The Royal Touch (Routledge Revivals)

Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France

Marc Bloch, J. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317517719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in English in 1973, The Royal Touch explores the supernatural character that was long attributed to royal power. Throughout history, both France and England claimed to hold kings with healing powers who, by their touch, could cure people from all strands of society from illness and disease. Indeed, the idea of royalty as something miraculous and sacred was common to the whole of Western Europe. Using the work of both professional scholars and of doctors, this work stands as a contribution to the political history of Europe.

BOOK 1

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THE ORIGINS

I

The beginnings of the touch for scrofula

1 Scrofula

The two words ‘écrouelles’, or more often ‘scrofula’, which is only a learned form of the first (both of them coming from the Latin scrofula), are used by doctors today to signify tuberculous adenitis, that is to say inflammation of the lymph nodes due to the bacillus of tuberculosis. It is obvious that before the advent of bacteriology, such specialization of these two names, which go back to the medicine of antiquity, was quite impossible. It was not possible to distinguish between the various infections of the ganglia; or at any rate the tentative scientific efforts at classification—which were bound to be abortive—did not leave any traces in current medical language. All these infections were uniformly called ‘écrouelles’ in French and scrofula or strumae in Latin; these last two words were generally synonymous. It should be added that by far the greater number of inflammations of the ganglia are tuberculous in origin; so that the majority of cases classed as scrofula by the doctors in the Middle Ages would also be diagnosed as such by our doctors today. But popular language was less precise than technical language. The ganglia most easily attacked by tuberculosis are those of the neck; and when the disease goes untreated, and suppurations occur, the face may easily appear to be affected. Hence a confusion, apparent in many of the documents, between scrofula and various other affections of the face or even the eyes.¹ Tubercular adenitis is very widespread, even nowadays; so what must it have been like in conditions of hygiene notably inferior to our own? If we mentally add the other kinds of adenitis, and all the vague crop of miscellaneous diseases popularly confused with them, we shall have some idea of the ravages attributable to what Europe of old used to include under the name of ‘scrofula’. In certain regions, as both mediaeval and modern doctors testify, these diseases were virtually endemic.² This is hardly ever a fatal disease; but especially where there is a failure to give the appropriate treatment, it is very trying and disfiguring. The frequent suppurations had something repulsive about them, and the horror they engendered is naively expressed in more than one ancient account. The face became ‘putrid’ and the sores gave forth a ‘foetid odour’. The background picture, then, which the historian of the royal miracle should keep in mind, is that of countless sufferers longing for healing, and ready to have recourse to any remedies they might hear of through common report.

I have already reminded the reader of what this miracle was. In France of old it was called ‘mal le roi’; in England, the King’s Evil. The kings of France and of England claimed that a simple touch of their hands, made according to the traditional rites, was able to cure the scrofulous. When did they begin to exercise this miraculous power? How were they led to make this claim? And how did their subjects come to acknowledge it: These are delicate problems, which I shall try to resolve. The rest of this study will be based upon reliable testimony; but here, in this first book devoted to origins, we are touching on a very obscure past, and we shall have to resign ourselves in advance to giving considerable place to hypotheses. The historian may legitimately make use of them, provided he does not put them forward as certainties. Let us then start by bringing together the most ancient texts relating to the ‘physician princes’, as they used to be called, beginning with France.

2 The beginnings of the French rite

We owe the first document, in which without a shadow of doubt the French ‘touch’ appears, to the chance fact of an unusual controversy.³ About the beginning of the twelfth century the monastery of St-Médard of soissons claimed to possess a most outstanding relic—a tooth belonging to Our Saviour, a milk-tooth, so it was said.⁴ In order to spread the news of their glorious treasure, the monks had a short treatise put together, which has since disappeared; but thanks to numerous other examples, it is not difficult to guess what it was like. It must have been a fairly crude production—a small booklet for the use of pilgrims, containing a collection of miracles.⁵ Now at this time there lived not far from Soissons a certain Guibert, the abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy, one of the best writers of the period. Nature had endowed mm with a mind that was both judicious and subtle; moreover, there may have been some obscure quarrel which has now passed into oblivion spurring him on against his ‘neighbours’ of Soissons,⁶ one of those bitter church rivalries that abound in the history of the time. This may well have helped to sharpen his love of truth in the matter at issue. He did not believe in the authenticity of the famous tooth; and when the document referred to above appeared, he in his turn determined to open the eyes of the faithful who had been deluded by the ‘falsifiers’ of St-Médard.⁷ That was the origin of this curious treatise De Pignoribus Sanctorum, which seems to have aroused little interest in the Middle Ages. In fact, there remains only one manuscript, copied perhaps under the eyes of Guibert himself;⁸ today, however, scholars have been delighted to discover, among a great deal of rubbish, evidence of a quite unfettered critical sense—something extremely rare in the twelfth century. It is a rather disconnected work, containing alongside amusing anecdotes a quantity of rather unrelated observations on the subject of relics, visions, and miraculous manifestations in general.⁹ Let us look at Book I, in which Guibert, in perfect conformity with the most orthodox doctrine, develops the idea that miracles are not by themselves any indication of holiness. God alone is their author; and in His Divine Wisdom chooses as instruments or ‘channels’ those men who are fitted to His purposes even if they are ungodly. Then there follow some examples from the Bible, or from the historians of antiquity, who were looked upon by the scholars of that time with almost as blind a faith as the Sacred Book itself. He mentions Balaam’s prophecy, and Caiaphas’, Vespasian’s healing of a lame man, the sea at Pamphylia parting in front of Alexander the Great, and finally the signs that so often announced the birth or the death of princes.¹⁰ To which Guibert adds:

But what am I saying? Have we not seen our Lord King Louis performing a customary marvel? With my own eyes I have seen people suffering from scrofula on the neck or other parts of the body crowd round the King in order to be touched by him—and to his touch he added also the sign of the cross. I was there quite near him, and even helped to keep the crowds from pressing too close upon mm. The king, however, showed his innate generosity towards them, drawing them to himself with his serene hand and humbly making the sign of the cross over them. His father Philip had also zealously applied himself to the exercise of this glorious and miraculous power; and I do not know what sins he committed to make him lose it.¹¹

Such are the few lines that nave been quoted again and again since the seventeenth century by the historians of scrofula. The two princes mentioned in them are clearly Louis VI and his father Philip I. What conclusions can we draw?

In the first place Louis VI (who reigned from 1108 to 1137) was considered to possess the power of healing scrofula; crowds were wont to press round him, and the king, himself tully persuaded of the power given to him from above, acceded to their prayers. And not only once, on some random occasion, in a moment of exceptional popular enthusiasm; no, we are already confronted with a ‘customary’ practice, a regular rite clothed in the forms that were to belong to it throughout the course of the French monarchy. The king touches the sufferers and makes the sign of the cross over them—these were the two successive gestures destined to remain a permanent part of the tradition. Guibert was an eye-witness, whose testimony cannot be put in doubt; he met Louis VI at Laon, and perhaps on other occasions; his office as abbot meant that he would have regular close access to his sovereign.¹²

But there is more to be said, This miraculous power was not considered as belonging personally to King Louis. It was recalled that his father and predecessor Philip I (1060–1108), whose long reign takes us back almost to the middle of the eleventh century, had exercised this power before him; and it was said that he had subsequently lost it because of ‘I do not know what sins’, as Guibert delicately puts it, for he was greatly attached to the Capetian family, and disposed to cover up their faults. There can be no doubt that it was a question of the doubly adulterous union between Philip and Bertrade de Montfort. The king was excommunicated for this crime, and it was thought that the divine wrath had struck him with various ‘shameful’ diseases.¹³ No wonder, then, that he had at the same time lost his healing power. This ecclesiastical legend is of little consequence for us here. But it does indicate that Philip 1is the first French king of whom we can say with certainty that he touched the scrofulous.

It should also be observed that this invaluable text remains absolutely unique for its period. As we pass down the ages step by step, in search of healings carried out by the kings of France, we have to travel on as far as the reign of St-Louis (1226–70), about whom, incidentally, we have fairly full information,¹⁴ before we arrive at any new document. If the monks of St-Médard had not claimed to possess a tooth of Cnnst, and if Guibert had not taken it into his head to hold forth against them, or if his treatise—like so many others of the same kind—had been lost, we should no doubt have been tempted to see St-Louis as the first healing monarch. There is in actual fact no reason to suppose that between 1137 and 1226 any interruption took place in the exercise of the miraculous gift. The texts dealing with St-Louis demonstrate clearly his powers as traditional and hereditary. Yet the continuous silence of the documents over almost a century demands an explanation, which we shall attempt later on. For the moment, however, we must concentrate upon determining when the rite began, and need only remember what has just been said by way of prudent counsel. By fortunate chance, we still have a few sentences from a twelfth-century writer who recalls in passing that his sovereign used to heal the scrofulous; and other less fortunate hazards may well have deprived us of similar references to previous Kings. If without more ado we were to affirm that Philip I was the first to ‘touch for scrofula’, we should be in danger of making the same kind of mistake as if—supposing the only manuscript of the De Pignoribus Sanctorum to have been lost—we had concluded in the absence of any mention earlier than St-Louis that this king had initiated the rite.

Can we hope to go further back than Philip I?

It is no new question, whether the first two royal lines already possessed the medicinal powers claimed by the Capetians. It was thrashed out again and again by the scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in controversies whose echoes even reached the royal table.

One Easter Day at Fontainebleau Henry IV, after touching for scrofula, thought it good to enliven his dinner by a novel kind of joust. He selected as the combatants certain scholars—André du Laurens, his senior physician, Pierre Mathieu, his historiographer, and Guillaume du Peyrat, his almoner. The doctor and historiographer maintained that the power of which their master had just given fresh proof went back to Clovis; the almoner denied that the Merovingians or Carolingians had ever exercised this power.¹⁵ Let us then also enter the lists and try to form an opinion. It is a complicated problem, but it may be split up into a number of simpler questions which must be examined one by one.

First, is there any documentary trace suggesting that any king of the first two dynasties may perhaps have claimed to heal the scrofulous? On this point, we shall have no difficulty in siding with the negative opinion, often expressed forcibly by du Peyrat, by Scipion Dupleix, and by all the learned minds of the seventeenth century. No document of that kind has ever been produced. But we should go further than this. Our knowledge of the High Middle Ages is based upon sources that are scanty, and therefore easy to explore. They have been conscientiously sifted over several centuries by the scholars of all nations. If such a source has never been ais-covered, it may safely be concluded that it does not exist. Later on, we shall have occasion to see how the story arose in the sixteenth century of the healing by Clovis of his squire Lanicet; and we shall then see that this tradition is without any real toundation. It is a younger sister of the legends about the Holy Phial or the heavenly origin of the fleur-de-lis, and must be consigned, along with its elder sisters, to the department of outworn historical accessories—as all serious Historians long ago agreed.

We must now put our problem in a more comprehensive form. Neither the Merovingians nor the Carolingians, as far as documentary evidence goes, possessed this special form of healing power for the specific illness of scrofula. But may they not have been considered capable of healing either some other particular disease, or even diseases in general? Let us see what Gregory of Tours has to say. In Book IX, with reference to King Guntram, the son of Clotaire I, there occurs the following passage:

It was commonly related among the faithful that a certain woman whose son lay stretched upon a bed of pain, suffering from a quaternary fever, made her way through the crowd from behind the king, and without his noting it, managed to pull off a part of the fringe of the royal cloak. She soaked it in water, and then gave this water to her son to drink. The fever immediately abated, and the disease was cured. For my part, I do not doubt this matter; for indeed I myself have often seen demons who inhabit the bodies of those possessed cry out the name of this king, and, being unmasked by the virtue proceeding from him, confess their crimes.¹⁶

So it would seem that Guntram possessed among his subjects and advisers—of whom Gregory of Tours was avowedly one—the reputation of being a healer. There was a miraculous power inherent in the clothes that had touched his person. His mere presence—or perhaps simply the invocation of his name (the text is not very clear on this point)—could deliver the possessed. The whole question is to know if he shared this miraculous capacity with those of his line, or whether it was simply a personal gift. His memory would not appear to have been the object of any officially recognized cult, although the Italian hagiographer Pietro Natali thought him worthy of a place in his Catalogue Sanctorum.¹⁷ But there is no doubt that many of his contemporaries, and first and foremost the bishop of Tours, considered him to be a saint. Not that his manners were particularly pure or gentle; but he was so pious!—for, says Gregory, a little before the passage quoted above, ‘you would have taken him for a bishop rather than a king’. Moreover, this same Gregory gives us a host of details about Guntram’s ancestors and uncles and brothers. Veriantius Fortunatus sang the praises of several Merovingian monarchs, but nowhere does it appear that any of those princes, though praised as more or less pious or generous or brave, had healed anyone. For the Carolingians, the verdict is the same. The Carolingian renaissance has left us a relatively abundant literature containing in particular some treatises of a semi-political and semi-moralistic character on the subject of royalty, and some biographies or collections of anecdotes about certain sovereigns; but it would be impossible to discover anything in them relating to the healing power of kings. If we were to rely on a single passage in Gregory of Tours and decide that the early Merovingians possessed medicinal powers, we should also have to assume that these powers had suffered an eclipse under the Carolingians. There would thus be no possibility of establishing continuity between Guntram and Philip I, between a king of the sixth century and one of the eleventh. It is simpler to admit that these miracles were attributed to Guntram by common belief, not as a royal attribute, but as a seemingly necessary consequence of the saintly character ascribed to him by his iaithful. For in the eyes of his contemporaries, what was a saint but—first and foremost—a worker of beneficent miracles? Moreover, as we shall see later on, it was all the easier for Guntram to appear saintly because he was a king, and belonged to a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Plates
• Preface
• Introduction
• Book 1 The Origins
• Book 2 The Grandeur and Vicissitudes of the Royal Healers
• Book 3 A Critical Interpretation of the Royal Miracle
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index