I Want My Mummy! Two Strange Medieval Spices...

Medicinal jars circa 1300, originating in Syria, found in London 

Not all items classed as spices in the medieval period had a culinary use. Some were medicinal and not what we would regard as a spice today. One item a physician might require for his preparations for example was a spice known as 'tutty'. Tutty was a panacea consisting of charred scrapings from inside chimneys. But not just any chimney. It was no good popping up to the castle in summer and taking a surreptitious rasp while no one was looking, oh no. Tutty was specifically scrapings from more exotic, far away climes, its point of export being Alexandria. 

To go with your tutty, you might want another spice for your supply chest called 'momie', 'mumia' or 'mummy'. A drug handbook of 1166 defines 'mummy' as a kind of spice collected from the tombs of the dead. This doesn't mean thousands of years old Egyptian mummies as we might imagine, but sligthly more recently enbalmed corpses that still have a bit of give in them. A 15th century treatise tells us that it is 'A spice or confection found in the tombs of people who have been embalmed with spices, as they used to do in ancient times, and as the pagans near Babylon still do. This mummy is found near the brain and the spine. You should choose that which is shining black, bad smelling and firm.' Yuk.
Mummy was thought efficacious when combined with the juice of a plant called shepherd's purse in stopping excessive nose bleeding. Its main function was to stop bleeding. If someone was spitting blood becauses of injury or malady, they were advised to put a mummy pill under the tongue, the latter made from mummy, mastic powder and water in which gum arabic had been dissolved.