KISSING BANNED IN ENGLAND
On the 16th of July 1439, as Plague spread throughout England and Europe, King Henry VI banned kissing.
This ban was seen as one way to curtail the advance of the deadly infection spreading.
During this period of time, it was common for people to greet each other with a kiss.
Church parishioners would often kiss one another upon meeting, or servants would kiss a master’s ring, men would kiss men and women, and vice versa.
For Henry VI, perhaps significantly, his knights and royal court would have kissed him to pay him homage.
The ban would have prevented the chance of Henry falling victim.
Whilst it is now understood that saliva can transmit germs, it was not a common understanding during the medieval period.
It was perhaps seen more as a preventative method, rather than an actual proven one.
However, the kissing ban was not the only ‘cure’ for plague.
For those with a dead snake handy, one preventative method was to rub it’s chopped up carcass on the resulting boils.
Another was to cut up a pigeon, or a chicken, and rub that across the body – in fact even a live chicken would do, if said chicken was willing.
Leeches were an obvious resort, as bloodletting was a common method for curing people of a wide variety of ailments and diseases.
Or you could try drinking the ground up horn of the unicorn….. if you could find one 😉
For those with the means, another concept was to eat a spoonful of crushed emeralds.
If you could not get your hands on any emeralds…
and did not have a chicken going spare…
and your unicorn hunt had proved unsuccessful…
one other cure, readily available and close at hand, was to apply human poop to the lesions under the arms and groin area
If that was not to your fancy, you could hire a plague doctor to beat you with a rod, in order to purify your soul and your body.
If none of those worked, and things were looking pretty desperate, and the boils were appearing – there was always a tall, cool, stiff drink of mercury to try, before you die….
