To have an idea of what their recipes might be, one must recall what the medicine was that the statutes of the kingdom protected. John of Gaddesden, court doctor under Edward II, got rid of the marks of the small-pox by wrapping the sick man in red cloths, and he thus cured the heir to the throne himself.[234] He had for a long time been troubled how to cure stone: “At last,” says he, in his “Rosa Anglica,” “I bethought myself of collecting {187} a good number of those beetles which in summer are found in the dung of oxen, also of the crickets which sing in the fields. I cut off the heads and the wings of the crickets and put them with the beetles and common oil into a pot; I covered it and left it afterwards for a day and night in a bread oven. I drew out the pot and heated it at a moderate fire, I pounded the whole and rubbed the sick parts; in three days the pain had disappeared”; under the influence of the beetles and the crickets the stone had broken into bits.[235] It was almost always thus, by a sudden illumination, bethinking himself of beetles or of something else, that the learned man discovered his most efficacious remedies: Madame Trote de Salerno never confided to her agents in the various parts of the world the secret of more marvellous and unexpected recipes. The law, however, made a clear distinction between a court physician and a quack of the cross-ways. Kings and princes had their own healers, attached to their persons, whom they trusted more than they did their ministers. Securing by indentures of 1372 and 1373 the services of “frere William de Appleton, phisicien et surgien,” and of “Maistre Johan Bray,” granting them forty marks yearly pension with the “bouche en court,” or right to be fed at his tables, and other advantages, John of Gaunt, “roy de Castille,” was careful to bind those men of learning to attend on him “in peace and in war, _so long as they lived_,” a pledge which his brother, King Edward, never exacted from his chancellors. A Gaddesden had the support of an established reputation to apply any medicament to his patients, and he offered the warranty of his high position. He had studied at Oxford, and he was an authority; a grave physician like Chaucer’s “doctour,” who had grown rich during the plague, his wealth increasing his repute— {188} “For gold in physik is a cordial,” had not neglected to pore over the works of “Gatesden.”