The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser].

  • Wilfrid Bonser
Date:
1963
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    67/492 (page 27)
    DOCUMENTS 27 of the Lacnunga. There are various Irish versions of it, and it is clearly of Irish origin. 1 Various other documents have been printed elsewhere. The ninth-century Book of Nunna-minster from Winchester, now in the British Museum (MS. Harley 2965), contains a version of the Lorica of Gildas and several charms, for example, one against poison 1 2 and one assigning the various parts of the body to the care of Biblical personages, 3 both quoted later. Isolated charms occur in a great many early medieval manu scripts, and many will be quoted in the following pages. (< d ) Archaeology Archaeology has also added considerably to our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon medicine. Useful information with regard to the physique and racial characteristics of our ancestors, especially during the earlier period, has been obtained from the exhumation of their bodies from the various Anglo-Saxon cemeteries scattered throughout England. Periapts which were worn to ward off disease have also been discovered in association with the bodies. On this question Morant says: But it is only for the first half of [the Anglo-Saxon] epoch—roughly until the [time of] Alfred—that we have any evidence relating to the physical type of the invaders. The characteristic Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in which . . . distinctive artifacts are found alongside the bodies all belong to the earlier period, and the majority are prior to the conversion of the inhabitants to Christianity at the beginning of the seventh century. Graveyards of the tenth and eleventh centuries have frequently been found, but they were of little interest to archaeologists as the practice of interring artifacts with the body had died out by that time and no skulls of the period appear to have been preserved. Records of the excavations of a large number of cemeteries which can be assigned to the earlier centuries are to be found in Archaeologia and in the Proceedings of various county archaeological societies, but unfortunately few of the skeletons are at present available for study, the usual practice having been to re inter them. All the material is in a fragile and incomplete condition, the shallow inhumations, usually in wooden coffins or without coffins at all, being ill adapted to preserve the skeletons, and in that respect they are 1 Singer, ‘The Lorica of Gildas the Briton’, Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., 1918-19, xii (Sect. Hist. Med.), 124 (reprinted in From Magic to Science, 1928, p. in). 2 See p. 286. 3 See p. 227.