Month: January 2016

Yesterday I attended the first of the 2016 Sandars Lectures delivered by Professor Anthony Grafton at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which this year (in honour of the 600th anniversary of Cambridge University Library) focus on early modern Cambridge historians. The first lecture, appropriately enough, concentrated on John Caius (1510-1573), who in addition to being the re-founder of my old college (in 1557) was one of the most important East Anglian Catholics of his generation.

Grafton’s lecture tackled a central problem in the biography of John Caius: namely, why his Historia Cantabrigiensis Academiae (1574) has become a notorious example of extravagant historical fantasy (‘a farrago of invention and credulity’ according to Christopher Brooke) while many of his other works displayed an advanced level of understanding of the latest Renaissance Humanist methods of history and research. Grafton drew attention to Caius’ abiding interest in philology; he was one of the few philologists working in England in the 1560s, when he was building up the newly re-founded Gonville and Caius College as ‘a Humanist machine for character formation’. The College’s celebrated three gates served as an architectural representation of the undergraduate’s progress from Humility to Virtue and finally to Honour, as he passed out of the Gate of Honour to receive his degree in the Senate House (something I have been privileged to do three times, although a porter once surreptitiously let me out of the Gate of Honour when I was still an undergraduate). In other ways, however, Caius did not fit the image of the enlightened Renaissance scholar, and he dealt with disobedient students by beating them and putting them in the stocks.

John Kays (for whom multiple surname variations can be found in the sources) graduated at the head of the list of BAs in 1532-3 from Gonville Hall, ‘a small, clerical establishment’ with a longstanding association with the county of Norfolk (Kays was from Norwich). It may have been in Italy, whilst studying at Padua, that Kays came up with the idea of adopting (like many scholars of the era) a convenient latinisation of his surname. At Padua Caius distinguished himself by editing the works of Galen. Later, at Basel, he formed a lasting friendship with another Humanist scholar, Konrad Gessner, who apparently inspired him to write his work on English dogs. Returning to England, Caius not only re-founded Gonville Hall as Gonville and Caius College in the reign of Queen Mary, but also served as President of the Royal College of Physicians and introduced Vesalian anatomical demonstrations to England. However, Grafton argued that Caius was a devotee of the medical tradition of Thomas Linacre rather than an innovator like Vesalius. For Caius, ‘What was needed was not so much better anatomy as better philology’, and in 1555 he lampooned a physician who was unable to decline corpus correctly as unfit to practice. In other words, Caius believed that it was by producing better editions of Galen rather than by any new investigation that medicine would be restored to its pristine purity. Caius took his devotion to the ancient medical writers to such an extreme that according to Thomas Muffett, on his deathbed in 1573 Caius brought in two wetnurses and sucked on their breasts in an effort to keep himself alive – following an ancient prescription.

Caius led a dual life as a scholar and university administrator, but it was this latter role which led Caius to write his Historia Cantabrigiensis Academiae. In the sixteenth century, ‘Cambridge was sorely in need of a past’, largely because most of the University’s older documents had been burnt in front of Great St Mary’s Church during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. However, ‘strange and wonderful documents’ were created in the late fourteenth century with the purpose of establishing the University’s independence from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Ely, in whose diocese the University lies. These documents were ‘serious fakes’ that served a very real and important purpose for the University. In the 1560s an argument concerning the antiquity of the University erupted between Cambridge and Oxford, when in 1564 a Cambridge orator informed Queen Elizabeth that Cambridge was older than Oxford. The Oxford orator Thomas Caius responded in 1566 with a Historiola of the University of Oxford, in which he claimed Oxford was the older institution. Archbishop Matthew Parker encouraged John Caius to vindicate Cambridge, which led to Caius’ Historia, published anonymously in London in 1574 ‘by a Londoner’. However, everyone seems to have known that John Caius was the author, and the book was not warmly received by the antiquary William Lambarde, even though he was a friend of Parker – Lambarde left it to ‘indifferent readers’ to judge the worth of the book themselves. John Leland’s verdict was more damning: ‘Truly I have never read anything more empty, more foolish or more stupid’.

Grafton established that one of the main sources used by John Caius was a Historiola of the University of Cambridge written in the late fourteenth century by the Carmelite friar Thomas Cantilupe, which resembled the sort of fabulous narratives that might be told before a jousting tournament, along with charters forged in the thirteenth century from King Arthur and the seventh-century Popes Honorius I and Sergius I. Caius consulted copies of these documents contained in the so-called Black Book of the University. Caius knew that the Black Book itself was not particularly old, and that William Buckenham, Master of Gonville Hall 1508-10 and Vice-Chancellor of the University (who may well have talent-spotted the young Caius in Norwich) had added material to it. However, Caius defended his work, and Cantilupe’s Historiola, against the criticisms of Leland and others by claiming that he could bring forward the same evidence in any form his opponents demanded – even illuminated in gold. Grafton argued, intriguingly, that this statement of Caius was a reference to the richly decorated Liber privilegiorum et libertatum universitatis Cantebrigiensis presented to the University in 1590 by a fellow alumnus of Gonville Hall, the recusant antiquary Robert Hare of Bruisyard, Suffolk (c. 1530-1611). Grafton suggested that Caius may have seen and had access to Hare’s ‘new register’ (which contained copies of the documents cited in Caius’ Historia) long before its presentation to the University; Hare was ‘a friend and affiliate’ of Caius.

One innovative feature of Caius’ Historia was his inclusion of a dense bibliography, although most of the books he cited existed only as manuscripts at the time. M. R. James traced Caius’ bibliography back to the massive collection of manuscripts collected by Parker at Lambeth Palace in the 1560s, which included not only the core of present Lambeth Palace Library but also the contents of the present Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the Cottonian Library that is now part of the British Library and manuscripts in Cambridge University Library. John Strype tells us that it was Parker who arranged the printing of Caius’ Historia and that the Archbishop sent out presentation copies of Caius’ work, yet oddly Caius never mentioned Parker in the book. Caius’ preoccupation with philology as a foundation of history (as well as medicine) was shown by his appeal to the use of the word constat (‘it stands as established fact’) in a manuscript owned by Hare (Gonville and Caius MS 717) by ‘an author of uncertain name, but great authority’ in recording that King Arthur issued a charter to the University. It was the fact that the author of the manuscript used the word constat (showing the author’s own certainty) rather than any other considerations of plausibility that demonstrated the authority of the source. Likewise, Caius accepted as authentic and incontestable the claim found in another manuscript that nine doctors of Cambridge were baptised in the year 141 – even though this information was scrawled into the manuscript in a later hand.

The credulity with which Caius composed his Historia contrasts strongly with the care he took in editing Galen, where he adopted the latest in Humanist editorial techniques – citing pages by their signa and even noting the exact date on which he consulted particular manuscripts. Caius may have learnt techniques like these from Angelo Poliziano in Italy, along with learning the latest in bibliographical scholarship from Gessner. He was one of the first Humanists to express the idea that a collection of data could be a thing valuable in itself, and a manuscript given by Caius to Gonville and Caius College library in which he commented on the order of the books of the Hebrew Bible shows that Caius was at the forefront of Hebrew scholarship in England at the time. Caius knew that the location and provenance of manuscripts mattered – he was a ‘library rat’ who enjoyed recounting his experiences of working in different libraries around Europe, and he advocated the establishment of better research libraries in England. To him we owe the earliest printed catalogue of books in Cambridge University Library (in the Historia), and he was an ‘antiquary in a serious way’ with a developed awareness that institutions change over time. He mourned for the austere Cambridge of his youth, and yet in the Historia Caius seemed to lack completely any sense of anachronism.

Caius was an incisive historical critic, but he had a blindspot when it came to the sources most important to him – those that could establish the antiquity of the University of Cambridge. Grafton argued that Caius was not ‘silly or crazy’; rather, he was following established practice in his own time. Notaries had procedures to ensure that copies of documents were accepted as being as authoritative as the original, and such a process had taken place at Great St Mary’s Church in 1419 when the Papal Notary Thomas de Ryhale verified the charters of the University – including those by King Arthur and seventh-century Popes. For Caius, the veracity of documents was ‘less about content than process’. Caius, as an institutional historian and annalist, saw every event in the University’s history without historical breaks, ‘flattened out and continuous’. He believed in reproducing what was in the archive, even if it was wrong, because he was a believer in documents and a believer in institutional continuity. Caius loved tradition, advocating the minute observance of all college and university customs, but his love of tradition also extended into the religious sphere and would get him into trouble, such as when it was reported to the Bishop of London that Caius retained ‘massinge abominations’ in his college under the cover of ‘college treasure’. On 13 December 1572 the vestments and ornaments were burnt in the college court over the course of three hours, and what the University authorities could not burn they smashed with hammers.

Grafton has difficulties accepting the idea that Caius was a crypto-Catholic, on the grounds that he was so friendly with Parker, and his guess concerning Caius’ religious convictions was that Caius was ‘a strange sort of mixture of Erasmian Christian and Protestant antiquary’. This was the one part of Grafton’s analysis with which I cannot agree – after all, one could argue equally that because Caius was close to the recusant antiquary Robert Hare he must have been a Catholic. The evidence of the vestments found in the college in 1572 speaks for itself; Caius founded his college in the heady Catholic Humanist days of Marian Cambridge in 1557, and in my view he was essentially a trans-European Catholic Humanist in the mould of Reginald Pole. Overall, Grafton made a convincing case for Caius the historian as a coherent figure, who showed that ‘institutional annals could turn in Caius’ hands into the strangest and most extravagant of polemics’.

For an historian of the English Reformation interested in Catholicism, survivals of Catholic imagery and practice into the post-Reformation period are always especially fascinating. One such survival, which was given the highest royal and official approval, was the image of St Michael the Archangel on gold coins and the beliefs that continued to accompany this legendary coin, known simply as the Angel. The popularity of this coin as a cultural artefact is evidenced by the survival, in many towns and villages throughout England, of inns, pubs and hotels named ‘The Angel’. In most cases, the current owners and patrons of these establishments have forgotten that it was originally named not after the celestial being but after the coin (apart from the Angel Inn, Reigate which has an image of the coin on its pub sign). No other coin attained the popularity of the Angel, which has a strong claim to be the most enduring coin in English history. First struck under Edward IV in 1465, the Angel remained in circulation until 1642 but continued to be minted from 1660 onwards as a ‘touchpiece’ – an amulet to cure the ‘King’s Evil’ – until the early nineteenth century, although by the end Angels were no longer being struck in gold. Other gold coins, such as the Sovereign, had similarly long lives – the Sovereign, first struck in 1489, is still being struck today but went out of circulation between 1604 and 1816. However, the Angel’s existence (apart from the interruption of the Commonwealth) was continuous. What is unusual about the Angel is its transformation from a mere coin to a semi-magical amulet.

The Angel

The Angel first appeared in the reign of Edward IV because a previous gold coin, the Noble (first minted in 1344) had risen in value owing to rising gold prices. The so-called ‘Angel Noble’ was a smaller coin introduced to have the same value as the old Noble (6s 8d, a third of a pound) and was inspired by a French coin, the Ange d’Or or Angelot, which featured an image of an angel holding a sceptre in one hand and the royal arms of France in the other on its obverse. An Ange d’Or had already been issued in France under the authority of the English King Henry VI, who claimed the French throne, and on this issue the angel was holding the arms of England and France together. However, this issue never circulated in England, and the design that appeared on the new English Angel was altogether more dramatic and less stiff than its French counterpart. On the obverse it featured the Archangel Michael, standing, plunging a spear topped with a cross into a dragon representing the devil. The reverse bore a ship superimposed with the royal arms and surmounted by the cross and a letter and emblem representing the monarch.

The imagery of the Angel was potent, drawing on a long tradition of St Michael the Archangel’s spiritual protection of the royal person – hence the inscription of the king’s titles accompanied the image of St Michael rather than an image of the king. The ship on the reverse, by contrast, was the ship of state sustained by the holy cross, as the inscription made clear: Per Crucem Tuam Salva Nos Christe Rede[mptor] (‘By thy cross save us, Christ the Redeemer’). Oddly, the Angel escaped any kind of re-design at the time of the Edwardian Reformation (1547-1553) when other emblems of royalty were thrown into question, such as the collar of the Order of the Garter featuring St George. Neither the imagery nor the inscription changed under Edward, when the cult of saints was under sustained attack, perhaps because the Angel was so popular and perhaps because angels were considered less theologically objectionable than other saints – St Michael was, after all, mentioned in the Bible.

One feature of the Angel that made it an especially popular coin was the fact that it was quite small in size and low in value compared with other gold coins. In 1500, the average labourer earnt around 4d a day, so that an Angel (at 6s 8d) represented less than a month’s wages. It is not inconceivable, therefore, that an ordinary English person might have seen an Angel in circulation from time to time. By the reign of Edward VI, however, the rising price of gold led to the Angel’s re-valuation at 10s (half pound), marked by a small Roman numeral X that appears on later Angels.

The Angel as a touchpiece

The Angel’s popularity as a gold coin small enough to circulate (higher value coins functioned as government bullion) has been effaced historically by its use for another purpose entirely: as a touchpiece. Touching for the King’s Evil was an ancient practice of the French kings, and according to legend it was a gift given to the Frankish King Clovis and his descendants. It is likely that the practice was taken over by English monarchs as a consequence of their claim to the throne of France during the course of the Hundred Years War. However, according to one legend the practice arose after Edward I invited the alchemist Ramon Llull to make gold for him in the Tower, and finding the gold to be the purest ever made it was named ‘angel gold’. When the gold was coined it bore the image of an angel, and the alchemical gold was found to have healing powers.

The King’s Evil is usually identified as scrofula, but it was essentially any unpleasant skin disease. Originally, kings physically touched sufferers in the belief that the royal touch had the power to heal the illness, but this was soon replaced by the practice of the monarch handing a gold coin, pierced through to allow it to be worn as an amulet, to the sufferer. As a result of the piercing the coin was void as legal tender because it was ‘cracked beyond the ring’ (i.e. the ring enclosing the inscription). Historians have generally treated the touchpiece as a mere extension of the royal touch, but there are interesting questions that arise from the fact that one coin in particular (the Angel) was chosen as a suitable touchpiece. Why was it thought necessary that the touchpiece should be a gold coin? And why was the Angel chosen rather than some other coin? There is no evidence that any other coin was ever used – not even the ‘ten shilling piece’, which was exactly equivalent in value. The touchpiece was far more than a token of royal favour, still less a souvenir of a personal encounter with the monarch, and contemporary accounts make clear that the virtus of the royal touch was thought to remain in the coin throughout the sufferer’s lifetime. The coin could even be given to another person who had never met the monarch and was considered equally effective, and the coin was applied in a quasi-medical fashion to parts of the body as a cure for skin disease rather than simply being worn as an apotropaic amulet to ward off the recurrence of scrofula.

M. R. Toynbee, in an article on Charles I and the King’s Evil that appeared in Folklore in 1950, showed that coins touched by Charles I were treated with particular reverence after the King’s execution, because he was considered a martyr by Royalists. In 1697, Sir Edmund Warcup described how a gold Angel touched by Charles I had preserved his health as a child and a young man, not just because a king had touched it but because the king who touched it was the martyred Charles:

From my birth to the age of 13 years, I was afflicted with the King’s Evil . . . and so notorious a diseased person I was, that a learned physician of that age requested my father to leave me at his house, to the intent that himself, with other famous physicians might daily consult on my case, there I continued a sad object for years, and so macerated that my life was often despaired of. At length my father got me touched by that holy martyr who put an Angel of gold (coined for that purpose) about my neck, and within six months after from being carried in arms tho’ about 12 years old I got strength, and afterwards by degrees the sores healed, the swellings abated, and a perfect health succeeded: then my father and friends sent me to travel, and my parents either through the pretended sanctity of those times or the fear of losing that piece of gold, sent me into France without it, when I came to Orleans my sores and swellings renewed, upon which I applied to one Dr. Winstone then resident there to avoid the storms in England, who administered proper remedies, but they not answering his expectation, he asked me if I had ben healed by the King, I told him yes; where then is the gold he gave you said the Doctor, I replied in England. He in a fury answered my friends were puritanical, and rebels, and would have no more to do with me, but bid me send for the gold. I did so, and when I had it rubbed the sores and swellings therewith, which perfectly cured me, and the same gold does at times upon several occasions afford me much comfort.

An English Royalist exile in Russia after the Civil War, Mrs Hebden, took with her an Angel touched by King Charles and lent it to an English merchant she met there, who was cured of scrofula, showing that the royal touch worked at second hand and that its virtus was thought to be within the coin itself. According to another story, a father and son who both suffered from scrofula used to pass a gold Angel between them that had been touched by Charles I.

The legend concerning the Angel’s alchemical origin and the way in which Angel touchpieces were used in practice both suggest that it was some quality in the gold itself – or perhaps inherent in the image of St Michael – that mattered to the effectiveness of a touchpiece, as well as the fact that the coin had been touched by the monarch. The idea that gold was a sovereign remedy was a familiar one in iatrochemistry and Paracelsan/astrological medicine, and it is possible that one reason for belief in the effectiveness of touchpieces was the correspondence between gold as the metal of the Sun and royalty, which corresponded astrologically with the Sun. Coins touched by Charles I were doubly effective because they simultaneously served as touchpieces for the King’s Evil and holy relics of the martyred king.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that on his Restoration in 1660 Charles II renewed the practice of touching for the King’s Evil and minted new touchpieces, this time with the ship on the obverse (with the royal titles as an inscription) and the image of the Archangel on the reverse, with the inscription Soli Deo Gloria (‘To God alone the glory’). This remained the standard design for Angel touchpieces thereafter.

Charles II may well have considered the inscription on Charles I’s touchpieces, Amor Populi Praesidium Regis (‘the love of the people is the protection of the king’) to be bitterly ironic, given the fate of his father, and opted instead for the Protestant-sounding Soli Deo Gloria, which harked back to the inscription on James I’s Angels – A Domino Factum Est Istud (‘this was done by the Lord’). James I’s inscription was a truncation of the inscription on Angels of Mary I and Elizabeth I, A Domino Factum Est Istud Et Est Mirab[ilis]. Even the Catholic James II, although he reintroduced the full Latin liturgy of touching for the King’s Evil from the reign of Henry VII, did not reintroduce the original medieval inscription. There was no royal touching in the reign of William and Mary, but when she came to the throne in 1702, Queen Anne revived the practice as a way of demonstrating her legitimacy as the daughter of James II, at a time when James’s son, James Edward Stuart, was regularly practising the royal touch in exile at St Germain and Rome. The infant Dr Samuel Johnson was famously touched by Queen Anne and wore the touchpiece he received on that occasion for the rest of his life.

Jacobite touchpieces

Although the minting of gold Angels in England ceased on the death of Queen Anne in 1714, and the Hanoverian monarchs discontinued the practice, the Jacobite pretenders in exile carried on commissioning touchpieces modelled after the originals (although now, reflecting the poverty of the Jacobite court, struck in silver). For Jacobites, the ability of the pretenders to cure the King’s Evil by touching was one of the proofs that they were the true kings of England, and ‘James III’ and ‘Charles III’ continued to mint touchpieces and give them to sufferers. Even the second son of James Edward Stuart, Henry Benedict Stuart, who succeeded as Jacobite pretender in 1788, had the pieces made.

On the last touchpiece minted for an English king, the abbreviated Latin inscription reads ‘Henry IX by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum [i.e. Frascati’. This indicates that the touchpiece was minted before 1803, when Henry became Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals and therefore Cardinal Bishop of Ostia and Velletri. The existence of touchpieces right down to the early years of the nineteenth century demonstrates that they remained in demand amongst Jacobites, although the Cardinal’s death in 1807 meant that the direct line of the Stuarts died out. This finally brought an end to the legend of the royal touch, although just as Dr Johnson treasured the touchpiece he had received from Queen Anne until his death, it is conceivable that infant recipients of touchpieces from ‘Henry IX’ treasured them into the late nineteenth century. The enduring cultural impact of the Angel has been even more long-lasting – consider the fact that in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, gold coins used by wizards are called ‘galleons’.

The use of the gold Angel as a touchpiece elided natural magic, Christian sanctity and political propaganda in a way that was very probably unique, in a state-sanctioned ceremony and using official currency. The religio-political significance of the royal touch is well known, but by focusing on the rite and practice of touching rather than the touchpieces themselves and the folklore associated with them, it is possible that the strong connotations of natural magic in the tradition of touchpieces has been allowed to fade into the background.