dissemination of heresy. The
Vice-Chancellor, who was the Rector of Lincoln, seized Dalaber and put
him in the stocks, but was too late for Garret, who had made off into
Dorsetshire. He took counsel with the Warden of New College and with
the Dean of Wolsey's new foundation, Cardinal College; and at length,
as they could find out nothing, being 'in extreme pensiveness', they
determined to consult an astrologer. They knew they were doing wrong.
Such inquiries were forbidden by the law of the Church, and they were
afraid; but they were more afraid of Wolsey. The man of science drew a
figure upon the floor of his secret chamber, and made his
calculations; at the end he reported that the fugitive was fled in a
tawny coat to the South-east. The trembling officials hastily
dispatched messengers to have the ports watched in Kent and Sussex,
hoping that their transgression might at least be justified by
success. They were successful: Master Garret _was_ caught--trying to
take ship at Bristol. It would need awesome circumstances indeed to
send a modern Vice-Chancellor through the night to inquire of an
astrologer.

In the realm of medicine, too, magic and the supernatural had great
weight, and claimed a measure of success which is not unintelligible
in these days, when the value of the will as an ally in healing is
being understood. Erasmus, suffering from the stone, was presented by
a Hungarian physician with an astrological mug, shaped like a lion,
which was to cure his trouble. He used it and felt better, but was not
sure how much to attribute to the lion. The famous Linacre, one of the
founders of the College of Physicians, sent to Budaeus, a French court
official and the first Greek scholar of the age, one gold ring and
eighteen silver rings which had been blessed by Henry VIII, and had
thus been made preservative against convulsions; and Budaeus presented
them to his womenkind. We need not take this to imply that he thought
little of them; more probably he reflected that convulsions are most
frequent among the race of babies, and therefore distributed them
where they would be most useful. Anyway, it was Linacre who sent them.
With such notions abroad, quackery must have been rife, and serious
medical practitioners had many difficulties to contend with. Some idea
of these may be gained from a letter written by Wolfgang Rychard, a
physician of high repute at Ulm, to a friend at Erfurt, whither he was
thinking of sending hi