Category Archives: 16th century

1579: Light your home with dung-dissolved glow worms

Thomas Lupton was an English moralist, eccentric and author of the 16th century. A staunch Protestant and an advocate for public welfare, Lupton wrote numerous manuscripts on several topics in the last quarter of the 1500s.

One of his tomes, the ornately titled A Thousand Notable Things of Sundry Sorts, was a disjointed collection of recipes, hints and medical receipts, gathered from various sources. Like others of his era, Lupton’s tips ranged from practical common sense advice to Paracelsian nonsense and bizarre wives’ tales.

For example, to “clear and strengthen” your eyes, Lupton says to “wash them in the morning with your own water [urine]”. To stop a nosebleed, tie a thin thread tightly on your little finger. To strengthen the vital parts and “chief members” [genitals], or to avoid the plague, drink “burning gold quenched in our wine”. To kill intestinal worms, drink ox gall. If you’ve lost your voice, go to bed with a piece of raw beef tied to your forehead. For haemorrhoids, apply black wool or brown paper.

For warts, Lupton cites a common medieval treatment:

“Cut off the head of a quick eel and rub the warts all over well with the same blood, as it runs from the eel, then bury the head of the said eel deep in the ground. When the head is rotten, they will fall away.”

For chronic tooth decay and pain:

“The powder of earthworms, mice dung or a hart’s tooth, put into the holes of teeth that be worm-eaten, doth pluck them up by the roots, or make them fall out without any other instrument.”

Finally, Lupton offers a means of lighting your home, three centuries before the advent of electricity:

“Worms that shine in the night, called glow worms, being well stopped in a glass and covered with horse dung, standing there a certain time, will be dissolved into a liquor, which being mixed with a like proportion of quicksilver [mercury]… and then put up in the midst of a house will give such a bright light in the dark, as the Moon doth when she shines in a bright night.”

Source: Thomas Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things of Sundry Sorts, 1590 ed. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1598: Cheese shortens your “gear”, says adulterous wife

In 1598 a Hounsditch woman, Margaret Browne, appeared at Bridewell Court to give evidence against her neighbour. Browne and her husband lived next door to John Underhill, a local bookbinder, and his wife Clement.

According to Browne’s testimony, Mr Underhill left town on business on May 13th. Around lunchtime, Clement Underhill received a male caller, a man named Michael Fludd. Mrs Browne, apparently a pioneer of the Neighbourhood Watch movement, followed events through windows and gaps in the walls. She saw and overheard a salacious exchange in the Underhills’ kitchen:

“As they were eating their victuals, Underhill’s wife said unto Fludd these words: “Eat no more cheese, for that it will make your gear short, and I mean to have a good turn of you soon.”

After lunch, Fludd retired upstairs to the Underhills’ bedroom, where he remained while Mrs Underhill attended their store. At six o’clock she joined him in the bedchamber, where Fludd:

“…took her in his arms and brought her to the bed’s foot and took up her clothes… She put her hand into his hose and he kissed her and pulled her upon him… He plucked up her clothes to her thighs, she plucked them up higher, whereby [Mrs Browne] saw not only her hose, being seawater green colour, and also her bare thighs.”

After nature had taken its course, Fludd “wiped his yard on her smock”, then Underhill “departed from him to fetch a pot of beer”. They then shared some bread and drink, with Mrs Underhill reportedly toasting Fludd’s performance in bed. Browne’s husband, who arrived home in time to witness the fornication next door, supported his wife’s testimony.

Confronted with this evidence, Fludd confessed to having “carnal knowledge of the body of the said Clement Underhill”. Despite the graphic nature of Mrs Browne’s testimony, Fludd was treated leniently: he was ordered to pay 20 shillings to the Bridewell hospital. Mrs Underhill was not arraigned and escaped without penalty from the court, though she did not escape public humiliation.

Source: Bridewell Court Minute Book 1598-1604, May 1598, f.23. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1517: Frog-squeezing copulation leads to frog-faced child

Ambroise Pare was arguably the most famous barber-surgeon of the 16th century. Pare served as a medical advisor to several French kings and once saved the life of a military officer who had been run through 12 times with a sword.

In Pare’s Oeuvres, a collection of surgical memoirs written near the end of his life, he recalled a strange case from the early 1600s. According to Pare, a woman near Blois had delivered a baby with the “face of a frog”. In 1517, the family was visited by a military surgeon, who examined the child and asked how it came to be deformed. According to the child’s father:

“…his wife had a fever… in order to cure it, one of her neighbours advised her to take a live frog in her hand and hold it until it died. That night she went to bed with her husband, still holding the frog in her hand… They copulated and she conceived, and through the influence of her imagination [she now] has this monster that you have seen.”

Pare’s writings contain another incident involving frogs. In 1551, Pare was consulted by a mentally disturbed man who was convinced his insides were inhabited by frogs which were “leaping about” in his stomach and intestines. Pare issued the patient with a strong laxative, resulting in “urgent emissions” from his bowels – and then secretly slipped some small live frogs “into his close stool”. The patient, apparently satisfied that the frogs were discharged, left feeling much better.

Source: Ambroise Pare, Les Oeuvres d’Ambroise Pare, 1664 edition. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1536: Paracelsus warns against glueing on severed body parts

Paracelsus (1493-1541) was a prominent but controversial figure in post-medieval medicine. Born Aureolus von Hohenheim in Switzerland, he was trained by his physician father but also dabbled in chemistry, metallurgy and alchemy. By the mid 1520s he was practising in Strasbourg while also researching and writing.

Paracelsus’ philosophy focused on the relationship between the human body and naturally occurring organic and mineral matter. He also stressed the importance of natural healing processes, something evident in this extract from 1536:

“The surgeon must know that nature cannot by fooled or changed. He must follow nature, not nature follow him. If he uses remedies contrary to nature, he will ruin everything. For example, you cannot replace a limb that has been cut off and it is ridiculous to attempt it. In Veriul, I once saw a barber surgeon take an ear that had been hacked off and stick it back with mason’s cement. He was given great praise and there were cries of ‘Miracle!’ But the next day the ear fell off, as it was undermined with pus. The same thing happens with limbs if you try to stick them back on again. Where is the honour in such trickery?

Source: Paracelsus, Grosse Wundartznei, 1536. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1565: Abused mule has feet cut off, then burned alive

Historical records briefly mention a case of bestiality in 16th-century France. According to a chronicler named Ranchin, an unnamed Montpelleir farmer was surprised “behind his mule” in 1565. According to the witness, the farmer was committing an “act that cannot be mentioned”.

The farmer was put on trial, convicted of buggery and bestiality and sentenced to be burned alive. The mule, despite its passive role, was sentenced to the same fate. But according to Ranchin, the mule refused to go without a fight and turned nasty, prompting brutal action from the executioner:

“Mulus… erat vitiosus et calcitrosus. In primis abcissi fuere quatuor pedes ipsius et demun in ignem projectus et una cum homine combustus fuit.”

(‘The mule was vicious and kicking. He was dealt with first, all four of his feet were removed and cast into the fire, after which he and the man burned.’)

Source: Memoires des Antiquaires de France, v.8. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1587: Mrs Wanker and the Widow Porker carted for “whoredom”

During the Tudor period, the back-ends of carts often doubled as places of punishment for minor criminals and delinquents. Though the exact origins are unclear, to be dealt with at the rear of a cart marked one’s fall from civilised society. Scores of prostitutes and adulterers were ordered to be “tied to a cart’s arse” and either whipped there or paraded around town for public humiliation.

In 1555, a London man named Manwarynge was “carted to Aldgate with two whores from The Harry, for bawdry and whoredom”. In 1560, “the woman who kept the Bell in Gracechurch” was carted for pimping. Sir Thomas Sothwood, an Anglican priest, was carted for “selling his wife”. In North Carolina, Mary Sylvia was found guilty of blasphemy and “carted about town with labels on her back and breast, expressing her crime”.

Some were also punished for slanders involving carts. Sir Thomas Wyatt was thrown into prison in 1541 for telling others that Henry VIII should be “thrown out of a cart’s arse”.

Another brief but interesting mention of ‘carting’ comes from King’s Lynn, Norfolk, where in 1587:

“John Wanker’s wife and the Widow Porker were both carted for whoredom…”

Source: Benjamin Mackerell, The History and Antiquities of the Flourishing Corporation of King’s Lynn &c., London, 1738. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1552: Gent dies after looking down a loaded longbow

Coronial records from the 16th century describe the death of Henry Pert, a gentleman from Welbeck, near Worksop in Nottinghamshire. Pert died a day after receiving an arrow to the head – apparently fired from his own weapon. According to the coroner’s finding, Pert was stood over his loaded longbow while attempting to release a jammed arrow:

“[Pert] went out to play at Welbeck and drew his bow so fully with an arrow In it that he lodged the arrow in the bow. Afterwards, intending to make the arrow climb straight into the air, he shot the arrow from the bow… Because his face was directly over the arrow as it climbed upwards, it struck him above his left eye, near to his eyelid, and into his head to the membrane. Thus the said arrow (worth one penny) gave him a wound, of which he immediately languished and lay languishing until noon on October 29th, when he died at Welbeck by misadventure.”

Source: Calendar of Nottinghamshire Coronial Inquests 1485-1558. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1536: Lord Edmund Howard beaten for bed-wetting

Lord Edmund Howard was a British nobleman and a courtier to Henry VIII. He was related to Henry’s three ill-fated wives: Anne Boleyn was his niece, Jane Seymour a cousin’s daughter and Catherine Howard his own daughter. Howard was also an inveterate gambler who squandered a fortune acquired from his first wife and had to palm off his children on relatives.

Howard was also plagued by ill health. While stationed in Calais in the mid-1530s Howard suffered from painful kidney stones. For advice he turned to Viscountess Lisle, an influential member of court with a reputation for dispensing good medical advice. Lady Lisle provided Howard with a diuretic “powder for stones”, probably dandelion-based.

In a letter believed to have been written in 1536, Howard wrote to Lady Lisle to advise that her powder had resolved his kidney stones but had left him with another embarrassing problem:

“I have taken your medicine, which has done me much good. It has caused the stone to break and now I void much gravel. But for all that, your said medicine hath done me little honesty, for it made me piss my bed this night, for which my wife has sore beaten me, saying ‘it is children’s parts to bepiss their bed’. You have made me such a pisser that I dare not this day go abroad.”

Howard asked Lady Lisle to provide him with “a wing or a leg of a stork”, as he had heard that eating one of these would put an end to his bed-wetting. It is not known whether he resolved his particular problem, however his health continued to deteriorate and he died in 1539.

Source: Letter from Lord Edmund Howard to Viscountess Lisle, undated, c.1536. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1582: Cuntius, the stinking vampire of Pentsch

In 1582, residents in a village in Silesia complained of visitations from a bad-breathed vampire named Cuntius. Before joining the ranks of the undead, Johannes Cuntius was actually a respected citizen and aldermen in Pentsch. In February 1582 he was fatally injured after being kicked by one of his “lusty geldings”.

Before expiring, Cuntius lingered for several days, complaining of ghostly visions and feeling like he was on fire. According to one witness, at the moment of his death a black cat entered the room and jumped onto his bed.

As befitted his civic status, Cuntius was entombed near the altar of his local church. But within a few days several townspeople reported receiving visits from the dead man. All described a “most grievous stink” and “an exceedingly cold breath of so intolerable stinking and malignant a scent as is beyond all imagination and expression”.

A whole litany of annoyances and harassments was attributed to the vampire, including accusations of:

“..Galloping up and down like a wanton horse in the court of his house… Miserably tugging all night with a Jew [and] tossing him up and down in his lodgings… dreadfully accosting a wagoner, an old acquaintance of his, while he was busy in the stable [and] biting him so cruelly in the foot that he made him lame… [Entering a] master’s chamber, making a noise like a hog that eats grains, smacking and grunting very sonorously…”

The people of Pentsch tolerated these nocturnal visits until late July, at which point they decided to exhume Cuntius’ coffin and deal with his wandering corpse. They found that his:

“..skin was tender and florid, his joints not at all stiff but limber and moveable… a staff being put into his hand, he grasped with his fingers… they opened a vein in his leg and the blood sprang out fresh as in the living.”

After a brief judicial hearing, Cuntius’ body was thrown onto a bonfire and burned, then hacked to pieces and crushed to ashes. As might be expected, the spirit of Cuntius ceased its nocturnal visits. By coincidence, the village of Pentsch became the town of Horni Benesov – the ancestral home of former US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Source: Various inc. Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism (Book III), 1655. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1529: Antonius de Arena’s rules for dancing

Antonius de Arena was born into a well-off family near Toulouse, France, sometime around 1500. He studied law at Avignon and later joined the French army, participating in the Italian War of 1521-26.

Arena, who was a romantic at heart and something of a ladies’ man, did not enjoy military life – he much preferred writing and teaching. Arena wrote several texts on matters of law, as well as manuals on conduct and etiquette.

In 1529, Arena penned The Rules of Dancing, a quite thorough account of of several examples of basse danse, the slow-moving court dances popular with the French nobility. He urged his readers, particularly young men, to take their dancing seriously, for “to dance badly is a great disgrace”. The young person who cannot dance well, he writes, is likely to fall victim to “proud ladies and damsels who gossip away like magpies”. In contrast, the man who can dance well will “kiss many charming ladies and a thousand girls”.

Arena goes on to offer advice on music, movement and choreography – as well as proper deportment while dancing:

“Wear the most elegant clothes when you are dancing and are all set for love… the slovenly dressed man will be ridiculed…”

“Do not have a dripping nose and do not dribble at the mouth. No woman desires a man with rabies…”

“Do not scratch your head in search of lice…”

“When you are dancing do not keep your mouth open, since the flies… could easily fly into your gaping mouth and choke you…”

“Do not eat either leeks or onions because they leave an unpleasant odour in the mouth…”

“Always maintain a smiling aspect when dancing and, I pray you, a pleasant friendly expression. Some people look as if they are weeping and as if they want to shit hard turds…”

Source: Antonius de Arena, The Rules of Dancing, 1529. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.