Chapter VI: Part III: The Etiological History of the Disease (2)

Text size

Some of the smaller burghs and villages of these early times had their individual rules and statutes upon the same point. The burgh of Prestwick, Ayrshire, which contains at present, and probably never contained more than about 1000 inhabitants, is situated about half-a-mile north of the leper hospital of Kingcase. The old official records and statutes of this small burgh, to which reference has repeatedly been made in the preceding pages, have lately been printed from the original MS. by Mr. Smith of Swinridgemuir. The earliest burgh record that has thus been preserved is a collection of the laws of the burgh, “Statuta Burgi de Prestwick maide by the haile consent of the community of the same at the Cross of the same burgh, and to be keepit and rafit unremittable and unrevocable.” The date of this collection, or probably re-collection of the burgh laws, is 1470. The fourth of the statutes fixed upon “for the common profit of the said burgh in time coming for everlasting memorans” is to the following effect:—

“It is statut yat na man inhabitant ye said burghe or weman commoun or intromet with ye sic folk (commune or intromit with the sick people) of Kingcase, vnder ye pain of exiling ye said burghe when thai ar ourtane (overtaken) be ane enquest yairupon, mair plainli yan ony oyder persounis or persoun duelland in all ye land about.”—P. 15.

In the minuted records of the burgh, different cases occur of persons accused in accordance with this statute. Thus, on December 1, 1477, Anne Kerd and Andro Sauer are accused of repairing to Kingcase.[341] On the 26th April of the second following year, 1479, it was alleged with regard to the said Andro Sauer, that he “repairis till Kingcase daily and nigtly and his wif and his bairnis.”[342] This Anne Kerd seems to have had the property of a burgess. At last, in November 1481, the same rebellious Prestwickian, “Andro Sauer, is fund in daili reparand to Kingcase, and yis the xxti court yerein, and is abill till infect ye hale toune; and weris ye seik folkis clathis and bonnettis.”[343] After this date no more mention is made in the records of Andro, who repeatedly figures in them previously, for other more serious deeds than that of repairing to Kingcase. I find, however, that others of his name, and probably of his kindred, fall into the same error for which he himself appears to have been banished. Thus, in 1496, Anne Sauer, Marion Myllar, Ellane Browne, and Anne Duncane, “are ilkane severale in amerciamentis for the selling of ale and intromettin of the folkis of Kingcase again the statutis of the towne.”

Few or none of the very early records and laws of the magistrates of Edinburgh have been preserved, but amidst some lately recovered, of a date as late as 1530, we find the following statute anent the “Leper Folke,”—“It is statut and ordanit be the Provost, Baillies, and Counsell of this burghe that na manner of Lipper persone, man nor woman, fra this tyme furth, cum amangis uther cleine personis, nor be nocht fund in the kirk, fische merket, nor flesche merket, nor na other merket within this burghe, under the pane of burnyng of their cheik and bannasing off the toune.”[344]

Some of the old edicts and regulations made in regard to the diseased in London have been preserved for us by Stow. According to the record of Edward III., that king sent, in 1346, “a commandment under his Great Seal, to the mayor and sheriffs of London, willing them to make proclamation in every ward of the city and suburbs, that all leprous persons within the said city and suburbs should avoid within fifteen days, and that no man suffer any such leprous person to abide within his house, upon pain to forfeit his said house, and to incur the king’s further displeasure. And that they should cause the said lepers to be removed into some out places of the Fields, from the haunt and company of all sound people.”[345] From some of the city records it further appears that the magistrates ordered “That the lepers walk not about the streets, nor tarry there; that the keepers of the gates swear that they will not permit lepers to enter into the city.” “There was at one time,” adds Stow, “a brief for removing them from the city and suburbs. At another time there was an edict for levying a hundred shillings out of a tenement of the lepers, and delivering it to their officers for sustaining them.”[346]

RESTRICTIONS PLACED UPON THE INMATES OF THE LEPER HOSPITALS.

The chance of contagion was provided against by other means besides the mere separation of the infected from the community, and their banishment to the lazar hospitals. In many instances the regulations and statutes to which the lepers were subjected, as inmates of these hospitals, were strongly restrictive, and framed with a view of preventing them from spreading the disease to others by any dangerous degree of personal communication with the healthy. The occasional severity of the restrictions to which, with this view, the leper inhabitants of the hospitals were subjected, affords us a curious example both of the great dread in which the disease was held, and of the extent and stringency of the measures of medical police which the local judicatories of this country had in these times both the power and the will to exercise.

The rules of the Greenside Hospital, Edinburgh, present in themselves a striking proof of this, and the occupants of the hospital were bound to observe these rules under the penalty of death. “That this,” observes Arnott, “might not be deemed an empty threatening, a gallows was erected at the gavel of the hospital for the immediate execution of offenders.”[347]

The persons placed in the Greenside Hospital in 1591 were five male lepers with two of their wives—viz. (to quote the record) “Robert Mardow, James Garvie, Johnn MacRere, James Wricht, and Johnn Wilderspune, lepperis, togidder with Isobel Barcar, spous to the said Robert Mardow, and Janet Galt, spous to the said James Garvie.” Among other regulations enacted in regard to them, it was specially ordained, “That nane of the said personis Lepperis, or their wyffes, depart or resort fra the said hospitall to na oyder pairt, or place, bot sit still thairat, and remayne thairin nicht and day, halyday and wark-day; and that they resave na oyder maner of personis, oyder man or woman, within the said place, bot sic as sall be placit with thame thairin, at command of the said Counsall and Session; and that they keip the dure of the said hospitall fast and clois, fra the dounpassing of the sone to the rysing thairoff, under the payne of hanging.”

“That the said Jonet Galt only cum to the markatts for buying sic viveris as is necessary to the saids personis, and presume to gang to na oyder pairt nor place in her cuming and returning to and frae the said markatts, under the payne aforesaid. Quhilk and other injunctions being red to the personis foresaids, they agreit thairto, and promisit to obey and underly the samyn, under the paynes therabove written. And thairfore, for the better obedience thairof, and for terrefying the said lepperis to transgress the samyn, the said commissioners has thocht meitt and expedient that there be ane _gibbet_ sett up at the gavell of the said hospital; and that the forme and order thairof be insert baith in the buiks of Counsall and Sessioun of this burgh, _ad perpetuam rei memoriam_.”[348]

The tenor of the regulations of the British leper hospitals was probably in few or no other cases so extremely stringent as in the establishment at Greenside. At least, if we may judge by the records of most of those hospitals, the rules of which have been accidentally preserved, the restrictions placed upon the inmates were confessedly great, but certainly by no means so severe either in their degree or in the punishment applied to them, as in those which we have just cited. Besides, in most institutions, the prior, master, or warden of the hospital, exercised a discretionary power in relation to the degree of seclusion of the lepers of their establishment.

Thus, among the rules of the leper hospital of St. Magdalene, Exeter, it was provided that “no brother or sister shall go or pass out of the house beyond the bridge, without the gate of the said hospital, without the license of the Warden or his deputy, upon pain to be put into the stocks, and to have but bread and water for one day.”[349]

Again, among the many rules enacted by the Abbot Michaele for the regulation of the hospital of St. Julian, in the neighbourhood of St. Albans, I may select the following as characteristic illustrations of the point which we are now considering:—

“Let no one presume to transgress the bounds fixed of old, (_metas ab antiquo statutas_), of which one is placed in the south, another in the north, as they still remain in view, except the custor of granges and granaries, to whom the charge is committed to the master.

“Let no brother venture to enter the bake-house or brew-house in any manner, with the exception of the brother to whom the charge is assigned, who, when he enters, may not approach the bread and beer, in touching or handling them in any way; since it is not meet that men of such infirmity should handle those things which are appointed for the common use of men.

“Let no one of the brothers attempt to go beyond the bounds of the hospital, namely, in the direction of the king’s road, without his close cape, in going to church or returning, nor stand or walk about in the said street before or after service (nor, indeed, at any hour of the day before or after dinner); but when divine service is finished, let them enter their hospitals with all haste, unless any one wishes to remain in the church, that he may have leisure for prayer and meditation. In like manner, we command that there be no standing in the corridor, which extends in length before the houses of the brothers in the direction of the king’s road; and that no brother hold conversation there (_teneat ibi parliamentum_) with another; but if any brother wish to hold colloquy with another, let one go to the other in order, as he may wish, through the said corridor, without standing by the way, unless some stranger chance to meet him, with whom he may briefly speak and pass on. But if an honest man and true come there, for the purpose of visiting an infirm brother, let him have access to him, that they may mutually discourse on that which is meet.”[350]

In considering under a previous head the extent of endowment of the British leper hospitals, we have seen that the inmates of many of the poorer institutions depended more or less entirely for their means of subsistence upon the casual alms which they were able to beg from the charitable. In a few favoured cases the lepers were specially authorised to pursue this occupation beyond the district of the hospital. A charter was given by King John to the lepers of St. Lawrence’s Hospital, Bristol, granting them great privileges of this kind. Some of the passages in this charter are curious, as illustrative of the present point. I append a translation of a part of it from the copy of the original document as published by Dugdale:—

“John, by the grace of God, King of England, etc., to the Archbishops, etc., greeting, know ye that we, for the love of God, have granted, and by this charter have confirmed to the lepers near Bristol, a croft beyond the gate of Lacford, on the road to Bath, to dwell there, as the charter which we gave them while we were Count Moreton reasonably proves; know ye also that we have received these lepers into our protection, and therefore desire and command that ye befriend and protect them (_quod eos manu teneatis et protegatis_), and cause no impediment to them, wherever they shall be asking alms in our lands, as our letters-patent which we granted unto them when Count Moreton rationally testifies,” etc.[351]

Grants and liberties, such as the above, were certainly, however, rare. In general the lepers were restricted as to the districts and places in which they presented themselves to seek for alms. We have already seen the Burrow Lawes ordering that they “sall not gang fra dure to dure, but sall sit at the ports of the burgh, and seek alms fra them that passes in and furth;” and the Scottish Parliament of 1427 enacted that they should not be allowed to sit and beg “neither in kirk nor in kirk-yairdis,[352] nor other places within the burrowes, but at their owne hospital, and at the part of the town and other places outwith the burrowes.” But even in exercising this vocation in these stated places, the unfortunate petitioners seem to have been everywhere obliged to use certain precautions, with the view of prohibiting them from diffusing the disease.

In Scotland, and in various other parts of Europe, they were obliged, for this purpose, to use a “clapper” or rattle, in order that the noise created by it might warn the healthy of the presence of an infected fellow-mortal, whilst, at the same time, they carried a “cop” or receiving dish, into which the charitable might drop their alms.[353] Muratori tells us that in Italy the lepers made their presence known at a great distance (_longe positos_) by the noise of a certain piece of wood. Marmotrecti describes more minutely the instrument as composed of wood, and formed of two or three tablets of it, which the leper struck together when seeking bread (_quas concutit leprosus quaerendo panem_).[354]

In the celebrated old Scoto-Saxon poem of Sir Tristrem, composed probably about the middle of the thirteenth century,[355] and valuable (to use the words of an acute critic)[356] “for its pictures of ancient manners” and the customs “of Scotland in the days of Alexander III.,” the hero of the romance is, at one stage of his adventures in Cornwall, represented as assuming for disguise and concealment the appearance of a leper or mesel.[357] In this character the poet provides him with the usual cop and clapper (stanza 80, p. 181).

Ganhardin gan fare,
Into Bretaine away;
And Tristrem duelled thare,
To wite what men wald say;
Coppe and Claper he bare,
Til the fiften day,
As he a mesel ware:
Under walles he lay,
To lithe.

We have already, in the Second Part of the present paper, seen Henryson, in the sixteenth century, describing his leper heroine as arrayed

With cop and clapper like ane Lazarous.

And from the advice proffered by the other lepers to the weeping Cresseid after she is actually removed to the lazar-house, the importance and frequent use of the clapper is sufficiently shown—

I counsall thee mak vertew of ane neid,
To leir to clap thy clapper to and fro,
And leir efter the law of lipper leid.[358]

Into some towns the lepers seem to have been allowed the liberty of entry, provided they used their clappers, to advertise the passing inhabitants of their presence, and thus allowed them to shun the supposed danger of their contact. The magistrates of Glasgow made the carrying of clappers one of the conditions on which they admitted the occasional entrance of the inmates of the Brigend hospital into their city, one of their edicts for October 1610 running thus:—“It is statut and ordanit that the Lipper of the hospital sall gang (walk) only on the calsie (street) syde near the gutter, and sall haif clapperis and ane claith upoun their mouth and face, and sall stand afar of quhill they resaif almous, or answer under the payne of banischeing them from the toun and hospital.”

One of the statutes of the Greenside hospital, Edinburgh, was to the effect—

“That nane of the lepperis cry or ask for alms, utherways then be thair clapper; and that every ane of thame, his day about, sitt at the dore of the said hospitall to that effect, the rest allwayes remaining within the samyn, and that thay distribute equallie amongs thame quhatsoever money they purches be thair said begging, and gif the just declaration thairof to the visitour appoynted everie Setterday, under sic payne as the counsill shall injoyne unto thame.”

LEPERS REGARDED AS DEAD PERSONS BY THE CIVIL LAW.

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.

Previous Next

Comments

Archæological Essays, Vol. 2Chapter VI: Part III: The Etiological History of the Disease (2)

0%19 min left in chapter