A life apart: leper hospitals
[October 2010: New
evidence of a late Saxon leper hospital in Winchester.] The first
independent hospitals in England were built by Archbishop Lanfranc soon after
the Norman conquest. He created St John's Hospital for the infirm in Canterbury
and a leper hospital outside it. Soon others were following Lanfranc's lead.
Leper hospitals sprang up on the outskirts of towns all over the country. One
such was the Hospital of St Mary Magdalen at Stourbridge, outside Cambridge.
There we have a building almost frozen in time. Its Romanesque chapel would
surely be recognised by the lepers who prayed there, if they could return
today.
But where did the lepers live? Leprosaria were long thought to be different from other hospitals of the time. Survivals are few and contemporary descriptions even fewer. So historians seized upon the account by Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury, of Lanfranc's foundation at Harbledown.
In a more remote place to the north of the west gate of the city, he built wooden houses on the downward slope of the hill and assigned them for the use of lepers - some for men and separate ones for a company of women.
It was easy to assume that a cluster of timber-built
cottages around a detached chapel was the standard pattern for these
communities. Yet where we have evidence on the ground of leprosaria, it seems
they had communal infirmaries like other medieval hospitals. The hall of the
leper hospital at Taunton was later divided into almshouses, but the original
form is clear enough. At York the lost site of the leper hospital of St
Nicholas has been rediscovered by the York Archaeological Trust. Excavations
revealed a twelfth-century aisled hall.
So were the wooden houses
at Harbledown just temporary structures
erected to meet an urgent need, while plans were afoot for a stone-built
hospital? Could it be that what we see as the nave of the chapel at Stourbridge
was actually the infirmary? That would fit the most common pattern for medieval
hospitals - an infirmary with a chapel at its east end. In recent years
twelfth-century leper chapels at Norwich (now the Lazar House Library) and
Dunwich have been reinterpreted along similar lines.
Most leprosaria were founded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so leprosy must have been widespread then. The growth of towns would help spread the disease. Leprosy thrives on close human contact. Whether or not this was fully understood, the Church acted to isolate lepers. In 1175 the English Church Council ordered that lepers should not live among the healthy. In 1179 the Lateran Council at Rome decreed that leper communities should have their own priests, churches and cemeteries.
This
dreadful disease produced a welter of emotions in the medieval mind. Pity vied
with horror. Those ravaged by leprosy were shunned not only through fear of
contagion, but because they were so hideously disfigured. It was widely seen as
a divine punishment for sin. However, the more compassionate felt that such
suffering must bring lepers closer to God and revered those with the courage to
care for them. It has often been said that other ailments were confused with
leprosy in the Middle Ages. Certainly the disease can be hard to recognise in
the early stages. However, medieval physicians were well versed in the works of
Galen, who gave clear and precise descriptions of leprosy. No doubt mistakes
were made, particularly where physicians were not involved, but there is
evidence of considerable caution in diagnosis. This is understandable.
Committal to a lazar house was a death sentence.
At St Mary Magdalene in Gloucester the rules decreed that the lepers should observe the disciplines of obedience, patience and charity, and hold all their property in common - the principles of monasticism. Meat could be eaten on three days of the week and feast days, but not on other days. Men and women were to be strictly segregated in and outside the house. At Exeter the lepers were expected to live chaste and honest lives and they were not to enter the city without the permission of the warden. Probably life was similar for lepers in other hospitals (such as St Mary Magdalen outside Bath.)
Continue to Sheltering the needy.