A GREAT HOSPITAL [137a]
Dr Moore writes in his preface: “The History is a gift from me to St Bartholomew’s, and I hope that the labour of investigating historical events, of meditating upon them, and of finally writing the book in such hours as my profession allowed during more than thirty years, may be taken as a proof of the gratitude I feel to the noble hospital with which my whole professional life has been connected.”
The book seems to me eminently worthy of its subject and of its learned author. [137b] As a record of the 800 years during which the Hospital has existed it naturally contains an enormous mass of detail, and this means that the book is physically very big. The first volume is of 614 quarto pages, and the second of 992 pages. The index contains at least 20,000 entries.
The Hospital and the Priory of St Bartholomew were the first buildings erected on the open space of Smithfield. The foundation took place in 1123, and Rahere, the founder, was the first Prior. He is
said to have been of lowly race, and to have made himself popular in the houses of nobles and princes “by witcisms and flattering talk.” Then he repented of such a mode of life and made a pilgrimage to Rome to obtain forgiveness. On his way back he had a vision of St Bartholomew, by whom he was directed to found a church in Smithfield.
It seems that “no part of the hospital as built by Rahere is now standing, but within the present building, which covers the original site, there still remains one thing which was there in his time. It is a legal document which his eyes beheld, and which was sealed in his presence. This charter is written on vellum in the clear hand-writing of the first half of the twelfth century.” The seal shows a “turreted building, which is probably the Priory of St Bartholomew’s as it looked in the first twenty years of its existence.”
The two parts of an indented chirograph have been preserved in the hospital, which give (i., p. 239) a view of the state of agriculture in Essex in the reign of King John. Mention is made of fields of wheat, rye, barley, oats and beans; of oxen, horses, of brew-house and barn. Rent was paid in kind and sent by water to the hospital quay, which may have been on the River Fleet and therefore nearer to the hospital than a landing-place on the Thames. The Fleet river, as Dr Moore happily points out (i., p. 246), is now shut up in a tubular dungeon, “as if to remind it of all the unhappiness it had passed by in the Gaola de Flete from the time” when the prisoners watched “the ships passing up
it with corn for St Bartholomew’s Hospital . . . to the days when the body of Samuel Pickwick was confided to the custody of the tipstaff, to be by him taken to the Warden of the Fleet Prison, and there detained until the amount of the damages and costs in the action of Bardell against Pickwick was fully paid and satisfied.”
The author never fails to make interesting use of the driest of charters. Thus in the reign of King John a person with the pleasant name of Adam Pepercorn grants to the hospital ten shillings quit-rent for some land in Grub Street, a region full of unhappy memories. Dr Moore quotes passages from Johnson, Swift, and Goldsmith to show that the name Grub Street should have been protected by such associations from any change; but nothing is sacred, and Grub Street is now known as Milton Street.
The author (i., p. 279) asks whether the brethren of St Bartholomew’s made any medical studies, and points out they may well have read parts of the Liber Etymologiarum by St Isidore of Seville, who flourished a.d. 601. The book is a general summary of knowledge in Isidore’s day, and few religious houses in England were without a copy.