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tenth century. The curing of leprosy sufferers features regularly in some of the hagiographic and homiletic writings of the late Anglo-Saxon period, 16 and various medical treatises exist from the late ninth and tenth century, including the Old English Herbarium ; the Lacnunga ; and Bald’s Leechbook , a work with possible Winchester connections. More significantly, archaeology is providing a growing body of evidence for the organised burial of leprosy sufferers in the late Saxon period. At Norwich, excavations in the medieval churchyard of Saint John’s Timberhill
tenth-century Anglo-Saxon scribe Cild and his recipes, some of which concern herbal concoctions to be drunk, sometimes out of special vessels such as church bells, with similar remedies for the ‘feeble-minded’. 136 Drinking out of a church bell is in Bald’s Leechbook, but is applied for a demoniac and not an idiot as Walker had erroneously claimed. 137 Another recipe by Bald appears to be more promising: ‘Against mental vacancy [ ungemynde ] and against folly [ dysgunge ]; put into ale bishopwort, lupins, betony, the southern or Italian fennel, nepte, water agrimony