This chapter examines evidence for friars who practised medicine in England, from the thirteenth through to the late fifteenth century. The evidence for individual practitioners is limited and scattered, and, with one exception from 1477, dependent on the appearance of these individuals in manuscript books. One text in particular, the Tabula medicine of 1416–25, surviving in a handful of manuscripts, is crucial because the friar compilers recorded the effectiveness of remedies tried out by various of their colleagues, and in some cases mentioned the names of patients they treated successfully. Earlier in the thirteenth century, we have two surviving manuscripts describing remedies and treatments for the nobility by the Dominican John of St Giles. Glimpses of individual practitioners who wrote their own manuscripts can be found in the cases of the Franciscan John Bruyll and the Carmelite Richard Tenet. Besides these details of practice, the letters of the Franciscan Adam Marsh give us a more general picture of the need to make use of friars with medical skills to tackle (chiefly, but not exclusively) the effects of the strenuous life of preaching, travelling and seeking alms, on their own brothers. A remedy book from the fifteenth century interweaves sections of medical texts and illustrative stories into a fabric of recipes collected for the use of a Franciscan house. In 1477 records of a lawsuit show the Franciscan Eryk de Vedica and his superior trying to recover fees for treatment of a woman patient in London. This is exceptional because it involved friars who went to law, but the kind of treatment for fees carried out by Vedica was probably much more common than this unique lawsuit might suggest.

The most famous of English friar practitioners in the later Middle Ages was William Appleton or Appulton. He is unusually well documented in administrative records and mentioned in chronicles, although the most famous thing about him was his death at the hands of a mob on Tower Hill, London, in the Peasants Revolt of 1381. Appleton was beheaded because of his prominence in the service of John of Gaunt, principal target of the common people. Gaunt was blamed for the military failures and financial exactions of the minority of Richard II.