The History of London by Walter Besant (best classic books TXT) 📕

the dying. The food is scanty: the appliances are rude: there is small hope of recovery: yet to die in hospital tended and consoled instead of in the hut where life has been passed is something for which to be grateful.

Consider into how great, how noble a Foundation the little hospital of Rahere has grown. The modern hospital contains 676 beds: it receives about 150,000 patients every year, of whom 7,000 are inpatients, 18,000 out patients, and 130,000 casuals. The eight brethren have become 30 physicians and surgeons besides the assistants called clinical clerks and dressers. The four sisters are now 159 sisters and nurses. There is a noble school of medicine: there are museums, libraries, lecture rooms, and there is a residential college for medical students: there is a convalescent hospital in the country. No hospital in the world has a larger or a more noble record than this of St. Bartholomew. And it all sprang from the resolution of one man, who started a humble house for the reception of the sick in a poor and despised place outside the City wall, but near to the Shambles where one could beg for broken victuals and for the pieces of meat that the butchers could not sell. Thus out of one good deed, apparently of small importance, has grown a never-ending stream of refreshment and healing. It has lasted for 700 years already: there seems no reason why it should ever stop.



21. THE TERROR OF LEPROSY.

One mile outside the City walls, on the west, stood for four hundred years the Hospital of St. Giles in the Fields.

Here was a Lazar House, i.e. a Hospital for Lepers. It was founded by Maud, Queen of Henry I. It was dedicated to St. Giles because this saint was considered the protector of cripples. Hence the name Cripplegate, which really means the Little Gate, was applied to the church of St. Giles, and supposed to mean the gate near the church dedicated to the Patron Saint of Cripples. A common result of leprosy was to make the sufferer lame and crippled. Hence the connection. Generally, however, Lazarus, whom our Lord raised from the dead, was esteemed the Saint of Lepers, whence a Leper's Hospital was always called a Lazar House.

In the middle ages the mysterious disease called leprosy was an ever present terror. Other plagues appeared at intervals and disappeared. Leprosy remained. It never left the land. It struck the King on his Throne, the Bishop in his Cathedral, the Abbess in her Nunnery, the soldier in camp, the merchant in his counting house, the sailor at sea. No class could escape it. Robert Bruce died of it; Orivalle, Bishop of London, died of it; Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, died of it. To this day it prevails in India, at the Cape, in the Pacific Islands, while there are occasional cases found in our own hospitals. The disease was incurable: the man, woman, or child, attacked by it would surely and slowly die of it. The leper was unclean: he was thrust out of the town: he had to live apart, or congregated in hospitals with other wretches similarly afflicted: if he walked abroad he wore a grey gown for distinction and carried a clapper as he went along, crying 'Unclean, Unclean,' so that the people might stand aside and not so much as touch his garments. And since he could not work with his hands, he was permitted to carry into the market a 'clap dish,' that is to say, a bowl or basin in which to receive food and alms.[2]

[2] Lacroix, _Science_, p. 146.

Leprosy is supposed to have had its origin in Egypt: the laws laid down in the Book of Leviticus for the separation of lepers are stringent and precise: it was believed, partly, no doubt, on account of these statutes in the Book of the Jewish Law, that the disease was brought into Western Europe by the Crusaders; but this was erroneous, because it was in this country before the Crusaders. Thus the Palace of St. James stands upon the site of a lazar house founded before the Conquest for fourteen leprous maidens.

This is not the place to describe the symptoms and the results of this dreadful disease. Suffice it to say that the skin thickens, is discoloured and ulcerates: that the limbs swell: that the fingers and toes drop off: that the voice sinks to a whisper: and that the sufferer's mind is weakened by his malady.

The fearful scourge was so prevalent that there was not a town, hardly a village, in any country of Europe which had not, in those centuries, its lepers and its lazar house, great or small. Every effort was made to isolate them: they were not allowed to worship with the rest of the people: they were provided with a separate building or chapel where, through a hole in the wall, they could look on at the performance of mass. And in addition, as you have seen, they lived apart and took their food apart.

As for their houses--the lazar houses--the chief of them all, the place where Abbot possessed some kind of authority over the others, was one built in a village near Melton Mowbray called Burton Lazars. The Hospital of St. Giles, for instance, became shortly after its foundation a 'cell,' or dependency, of this House.

Whatever the cause of this malady, whether it be contagious, i.e. communicated by touch; or infectious, that is, communicated by breathing the same air; or hereditary; it is quite certain that it was greatly aggravated by the habits of the time. Bad food, uncleanly habits, bad air, all contributed to the spread of leprosy. Especially it has been considered that the long fasts during which meat was prohibited encouraged the disease: not because abstinence from meat is in itself a bad thing, but because the people had to eat fish imperfectly cured or kept too long, and unwholesome. Fresh-water fish could not be procured in sufficient quantities and it was impossible to convey fish from the sea more than a certain distance inland.

The dreadful appearance of the lepers, their horrible sufferings, produced loathing more than pity. People were horror stricken at the sight of them: they drove them out of their sight: they punished them cruelly if they broke the rules of separation: they imprisoned any citizen who should harbour a leper: they kept bailiffs at the City gates to keep them from entering. Fourteen of these afflicted persons were required to be maintained in accordance with Queen Maud's Foundation by the Hospital of St. Giles: there was also a lazar house in the Old Kent Road, Southwark: one between Mile End and Bow: one at Kingsland between Shoreditch and Stoke Newington: one at Knightsbridge, west of Charing Cross, and one at Holloway.

On the Dissolution of the Monasteries, all these lazar houses were suppressed. Now, since we hear very little more about lepers, and since no new lazar houses were built, and since the prohibitions to enter churches, towns, &c., are no more renewed, it is tolerably certain that leprosy by the middle of the sixteenth century had practically disappeared. The above will show, however, how great and terrible a thing it was between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries.



22. THE TERROR OF FAMINE.

Suppose that all the ocean traffic were stopped; that there was no communication, or exchange of commodities, between our country and another; suppose that the people of this island depended entirely on their own harvests and their own cattle for their support. You would then easily understand how a single bad year might produce scarcity of food, and a very bad year might produce a famine. That was our condition down to the fifteenth century. Some corn may have been brought over from Prussia or from Hamburg; but there was no regular supply; the country depended on its own harvests. Therefore, the fear of a famine--or of scarcity--was ever present to the people.

Many of these famines are on record. In the year 990 a famine raged over the whole of England; in 1126 there was a terrible scarcity. Wheat was sold at 6_s._ a horseload. Now, in the twelfth century a shilling meant more than a pound of our money, in purchasing power. It is not stated how much constituted a horseload. It would probably mean the filling of the two baskets hanging on either side of the packhorse. In 1257, after a wet season and a bad harvest, wheat rose to 24_s._ a quarter, a price which prohibited all but the richest from eating wheaten bread. It is said that 20,000 perished of starvation. In 1316, after the same cause, wheat became so scarce that its price rose to 4_l._ a quarter. So great was the distress this year, that great nobles had to dismiss their retainers; the roads in the country were crowded with robbers. Robberies were openly committed in the streets for the sake of food: in the prisons the unfortunate criminals, left to starve, murdered and devoured each other. The people ate carrion and dead dogs. In 1335 there was another time of scarcity and suffering; in 1439, the distress was so great that the people made bread of fern roots and ivy berries. Then, for the first time, we read of the famine being assuaged by the arrival of rye from Prussia. In 1527 a threatened famine was checked by the Hanseatic merchants who gave, or sold, a hundred quarters of wheat to the City and sent three ships to Dantzig for more. In 1593 and in 1597 wheat rose to an enormous price. The last time of scarcity was during the long war with France, which lasted, from 1792 to 1815, nearly a quarter of a century. We were then compelled to depend almost entirely upon our own harvests. Wheat went up as high as 103_s._ a quarter.

At no time did the poorer classes depend much upon wheat. Rye and oats made the bread of the working people. But bad harvests affected rye and oats as much as wheat.

The famine prices of wheat may be explained by the following facts. In the reign of Henry I., at ordinary prices, bread enough for one meal for 100 men could be bought for a shilling and a whole sheep cost fourpence. In the next century, when wheat was at 6_s._ a quarter, a farthing loaf was to weigh 24 oz. whole meal and 16 oz. white. When it was at 1_s._ 6_d._ a quarter the farthing loaf was to weigh 96 oz. whole grain and 64 oz. white. The quartern loaf of 4 lb. or 64 oz. now costs 5_d._, wheat being very cheap. So that prices in time of plenty being supposed the same, money was worth twenty times in that century as much as it is worth now. In the reign of Edward I. wheat went down to 1_s._ a quarter.

The food of the craftsmen in London was, in ordinary times, plentiful and cheap. The City, as we have seen, was always remarkable for the great abundance of provision which was brought there. And there is every reason to believe that while the rustic fared poorly and was underfed, the craftsman of the towns always enjoyed good food and enough of it. This made a time of scarcity hard to bear for one who habitually lived well.

Once or twice an attempt was made to provide the City with granaries in case of famine. Thus the origin of Leadenhall, the great City market, was the erecting of a public granary here by Sir Simon Eyre in 1419. Attached to the Hall, after the manner of the time, was a chapel dedicated to the