Odd this day
Today is the 505th anniversary of the death of the Revered Dr John Colet, Renaissance scholar, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, founder of St Paul’s school, and a man whose bodily ooze was tasted 161 years after his death.
Obviously, if you want to learn much about Colet himself, you came to the wrong place. He was mates with Erasmus, and an early Christian humanist — that is, someone who thought dignity, freedom and happiness were important — but that’s all you’re getting unless you google him. I assume it means he was one of the people who started shifting religion away from all the medieval obedience-and-fear stuff, but I’m interested in people drinking his juices.
He was swept off in 1519 by the ‘sweating sickness’ at the age of 53, and interred in St Paul’s Cathedral. Unfortunately for him, or at least for his posthumous dignity, this was, of course, old St Paul’s, which burnt down in 1666, along with a fair bit of the rest of London. The wall he was in, damaged as it was, was left there until about 1680. (Construction of the new St Paul’s started in 1675.)
When the wall was taken down, Colet’s coffin was found. According to John Aubrey, in his Brief Lives:
The coffin was of lead and layd in the wall about 2 foot ½ above the surface of the floore.
But, obviously, that’s not the important bit. That would be:
After the conflagration his monument being broken, his coffin, which was lead, was full of a liquour which conserved the body. Mr. Wyld and Ralph Greatorex tasted it and ’twas of a kind of insipid tast, something of an ironish tast. The body felt, to the probe of a stick which they thrust into a chinke, like brawne.
Antiquarian Anthony Wood, in his 1691 work Athenae Oxonienses, says the stick was what they used for the tasting:
Some of the Royal Society, who out of curiosity went to see it, did thrust a probe or little stick into a chink of the coffin, which bringing out some moisture with it, found it of an ironish taste, and fancied that the body felt soft and pappy like brawn.
…which is also entirely disgusting, not least for the phrase “soft and pappy”.
Edmund Wyld (politician) and Ralph Greatorex (mathematical instrument maker) were men of the Royal Society (the former a fellow, the latter a regular attendee at meetings). Given this, it may be possible — vanishingly unlikely though this seems — to explain what on Earth possessed them to savour the fluids emanating from a decomposed corpse.
Elizabeth Swann, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies at Durham, you see, wrote a book, Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England, in 2020 which recounts this frankly foul tale in its introduction. (Whether the rest of its contents can hope to live up to such a beginning, I’m afraid I cannot tell you. Had I but world enough and time… Anyway.)
Ms Swann, whose constitution is clearly a strong one, writes:
From a twenty-first century perspective, Wyld and Greatorex’s tasting of the ‘moisture’ in Colet’s last resting place is peculiar to say the least. What impulse led these two eminent men to sample the coffin’s revolting contents?
…and goes on to suggest some possible answers. To begin with:
It becomes more explicable if we take into account the importance of the sense of taste to the world of early modern experimental philosophy … flavour was considered an important guide to determining the nature and properties of unfamiliar substances
Well, OK, but it’s still, if we’re using academic terminology, pretty fucked up, isn’t it? Swann, perhaps anticipating my thinking, continues to pick the event apart. There’s a clue in the title of her book: we’re talking about the ‘early moderns’. The Renaissance is behind us, and the Enlightenment is either just about to start (with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687) or has been gathering speed for fifty years (since René Descartes’ Discourse on Method). Or, if you take as its start the Glorious Revolution of 1688, we’re about to leap into the ‘long’ 18th century. Either way, time has moved on, and an early idea of what constitutes scientific enquiry is The Current Thing. So…
Given Colet’s reputation for humanist rigour, and the desire of members of the Royal Society to overturn what they saw as the bookish pedantry of humanist scholarship in favour of a new emphasis on sense experience as a source of knowledge.
In other words, they could be demonstrating that the old order changeth, yielding place to new, and just doing so in a particularly repellent way. She even suggests that, what with
the Catholic practice — deplored by Colet himself — of touching, kissing, and even licking the bodily remains of saints
…this could be
taken as an expression of extreme veneration.
But it could be that they were just deeply weird people. Or shitfaced. I don’t for a moment discount the theories of a proper historian, but I think these could at the very least have been contributory factors. Maybe the booze in particular.
The popular idea of people hurling shit out of their windows in The Olden Days is now considered (at least) debatable, but water quality then was not what it (largely) is now. It may be that Messrs Wyld and Greatorex were setting an example later apparently followed by John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, who — according to legend — avoided the gastroenteric difficulties suffered by the rest of the cast and crew of The African Queen by shunning the local water. Bogart later said:
All I ate was baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whiskey. Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead.
It’s probably more myth than legend, given how severely dehydrated they would have been if it was true, but the point I’m laboriously making is that it seems likely to this rather silly historian that Wyld and Greatorex made their visit to the remains of Old St Paul’s after the pubs had opened.
