Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/166

146 and the sluttishness within doors," says Erasmus, writing after his first visit to this country, "The floors are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes, so renewed that the substratum may be unmolested for twenty years, with an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, and everything that is nasty." This horrid mess was utilised by the sixteenth-century doctors, who professed to cure what they diagnosed as a "stitch in the side" by taking a well trodden clod of this refuse, making it into a cake with vinegar, well toasted, and clapping it on to the side. Other old prescriptions show that medicine had made very little progress.

"If a man were become verye weake and feable by reason of a longe sicknesse, even that he seemeth to be consumed, nether can recover, then take twentye olde cockes, dresse and dighte them as though they should be eaten, seth them in the thyrde part of a tonne of water, stampe them in a morter, so that the bones be al to brused, make a bath therewyth and let hym bathe therein." Yet more inadequate are some other prescriptions. For headache, the patient is ordered to roll up and down on his tongue while fasting, a mixture of pepper and mustard