CHRIS KOENIG ponders the lot of country folk who had the misfortune to fall seriously ill in medieval Oxfordshire

Perhaps the best insight into the medieval outlook of heaven and hell, with this world stuck between the two, is provided by the poem Piers Plowman, now generally accepted to have been written by William Langland, of Shipton-under-Wychwood in the 14th century.

There are early manuscripts of the poem in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, but it is the edition of the third and final version, known as the C Text, at Trinity College, Dublin, that places Langland in Oxfordshire. It categorically states that: "Stacy de Rokayle was the father of William de Langlond; this Stacy was of noble birth and dwelt in Shipton-under-Wychwood, a tenant of the Lord Spenser in the county of Oxfordshire. The aforesaid William made the book which is called Piers Plowman. Other manuscripts refer to the author as William W., which could mean William of Wychwood."

It seems that in those far-off days ordinary men and women, for the most part illiterate, lived out their lives in a sort of religious haze, almost a dream world. Indeed the first vision that the narrator (called Will) describes, occurs in a dream. He sees a tower where truth dwells, and a deep dungeon. Between them he sees "a fair feeld ful of folk" where the grand and the less grand go about their worldly business.

One is reminded of Thomas Hobbes, a student at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, writing in Leviathan some 300 years later: "No arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

But what would have happened to, say, a poor ploughman who fell ill in Oxfordshire in the 14th century?

He would probably simply die in his hovel unless he found his way to one of the county's hospitals, set up piecemeal by charitable nobles and merchants and usually funded from endowments based on the rents from land.

Someone living in the Royal Forest of Wychwood, for instance, might have been cared for at St John's Hospital in nearby Burford. Records show that Henry III granted ten cartloads of dry firewood to that hospital in 1226 and that later more wood from the royal forest was forthcoming.

Ironically, the Black Death seems to have removed many of the sick from Oxfordshire, including most lepers for whom many early hospitals were founded. Indeed, Margaret Markham in her notes on medieval hospitals in the excellent Vale and Downland Local History Series, remarks that John Gaddesdon, professor of medicine at Oxford from 1307-1325, described four different types of leprosy.

St Bartholomew's Hospital in Oxford was originally founded for 12 lepers but the number was later reduced to eight, of whom two were required to be fit enough to plough the few acres surrounding the place.

Patients in Oxfordshire's hospitals were under the charge of one or more priests. At Ewelme, a rare example of a medieval hospital that survived the Reformation, no one with an intolerable disease such as leprosy was admitted, and to some extent the place was a home for the old and infirm.

Inmates at most hospitals were forced to lead almost monastic lives complete with vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Even at Ewelme, a comparatively easy-going establishment founded in the 15th century, all patents had to leave their property to the hospital when they died. Anyone receiving property yielding more than £4 a year had to leave the house, and anyone with property yielding less than that had to give half to the foundation.

What ploughman then, one wonders, would ever have entertained a vision of the present John Radcliffe Hospital?