Castle Characters - William Burntoft
In April 1312, an important summons arrived at the home of a man called “Master William Burntoft” of Newcastle. The King, Edward II, was in residence at his royal castle and one of his courtiers had fallen ill and needed the services of a doctor – William Burntoft was just the man and rushed to the Castle. It’s hard to know what he felt at that moment – treating royalty and their friends could be either lucrative or could ruin your career if they died in your care, so it must have been a nerve-wracking trip up to the Castle. As it happened, King Edward was taking no chances; the patient was none other than the notorious Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall – hated by the barons of England, but beloved of the King himself. Edward had summoned two people to treat Piers, a monk from the Priory at Tynemouth called Robert of Birmingham, and William Burntoft, described as a “Physician”. We don’t actually know what exactly Piers was suffering from at the time, though other sources from during his life describe him as having a ‘secret illness’ that compelled him to make short journeys – maybe he had piles. At any rate he was feeling a lot better by May 4th, because he and Edward were forced to flee Newcastle when an army raised by rebellious barons caught up with them. They left in such a hurry that they left Piers’ baggage behind, filled with such fabulous treasures as a lion skin belt studded with jewels, and even allegedly left behind Edward’s pregnant wife Isabella.
The painting Edward II. and his Favourite, Piers Gaveston by Marcus Stone
That, sadly, is pretty much all we know of William Burntoft! A lifetime of medical training and practice, and your entire existence disappears from the record save from a couple of lines in the “Wardrobe Accounts” of the King recording the payment made to him and Robert. William of Burntoft was one of the millions of ordinary citizens of medieval England who vanish from view almost completely except where their lives intersect with the lives of royalty. In this case, William’s experience of royalty does not seem to have been too irksome – he was paid 10 marks for no more than a week’s work. A mark was not a coin, but a unit of accounting in medieval England and was worth 160d (pence), meaning 10 marks was worth over £6 in an age when a labourer got paid around £2 per year! Not bad for a few days, even if treating the King’s closest companion must have been a stressful assignment. Robert of Birmingham was paid the same amount, though as a monk he had taken a vow of poverty, so the money presumably went straight into the coffers of the Prior of Tynemouth.
So, what exactly can we say about William Burntoft? Firstly, his name implies that he was born in the North East, but possibly not in Newcastle – the village of Burntoft is near Billingham by the River Tees, and the normal surname practice of using the place that someone was born would indicate that he moved to Newcastle from there. As well he might – Burntoft was a tiny place and would not even have been able to support a barber-surgeon or apothecary, never mind a trained physician! Newcastle on the other hand was the largest town in the region and the fourth wealthiest town in all of England, so would be a natural place for a physician to head to set up practice.
Most of what we can say about him comes from his profession. He is called in Latin, “Magistro Willielmo de Burntoft, Phisico”. The title of “Magister” or master, and the fact that he is called a Physician, tells us that he was indeed a degree educated doctor, rather than a ‘lesser’ medical professional. In the medieval world, there were several different types of medical professional you could seek out if you felt a bit under the weather, in addition to unofficial healers like wise women and herbalists. Apothecaries dispensed various kinds of drugs, potions, lotions, ointments, and other medicines, prepared according to various recipes, and involving herbs, animal parts, chemical compounds and what have you, sometimes under the direction of a physician. Many people would seek out an apothecary as their first port of call if they were sick, as it was much cheaper than the services of a fully trained physician – there was, after all, no such concept as universal healthcare in the middle ages, so whatever assistance you wanted, you had to pay for.
For those whose illness could not be cured by smearing some poultice on it, there was also the option of a barber, sometimes known as barber-surgeons. One of our other castle characters, Matilda, was a barber. They specialised in the messy, physical side of medicine that involved cutting or pulling things off – whether that was hair, teeth, boils, or limbs. As the medieval period progressed, some surgeons started to approach their trade a little bit more academically, but barbers and apothecaries were both trained in the traditional medieval way by serving an apprenticeship and learning the trade on the job.
Physicians thought of themselves as a cut above such simple tradespeople both in status and the cost of their services. They were academics, through and through, and like all physicians William Burntoft would have gone to University. It often surprises people to hear that medieval doctors were university educated, but just like today you could not call yourself a physician without the degree to back it up. It was a long course of study as well – to begin with, you would need to complete a “Master of Arts” degree, which took six years, usually starting when you were about 15 years of age. During this time, William would have studied logic, rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (all in Latin), before moving on to specialise in medicine once his degree was completed. This usually took a further six years, meaning William would have been at least 27 years old once he had qualified as a physician.
Lecturing, medieval style
We don’t know where William Burntoft studied, but it’s likely that his first degree would have been at either Oxford or Cambridge, as these were the only Universities in England at the time (in fact the only ones in Britain until St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities were founded in the 1400s). This would not have been cheap – scholars were expected to buy their own books as well as pay for tuition, and as all books were handwritten manuscripts this could cost a small fortune – students were always complaining of impoverishing themselves to buy more books. It could be a pretty raucous education as well, as students were notorious in the Medieval period for heavy drinking and violence – one of the leading causes of death mentioned in the medieval coroner’s rolls from Oxford is being “murdered by clerks” – students were usually referred to as clerks as the universities all started as offshoots of the church, so students were technically “clerics”.
Once he had finished his education (both in academic disciplines, and in fighting and drinking) William could either have continued to study medicine at Oxford or gone to Europe to continue his studies – the Universities in Paris, Bologna, Montpelier and Padua were all famous for medicine and would have given William access to new medical texts translated from Arabic. The Muslim Kingdoms had been pioneering advanced scientific techniques in the middle ages, and the spread of this knowledge into Europe helped physicians rediscover the works of many Ancient Greek doctors and scientists as well as more “modern” Muslim scientists like Omar Khayyam and Al-Zahrawi. The fact that Universities all over Europe taught in Latin would mean that an English scholar like William Burntoft could converse easily with fellow academics from anywhere in Christendom (or indeed most of the world).
We also know what kind of things William would have studied and learned as part of his medical education. Most medieval medical knowledge was left over from the times of the Greeks and Romans, and medieval physicians idolised ancient doctors like Galen, Celsus and Hippocrates – innovation was not a priority, and learning the thoughts of the ancients and following them precisely was usually more of a priority. William would have learned the prevailing theory from the time about how disease was caused as well.
This is known today as “humourism” and stated that just as the world was made from the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), the human body was composed of four humours or fluids, each corresponding to one of the elements. These were blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. If the humours were in balance, a person would be healthy, but if any of the humours were not properly balanced sickness was the result, and the physician’s job was to diagnose which of the humours was causing the illness and how best to rebalance them. Diagnosis was often as simple as observing the colour, smell and even taste (!) of a patient’s urine as well as observing their other symptoms, although to be sure, casting horoscopes was also a common practice, as the planets and stars were believed to influence the humours.
Diagram of the four humours.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org The four elements, four qualities, four humours, four seasons, and four ages of man. Airbrush by Lois Hague, 1991. 1991 By: Lois Hague and St Bartholomew's Hospital.Published: [1991]
Interestingly, some concepts from this theory have come down to us today – for example, we might still call someone seen as sad and gloomy “melancholic”, which means possessing a lot of black bile, a humour believed to cause dark moods when present in excess. Many of us will also remember being told that we would “catch cold” if we went out in the rain without a coat. This is based on the medieval belief that phlegm, representing the element of water, was cold and wet, so getting cold and wet yourself would lead to a build up of phlegm in the body, causing you to become ill.
Physicians were also supposed to study the best medicines to rebalance the humours and anatomy and surgery, although they rarely practiced these things themselves, preferring not to get their hands dirty. They would sometimes write out recipes for medicines that were given to their patients to pass on to the apothecary – the origin of the modern “prescription”. I wonder if medieval physicians’ handwriting was as notorious as their modern counterparts? In the 1300s, when William Burntoft was practicing, there was starting to be some crossover between surgeons and physicians, with some surgeons studying at university and even forgoing cutting hair altogether, blurring the boundary between a doctor and a surgeon – today the last vestige of this divide between the professions is the fact that surgeons do not use the title “doctor” before their name.
Like many of the people who have lived and worked in or around Newcastle Castle, the best we can do to put “flesh on their bones”, so to speak, is to take this kind of deep dive into their professional lives. Sadly, we’ll never know William Burntoft’s own thoughts about his work, the King he worked for, or anything about his private life. All we have is what amounts to a receipt for his work and the stonking amount he charged for it! One last question remains that we can speculate an answer to – what could possibly justify the huge charge? Well, John of Arderne, an academically educated surgeon of the 1300s might just have had the answer. When discussing fees, he says a good doctor always charges the rich an exorbitant fee, so that the doctor can still afford to treat those who cannot afford to pay.