According to the tenor of various old civil codes and local enactments, when a person became affected with leprosy he was looked upon as legally and politically dead, and lost the privileges belonging to his right of citizenship.
By the law of England lepers were classed with idiots, madmen, outlaws, etc., as incapable of being heirs; and a leper removed by a writ de leproso amovendo could not be a guardian in socage.[359]
Rotharis, king of Lombardy, as early as the eleventh century, decreed that when any one became affected with leprosy, and the fact was known to the judge or people, so that the leper was expelled from society and dwelt in seclusion, he had no power to alienate his effects or dispose of them to any one (non sit illi licentia res suas alienare aut thingare cuilibet personæ). For, it is added, from the very day on which he is expelled from his home, he is to be regarded as dead (tanquam mortuus habetur).[360] The same was the law of Normandy, according to Dufresne[361] and Delamarré;[362] and Lobineau, in his history of Brittany,[363] speaks of it being formerly in accordance with the rituals of various churches.
The leper was not looked upon in the eye of the law alone as defunct, for the Church also took the same view, and performed the solemn ceremonials of the burial of the dead over him on the day on which he was separated from his fellow-creatures and consigned to a lazar-house. He was from that moment regarded as a man dead amongst the living, and legally buried, though still breathing and alive. The ritual of the French church retained till a late period the various forms and ceremonies to which the leper was subjected on this day of his living funeral. Ogée[364] and Pluquet[365] have both described them.
A priest robed with surplice and stole went with the cross to the house of the doomed leper. The minister of the church began the necessary ceremonies by exhorting him to suffer, with a patient and penitent spirit, the incurable plague with which God had stricken him. He then sprinkled the unfortunate leper with holy water, and afterwards conducted him to the church, the usual burial verses being sung during their march thither. In the church the ordinary habiliments of the leper were removed; he was clothed in a funeral pall; and while placed before the altar between two trestles, the Libera was sung, and the mass for the dead celebrated over him. After this service he was again sprinkled with holy water, and led from the church to the house or hospital destined for his future abode. A pair of clappers, a barell, a stick, cowl, and dress, etc. etc., were given to him. Before leaving the leper, the priest solemnly interdicted him from appearing in public without his leper’s garb—from entering inns, churches, mills, and bake-houses—from touching children, or giving them ought he had touched—from washing his hands or anything pertaining to him in the common fountains and streams—from touching in the markets the goods he wished to buy with anything except his stick—from eating or drinking with any others than lepers;—and he specially forbade him from walking in narrow paths, or from answering those who spoke to him in the roads and streets, unless in a whisper, that they might not be annoyed with his pestilent breath and with the infectious odour which exhaled from his body;—and last of all, before taking his departure, and leaving the leper for ever to the seclusion of the lazar-house, the official of the church terminated the ceremony of his separation from his living fellow-creatures by throwing upon the body of the poor outcast a shovelful of earth, in imitation of the closure of the grave.
List of Leper Hospitals in Great Britain.
In Part I. I enumerated specially the different Scottish leper hospitals with which I was acquainted, and referred in general terms to the number of similar institutions that had existed in England. Under the idea that a connected view of all the British leper hospitals might prove interesting, I have drawn out the following alphabetical list of such of them as have come to my knowledge in the course of the preceding inquiries. To the locality of each hospital and its special designation, or rather dedication, I have added the dates, as nearly as they could be ascertained, either of its original foundation, or of the first notice of it to be found in historical records. Among the unarranged mass of materials contained in the Notitia Monastica, and in the Monasticon Anglicanum, (to which works I am principally indebted for the notes of the English leper houses), references exist to many old hospitals, the individual objects of which are now utterly forgotten and unknown. If sufficient records of them had been preserved we would probably have been enabled to increase to a much greater extent the subjoined list of institutions for lepers, as many of them, there is little doubt, were set aside (like those we now enumerate) for the reception of the victims of that disease, whose olden history, in as far as relates to this country, we have so hastily and imperfectly attempted to trace.
List of Leper Hospitals formerly existing in Great Britain.