greatly increased income it went
to the Master after the manner common to all the old charities. During
the latter half of the sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth
century St. Katherine's by the Tower consisted of a beautiful old
church standing with its buildings clustered round it--a Master's
house, rich in carved and ancient wood-work, with its gardens and
orchards; its houses for the Brothers, Sisters, and Bedeswomen, each
of whom continued to receive the same salary as that ordained by Queen
Eleanor. Service was held in the church for the inhabitants of the
Precinct, but the Hospital was wholly secular. The Master devoured by
far the greater part of the revenue, and the alms-people--Brothers,
Sisters, and Bedeswomen--had no duties to perform of any kind.

In the year 1698 this, the third chapter in the life of the Hospital,
was closed. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Somers, held in that year a
Visitation of the Hospital, the result of which is interesting,
because it shows, first, a lingering of the old ecclesiastical
traditions, and, next, the sense that something useful ought to be
done with the income of the Hospital. It was therefore ordered in the
new regulations provided by the Chancellor that the Brothers should be
in Holy Orders, and that a school of thirty-five boys and fifteen
girls should be maintained by the Hospital. It does not appear that
any duties were expected of the Brothers. Like the Fellows of colleges
at Oxford and Cambridge, they were all to be in priests' orders, and
for exactly the same reason, because at the original foundations of
the colleges, as well as of the Hospital, the Fellows were all
priests. As for the Master, he remained a layman. This new order of
things, therefore, raised the position of the Brothers, and gave a new
dignity to the Hospital; further, the School as well as the Bedeswomen
defined its position as a charity. It still fell far, very far, short
of what it might have done, but it was not between the years 1698 and
1825 quite so useless as it had been. A plan of the Precinct, with
drawings of the church, within and without, and of the monuments in
the church, may be found in Lysons. The obscurity of the Hospital, and
the neglect into which it fell during the last century, are shown by
the small attention paid to it in the books on London of the last
century, and the early years of the present century. Thus, in
Harrison's 'History of London,' though nearly every chur