“. . . Take off your caps, give ear, look at my herbs which my lady sends into this land and country; and because she wishes the poor as well as the rich to have access thereto, she told me that I should make pennyworths of them, for a man may have a penny in his purse who has not five pounds; and she told and commanded that I might take pence of the current coin in the land and country wherever I should come. . . . “These herbs, you will not eat them; for there is no ox in this country, no charger, be he never so strong, who if he had a bit the size of a pea upon his tongue would not die a hard death, they are so strong and bitter. . . . You will put them three days to sleep in good white wine; if you have no white take red, if you have no red take fine clear water, for one may have a well before his door who has not a cask of wine in his cellar. If you breakfast from it for thirteen mornings you will be cured of your various maladies. For if my father and mother were in danger of death and they were to ask of me the best herb I could give them, I should give them this. This is how I sell my herbs and my ointments; if you want any, come and take them; if you don’t, let them alone.”[231] This herbalist was of those early maligned in France and England by royal ordinances for the illegal practice of medicine. Philip the Fair in 1311, John the Good in 1352, had issued severe decrees against them. They were berated with being “ignorant of men’s temperament, of the time and mode of administering, of the virtues of medicines, above all, of laxative ones in which lies danger of death.” These people “often come from abroad,” go through town and suburbs, and venture to administer to the confiding sick, “clisteria multum laxativa et alia {186} eis illicita,”[232] at which the royal authority was justly indignant. In England the itinerant drug-sellers had no better reputation; the popular songs, satires and farces always show them associating in taverns with the meanest rabble, and using—true to nature—the most ridiculous rant. Master Brundyche’s man, in a play of the fifteenth century, thus prepares the minds of the hearers for the advent of the “leech,” his master, deriding both: What dysease or syknesse y^t ever ye have, He wyl never leve yow tylle ye be in your grave.[233]