Over the years I have noticed a trend amongst some archaeologists towards a fascination with parasites and related unsavoury medical matters that might well put other people off their mid-morning break or indeed a whole meal. Nonetheless the information that such studies reveal does augment our understanding of medieval daily life, and of the medical constraints upon it.
The ongoing research in medieval graveyards in Cambridge has yielded much about the daily life of both clergy and townspeople there in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The latest study from the project has moved on to worms in the human gut and seeks to explain why this was much more of a problem for the Augustinian friars than for the laity. I am not sure that I am convinced by the proffered explanation, but that may just be me being fastidious.
The BBC News report of the research - which typically manages to describe friars as monks - can be seen at Medieval Cambridge monks were riddled with worms, study finds
Believe it or not, certain species of fleas and lice can carry tapeworms, in a state of arrested growth due to obvious size constraints. If these pests are ingested then any tapeworms they contain can escape from them and further grow inside their new host.
ReplyDeleteSo if the monks wore hair shirts and made a virtue out of being uncomfortably infested with lice, as Thomas a Becket was for example, instead of adhering to William of Wykekam's more sensible dictum that Cleanliness is next to Godliness, then they could easily have accidently ingested an infected louse, by scratching near a plate of food for example.
But the article's explanation sounds the most plausible, because monks probably ate more salad and herb based food, having ample gardens from which to source it and expertise and labour to grow it in a greater variety than townsfolk, whereas the laity probably ate mostly boiled stews and baked pies with less raw "greenery" that could be polluted with untreated sewage.
John Ramsden
https://highranges.com
I think your suggestion about the different types of meal between laity and religious insightful and makes for a clearer understanding of the possibilities than the original report.
DeleteI do however wonder if the Friars might have been a bit more careful about processing their manure. It depends how resilient the gut worms are of course.