THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF OLD PLYMOUTH. 345 
carious tenure, rose wooden sheds, rudely plastered or whitewashed, 
on the edge of the town ditch, sheltering the last new settlers that 
had flocked into the town for occupation or protection — a mixed race, 
of whom little enquiry was made ; tolerated, not acknowledged — of 
all blood, all climates, all religions, permitted to live or die, as it 
pleased God or themselves, provided only that they yielded due 
obedience to the proper civic authorities. Here the leprosy and 
the plague were certain to enter first ; here infection did its worst. 
In the higher city there might be parish churches and schools ; a 
skilful leech to look after the welfare, bodily and spiritual, of the 
inhabitants. In defect of these, the different guilds established in 
the city proper provided in some. measure for the instruction and 
comfort of the master and his apprentices. The city ponds and 
rivulets yielded fresh water to those who were willing to fetch it ; 
the chaplain of the guild, its church or chapel, provided for the 
common worship and spiritual welfare of its members ; the common 
purse of the guild furnished relief against sudden misfortune, and 
paid for the funeral obsequies and masses of the defunct brother. 
But for those who did not belong to the guilds, who resided in the 
suburbs, so to speak, and increased daily and rapidly in the un- 
settled condition of the country, or as the oppression, or harshness, 
or stern justice of the feudal baron made the town a more safe and 
desirable abiding place than the country, — for these there were no 
such advantages. Imagination can only conceive their condition ; 
history is silent."* 1 
"Leprosy, fostered by bad diet, wretched lodging, and squalid 
clothing, was a bitter scourge to the town population. The disease 
imported from the East had broken out in the 13th century with 
unusual violence ; loathsome and infectious in the highest degree, 
it spared none. It appeared equally without warning in the king's 
court or council chamber, and in the degraded purlieus of the city. 
Once a leper always a leper. The medical skill of that age knew 
no cure ; political economy could devise no precautions — none, ex- 
cept the most necessary, as the most cruel, the dismemberment of 
the infected limb. The leper was driven from home and occupa- 
tion, from family and township ; he was disqualified from approach- 
ing house or city, deprived of all civil rights, banished from the 
Church. The political economist of the 13th century had skill 
enough to accomplish this much, no more : leprosy, like pauperism, 
* " Mon. Fran." p. 8. 
2 L 
