Gone Medieval - How To Keep Fit in the Middle Ages

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

If your new year's resolutions include getting more exercise, drinking less, or eating well, you might be surprised to know that medieval people were every bit as interested as we are in becoming, being and staying healthy.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega talks to Professor Carol Rawcliffe about her fascinating research into health and fitness in the late medieval period and what people thought about staying fit and well.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Happy New Year, everyone. As we break the seal on a brand new 2024, a lot of us are beginning to think about our resolutions for the year ahead. More to the point, some of us may or may not, still be feeling the effects of the revelry of Christmas, or even just the excess of last night. And we might be vowing to turn over a new leaf and start living like to live. more healthily in the new year. Maybe you'd like to take up more exercise, cut back on your alcohol intake, or just be a bit more

thoughtful about the way that you eat. These sorts of ambitions are perfectly normal in our society, but you might be surprised to learn that the idea of keeping fit is by no means a new one. Medieval people were every bit as interested in being, getting, and staying healthy as we are. They just had some really different ways of looking at the whole thing. In a medical system which is guided not by germ theory, but the idea that one needed to keep the four humors, that's black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm in balance. Diet was less about calories and more about foods that complemented your theoretical humoral makeup.

Medieval people might not have understood the concept of aerobic or anaerobic activity, but they absolutely knew that exercise, from swimming to lifting weights, was of huge benefit. Sure, they didn't know what germs were, but they knew that if you wanted everyone in the city to stay healthy, you had to clear out the rubbish and make sure everyone had clean water. So, the same means and goals were there, but medieval people were using a very different framework to explain it. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonika, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I've asked the legendary professor Carol Rockcliffe, who you may remember from our episode on leprosy, and whose research currently looks at ideas of health and fitness in the late medieval period. to join me once again to help explain exactly how medieval people thought about staying fit and how medical practitioners and sometimes society as a whole facilitated that process. Thank you so much for being here.

Pleasure. We wanted to talk about your more recent work, which is on the idea of keeping fit in the Middle Ages, which I think a lot of people would be really surprised to hear that medieval people were thinking of this at all. Maybe they would. I think people have this idea of everyone walking around knee-deep in squalor. which is certainly not the case. And when you think about it, preventative medicine is really the best bet.

We realize that death is omnipresent in the Middle Ages, but there's even small things. Suppose you're in a pub brawl if you're a man and you get a cut. That can easily become septuosemia. There's no antiseptis. There's no blood transfusion. There's no antibiotics. There's none of the technology that we take for granted today in the West.

And you can easily be looking at death. with a very minor infection. And if you add on to that, malaria, typhoid, diphtheria, the black death, preventive medicine begins to assume a really important position. Just to put this into perspective, we're all thinking about deaths in COVID. But during the black death, between a half and a third of the population of Britain died, this is before the subsequent outbreak. And in Norwich, where I live, the population fell from about 25,000 in 1330.

to just below 8,000 in 1370. It's just absolutely overwhelming, and especially when we think about Norwich, that's the second largest city in England after London at the time. People say the word decimate, and I'm always saying it's much more than that, because decimate only implies you lost 10%. Now, that may encourage you, oh, it's all doom and glim.

But on the other side, it makes people very anxious to stay fit, because once you did fall ill, health is very fragile. So we see from way before the black death the burgeoning of this literature, which is called Regimen Sanitatis, the Regiment of Health, which is about how to preserve your health, how to keep fit. And with the passage of time, it elaborates to cover just about everybody. You can have regimen for an individual. If you're really rich, you can commission one. Or you can have them for particular groups of people, such as travellers, the elderly, the young, pregnant women. you can have them for cities, keeping cities healthy and fit, and they multiply in a whole range of

different sort of spheres. You even have them for soldiers, for life in camp. How do you keep fit if you're marching from one place to another, probably spreading disease? So there's a real focus on the idea of prevention being better than cured. And when we say keeping fit, the way they're thinking about fitness and health is very different to how we are, though, right? Because we're working here on the humeral system. We are. And the idea is that basically you are what you eat. The great Greek physician, Galen,

describes diet as the first instrument of medicine. What happens in the body and remember there's no idea of circulation at this day is what you eat. It's cooked in the stomach and then in the liver it's turned into what is called humeral matter. And this can be hot and dry

or hot and wet, cold and dry or cold and wet. And keep it. Keeping a balance between these humours is what health is all about. This matter is transmitted in the veins to the body and it feeds it. Some of this matter is filtered through the heart and mixed with air from the outside world. And that is called vital spirit or numa.

And that gives life and that's warm. And then some of this matter finally is filtered through a network at the base of the brain. It doesn't exist, but Galen thought it did. That becomes animal spirit and that animates you and it drives your thought processes. All of this very complex, very sophisticated and very holistic system is in many respects driven from what you put in your mouth and what you breathe. And keeping fit is predicated on managing all this system. There's a huge emphasis then on literally what's coming into your body, whether we're inhaling it or in my case. inhaling because I eat too fast. And we want to keep ourselves in balance. You will turn to

these regimen sanitized tannitas in order to tell you how to do that. Are these individualized diets that we're really looking at? It depends what the regimen is for. The idea in here, and it's very simple and it's very good, and it will resonate with listeners because it's based on what are called non-naturals. And these are agencies outside the body, and there are six of them. And the first of them is diet. So you eat a diet which keeps your humour's balance. The second of them is the environmental air and water. So you need clean air and fresh water.

And then you have agents such as the hygiene of sleep. Exercise. You need to exercise, but you need to be careful not to overdo it. Then you've got what is known as repletion and expulsion. So you get rid of things which are dangerous for your body. body. So you need to take laxatives perhaps or enemas or diuretics. You need to bathe to sweat out substances which may be corrupt in your body and you may possibly need to have phlebotomy and that is bloodletting if you're a man because these ideas suggest that you may be carrying

corrupt matter in your body and this is really important during plague time. And the sixth thing which will again resonate today is the idea of the accident of the soul and this is avoiding stress, anger or perhaps anxiety, real stress over what am I going to do now? I'm afraid, fear, and also anxiety about sin. And so confession will help with that. The other things you can do is gardening, for example. Gardening is relaxing. Going out walking in the fresh air, music, reading. All these kinds of ideas will help you to keep that humoral balance and will also help you to defend yourself in times of plague. So just circling back to the phobotomy, I think this is a particularly masculine treatment.

Yeah, men aren't menstruated. Also, if you're not menstruating and you're a woman, you're probably pregnant, unless you survive into old age, which many people do after the black death, because those who survive, having better diets and living in better conditions, generally it's a masculine thing. If you're a young man, you would be recommended to have it, say, every six or seven weeks. But you have to be very careful because you don't want to be phlebotomized when the moon's in the wrong side, something else altogether. But phlebotomy is just one of a raft of different strategies. Your regimen may be an off-the-peg one because these begin to circulate in generic copies. A society becomes more literate.

But if you're really grand, you will have your own. And we do have surviving some of these guides which are written for a specific individual, such, for example, as one that was written for Humphrod-Ducrebloste, the younger. brother of Henry V and he was quite promiscuous and his doctor who is called Gilbert Kimer he tells him you're sleeping around far too much this is bad for your humeral balance it's making you phlegmatic of course is a feminine human you're weakening your blood so stop it I don't know if he took any notice of it but at the other extreme we do know that urban corporations take notice because they introduce all these schemes for public health

They do have some effect. After they Black Death, they invest in enormous amount in carts for refuse cleaning. They improve rules about how you manage suspects and the like. And on top of that, they're investing much more heavily in the water supply. And bearing in mind that they're quite draconian rules about flytipping, dumping refuse. This all adds up to a major health initiative. Of course, we can't envisage it in our terms because they didn't simply have the resources or the money. But they are doing a lot.

And when we add on to this all the rules about butchery, butchers are obliged to follow very strict regulations about where they dump carcasses and the like and sell-by dates for food produce, making sure contaminated food isn't being sold. It does add up to quite an achievement, I think, and it's not unique to London. Other towns and cities throughout England

are trying, even if they don't over-success to improve levels of public health. And this is seen as a religious work as well because in the Bible Christ explains that you've got to perform certain activities in order to go to heaven. You give the poor water, you give them food, you give them clothing, you visit the sick and so on.

And you can easily translate paying for pipe water into performing a comfortable deed. And one of the great benefactors of the city of Richard Whittington certainly has his eye on the next life when he's providing money for prison reform so prisoners are living in cleaner conditions. He's instituting measures for cleaning streets and having cleaner water. You've always got one eye on the next one.

One of the things that I think is really intriguing about medieval people is how they are aware of these things. I don't know how much good 10 feet outside the walls is going to do it, but it's something fair play to you. But they are very strict about how the waste is removed and has to be taken out into barges and deposited in the Thames at Ebtide. But there is a lot of nimbism, and the people who live in Hobart, create literally a stink about this, and they petition Parliament,

and they make such a fuss because, of course, the great and the good living in Hobart, and they have their residences on the river, and they get very wrought up about these butches. And so you do get these responses about this air is not healthy. All this litigation shows you how common these ideas were. You're taking someone to court for breaking health regulation, and you can do it successfully because this is all enacted by Parliament. It's all in the statute book. and if it's not in the statute book, it's in local regulations, and you can be fine quite substantial sums,

particularly when plague is around. These towns and cities become much more twitchy. So do individuals. These ideas even translate into travel guides. I was reading a very interesting guide, which was written by a man called William Way, and he'd been on Pilgrimited to Jerusalem, and he gives you all these practical guides about what you should and shouldn't do when you're travelling. travel with a large barrel just in case you get the trots and you're on shipboard, advice about where not to go. Don't stop at Famagusta, he says, because there's marshland and the air is very corrupt. And he's also giving you the idea of the food. You shouldn't eat native food unless it's chickens or hens that you can actually see the eggs being laid and it's safe on board.

Don't use local fruit because it may make you sick. And of course, if it's washed in corrupt water, it may well hear this. It might do, yeah. And so a lot of these guides that are produced for travellers are really quite specific, and in many respects, quite pragmatic, by dealing with things like sunburn, upset stomachs and the like. But again, their basis is humoural theory in ways that we might find quite perplexing. You've both got to keep an eye on your humeral balance wherever you are. Because I think that what I'm most familiar with in terms of health recommendations, it's dietary advice. I'm forever looking at dietary regimen that tells you to eat trout cooked in almond milk

and being like, oh, I don't, I suppose so. You know, because these things would be good for, if you're a little too hot, a trout is a slightly cold and it brings down this. And almonds are sanguine, and so blanc-manger, which is chicken mixed with almonds and gives us blemange, is the ideal diet for the sick or people with upset humours because it's moderately sanguine. Sanguine is the best humor. So you're always trying to have a moderately sanguine humour.

It's very difficult for some people who may be caloric. And your humour is balanced changes through life, which is why advice changes. Where do you mean for the elderly are very interesting, because they're dealing with people who are implicitly going to be colder than drier, actually. You go through a hot dry phase and then you become colder and drier. Because the process of ageing is one of just simply becoming colder and colder. And then gradually in the end, you're so little heat in your body. It can't cope with the moisture and you end up drowning in your own humours.

It's very sophisticated and very complicated. But this regimen for the elderly, for example, would prescribe a warm, moist diet. They also prescribe keeping cheerful. That's good for your levels of warmth. Sanguine people are by nature cheerful. And so you're advised to see your friends regularly. Enjoy gardening. Have food that is going to make you feel happy, but not too much of it.

A little meat cooked in red wine, but not too much of it. And also keep your brain active. So you should do mathematical puzzles or reading. And so a lot of this, while relating to humoral balance, is actually very resonant today. And of course, the idea of getting drier as you age is familiar to those of those you see our wrinkles in the mirror. What about then exercise? Does that also apply to regular people? You're a peasant.

You're out there plowing in the field. As anyone's saying to peasants, oh, by the way, you really need to... be doing some star jump. It doesn't because exercise to be really effective has to be taken at specific times of day to assist your digestion and these guides say specifically we're not talking about people walking long distance to trade or somebody digging in the field we're talking about people who may be more sedentary but they will need to break off at particular points and you do not exercise on a full or an empty stomach but the regimens for exercise are amazing and it was one that was produced for the canons who are living in Smithfield. And the person who wrote it, who was called

John Merfield, he actually copied it from somebody else. He's advising them to exercise in their own cells because he says it's not really becoming for the church to see people jogging around London. But the exercise he suggests, these are for youngish men, is do weight training and to have particular weights which they lift up and put down, or to have ropes that they can swing on so they're getting upper body strength. The idea is you exercise. all the parts of the body to an equal degree. Although if you're old and your knees are creaky, it might be advisable to row. So once you get arthritic knees, then you have to modify your regimen.

So the exercise that you're taking is a bit fraught because there's also a lot of status involved here. So for example, Thomas Elliott, he's writing in the 16th century, absolute thing about football. He says, do not do football. It's just appalling. Only it's scruffs and the layer of orders do football. Footyball, he calls it. It's much better to do something like riding or archery,

because that's more in keeping with people of a higher status. So these very aggressive group sports, and not for somebody who's a king or a nobleman, you hunt. And the people who write hunting literature make a great thing about how healthy it is. People who hunt eat sparely. They exercise a lot,

and they're out in the open air, and they're fit. Galen said hunting with dogs was one of the best forms of exercise that anyone could take. It made you happy. And there are guides for women too. There are guides for monks because it's very important that you stay fit so you can do God's work. In the later middle ages, hair shirts often go out the window as do ascetic diets because the idea is that you need a balanced diet, you need to live in clean surroundings to do the work of God. Yeah, I suppose a lot of time that work is things like working in hospitals. You better be healthy if everyone around you is

unwell and needs help. And these ideas are very prominent among the friars because friars are doing pastoral work and they're doing a lot of walking. They have to be fit. Ideas of physical health really take off with the friars as well. There are a lot of different reasons

explaining why they become so popular. But ordinary people in the street would know these ideas because Regimeina are often rhymed so you can repeat them in verse even if you can't read. And the proclamations that are made in towns and cities explaining why you have to bring your refuse out on Tuesday,

we'll explain exactly the importance of having fresh air. So we shouldn't just assume that these ideas are circulating among a narrow elite. A sort of rough and ready version of them is percolating down among ordinary citizens who know very well that they shouldn't be eating contaminated meat and know that they should be drinking fresh water, just as we don't necessarily know the mechanics of the spread of COVID. And a lot of our wisdom about being fit, received, isn't it? One of the reasons these ideas take off so much is that they tie in absolutely

with the teachings of the church. They come from Arab physicians, writers on medicine originally, many of them, but they're just fit, don't they, like a glove, ideas about the seven deadly sins. And they fit ideas about keeping the body politic clear of vagrants and ne'er-do-wells who are clogging up the humoral system of the body politic. They give the rulers of towns that it's a good reason to get rid of vagrant. malleable these ideas, and they can be used for a whole raft of different reasons, many of which we might consider to be quite cruel. Regarding vagrants as a sort of form of corruption in the body policy, you need to get rid of, you can use them for those ideas as well. Yeah, absolutely. So when we're talking about gender, it sounds like I would expect to see more of them be for men.

There's a monastic lifestyle one. For travelers, it's not that women don't travel. Do we see, for example, guides for the health of nuns? are certainly clearly aware of these things. There's a famous abbess Euphemia who was at Whirlwell Abbey and she put all these ideas into action in her monastery. She cleared out dirt, she had gardens planted, she made sure that the nuns took exercise, she had orchards put where they could go and stroll every day, and she was noted for it in the chronicles. And then there are guides that are written for specific women, such as Eleanor of Provence, the wife of Henry III, a man called Aldo Brandino of Siena, wrote a guide for her and female members of her family.

So women are not left out. But in these guides, it's always the male voice, but of course it can be men and women. And the abbesses and people who are running female houses are very much just as aware of these ideas as monks are. They're not precluded from this literature at all. And many women, of course, in the later middle ages, are completely literate. They're interested in these books. some women indeed are practicing medicine. We shouldn't regard them as being shut out

because a male voice is being employed here. It's also quite striking with this emphasis on what we would call mental health. I think that there is this tendency for us now to say to ourselves, oh, a preoccupation with mental health or in understanding that this is a part of one's overall health, that's something that we've just discovered now. This is completely untrue. The system I've described where the animal spirits are influencing how you think.

The mind and body are welded together in this holistic unit, and nobody in the Middle Ages would have divorced physical from mental health. They would have seen it as a packet. And when you take into account, too, that there is this religious element as well, despair is a sin. You know, despairing of your salvation is a sinful thing. You need to take measures to buck yourself up for religious reasons as well. You need to take care that you're not sinking into a pit of depression or anxiety. And monastic writers are very aware of this, of the dangers of acidi, acidi, of being alienated from your community. And this is why they are so adamant about having a proper diet, having periods of rest and relaxation.

In many places monks are sent away for a period to country estates where they can enjoy fresh air and more exercise. They have periods of relaxation from the round of prayer that they are caught in case they do. just become completely disenchanted with this. And you can write a whole article about actual health practices in monasteries to prevent people sinking into this flower despond, if you like. If you're on this religious treadmill and you're not thinking very carefully what you were doing. Yeah, I suppose that's true. If you're encouraged to ruminate at length about your soul, it can be quite easy to get down. It can be introspective and you can lose the plot. There's an entertaining aspect of this because the young monks at St. Albans were sent away to a country estate on a rotor, and they'd have a period of holidays where they would have to attend a few services and do some reading, but the rest of the time they could go out.

And the abbot got very concerned that some of them were running into the neighbouring fields and jumping over hedges. And he wrote this very strong memorandum and they're playing for more. But we do know that some monks have David Beckham's style injuries. they must have sustained when they're playing ball games because these young men, they're taking their novitiate when they're teenagers. They can be stuck in a religious environment for a very long time and some of them live to a really ripe old age and so on the one hand you can have a very high death rate among choir monks but on the other some of them can live to a really ripe old age. There's a lot of concern in the late middle ages about the mental world these people

are occupying? Are they getting enough break to think about what they're doing and then come back refreshed? But also within the kind of religious context of the Middle Ages, in a situation where you're encouraged, for example, to confess fairly

regularly, it can almost act as a form of talking therapy in a way. It is, and this is why it's one of the things you do to deal with your accidents of your soul. Many physicians in their practica, these are their Latin case notes, observe that the page does recover after confession. In 1215, confession was mandatory before medical treatment. The

papacy introduced this ruling. Not everybody observed it. You're supposed to confess. And if you do believe that sin is causing disease or is you're carrying this awful burden of things you've done wrong. And you don't have to be religious to do it. You can feel very guilty about your behaviour. And you confess, then you will feel better. This will give you a new lease of life. and you may be able to go about your daily life in a much more energetic fashion. These ideas of your mental health are hugely important in the Middle Ages, particularly when you think that you're living in this period of epidemics, you do need to take constant steps to deal with this,

and they have to be psychological as well as physical. The regimen of health, if properly followed, did include enough advice for you to lead a good life, for example, avoiding binge drinking, moderate sexual activity, moderate diet. These are Aristotelium, but they're also fit in very well with a sort of life that your average layman or laywoman in the Middle Ages would be trying to live. They couldn't aspire to be saintly, but they could aspire to be good. And being good is a question of balance. And it's been said that the regimen becomes in the later Middle Ages, not just a lifestyle guide, but a sort of secular ethics.

and it is something which people turn to, not just for physical but for mental health. But as we've said, the two are so closely integrated that you cannot separate. It's just how we are now. All one has to do is look at any sort of like health influencer online, right? And you'll hear exactly the same thing. Although, of course, at a more benign level, it's the sort of thing that you would also hear from your own doctor when you go in. Even if we feel as though we are experiencing mental health problems, often our first port of call is our medical doctor. Doesn't though today ask us if we've confessed?

Luckily. I'm not really looking for that particular intrusion. It is true. Obviously there are these huge differentiation points between us and medieval people. Clearly, I don't want to talk to my doctor about the state of my soul or my salvation. But in a different world where that was the organizing principle, the way that we all thought about ourselves and what we owe to each other, then that would be much more welcome. Yes, it would. There is a strong element of community in these guides, particularly the ones that are produced in plague time.

They do stress that not only do you have to do certain things to avoid plague, but you also have to be a good neighbour. You don't throw your dirt out. And the guides that are written attracts for plague do emphasise this element of Christian community. You're supposed to behave in a way that is going to benefit your neighbour as well as yourself. People tend to see themselves much less as isolated units. are part of a community and you're all working together because in many senses plague is seen as a punishment for collective sin but it's also something that you're aware that you do together you resist together so these guides are not only helping individuals but they're helping entire communities

by emphasizing that element of cohesion as well and this is something which these urban regimen really emphasized because the town or the city is seen as a body it is a body that is made up of component members. And these members all have to work together. There's no point having a healthy brain if your feet aren't working. And therefore, the aristocracy don't just look after themselves. They have to make sure the peasantry and the laboring classes are all right because they're the feet. So you are in a body of limbs and organs, all of which have to be healthy and they all have to work together in a corporeal unit. The overriding metaphor is of the body. body, the urban body of these people together. Individuals who are introducing components of

sin or dirt or filth are bad. They are, in some senses, to be expelled, be corrected. Because there are these very tight-knit little communities which have their own little court. And everybody is answerable to these. If you're throwing your rubbish out or you're poisoning a ditch or you've got somebody in your house who's got an infectious disease or something like that, you are answerable to the community. And people will report you. There's an awful lot of of this goes on and the London Leap records, they call Wardment Records, very interesting. Mrs. Bloggs has got a gutter that's overflowing. Joe Smith is keeping prostitutes in his house. There's an eye on you, this is not all entirely voluntary. And these records are very interesting because they show us

how seriously people took these ideas, because these complaints are coming from the bottom up. They're coming from street level. Your neighbour is reporting you because you're doing something that's unhygiene. That just goes to show that there is this sophisticated idea among the average citizen. It isn't about proclamations. This is actual grassroots. It is. It's not policing, is it? But double-checking.

Double-checking. We do call it urban policing. Pigs are a huge thing. You're not supposed to have pigs in many towns and cities, but people keep them. And sometimes they let them out. Now, on the one hand, they're clearing the gutters. But on the other, they're seen as a source of filth and pollution. And you're supposed to get rid of them.

People are reported if they have dangerous pigs, noxious pigs, and this extends to all other kinds of urban animals. And so you've always got somebody watching you. I could talk to you about this all day, but I think we're going to have to leave it there. Carol, I can't thank you enough. This has been an absolute delight. Thank you. My many, many thanks to Carol for joining me once again, and thanks to everyone for listening. And best wishes for your own New Year's resolutions, whatever they may be. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonogne, and this is my very.

been gone medieval from history hit. And if you've liked what you've heard, please don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast, and tell your friends about it. My co-host Matt Lewis will be back on Friday to bring even more medieval goodness into your life. And I'll be back next Tuesday, as always. Hopefully, with perfectly balanced humors. Until next time.