Note 218 — PART III.
Reading edition
Ropemakers were long treated and shunned as lepers, because their trade was one which at an early part of the middle ages was principally followed by pilgrims and crusaders who had returned in a leprous condition from the East.—Ogée’s Histoire de Bretagne. Hensler’s Abendländischen Aufsatze, 1790, p. 212.