ABSTRACT
Although deliberate poisoning was well known to the Arabs and in Renaissance Italy, it was always rare in England, although there were mentions. In the fourteenth century, the chronicler Ranulf Higden claimed that Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II, had poisoned Henry’s mistress Rosamund de Clifford a century and a half earlier in 1176.1 But there is no firm evidence for this. Poisoning in the Middle Ages was often by repute, when a chronicler wished to assign particularly base motives to someone.
