The Middle English Term ‘Froten’: Absolon and Barber-Surgery

Abstract

Who rubbeth now, who froteth now his lippes With dust, with sond, with straw, with clooth, with chippes (Chaucer, The Miller's Tale, lines 3747–8)1 Absolon's response to his misdirected kiss in The Miller's Tale is to rub and frot his lips. Chaucer's use of the term froten (MED, 1. (a) ‘To rub; rub so as to polish, sharpen or to remove something’, as well as 2. (b) ‘to scrape’), however, is more than just a reiteration of the preceding act of rubbing (as the gloss in The Riverside Chaucer suggests).2 It is in fact a specific remedy for ‘passions’ of the mouth commonly prescribed by medieval medical practitioners. Frotynge is therefore a fitting course of action for Absolon who, further to being a parish clerk, is a barber-surgeon and as such possesses particular knowledge about the pathology and remedy of the mouth and its parts.3 The numbers of medicinal remedies either that are to be administered by frotynge and rubbing medicine in the mouth or that employ frotynge the mouth as a therapy are innumerable in medical works from the late medieval period. Book VII of the encyclopaedic On the Properties of Things, for example, lists frotynges among other remedies such as mouthwashes and purgative treatments – diseased gums causing De fetore oris (or ‘stench of mouth’), for example, should be ‘ifrotid and iclansid’.4 The fifteenth-century Middle English version of Lanfrank's Science of Cirurgie, advises that discoloured teeth should be froted with a medicinal powder.5 Another surgical treatise, the anonymous fifteenth-century Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac's Cyrurgie, similarly recommends remedying diseases of the mouth by: wasshynges and by gargarismes, by chewynges, by fillynges, by enoyntynges, by vaporaciouns, by frotynges, by subfunygaciouns, by cauterizacions, by medecynes þat purgen the hede, by droppynges in þe eres and by honde wirchynges … (my italics)6