Note 51 — PART I.

In the index to Tanner’s Notitia Monastica (Nasmith’s folio edition), 509 hospitals, leper-houses, and Maisons dieu are referred to as having existed in England previously to the Act for their suppression by Henry VIII. (See a table in Taylor’s Index Monasticus, p. xxv.) We have no collection of data on which to form any similar general calculation for Scotland. In Chalmers Caledonia (vol. ii. p. 347) nine hospitals are stated to have existed in the county of Berwick alone. In the Scottish Parliament of 1424, an Act was passed regarding the hospitals “uphaldane to pure folks and seik” (poor people and sick) throughout the kingdom, and empowering the chancellor and bishops to “reduce and reforme tham to the effec of thair first fundacione” (see Thomson’s edition of the Scotch Acts of Parliament, vol. ii. p. 7). Some of the hospitals in these early times were founded for the reception of the sick and infirm, others for lepers, many for the poor and aged, and a considerable number for the gratuitous entertainment of pilgrims and travellers. Among the whole long English list I have only found four endowed as lunatic asylums. A few were instituted for purposes which sound strangely in the ears of the present generation. Thus the hospital of Flixton, or Carman’s Spittle, in the parish of Folketon, Yorkshire, was founded in the time of King Athelstane, to preserve travellers from being devoured by the wolves and other voracious and forest beasts of the districts (“pro conservatione populi inde transeuntis, ne populus ille per lupos et alias bestias voraces et sylvestres, inibi existentes, devoretur”). See the renewed charter of Henry VI. in the Monasticon Anglicanum, tom. ii. p. 372.