This Deed of Gift and the Confirmation of the present Charter of my Foundation I have on behalf of myself and of my heirs made secure and binding.
In the year of our Lord 1247 on the Wednesday after the Feast of S. Luke the Evangelist.
These being Witnesses—
Peter Fitz-Alwyn, then Mayor of London, &c. &c.
This is what the London Citizen (see Collections of a London Citizen) says of the House:—
“A chyrche of Owre Lady that ys namyde Bedlem. And yn that place ben founde many men that ben fallyn owte of hyr wytte. And fulle honestely they ben kepte in that place: and sum ben restoryde unto hyr wytte and helthe agayne. And sum ben a-bydyng there yn for evyr, for they ben falle soo moche owte of hem selfe that hyt ye uncurerabylle unto man. And unto that place ys grauntyde moche pardon, more thenne they of the place knowe.”
This Priory continued for nearly three hundred years, during which period it never obtained any popularity or any substantial increase to its revenues. On searching the Calendar of Wills, we find a few bequests left to the House until 1411. After this date there is no more mention of the House.
Then poverty fell upon it: it received permission to beg for alms; and the Brethren—were there ever any sisters?—as they died were not replaced; between the years 1411 and 1538—that is, for a hundred and twenty-seven years—there is a dead silence in the Wills. We know that there was a chantry here for Lord Basset, who was a benefactor; and we know that Henry the Fourth appointed in 1423 one Robert Dale, and in 1471, one Richard Sneeth as Prior or warden. The House was probably the most conspicuous case in London of a Foundation of which only the shell was left. Its endowments gone, the “special devotion” of the Founder to the Church of Bethlehem no longer understood, the respect for the sacred site of Bethlehem a thing decaying, and, at last, the very Brethren gone. At the Dissolution one man was found in the House, the Master, and he had left off wearing the habit of the Order. Was he quite poor? Did he live alone in the place wandering about the ghostly cloister, singing matins at midnight alone in the mouldering chapel, the roof of which was falling off? Or cultivating the little garden beside the City Ditch for vegetables and roots which formed most of his food? Strange life! Or were the revenues large enough to keep him in comfort with servants to attend upon him, so that he lived in semi-ecclesiastic guise?
There is some obscurity about the conversion of the House into an Asylum for persons of unsound mind. Stow says that it became an asylum, but does not give the date. Newcourt says, that “sometime, a King of England”—which is vague—disliking the presence near the Court of the Lunatic Asylum which stood at Charing Cross, ordered the removal of the inmates to Bethlehem, which would show that the place had fallen into decay some time before the Dissolution. In the year 1523 one Stephen Jennings gave £40 towards the purchase of the patronage of the House, and the Mayor took steps toward carrying out this object when the Dissolution happened, and the place, whose surrender value is not stated, went to the King. The mad people were turned adrift; one knows not where they went or how they fared: in 1546, however, the King gave the House to the City, and the Mayor bought the patronage and houses and tenements belonging to it and replaced the lunatics.
The church was taken down in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It does not appear that the House had any property, because the patients were maintained by their friends, or if these were too poor, by a charge upon the parish. There was accommodation for sixty patients. Five years after the King’s gift, license was granted to John Whitehead, proctor of the House, to ask for alms in the dioceses of London, Ely, and Lincoln.