Laws against Lepers.
The ordinance of 21 Edward III. (1346) against the harbouring of lepers in London is the only one of the kind (so far as I know) in English history; the Statutes of the realm contain no reference to lepers or leprosy from first to last; the references in the Rolls of Parliament are to the taxing of their houses and lands. The laws which deprived lepers of marital rights and of heirship appear to have been wholly foreign; in England, leprosy as a bar to succession was made a plea in the law courts. It appears, however, that a law against lepers was made by a Welsh king in the tenth century[203]. It is not easy to realize the state of Welsh society in the tenth century; but we know enough of it in the twelfth century, from the description of Giraldus Cambrensis, to assert with some confidence that “leprosy” might have meant anything—perhaps the “lepra Normannorum[204].”
In Scotland the laws and ordinances, civil and ecclesiastical, against lepers have been more numerous. In 1242 and 1269, canons of the Scots Church were made, ordering that lepers should be separated from society in accordance with general custom. In 1283-84, the statutes of the Society of Merchants, or the Guildry, of Berwick provided that lepers should not enter the borough, and that “some gude man sall gather alms for them.” In 1427 the Parliament of Perth authorised ministers and others to search the parishes for lepers[205].
We conclude, then, that little was made of leprosy by English legislators (rather more by the Scots), just as we have found that in the endowment of charities, the leprous had only a small share, and that share a somewhat exaggerated one owing to the morbid sentimentality of the chivalrous period. The most liberal estimate of the amount of true leprosy at any time in England would hardly place it so high as in the worst provinces of India at the present day. In the province of Burdwan, with a population of over two millions, which may be taken to have been nearly the population of England in the thirteenth century, there are enumerated 4604 lepers, or 2·26 in every thousand inhabitants. But even with that excessive prevalence of leprosy, and with no seclusion of the lepers, a traveller may visit the province of Burdwan, and not be aware that leprosy is “frightfully common” in it. In medieval England the village leper may have been about as common as the village fool; while in the larger towns or cities, such as London, Norwich, York, Bristol, and Lincoln, true lepers can hardly have been so numerous as the friars themselves, who are supposed to have found a large part of their occupation in ministering to their wants. A rigorous scepticism might be justified, by the absence of any good diagnostic evidence, in going farther than this. But the convergence of probabilities does point to a real prevalence of leprosy in medieval England; and those probabilities will be greatly strengthened by discovering in the then habits of English living a vera causa for the disease.