Some medical ideas and theories common to the Mediterranean world, such as that of the four humours and the practice of bloodletting to keep them in balance, or the role of dieting in preserving and restoring health, although practised assiduously by the Greeks and Romans and their followers, do not seem to have received as much attention from the Anglo-Saxons. But that they were acquainted with these theories and practices is clear from medical collections in Latin made by the Anglo-Saxons. We will find it useful to examine these to find out what an Anglo-Saxon physician might be expected to know about the best-established theories of disease and treatment in medieval Europe.

Medical collections in Latin of undoubted Anglo-Saxon compilation are obviously not as easy to identify as Old English ones, but at least two such survive in fairly late manuscripts, one in the Canterbury Classbook (CUL, Gg. 5. 35) and the other in the Ramsey Scientific Compendium (Oxford, St John's College 17), both of about 1100. There are other smaller texts, mostly of the kind Cockayne called ‘flyleaf leechdoms’. All these give a picture of medical lore of Mediterranean origin available to the Anglo-Saxons independently of the Leechbooks and Lacnunga. They show that Englishmen were acquainted with most of the minor works which circulated freely, usually pseudonymously or anonymously, through the whole of the Middle Ages. A summary of their contents shows that they were often of dubious medical value.