Lusty Lepers

There can’t  be too many days in a year that you find yourself sitting in the British Library, eating a posh sandwich and speaking a little too loudly about lusty lepers. All in the name of art history of course...


Mark kisses Tristram.
A two-coloured tile from Chertsey Abbey.

You see that I have a hundred companions here;

Give us Isolde to be our common property.

No lady ever had a worse fate:

Sir, our lust is so strong!

No lady in the world could tolerate

A single day of relations with us!

Our ragged clothes stick to our bodies;

With you she was accustomed to luxury,

To beautiful furs and pleasures;

She was used to fine wines

And great halls of dark marble.

If you give her to us lepers,

When she sees our squalid hovels

And shares our dishes

And has to sleep with us,

And when, instead of your fine food, sir,

She has only the scraps and crumbs

That are given to us at the gates –

By the Lord in heaven,

When she sees our “court”

And all its discomforts,

She will rather be dead than alive.

Then that viper Isolde will know

That she has sinned,

And she will wish she had been burned to death.

King Mark is persuaded to give his adulterous wife Isolde to a group of lepers as a more fitting punishment than burning. - Bréoul’s Tristram, c.1175, lines 1192-1216.