RULES TO BE FOLLOWED IN THE PRACTICE
OF BLEEDING
A detailed account of special rules to be followed in the
practice of bleeding will be found in Ulric's Antiquiores
consuetudines (d. 1093) of the Monastery of Cluny[410]
and the
chapter "Permission for Being Bled" in the Monastic
Constitutions of Lanfranc.[411]
From a review of these, and a
variety of other sources,[412]
the routine of the monk who subjected
himself to bloodletting went as follows:
After having obtained formal permission to be bled
(licentia minuendi) by petition to the chapter, the brother
left the church at the end of the principal mass and went to
the dormitory to exchange his vestments of the day (diurnales)
for his clothing of the night (nocturnales) which he
retained for the three days of rest that followed his operation.
The operation was initiated with a brief prayer which
began with the verse Deus in adjutorium meum intende. (In
the Benedictine monastery this prayer was preceded by an
inclination of the body called ante et retro.) The incision
was made in the morning, save for the time of Lent, when
it was done after vespers. The patients were issued bandages
of linen (fasciae, ligaturae, ligamenta brachiorum, bendae,
arcedo) with which to wrap their arms. Some consuetudinaries
recommend that before being bled a monk should
pass by the kitchen to have his arm warmed.
During recovery the patients were not held to their
regular duties in the choir, but had leave to rise later than
the others and to recite only a part of the divine office.
Moreover, they were at liberty to take walks in the monastery's
vineyards and meadows. Their diet, as already
mentioned, made allowance not only for the ordinarily forbidden
meats, but also for greater abundance. During the
periods when the rest of the community ate only one meal,
the frater minuendus ate two; on all other occasions, three:
the mixtum, the prandium and the coena.
It is obvious that in view of all these special privileges,
bloodletting acquired an attraction that in the minds of
some of the more conservative members of the community
bordered on dissipation; and the monastic consuetudinaries,
indeed, abound with admonitions aimed at curtailing
the spread of merriment, if not of outright breaches of
discipline, with which this activity tended to be associated.
A main concern of those who were in charge of monastic
discipline was to prevent the seynies from coinciding with
important religious festivities; others felt it necessary to
restrict the repetition of the privilege to certain cycles. The
monastery of St. Augustine in Canterbury allowed the
monks to be bled in intervals of seven weeks; at Ely the
interval was six; in other monasteries it was only five or
four times per year that a monk could be bled.
The reconstruction of the House for Bloodletting poses
problems of a special kind. Safety of construction, in the
presence of so many corner fireplaces, requires that its
walls be built in masonry. The house is not inhabited by
any permanent residents and serves one purpose only:
bleeding and recovering from this treatment. There is no
need for the designation of any internal boundaries between
the primary function of the building and such subsidiary
functions as sleeping or stabling animals which in the plans
of other buildings led to the delineation of aisles and leanto's;
and this is the reason, in our opinion, why the drafting
architect showed it as a unitary all-purpose space. Yet the
size of the building argues against the assumption that it
was surmounted by a roof that spanned the entire width of
the house in a single span. For the nave of a church a roof
span of 35 feet would be normal practice in this period, but
in a simple service structure it would be an anomaly. We
have introduced in our reconstruction of the House for
Bloodletting two inner ranges of roof-supporting posts
whose presence cannot be proven from the simple analysis
of the plan of this building.[413]
[ILLUSTRATION]
SITE PLAN
