a new complication. He had been made Archbishop of York and overlord
of Durham. Black William's sister Richenda seized this archbishop and
imprisoned him: and then Hugh joined the anti-Longchamp party, sided
actively with John and with Gerard de Camville, who was beseiged in
Lincoln. Hugh excommunicated Richenda. His influence turned the scale
against Longchamp.

It would require a treatise in itself to unfold all the tangled story of
the first half of Richard's reign till the king returned to England
after war, prison, and heavy ransom, in March 1194. Practically, at this
date the Bishop of Lincoln disappears as much as possible from political
life; or at least tried to do so. He was building the cathedral and
doing his duty as bishop, befriending the needy and the outcast, and
showing himself the enemy of wrong-doers. Now we hear of him clipping
the love locks of his young sacristan Martin, who straightway became a
monk; now following in the steps of great St. Martin by some passionate
acts of pity, and now retiring mostly in harvest time (when all hands
are busy and all hearts are out of reach) to his beloved Witham for a
month's retreat.

Of course all devout people in the Middle Ages had an especial care for
lepers because of that most fortunate mistranslation in Isaiah liii. 4.
which we render "we did esteem Him stricken," but which the Vulgate
renders _putavimus eum quasi leprosum_: we did esteem Him as it were a
leper. Hence service to lepers was especially part of service to Christ.
At Maiden Bradley, in Somerset, was a colony of leprous sisters; and at
Witham Church a leper window looked towards their house. At Lincoln{8}
was the Hospital of the Holy Innocents called La Malandrie. It was
founded by St. Remigius, the Norman cathedral builder, with thirteen
marks revenue and further endowed by Henry I. and Henry II. The
condition of all these leper outcasts was more than miserable. The
disease was divided into the breeding, full and shipwreck periods. When
the first was detected the patient was led to church, clothed in black,
Mass and Matins for the dead were said over him, earth was thrown upon
his foot, and then he was taken to a hovel on waste land where he was to
be buried at the last. Here he found a parti-coloured robe, a coat, two
shirts, a rattle, knife, staff, copper girdle, bed, table, and lamp, a
chair, chest, pail, cask and funnel, and this was his portion for ever.
He was not before 1179 allowed