Watch House On The Bridge Bradford on Avon Wilts
The study of the bridges of England seems to have been somewhat neglected by antiquaries. You will often find some good account of a town or village in guide-books or topographical works, but the story of the bridges is passed over in silence. Owing to the reasons we have already stated, old bridges are fast disappearing and are being substituted by the hideous erections of iron and steel. It is well that we should attempt to record those that are left, photograph them and paint them, ere the march of modern progress, evinced by the traction-engine and the motor-car, has quite removed and destroyed them.
CHAPTER XV
OLD HOSPITALS AND ALMSHOUSES
There are in many towns and villages hospitals—not the large modern and usually unsightly buildings wherein the sick are cured, with wards all spick and span and up to date—but beautiful old buildings mellowed with age wherein men and women, on whom the snows of life have begun to fall thickly, may rest and recruit and take their ease before they start on the long, dark journey from which no traveller returns to tell to those he left behind how he fared.
Almshouses we usually call them now, but our forefathers preferred to call them hospitals, God's hostels, "God huis," as the Germans call their beautiful house of pity at Lübeck, where the tired-out and money-less folk might find harbourage. The older hospitals were often called "bede-houses," because the inmates were bound to pray for their founder and benefactors. Some medieval hospitals, memorials of the charity of pre-Reformation Englishmen, remain, but many were suppressed during the age of spoliation; and others have been so rebuilt and restored that there is little left of the early foundation.
We may notice three classes of these foundations. First, there are the pre-Reformation bede-houses or hospitals; the second group is composed of those which were built during the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I. The Civil War put a stop to the foundation of almshouses. The principal landowners were impoverished by the war or despoiled by the Puritans, and could not build; the charity of the latter was devoted to other purposes. With the Restoration of the Church and the Monarchy another era of the building of almshouses set in, and to this period very many of our existing institutions belong.