injuries are so common, surgeons have many opportunities to practise – removing arrowheads and bullets, stitching up cuts, replacing sections of skull and mending organs damaged by sword wounds. They know that if they need to amputate a limb, they can take advantage of the painkilling qualities of the body’s endorphins if they are quick enough. If not, they have opiate-based painkillers and alcohol. Knowledge of anatomy is much better than it was, due to the availability of Vesalius’s
De Humani Corporibus Fabrica
(1543) and the possibility of dissection; the Barber-Surgeons Act of 1540 makes provision for the surgeons of London to be given the corpses of four executed criminals every year for examination. Hence a surgeon will be able to staunch blood flow, mend broken bones, reset dislocated limbs, cauterise wounds, treat sores and extricate objects just as well as his modern counterpart. As for amputation, you will need a strong stomach to be a surgeon. In his
Certaine Workes of Chirurgerie
, Thomas Gale explains that gunshot wounds sometimes lead to gangrene and the mortification of the flesh, in which case you have to amputate the limb in order to save the patient’s life. Having fed the patient to make him strong and having tightly applied a ‘defensive’ (tourniquet), the surgeon should proceed as follows:

When you have all things prepared, with bolsters and rollers [bandages], and other things thereto pertaining, you shall go to the patient and comfort him as I have said before, covering his eyes and setting him in some place convenient, having certain persons meet for the same purpose to hold his body and his arms [in case] he let not your operation, and other apt persons to hold the member that you will take away. You shall then quickly with a sharp incision knife cut the flesh round about to the bone, within half an inch of the defensive that was before laid on. And one thing you must take heed of: there lieth a nerve between the two bones of the leg beneath the knee which you must cut asunder with your incision knife, lest in sawing the bones … it might be so plucked and torn with the saw provoking great accidents such as sincope, spasms, dolour, yes, and death also, which I myself have often times seen. Then when you have made your incision perfect with a fine saw you shall cut asunder the bones speedily and with as little shaking of the member as you may, then lay upon the ends of the bones a little lint dipped in oil of roses and so wrung out again, the oil being first made warm.
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The great failing of Elizabethan surgeons is their inadequate knowledge of infection. They clean their instruments after using them, but the idea of sterilising them is a thing of the distant future, and so diseases are easily passed between patients. Blood poisoning is therefore common, and even the best surgery is often fatal. All in all, you might think that those who die suddenly or unexpectedly in their sleep, with no chance of receiving medical or surgical help, are the lucky ones.

11

Law and Disorder

You might suspect that sixteenth-century England is something like the Wild West when it comes to law and order. Violence is endemic and you will not find a policeman if someone attacks you. But that is more or less where the similarities end, and the lack of policemen is in fact an entirely superficial impression. There is rather a lot of policing going on. It is conducted not by a national police force but by sheriffs, Deputy Lieutenants, constables, watchmen, bailiffs, bedels, reeves, churchwardens and even good old yeomen. On top of all this, there are other forms of social control – from heralds policing the right to bear arms to ale tasters and bread weighers who make sure that the beer sold in a town is fresh and the bread up to scratch. It is true that, when a crime is committed, forensic science doesn’t come into play; if a body is found and no one is prepared to give evidence, the murderer is likely to get away with it. Nevertheless, it will be the amount of policing that astonishes you, not the lack of it.

In the cities and large towns, especially London, the exercise of the law is very visible. There are watchmen patrolling the streets at night. You will hear the cries of those in the high-walled gaols by the city gates, reaching out from behind the bars of their cells. You will witness prostitutes, pimps, beggars and other moral offenders being carted through the streets of the city to and from Bridewell. You will see the gaunt faces of men and women on their way to Tyburn to be hanged for theft or murder. In the taverns you will see men with holes gouged in their ears for vagrancy. In Cheapside you might notice men and women locked in the pillories. You will see men being brought in by constables from the neighbouring districts to be interrogated in London. And from time to time you will witness mob justice, such as in March 1561 when a thief steals a child’s silver necklace in Tower Street and is pursued by onlookers. They catch
him in Mark Lane and beat him to death. Regardless of whether there is an official police force, wherever there are people you will find law and its enforcement.
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The Heart of Justice

On 17 July 1579 a young man named Thomas Appletree is fooling about with some friends in a boat on the Thames near Greenwich. He has a loaded gun, which to the great amusement of the party he fires three or four times at random. Unknown to him, the glass-sided royal barge is slowly floating towards them. The queen is aboard, discussing with the French ambassador the possibility of her marrying the duke of Anjou, when one of Thomas Appletree’s bullets strikes the helmsman six feet from her and leaves him lying on the deck, bleeding profusely. The queen tosses the injured man her scarf and tells him to be of good cheer: the bullet was surely meant for her and the fact that it struck him is good news, for the assassin has failed. Later, there is a thorough investigation, and Appletree is soon found. He confesses and is duly condemned to death for endangering the queen’s life. A gallows is set up on the bank of the river so that he may be hanged close to the scene of his crime. Before his execution, Appletree makes a speech to the assembled crowds. He is no traitor, he says, but admits that through his carelessness he has endangered the life of the sovereign and therefore deserves to die. When he has said goodbye to his friends, the hangman places the noose over his head. Just then, when he is on the very brink of death, a man in the crowd steps forward with a pardon from the queen. She knows Appletree is just a silly young man, but he had to be taught a lesson.
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This event illustrates a unique duality in English law: justice is enacted in the name of the monarch, but it is not of the monarch’s making. The common law of England – based on the presumption that it applies commonly to all subjects – is an ancient system that depends on the examination of past precedent. This is the fundamental difference between English law and the laws of Continental kingdoms, which depend on Roman law (which does not depend on past precedent but on the ruling of the monarch). Although parliament passes legislation for the queen to approve, it is not essentially a law-making body; rather its purpose is to clarify and explain how the courts should
interpret the common law in specific contexts. Where it finds the existing law inadequate, parliament introduces new legislation; but that does not remove the requirement for the new law to respect past precedents. While this seems to suggest that the monarch has nothing to do with the administration of justice, quite the opposite is true. She can wilfully circumvent the laws codified by parliament, throw past precedents to the wind – and grant a man like Thomas Appletree a pardon.

The privy council has a special role to play in the Tudor legal system. When it meets in a certain room in the Palace of Westminster it acts as a law court, formally described as ‘the lords of the council sitting in the Star Chamber’. Commonly known just as ‘Star Chamber’, it tries those who have failed to act on orders and proclamations sent out by the privy council. It also deals with serious breaches of the peace, duels, conspiracies, riots, libels, defamation of character, disputes over land ownership and assaults on persons of rank. Only Star Chamber has the power to authorise the use of torture. You should worry if you are summoned to one of its sessions: privy councillors will try you on the basis of written depositions from witnesses – you yourself will not always be allowed to say anything. The public are permitted to watch this display of legal power, but you, the accused, might only be summoned to hear the judgement. The councillors do not have to abide by the legal system when sentencing you: they can give you any punishment they think fit, from imprisonment in the Tower, to whipping, branding or the pillory. They can punish you by cutting off your ears, slitting your nose or imposing a heavy fine. There is no jury: every single councillor present is a judge. You can see why Star Chamber is occasionally compared to a court martial.
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The justification for this disregard for legal form is to stave off threats to the monarch and the state. Repeated assassination attempts mean that Elizabeth has little choice but to empower the privy council to take action. This leads to a growing network of spies, all reporting to Sir William Cecil and (after 1573) Francis Walsingham. It is a spy in the French embassy who reveals the Throgmorton Plot of 1583, the plan to encourage a Catholic uprising while Spanish forces invade England. In 1586 a trap carefully laid by spies working for Francis Walsingham delivers proof that the imprisoned Mary, queen of Scots, is party to a plot to kill Elizabeth. An enthusiastic young Catholic gentleman by the name of Anthony Babington is behind the scheme.
Coded letters are smuggled in and out of Chartley, where the Scots queen is imprisoned, hidden in waterproof wallets inside ale barrels. When Babington writes to Mary asking for her blessing on his plan to make her queen of England, she replies giving him her approval. Walsingham’s secretary intercepts the letters and manages to break the code. There can be no doubting Mary’s treason; her trial and execution soon follow.