[352] In former times the churchyards seem to have been the general resort of beggars. Æneas Sylvius, who visited Scotland as the Pope’s Legate in the reign of James I., speaks of there seeing the almost naked paupers (pauperes, pæne nudos; ad templa mendicantes) supplied with coals as alms.—Historia de Europa, c. 46. Sibbald’s Chronicle of Scottish Poetry, vol. i. p. 176.
[353] We have seen, in a previous page (p. 137, supra), that the lepers met with by Maundrell, in Palestine, in 1697, carried a kind of “cop,” or, as he expresses it, they came “with small buckets in their hands to receive the alms of the charitable.” Evelyn, in his interesting Memoirs, alludes to a curious mode of sending alms to the leper that he saw practised one hundred years ago in Holland. In his Diary, under the date of 26th July 1641, he states, “I passed through Deft to the Hague, in which journey I observed divers leprous poor creatures dwelling in solitary huts on the brink of the water, and permitted to aske the charity of the passengers, which is conveyed to them in a floating box that they cast out.”—Bray’s edition of Evelyn’s Memoirs, etc., vol. i. p. 12.
[354] Antiquitates Italicæ Medii Ævi, tom. iii. p. 54.
[355] Sir Tristrem, a metrical Romance of the thirteenth century, edited by Sir Walter Scott (Edinb. 1804), Introduction, p. 12.
[356] Tytler’s “Historical Inquiry into the ancient state of Scotland,” History (2d edit.), pp. 305 and 337.
[357] In Robert de Brunne’s translation (made in the reign of Edward the Third) of Peter Langtoft’s Chronicles, the same term “mesel” is used as synonymous with leper, and applied to one designated in the rubrics “Baldeiano Leproso.”
Baldewyn the Meselle, his name so hight, ...
For foul meselrie he comond with no man.
John Trevisa has rendered the lepra of Glanville by “meselry,” in translating, in 1398, the treatise De Proprietatibus Rerum.—See the London edition of 1535, pp. 109-110.
[358] Testament of Cresseid, as previously quoted.