But those left behind in the lazar-house—ah me! deprived of the only man who had gained an empire over their hearts, and could control them—what of them?
They lost all control, and broke through all discipline; they overpowered their keepers, who indeed scarcely tried their best to restrain them, sharing the common fear; they broke the gates open; they poured forth and dispersed all through the country, carrying the infection wherever they went.
Still this was not a very wide scope; the woods, the forests, were their chief refuge. And soon the story was told everywhere. It was heard at the lordly towers of Warwick; it was told at the stately pile of Kenilworth; it was proclaimed at Banbury. It startled even those violent men who played with death, to be told that a hundred lepers were loose, carrying the double curse of plague and leprosy wherever they went.
"It must be stamped out," said the stern men of the day: "we must hunt them down and slay them."
So they held a council at Banbury, where all the neighbouring barons—who were generally of one party in that neighbourhood—took counsel.
They decided that proclamation should be everywhere made; that if the lepers returned to the lazar-house at Byfield within three days, all should be forgiven; but otherwise, that the barons should collect their savage hounds, and hunt them down in the forest.
And this was the very forest where we left poor Evroult dying—the forest of the hermitage which these poor lepers were tolerably sure to find out, and to seek shelter.
And here we will leave our poor friends for a while, and return to Wallingford Castle.
FOOTNOTE:
[26] This is an extant form of those ages for the reconciliation of a penitent at the last gasp.