In the time of abbot Gregory (1119 to 1146), the hospital and church of St Julian was built on the London road, for six poor brethren (Lazares or pauperes Christi) governed by a master and four chaplains. The mastership of St Julian’s is twice mentioned in the abbey chronicles as a valuable piece of preferment. In 1254 the lands of the hospital were so heavily taxed, for the king and the pope, that the miselli, according to Matthew Paris, had barely the necessaries of life. But a century after, in 1350, the revenues were too large for its needs, and new statutes were made; the accommodation of its six beds was by no means in request, the number of inmates being never more than three, sometimes only two, and occasionally only one[174]. The fate of the other leper-house of St Albans abbey, that of St Mary de Pratis for women, is not less instructive. The date of its foundation is not known, but in 1254 it had a church and a hospital occupied by misellae[175]. A century later we hear of the house being shared between illiterate sisters and nuns. The former are not called lepers, but simply poor sisters; whatever they were, the nuns and they did not get on comfortably together, and the abbot restored harmony by turning the hospital into a nunnery pure and simple[176]. Similar was the history of one of the richest foundations of the kind, that of Mayden Bradley in Wiltshire. It was originally endowed shortly before or shortly after the accession of Henry II. (1135) by a noble family for an unstated number of poor women, generally assumed to have been leprosae, and for an unstated number of regular and secular clerics to perform the religious offices and manage the property. It had not existed long, however, when the bishop of Salisbury, in 1190, got the charter altered so as to assign the revenues to eight canons and—poor sisters, and so it continued until the valuation of Henry VIII., when it was found to be of considerable wealth. In like manner the hospital of St James, at Tannington near Canterbury, founded in the reign of Henry II. for twenty-five “leprous sisters,” was found, in the reign of Edward III. (1344), to contain no lepers, its “corrodies” being much sought after by needy gentlewomen[177].
Another foundation of Henry II.’s reign was the leper-hospital of St Mary Magdalen at Sponne, outside the walls of Coventry. It was founded by an Earl of Chester, who, having a certain leprous knight in his household, gave in pure alms for the health of his soul and the souls of his ancestors his chapel at Sponne with the site thereof, and half a carucate of land for the maintenance of such lepers as should happen to be in the town of Coventry. There was one priest to celebrate, and with him were wont to be also certain brethren or sisters together with the lepers, praying to God for the good estate of all their benefactors. “But clear it is,” says Dugdale, “that the monks shortly after appropriated it to their own use.” However, they were in time dispossessed by the Crown, to which the hospital belonged until the 14th of Edward IV[178].
One of the most typical as well as earliest foundations was the hospital of the Holy Innocents at Lincoln, endowed by Henry I. We owe our knowledge of its charter to an inquisition of Edward III. It was intended for ten leprosi, who were to be of the outcasts (de ejectibus) of the city of Lincoln, the presentation to be in the king’s gift or in that of the mayor or other good men of the city, and the administration of it by a master or warden, two chaplains and one clerk. In the space of two centuries from its foundation the character of its inmates had gradually changed. Edward III.’s commissioners found nine poor brethren or sisters in it; only one of them was leprosus, and he had obtained admission by a golden key; also the seven poor women had got in per viam pecuniam. In Henry VI.’s time provision was made for the possibility of lepers still requiring its shelter—quod absit, as the new charter said.
In the same reign (end of Henry I.) the hospital of St Peter was founded at Bury St Edmunds by abbot Anselm, for priests and others when they grew old and infirm, leprous or diseased. The other hospital at Bury, St Saviour’s, had no explicit reference to leprosy at all. It was founded by the famous abbot Samson about 1184, for a warden, twelve chaplain-priests, six clerks, twelve poor gentlemen, and twelve poor women. About a hundred years later the poor sisters had to go, in order to make room for old and infirm priests.
Sometime before his death in 1139, Thurstan, archbishop of York, founded a hospital at Ripon for the relief of “all the lepers in Richmondshire;” the provision was for eighteen patients, a chaplain and sisters. At an uncertain date afterwards the house was found to contain a master, two or three chaplains and some brethren, who are not styled leprosi; and from the inquisition of Edward III. we learn that its original destination had been for the relief as much of the poor as the leprous (tam pauperum quam leprosorum), and that there was no leprous person in it at the date of the inquisition.
The mixed character of hospitals commonly reckoned leper-hospitals is shown by several other instances. St Mary Magdalene’s at Lynn (1145) provided for a prior and twelve brethren or sisters, nine of whom were to be whole and three leprous. St Leonard’s at Lancaster (time of king John) was endowed for a master, a chaplain, and nine poor persons, three of them to be leprous. St Bartholomew’s at Oxford provided for a master, a clerk, two whole brethren and six infirm or leprous brethren; but the infirm or leprous brethren had all been changed into whole brethren by the time of Edward III[179]. So again the Normans’ spital at Norwich was found to be sheltering “seven whole sisters and seven half-sisters.”
The leper-hospital at Stourbridge, near Cambridge, was founded for lepers by king John, the one king in English history who cared greatly about his leprous subjects. It was committed to the charge of the burgesses of Cambridge, but it was shortly after seized by Hugo de Norwold, bishop of Ely, and within little more than fifty years from its foundation (7 Ed. I.) it was found that the bishop of Ely of that day was using it for some purposes of his own, but “was keeping no lepers in it, as he ought, and as the custom had been[180].”
The ostentatious patronage of lepers by king John, of which something more might be said, was preceded by a more important interposition on their behalf by the third Council of the Lateran in 1179 (Alexander III.). The position of leprosi in the community had clearly become anomalous, and one of the decrees of the Council was directed to setting it right. Lepers, who were “unable to live with sound persons, or to attend church with them, or to get buried in the same churchyard, or to have the ministrations of the proper priest,” were enjoined to have their own presbytery, church, and churchyard, and their lands were to be exempt from tithe[181]. Within two or three years of that decree, in or near 1181, we find a bishop of Durham, Hugh de Puiset, endowing the greatest of all the English leper-hospitals, at Sherburn, a mile or more outside the city of Durham. The bishop was a noted instance of the worldly ecclesiastic of his time. He was accused by the king of misappropriating money left by the archbishop of York, and his defence was that he had spent it on the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the leprous, and such like deserving objects[182]. William of Newburgh has left us his opinion of the bishop’s charity: it was a noble hospital lavishly provided for, “but with largess not quite honestly come by” (sed tamen ex parte minus honesta largitione[183]). The hospital of bishop Hugh, dedicated to the Saviour, the Blessed Virgin, St Lazarus, and his sisters Mary and Martha, still exists as Christ’s Hospital, a quadrangular building enclosing about an acre in a sunny valley to the south of the city, with a fine chapel, a great hall (of which the ancient raftered roof existed into the present century), a master’s lodge, and a low range of buildings on the west side of the square for the poor brethren, with their own modest hall in the middle of it. The original foundation was certainly on a princely scale, as things then went: it was for five “convents” of lepers, including in all sixty-five persons of both sexes, with a steward or guardian to be their own proper representative or protector, three priests, four attendant clerks, and a prior and prioress. We hear nothing more of the hospital for a century and a half, during which time it had doubtless been filled by a succession of poor brethren, or sick poor brethren, but whether leprous brethren, or even mainly leprous, may well be doubted after the recorded experiences of Ripon, Lincoln and Stourbridge. Its charter was confirmed by bishop Kellaw about 1311-1316; and in an ordinance of 1349 we still read, but not without a feeling of something forced and unreal, of the hospital ministering to the hunger, the thirst, the nakedness of the leprous, and to the other wants and miseries by which they are incessantly afflicted. But within ninety years of that time (1434) the real state of the case becomes apparent; the poor brethren had been neglected, and the estates so mismanaged or alienated to other uses, that new statutes were made reducing the number of inmates to thirteen poor brethren and two lepers, the latter being thrown in, “if they can be found in these parts,” in order to preserve the memory of the original foundation[184].
To these samples, which are also the chief instances of English leper-hospitals, may be added two or three more to bring out another side of the matter. In the cases already given, it has been seen that the provision for the clerical staff was either a very liberal one at first or became so in course of time. The hospitals, whether leprous or other, were for the most part dependencies of the abbeys, affording occupation and residence to so many more monks, just as if they had been “cells” of the abbey. The enormous disproportion of the clerical staff to the inmates of hospitals (not, however, leprous) is seen in the instances of St Giles’s at Norwich, St Saviour’s at Bury and St Cross at Winchester. The provision was about six for the poor and half-a-dozen for the monks. But even the purely nosocomial part of these charities was in not a few instances for the immediate relief of the monasteries themselves. St Bartholomew’s at Chatham, one of the earliest foundations usually counted among the leper-hospitals, was for sick or infirm monks. The hospital at Basingstoke, endowed by Merton College, Oxford, was for incurably sick fellows and scholars of Merton itself. The leper-hospital at Ilford in Essex was founded about 1180 by the rich abbey of Barking, for the leprous tenants and servants of the abbey, the provision being for a secular master, a leprous master, thirteen leprous brethren, two chaplains and a clerk. St Lawrence’s at Canterbury (1137) was for leprous monks or for the poor parents and relations of monks. St Peter’s at Bury St Edmunds, founded by abbot Anselm in the reign of Henry I., was for priests and others when they grew old, infirm, leprous, or diseased.
The instances which have been detailed in the last few pages, perhaps not without risk of tediousness, have not been chosen to give a colour to the view of medieval leprosy; they are a fair sample of the whole, and they include nearly all those leper-hospitals of which the charters or other authentic records are known[185]. It is possible by using every verbal reference to leprosy that may be found in connexion with all the five hundred or more medieval English hospitals in Bishop Tanner’s Notitia Monastica or in Dugdale’s Monasticon, to make out a list of over a hundred leper-hospitals of one kind or another. But there are probably not thirty of them for which the special destination of the charity is known from charters or inquisitions; and even these, as we have seen, were not all purely for lepers or even mainly for lepers. As to the rest of the list of one hundred, the connexion with leprosy is of the vaguest kind. Thus, four out of the five hospitals in Cornwall are called lazar-houses or leper-hospitals, but they were so called merely on the authority of antiquaries subsequent to the sixteenth century. The same criticism applies almost equally to the eight so-called leper-hospitals, out of a total of fourteen medieval hospitals of all kinds, in Devonshire. It is clear that “lazar-house” became an even more widely generic term than the terms lepra and leprosus themselves[186].