September 18, 1946

Carole Rawcliffe (September 18, 1946) is a Professor of Medieval History, at the University of East Anglia. Her book Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities (2013) provides a corrective to common cliches about the medieval era:

Far from demonstrating indifference, ignorance or mute acceptance in the face of repeated onslaughts of epidemic disease, the rulers and residents of English towns devised sophisticated and coherent strategies for the creation of a more salubrious environment; among the plethora of initiatives whose origins often predated the Black Death can also be found measures for the improvement of the water supply, for better food standards and for the care of the sick, both rich and poor....

Our interest now is the remains left by tanners, furriers and skinners. The latter, Rawcliffe reports:

.....could be remarkably casual when disposing of the remains of slaughtered animals, as we can see from the case of William le Skinnere of Norwich, who in 1288 incurred public opprobrium for throwing dead cats into the pool which fed one of the city's major watercourses...About a third of the seventy-nine feline skeletons discovered in one of Cambridge's medieval wells show signs of skinning...

The point above is the outcry against the practice.

Other books Rawcliffe wrote include:

The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, 1978; 

Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England, 1995; 

The Hospitals of Medieval Norwich, 1995; 

Medicine for the Soul, 1999; 

(with R. G. Wilson) The History of Norwich, 2004;