equally trying to the old surgeon's feelings. With such slender and precarious remuneration it was excusable that the royal doctors should sometimes have an eye to the main chance, and Fabyan tells a story against one Master Dominic, physician (very much) in waiting to Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV. Before the birth of her first child (the Princess Elizabeth) Master Dominic had been very positive that it would be a boy, and so, when the time came, he stood outside the queen's room 'that he myght be the firste that shulde brynge tydynges to the kynge of the byrth of the prynce to the entent to have greate thanke and rewarde of the kynge; and lastly when he harde the childe crye, he knockyd or called secretly at the chamber dore, and frayned what the quene had. To whom it was answeryd by one of the ladyes, "what so ever the quenes grace hath here wythin, suer it is that a fole standithe there withoute." And so confused with thys answere, he deperted wythoute seynge of the kynge for that tyme.' [Illustration: '_... called secretly at the chamber dore._'] The position of the medical man who was not attached to the court or to some nobleman's suite is rather obscure. In London during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the surgeons of the city were under the control of two or more master surgeons who acted as universal consultants; any surgeon undertaking a case involving risk to life or limb being obliged to call in one of the masters to see that his treatment was correct. In the same way the veterinary surgeons were at liberty to call in the advice of a master farrier, and if through conceit or negligence they did not do so and the horse they were treating died, then they would be responsible to the owner for its value. As to the country practitioner, it is not quite clear who licensed him to take the title of 'leech' or whether he merely assumed it. There were, no doubt, a certain number of men of learning in the provinces, and in 1478 Sir John Savage was able to find a 'connyng fisission' for Robert Pilkington in Macclesfield. He certainly required such a one, for, as a result of eating a mess of 'grene potage' containing poison he was 'swolne so grete that he was gyrd abowte his bodye in iij places with towells and gyrdylls' to prevent him bursting. When a man is in such a state it is 'a thousand to one if he lives the age of a little fish,' as Nicholas Culpeper would say, but the physician 'dyd grete cures to hym' and he recovered. As a rule, however, it is probable that the country leech had little more knowledge of the healing art than many of his patients. It must be remembered that a knowledge of simple herbal remedies was pretty widely diffused, and an acquaintance with more elaborate preparations formed part of the education of the upper classes. Did not the lady of the manor almost to our own days dispense home-made medicines with moral stimulants to her tenants, whose simple minds and