Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines

Through metaphor, symbolism and allegory Grosmont describes how his body has been attacked by the seven deadly sins which now permeate him and talks his reader through the necessity for confession and penance to allow Christ to perform his work.

Le Livre was probably written at the urging of his friends and relatives, for a literary audience which would have primarily comprised his fellow nobility, but would also have included senior ecclesiastics, lawyers and the educated mercantile class.

Henry of Grosmont's devotional-medical treatise[4][5] is notable for being one of only a few written by individuals of such rank and power in the Middle Ages,[6][note 1] and, to the historian K. B. McFarlane it is "the most remarkable literary achievement of them all" for the period.

[11] Antonia Gransden has described the piece as "an allegory on the wounds in Henry's soul, discussing the remedies to be supplied by the Divine Physician and his assistant, the Douce Dame", all the while interspersed with personal reminiscences of how he sinned in the first place.

[31] Although possibly written by a scribe, Grosmont provides a postscript, including his name written—comments Arnould, "in a naive device prompted by his humbleness"—backwards anagramatically:[21][note 3] Cest livre estoit comencee et parfaite en l'an de grace Nostre Seignur Jesu Crist MCCCLIIII.

Et le fist un fole cheitif peccheour qe l'en appelle ERTSACNAL ED CUD IRNEH, a qi Dieux ses malfaitz pardoynt.

[37] It is also unlikely that he was in a position to devote any length of time solely to the book's composition; although during this period war with France and Scotland was at a lull, a parliament took place at Westminster between April and May 1354 which he attended.

[46] He also confesses to the sin of sloth, which beset him to such an extent that he regularly failed to rise in time for morning mass, and gluttony, with overindulgence in the best food and drink,[47] with its rich sauces and strong wine.

[64][note 8] In part, this loose structure was probably a direct result of the nature of its composition if, as has been surmised, that Grosmont wrote portions of it each day, dipping in and out of writing in between a myriad of other duties and responsibilities.

[18] The son and heir of Henry, 3rd Earl of Lancaster, and Maud Chaworth, Grosmont became one of King Edward III's most trusted captains in the early phases of the Hundred Years' War and distinguished himself with victory in the Battle of Auberoche.

[55] Thomas Grey, writing a few years after Grosmont, called the duke "wise, full of glory, and valiant, and in his youth eager for honour and feats of arms, and before his death, a fiercely devout Christian".

[74][note 10] He was the wealthiest and most powerful peer of the realm,[66] but, comments Janet Coleman, he was no scholar,[75] something Grosmont readily admits; while his discussion of things religious is broad, imaginative and wide-ranging, he himself points out that he deliberately avoids "profound matters".

[82] Conversely, argues Richard Kaeuper, there are "perhaps contradictions in Lancaster's piety", as his 1346 raid into Poitou was particularly bloody, and involved the burning of many churches,[83] demonstrating what Batt calls both "generous and unsparing... pitilessness as well as courtliness".

[84] This was to the extent that when Pope Clement heard of Grosmont's sacking of Saint-Jean-d'Angély abbey—in which, as well as emptying the house of its valuables the monks were taken captive and held to ransom—Clement wrote to the earl asking him to restrain his men from attacking religious buildings or ecclesistics.

He describes his confessor as a forester whose job is, metaphorically, to maintain a balance in the chase between the animals and predators, in which the body is the park, a man's virtues are the game, under constant threat of attack from vice.

[26] Surgeons at the University of Montpellier were donated the bodies of executed criminals for dissection and research purposes; Grosmont uses this as a means of expressing his wish that his soul could be so opened up to expose its sin.

[14] Labarge describes how Grosmont Makes us see the cooks and innkeepers incessantly crying their wares, the women better dressed than on Easter, the men drinking in the taverns and going to brothels while citizens and merchants brawled loudly.

[93]One of the few occasions where Grosmont veers from real-life experience into medieval myth is in his description of curing frenzy[94] (probably delirium)[95] for which he prescribes the evisceration of a live cockerel which is then placed on the head of the patient; this is his metaphor for receiving the ointment of Christ's blood.

[96] During his 1356 Siege of Rennes, for example, the French captain Olivier de Mauny entered the English camp, badly wounded; Grosmont saw to it that his surgeons gave him the best treatment and "healing herbs" they could.

[95] It is curious, suggests Batt, that with all Grosmont's life experience, his piety and all the religious foundations he has by now accomplished, that at no point does he refer directly to his personal, real-life religion, never mentioning, for example, his holy thorn or St Mary's Newarke,[97] or even his family or friends.

[4] Although Fowler comments that "on the latter point he was modest about his own accomplishment",[4] Tavormina argues that this was not necessarily to be taken literally, as a number of similar expressions of self-apology are found in other contemporaneous texts and should be seen as intentional humility.

[81] Although Le Livre rarely touches on chivalry,[104] Arnould has noted a stark difference in the Grosmont known to contemporaries and thence to historians—the great general, diligent royal servant and epitome of chivalry—and the one he presents himself, "so ingenuously humble and sometimes crudely frank".

The chronicler Thomas Walsingham, for example, describes Grosmont as symbolically supporting his grandson's accession to the throne in 1399 by supposedly writing him a letter recounting the benefits of a chrism—which the author claimed to have brought back from the Holy Land—to new kings.

Thomas Otterbourne, writing around 1420, uses Grosmont as a trope for opening his own treatise, by explaining how the duke begs for mercy for his sins while simultaneously giving thanks for the good things he has enjoyed along the way.

[115] Grosmont's Livre was originally produced in 26 folios, at least one of which was a family copy as denoted by his armorial decorating page borders; this version ended up—Maya, Mexica—in the extensive library of his great-grandson Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.

[Grosmont] suffers from seven perilous wounds in his ears, eyes, nose, mouth, hands, feet, and heart through which the seven deadly sins, like enemies breaching a castle, have entered his body (soul).

[120][note 17] Rothwell argues that medievalists will not find Arnould's description of Grosmont's life providing anything new to the field, or "have scant concern with the following hundred pages dealing in minute detail with the phonology, morphology, and a few syntactical points relating to the language".

[124] He compares its "picturesque style" with that of St Francis de Sales,[125] while Ackerman has suggested that, with its "engaging, anecdotal charm" it is close to the spirit of the Ancrene Riwle,[15] which Grosmont probably knew of, either in English or French.

[23] Batt also argues, however, that there are elements of what to modern perception are found in a situation comedy, particularly in the character sloth, which she calls "arguably the most engaging of Henry's projections of his own sinful self".

"[136] A further 26 fragmentary folios of Grosmont's work were identified as belonging to Le Livre in the early 1970s, in a National Library of Wales manuscript[22] previously thought—thanks to being "carelessly and systematically misbound"[137] around the end of the 17th century[115]—to be a 15th-century medical treatise.