(d) “Alien” Hospitals.—There were other hospitals subordinate to foreign convents. The Great St. Bernard in Savoy established an offshoot at Hornchurch; Altopassu in Italy maintained St. James’, Thurlow; the leper-house near Rye was affiliated to Fécamp. Farley, near Luton, was under Suntingfield by Boulogne; the staff were at one time brethren of the Order of St. William of the Desert.[131] The varying fortunes of the hospital near Charing Cross may be learnt from Dr. Jas. Galloway’s Story of St. Mary Roncevall. Alien houses had a chequered history, being confiscated in time of war, and most were suppressed before the general Dissolution.

3. The Friars

By word and deed, St. Francis preached the duty of serving lepers. “He appointed that the friars of his Order, dispersed in various parts of the world, should for the love of Christ diligently attend the lepers wherever they could be found. They followed this injunction with the greatest promptitude.”[132] In England, however, it would appear that there was not that close association between p210 friars and hospitals which existed in Italy. Led by national reformers, the work of tending lazars had long been carried on. The great majority of refuges for them were founded between 1084 and 1224 before the brethren arrived in this country. Speaking of the friars’ labours, Green says that “their first work lay in the noisome lazar-houses,” and Brewer alludes to “their training for the leper-hospitals,” but there seems to be little or no definite record of such service in this country. There were, however, many individual outcasts, who had not the comfort of the hospital, and to these the new-comers may have ministered.

A few hospitals—not for lepers—were indeed appropriated to the Mendicant Orders, or served by them. The association is of the slightest, and usually of short duration. Thus the Bamburgh spital had probably disappeared when Richard II gave its chapel to the Friars Preachers, “in part remuneration for a cross made from the wood of the Holy Cross presented by them to the king” (1382). The Crutched Friars once had some connection with Holy Cross, Colchester. The relation between hospitals and the Bethlehemite and Maturin Orders was closer, and dated from the friars’ first century of work. St. Mary of Bethlehem in London was founded upon land belonging to that community, members of which were its original officials. Deeds of 1348 call them “the Order of the Knighthood of St. Mary of Bethlehem”; possibly the link with the Holy Land led them to adopt this military title. Maturin or Trinitarian houses were more akin to the infirmary and pilgrim-hostel than were any other friaries; one-third of their revenue was spent in relieving local poor. Their houses (often called “hospitals”) are p211 not included in the present volume, save when they were not merely friaries. For example, Stephen, Archdeacon of Wilts, who was rector and patron of Easton Royal, founded there a house for indigent travellers (1246).[133] The master was a Trinitarian brother, but he was presented by the patron, to whom he and the other priests owed obedience; in 1287 the same man was minister of Easton and of the house of St. Mary Magdalene by Hertford. St. Laurence’s, Crediton, was served by the Hounslow Maturin convent. The almsmen of God’s House, Donnington, worshipped in the adjacent Trinitarian Chapel.

To recapitulate: the hospital was a semi-independent institution, subject to royal and episcopal control in matters of constitution, jurisdiction and finance, yet less trammelled in organization than most religious houses. It formed a part of the parochial system, and had also links of one kind and another with monastic life.

[♦] p212

CHAPTER XV DECLINE OF THE HOSPITALS

“Many hospitals . . . be now for the most part decayed, and the goods and profits of the same, by divers persons, spiritual and temporal, withdrawn and spent to the use of others, whereby many men and women have died in great misery for default of aid, livelihood and succour.”

SUCH is the preamble to the Statute for the reformation of hospitals (1414). Responsibility for use and abuse rested with the patron, but more immediately with the warden into whose hands he committed the administration. If this chapter is necessarily devoted to the seamy side of hospital life, let no one suppose that officials were all bad, or even all careless. There were men “in whose purity of conscience the king confides,” chosen for “probity, character and knowledge.” Yet upright, thrifty and faithful wardens were far from common, and it does not sound hopeful when one and another was appointed “during good behaviour.”