The three panels telling the story of Hugh, a monk of Jervaulx, have a message for the viewer: the “water of Canterbury,” tinged with a bit of Becket’s blood, has more power to heal than human medicine.
In the first scene, the gravely ill monk Hugh is in bed. Behind him, his father abbot, holding a crozier, and a brother monk, holding a book, lean over him in concern. At the center of the panel, a doctor, wearing a fur hat and a long red robe – signs of his wealth and authority – bends over Hugh and offers him a rectangular container of medicine. To his right, his assistant holds a case with more medicines within it.
In the second panel, Hugh sits up in bed and tips a round ampulla to his lips. This ampulla contains the Becket blood-and-water relic. Many thousands of pilgrims left Canterbury carrying such ampullas, some of which have survived in archaeological contexts. The surviving ampullas are much smaller than the one pictured on this panel, but the glaziers wanted viewers to be able to identify exactly what Hugh had chosen to drink.
In the third panel, Hugh has flipped over onto his stomach and a great gush of blood is pouring out of his nose. To modern viewers this is alarming, but medieval viewers would have understood that this nosebleed meant that Hugh was healed. Medieval medical theory held that illness resulted from an imbalance of humours within the body. Either too much or too little of any of the humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm) would make a person ill. Hugh’s drink of the water relic has expelled excess blood from his body and made him well.