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596
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
quiries just considered, but some mention of them must be
made to give a true picture ofthe scope ofthe medieval English
interest in the problems ofnature. Many ofthese problems were
practical.
and animals is
Thelong'characteristic English love ofplants seen in the illustrations from nature in a bestiary and a herbal
dating from the twelfth century, those in the latter, executed at
Bury St. Edmunds, being especially good (Pis. 127 and 128 a).
A number of thirteentlvcentury English manuscripts contain
excellent illustrations ofanimals ofvarious kinds, especially of
birds; Matthew Paris about 1250 described an immigration of
crossbills, and illustrated the bird. Keen observation ofnature
by sculptors and carvers is shown in the capitals, bosses, and
misericords of churches such as York, Ely, and Southwell.
Books on falconry and fishing, especially the
fifteentlvcentury
Tnatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle and Boke of St. Albans,
and Walter of Henley's Hoselondrie, a standard treatise on agri'
culture from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, are also the
work of naturalists. Bartholomew the Englishman's popular
work, On the Properties of Things, said to have been a source of
Shakespeare's natural history, contains some good observation,
for example his famous description of the domestic cat. The
descriptions of plants in herbals improved generally in the
fourteenth
century, an English example being the herbal ofthe
surgeon, John Arderne. At the same time commentaries on
Aristotle's zoology, for instance those of Walter Burley and
John Dymsdale, show an interest in theoretical biology.
The field of biology in which it was possible most easily
to obtain some both practical and theoretical training was
medicine. The Anatomia PJcardi probably the work of an
Englishman written in the late twelfth century, asserts that
*a knowledge of is anatomy necessary to physicians in order
that they may understand how the human body is constructed
to perform different movements and operations'. Some pracx
tical instruction in anatomy was probably required of the
medical student at Oxford, as in continental medical schools,
by the end ofthe thirteenth century; a manuscript ofabout that