ve seen, they lived apart and took their
food apart.

As for their houses--the lazar houses--the chief of them all, the place
where Abbot possessed some kind of authority over the others, was one
built in a village near Melton Mowbray called Burton Lazars. The
Hospital of St. Giles, for instance, became shortly after its foundation
a 'cell,' or dependency, of this House.

Whatever the cause of this malady, whether it be contagious, i.e.
communicated by touch; or infectious, that is, communicated by breathing
the same air; or hereditary; it is quite certain that it was greatly
aggravated by the habits of the time. Bad food, uncleanly habits, bad
air, all contributed to the spread of leprosy. Especially it has been
considered that the long fasts during which meat was prohibited
encouraged the disease: not because abstinence from meat is in itself a
bad thing, but because the people had to eat fish imperfectly cured or
kept too long, and unwholesome. Fresh-water fish could not be procured
in sufficient quantities and it was impossible to convey fish from the
sea more than a certain distance inland.

[Illustration: THE LEPERS BEGGING.]

The dreadful appearance of the lepers, their horrible sufferings,
produced loathing more than pity. People were horror stricken at the
sight of them: they drove them out of their sight: they punished them
cruelly if they broke the rules of separation: they imprisoned any
citizen who should harbour a leper: they kept bailiffs at the City gates
to keep them from entering. Fourteen of these afflicted persons were
required to be maintained in accordance with Queen Maud's Foundation by
the Hospital of St. Giles: there was also a lazar house in the Old Kent
Road, Southwark: one between Mile End and Bow: one at Kingsland between
Shoreditch and Stoke Newington: one at Knightsbridge, west of Charing
Cross, and one at Holloway.

On the Dissolution of the Monasteries, all these lazar houses were
suppressed. Now, since we hear very little more about lepers, and since
no new lazar houses were built, and since the prohibitions to enter
churches, towns, &c., are no more renewed, it is tolerably certain that
leprosy by the middle of the sixteenth century had practically
disappeared. The above will show, however, how great and terrible a
thing it was between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries.

22. THE TERROR OF FAMINE.

Suppose that all the ocean traffic were stopped; that there was no
c