Were Medieval Monks ‘Sinful’ Because of Their Filthy Gardening Habits?
A team of Cambridge archaeologists who performed the first analysis of parasitic infections among local medieval townspeople have unearthed some surprising results. The local monks, it turns out, were riddled with worms. Though this might seem like an opportunity to snicker at the irony of hygienically challenged medieval friars, for the friars themselves parasitic infections were more problematic. Though the source of the infections is likely to have been contaminated vegetables, for the monks worms were a shocking sign of their own sinfulness.
The study, published last week by a University of Cambridge-led team in the International Journal of Paleopathology, analyzed the remains of 19 burials of Augustinian Friars and compared them with 25 burials from a local parish cemetery. The scientists took sediment from pelvis area of the remains and used micro-sieving and digital-light microscopy to identify the eggs of intestinal parasites. The results were astonishing. Despite the superior sanitation systems the monks enjoyed, 58 percent of them showed evidence of roundworm and whipworm infection. Only 32 percent of the lay people buried in the parish cemetery of the now demolished All Saints by the Castle, however, were infected with the same parasites. As Dr. Piers Mitchell, archaeologist, infectious disease expert, and the lead author of the study, put it, “The friars of medieval Cambridge appear to have been riddled with parasites.”
Given that parasites are spread by poor sanitation and fecal matter, these results were unexpected. It is likely (though further research is needed to confirm this) that the Augustinian friars had some form of running water that was used for sanitation purposes. Lay people, by contrast, only had access to cesspit style toilets—holes in the ground, basically. Given that parasitic infections are spread hand to mouth by ingesting contaminated fecal matter, it’s surprising that the monks outpaced their lay counterparts in infection rates.
Mitchell suggested one possible explanation to Science Direct, “the friars manured their vegetable gardens with human faeces, [which was] not unusual in the medieval period, and this may have led to repeated infection with the worms.” The study also identifies the pig excrement fertilizer sometimes used in gardens as another potential source of contamination (pigs can also be infected with roundworm). These fertilizing methods, the team suggests in the article, “might have led to higher infection rates” among the friars.
The extent of infection would almost certainly have been apparent to the monks themselves. Study co-author and doctoral student Tianyi Wang noted that “Roundworm was the most common infection” among the monks. Roundworm (ascaris lumbricoides) is often visible in stool and causes symptoms like nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, and abdominal pain. It’s likely that some sufferers were aware of the source of their discomfort.
Moreover, as the authors of the study note, parasites are discussed in contemporary medical literature. John Stockton, a 14th-century Cambridge physician, bequeathed a manuscript to Peterhouse College that includes a chapter entitled “De lumbricis” (“On worms”). This text links different species of intestinal worms to different kinds of phlegm: “Different shapes of worms are generated there according to the varieties of the humour, phlegm. Long round worms form from an excess of salt phlegm, short round worms from sour phlegm, while short and broad worms came from natural or sweet phlegm. Bitter medicinal plants like aloe and wormwood kill these intestinal worms, but they need to be disguised with honey or other sweet things.” The descriptions of the long round and short round worms, the scientists observe, seem to correspond to roundworm and pinworm, respectively. For what it is worth, wormwood has been used as a de-worming agent in livestock for centuries and sweet wormwood tea is still used as an effective anti-parasitic treatment for the tropical parasite schistosomiasis.
Given that we are dealing with people in religious life, the moral and religious significance of parasite infections also seems relevant. Late antique and medieval tours of hell—stories in which a protagonist (usually an Apostle or Mary) travels through the regions of hell and sees the punishments visited on sinners—often describe people being consumed by worms in the afterlife. Dr. Meghan Henning, an associate professor at the University of Dayton and the author of Hell Hath no Fury, told The Daily Beast that in these stories people are punished with worms for a variety of sins: heresy, refusing baptism, adultery, fornication, charging interest on loans, murder, poisoning, strangling their offspring, having sex with both a mother and her daughter, and the catchall crime of “being filled with evil.”
Some of the crimes associated with worm punishment, said Henning, were focused on the abuse of clerical offices. For example, those deacons who ate the offerings set aside for the poor, undeservedly held high ranks, or abused their power would be liable to this kind of judgement in hell. There are even narratives about parasite infections among the powerful that link them to religious crimes. Antiochus IV of Syria, the tormentor of the Maccabees, met an unpleasant end when his body “swarmed with worms… his flesh rotted away” and people refused to carry his litter because of the repulsive stench that emanated from his form (2 Macc. 9:10). Or take, for example, Judas, history’s archetypical betrayer. A second-century tradition about Judas describes him in his final days as completely swollen and emitting a foul stench. When he urinated, “pus and worms” passed out of his body. The same motif pops up in later accounts of unseemly deaths. As Jennifer Barry and Ellen Muehlberger have explored in their work, heretics and persecutors were eaten by worms as they died. The emperor Galerius died of a painful worm-swarming ailment, while the heretic Arius met an undignified end on the commode from a case of explosive parasite-filled diarrhea.
For the literate monks of the Augustinian friary, none of this was good news. While there was more neutral medical literature on the subject, religious literature linked parasites to sinfulness. And it is clear that stories about eternal punishment were popular among members of monastic orders. For monks suffering from parasitic infections the realization that their bodies were like those of the damned must have been terrifying. When I asked Henning about this she responded “I think a person who had a parasitic infection would think that they, or their body were being punished, that they were being eaten alive from the inside out because they were weak, penetrable, and sinful. They would have thought that their bodies were becoming ‘womanly’ and revealing some hidden sin to themselves and others.” Just as some modern conditions are erroneously connected to sexual immorality, monastic literature regularly associated all kinds of illnesses with sin.
All of this suggests that monks not only suffered from parasitic infections, they may also have been consumed by fears about the state of their souls. Monks may have sought out treatment quietly or suffered in silence rather than admit to their predicaments. After all, their bodies contained infestations that were linked, in the religious imagination of their time, with sinfulness. Other than offering a chilling warning about the perils of unsanitary home gardening, perhaps the lesson here is to suspend judgement about the causes of people’s ailments. Or, if that’s impossible, then to remember the crisp leafy truth: God judges those who don’t wash their lettuce.
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