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 ha