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52 Most amazing, however, are the facts regarding surgery at that period. At a time when foreign or domestic war was raging through nearly the whole country, anatomy, so far from being studied, was abominated as a barbarous violation of the remains of the dead. Henry V. when invading France took only one surgeon with him! This surgeon, Thomas Morstede; however, engaged to bring fifteen assistants, twelve students of surgery, and three archers. Morstede was to have the pay of a man-at-arms, and his assistants that of common archers. What an idea does this give us of the agonies suffered, and of the wholesale waste of human life in those wars! Henry himself seems to have been impressed with this fact, for in his second expedition he was anxious to procure a competent supply of surgeons, but not being able, he granted to Morstede a warrant empowering him to press the requisite number, or what Morstede thought a requieite number, of surgeons for the army.



There is little doubt that Henry himself fell a victim, in his prime, to the medical ignorance of the age, for his complaint was a fistula, which none of his professional attendants knew how to cure. Yet the surgeons of Paris, at this time, 1474, achieved a chef d'œuvre in their art, performing successfully on an archer, under sentence of death, an operation for the stone.

Mathematics were in this age confounded with astrology; the mathematician and astrologer were synonymous terms. A book by Arnold do Marests, an astronomer in France, was declared by the University of Paris to "contain many superstitions, many conjurations, many manifest and horrible invocations of the devil, and several latent heresies and idolatries." In England there was a board of commissioners for discovering and apprehending magicians, enchanters, and sorcerers—and by it Thomas Northfield, professor of divinity and sorcerer, was apprehended at "Worcester in 1432, with all his books and instruments. Alchemy, as we have shown, was not only in high vogue, but especially patronised by Henry VI.

The scale of literary merit in this century, as may be inferred from what has gone before, is, for the most part, extremely low. You look in vain for one divine, physician, or philosopher, who cast a glory on the age. The names of the chroniclers are little more distinguished; their language is anything but elegant or classical, and the facts they record alone give them value. We have awarded Caxton his fame as a printer; as an author, and the continuator of Higdon's Polycronicon, he is less estimable. Next to him comes Thomas Walsingham, a monk of St. Albans, and unquestionably the best historian of the period. He wrote two works: a history of England from the first year of Edward I. to the death of Henry v., and a history of Normandy from the beginning of the tenth century to 1418, under the absurd title of Ypodigma Neustriæ—Neustria being the ancient name of Normandy.

Thomas Otterbourne, a Franciscan friar, compiled a history of England from the chroniclers of an earlier period down to 1420. John Whethamstele, Abbot of St. Whethamstele



Albans, wrote a chronicle of twenty years, from 1441 to 1461, in which there is a very full account of the two battles of St. Albans, and of the affairs of his abbey. He lived to be a hundred years old. Thomas de Elmham, Prior of Linton, wrote the life and reign of Henry V. in a very inflated style. The history of Henry V. was also written by an Italian who called himself Titus Livius, probably imagining himself on a par with the Roman historian in literary genius. He was a protége of the great Humphrey of Gloucester, and re-wrote Elmham's history in a more tolerable style. John Rous, the antiquary of Warwick, was an industrious collector of materials for a history of the kings of England, and a work still more valuable, called the Warwick Roll, containing portraits of the most celebrated persons of the time. Robert Fabyan, a merchant and alderman of London, wrote "The Concordance of Stories," a history