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FLEAS
Fleas are blood-drinkers, but are fairly fussy eaters, each species
deliberately having their own preferred species to live on, however, they are
wholly averse to taking a bite from anything they can land onto. Fleas seem
to have been a common problem at the time, a problem exacerbated because
no matter how clean people were, animals always provided a reservoir for
fresh infection; even today, you are more likely to be bitten by a "cat flea"
or "dog flea" than you are a "human flea".  Once established in a house,
fleas can be a difficult pest to remove as an adult can live up to 18 months
between feeds.  Unsurprisingly, fleas were a major problem, as this text
from a late 14thC English manual of French/English conversation makes
clear:  'William, undress and wash your legs, and then dry them with a
cloth, and rub them well for love of the fleas, that they may not leap on your
legs, for there is a peck of them lying in the dust under the rushes...Hi the
fleas bite me so!  and do me great harm, for I have scratched my shoulders
till the blood flows'.

        In concurrence, the Goodman of Paris (GoP, 1393) tells his wife
that one of the ways to 'bewitch and bewitch again' her 'husband to be' is to
make sure that his bed is free of fleas during the summer.  He comes up
with various methods of dealing with these 'familiar beasts to men' : firstly
he recommends the placing of flea-traps around the affected room:
If the room be strewn with alder leaves, the fleas will be caught thereon ';
I have heard tell that if you have at night one or two trenchers slimed with
glue or turpentine and set about the room, with a lighted candle in the midst
of each trencher, they will become stuck there'.
The GoP thoughtfully (in a different part of his book) tells us how to make
glue: 'it behoves you peel holly when it is at the sap (which is commonly
from the month of May up to August) and then boil the bark in water until
the topmost layer separate; then peel it off, and when it is peeled, wrap up
that which remains in elder leaves or other large leaves, and set it in some
cool place, as in a cellar, or within the earth, or in a cold dung heap for the
space of nine days or more, until it is decayed.  And the n behoveth it to
pound it like brayed cabbage and to make it up into cakes like woad, and
then go wash the cakes one after another, and break them up like wax; and
let them not be too much washed in the first water, nor in too hard a water.
and after you may break it up all together and knead it in running water and
put it in a pot and keep it well covered'. The great advantage  of this glue is
that it can be made whilst insect infestations are at their worst, ie. during the summer.

        A 15thC English Leechbook (collection of medical recipes)
suggests the following "traps": 'For fleas and lice to slay them, take
horsemint and strew it in your house, and it will slay them'  or  'Take the
juice of rue and anoint your body with it' or 'Take gorse and boil it in water,
and sprinkle that water about the house, and they will die.  Palladius (5thC)
recommended bring fleas to a sticky end on surfaces which were often
sprinkled with oil dregs.  John Gerard's Herball makes the following claims
for: Fleabane (Erigeron sp.) 'burned where flies, gnats, fleas or any other
venomous things are, doth drive them away'  Fleawort (Plaintains or
Plantago sp.) 'some hold that the herb strewn in the chamber where many
fleas be, will drive them away, for which cause it took the name Flea
wort: but I think it is rather because the seed does resemble a flea so
much, that it is hard to discerne the one from the other';  Willow herb
(Primilaceae or Lysimachia sp.), 'it is reported that the fume or smoke of
the herbe burned doth drive away fleas and gnats and all manner of
venomous beasts'

        Ibn-el-Beithar, a 13thC Spanish Moslem writer, recommended
macerating a cucurbit (Citrullus colycynthus) or oleander (Nerium oleander)
in water and spraying the liquid around to get rid of fleas.  If all of the
above herbs proved ineffective, the GoP also had some hints for "direct-
action":

        When the coverlets, furs or dresses wherein there are fleas, are
folded and shut tightly up, as in a chest tightly corded with straps, or in bag
well tied up and pressed, or otherwise put and pressed so that the aforesaid
fleas be without light and air and kept imprisoned, then will they perish
forthwith and die...... The other way that I have tried [to catch fleas] and 'tis true: take a rough cloth and spread it about your room and over your bed,
and all the fleas that shall hop on it will be caught, so that you may carry
them away with the cloth wherever you will.. I have seen blankets [of white
wool] set on the straw and on the bed, and when the black fleas  hopped on,
they were the sooner found upon the white and killed.'

        This latter way of dealing with fleas seems to be corroborated by
the duties of the Chamberlain in John Russell's 15thC Book of Nurture (as
Russell meant the book to be used to teach male servants it's clear that
outside, of the GoP's house, pest control is not just a female activity):
'Return in haste to your lord's chamber, strip the clothes off the bed and
cast them aside and beat the feather-bed, but not so as to waste any
feathers, and see that the blankets and sheets be clean'.
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Stefan