Here’s a wonderful short poem (scroll down for text and translation) by the Middle Scots poet William Dunbar (born ?1460, died ?1513) which gives us a late medieval account of a migraine. Dunbar was a cleric, poet and courtier in the service of James IV of Scotland. I’ve been skimming through his works recently, partly for tutorials on late medieval poetry and partly because he uses so many different verse forms and stanza forms in his poems (which makes him a good subject of research for my book).