Mr. Anderson, the biographer of Arderne, remarks that although he called himself 'Chirurgus inter Medicos,' 'there is nothing to show that he possessed a master's degree, or any formal license for the exercise of his calling.' Mr. Anderson adds, however, 'his writings prove that he was a man of clerkly attainments, with a good knowledge of Latin and French, and well read in the available literature of his profession, quoting freely from the works of the mediæval surgeons, the Arabs, and even from the Greeks.' Mr. Anderson notes that there are no less than twenty-two manuscripts of the works of Arderne in the British Museum, both in the original Latin and in early English translations, 'some repeating or overlapping others in matter.' His book _Da curâ Oculi_ is dated from London in 1377. It was not until the next century that a surgeon of equal distinction had arisen in England. There must have been many incompetent practitioners in London in the fourteenth century, an instance of which evil we find in Riley's _Memorials_. John le Spicer of Cornhill in 1354 attended Thomas de Shene, who suffered from a serious wound in the jaw. Certain surgeons sworn before the Mayor found that the 'enormous and horrible hurt on the right side of the jaw of Thomas de Shene' was incurable, but they held that if John le Spicer had been expert in his craft, or had called in counsel and assistance to his aid, the injury might have been cured.[140] When the charter was granted to the Barbers' Company in the next century it is expressly stated in the preamble (1462) that through 'the ignorance, negligence and stupidity' of various barbers and other practitioners in surgery many of the King's lieges had 'gone the way of all flesh.' Mr. D'Arcy Power states that 'a Guild of Surgeons, distinct from the Guild of Barbers, existed in London from time immemorial. The guild was always a small body, probably never more than twenty in number, and sometimes dwindling to less than a dozen. It existed and remained unincorporated at a time when many of the other guilds either vanished or were converted into companies. The earliest notice of the Surgeons' Guild occurs in 1369.'[141] This information is obtained from Letter Book G, translated from the Latin by Riley.