The Formation of a
Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Medieval
R. I. Moore (
pp. 45-65
Lepers
“And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean.
All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone, without the camp shall his habitation be.”
Lev. 13: 45-46.
The history of lepers and leprosy is complicated both by the medical uncertainties which still surround the disease and by the difficulty of knowing what medical conditions are described as leprosy when it appears in historical sources from different periods and cultures.
Leprosy is caused by a bacillus called microbacterium leprae which was identified by G. W. A. Hansen in 1874, and is therefore sometimes called Hansen's disease, as it will be from time to time in this section distinguish it from other conditions which may have been called leprosy at different times. But it was almost another century before clinical proof of Hansen's discovery was established by the success infection of a healthy organism in laboratory conditions.[1] Until very recently, therefore, there has been great freedom to ascribe the cause of leprosy to an extraordinary variety of circumstances, from an exceptionally lascivious temperament to an excess of bad fish in the diet. To add to the confusion microbacterium leprae manifests itself clinically in several different ways, some of which are relatively mild and is closely connected with various tubercular conditions The disease is therefore both difficult to diagnose correctly and easy to confuse with others: even today a standard medical textbook warns that a doctor who is not looking for leprosy may easily miss it while one who is is liable to see it everywhere[2]
The next chapter will argue that
these difficulties are central to assessment of the problem which leprosy posed for
twelfth-century
THE LEGACY OF ANTIQUITY
It is quite clear
that the leprosy of Leviticus was not Hansen's disease, which seems to
have originated in
In repenting of his action and founding a hospital
for lepers dedicated to the memory of
Zoticos,
If anyone is afflicted with leprosy and the truth of the matter is recognised by the judge or by the people and the leper is expelled from the civitas or from the house so that he lives alone, he shall not have the right to alienate his property or to give it to anyone because on the day that he is expelled from the home it is as if he had died. Nevertheless while he lives he should be nourished on the income from that which remains.
In a later chapter Rothari provides that a betrothed girl who contracts leprosy (or goes mad, or blind in both eyes) may be cast off without penalty. The man will bear no guilt because `it did not occur on account of his neglect, but on account of her weighty sins and resulting illness."[5]
Rothari's diagnosis confirms what
the circumstances of his reign and legislation would lead us to expect, that we see here the continuation of the tradition of
late antiquity, and not a response to any actual change in disease patterns. Similarly, the
actions of the abbot of
Remiremont a little later in assigning separate cells to leprous nuns and instructing them not to
communicate with the healthy, and of St Othmar
in the next century in constructing a leper house near his monastery, whose inmates he cared for himself,[6] are more
likely to represent respect for the Biblical teaching than the appearance of Hansen's disease
in these relatively central regions of Western Europe. They also confirm,
however, that when the disease did become widely current a framework for
dealing with it was already familiar.
Apart from those
two incidents the legislation of Rothari inaugurated a silence in the western sources which lasted
almost unbroken until the eleventh century.
Indeed the recrudescence of leprosy which
then becomes visible is often attributed (like heresy, syphilis and gothic arches) to the increased contact with
the middle east that came with the
crusades. That will not quite do.[7] William
of Malmesbury, writing early in the
twelfth century, tells the story of a dispute
which arose between the monks of St Martin who carried his body from
almost a year before he was betrayed by his efforts to avoid meeting an important visitor and compelled to resign and
leave the abbey for a place of
seclusion.[9] At a time when the absence of archaeological evidence for Hansen's disease in Western Europe
in these centuries is beginning to assume a negative weight it would be rash to
take either of these references at
face value, but Reginald's story in particularly suggests at least that the idea of the leper was something more than biblical
metaphor.
THE ONSET OF MEDIEVAL LEPROSY
Once more it is in the early years of the eleventh
century that we pie up the trail
again, and towards the end of it that scattered an unrelated episodes begin to form what can be seen as the
beginning of a continuous story thenceforth. In 1014, lepers were among those who were cured by the relics which Bishop Gerard
translated to his church at Arras,[10]
and in 1023 at Orleans, `a district which
had man infirm, especially lepers,' they were given money and kissed in demonstration of his humility by King Robert I. In
1044 Aelfward was compelled by leprosy to give up the bishopric of
There is every possibility that there was more to
incidents like these, which involved the deposition of holders of
authority in turbulent times, than simply nervousness of
leprosy. They do occur, however, on the eve of a most dramatic alteration in the
treatment of lepers, and one which represents a remarkable effort of organization and expenditure - the foundation of hospitals and homes for lepers which took place on a large scale all over
The institutions
represented by these figures include not only large and permanent foundations but houses which may
only have lodged one or two lepers for a few
years, or conversely might have existed for many years before their
presence happened to be noted, for one
reason or another, in a surviving record; the probability of the latter obviously increased with time. The
table is therefore likely to exaggerate the number of leper houses which
existed at any one time, at any rate
in the later part of the period, and to suggest (as the comment on the figures for England and Wales illustrates) that they came into existence
somewhat later than was really the
case, Nevertheless, it shows pretty unequivocally that the movement began around the end of the eleventh and
beginning of the twelfth centuries,
surged to a peak about a hundred years later, and fell away quite quickly in the later part of the thirteenth century. The institutions mentioned for the first
time after 1250 in England and Wales are almost all very small and in remote
regions (several of them in Cornwall), and from this time there is a growing number of indications both from England and from
the continent that there were more
vacant places in leper hospitals than lepers to fill them; the decline became
rapid in the years after the Black Death.
Lastly, it should
be noticed that there is a clear and general explanation for the marked
increase in these foundations in the last quarter of the twelfth century. In 1179
the Third Lateran Council reiterated that lepers should be segregated, and were
forbidden to go to church
or to share churches and cemeteries with the healthy.[12]
It laid down that those who were living in
communities should be provided with chapels, priests and cemeteries,
though this was not to be done in a way which was detrimental to the parochial
rights of existing churches. Many of the donations recorded in the following
decades, often by bishops and chapters, were plainly designed to implement this
decree. In 1186, for example, the bishop and chapter of Arras made a church
available for the use of the inhabitants of the leprosarium of Grand-Val, which
had probably come into existence about twenty years earlier, and the existence
of the leper hospital at Bethune is first signalled by the gift of a chapel to
it by Robert d'Hinges and his wife Sarah in 1194.[13]
Table 1 – Leper hospitals 1st referred
to in the years indicated
1075-1100 1100-25 1125-50 1150-75 1175-1200
1200-25 1225-50 1250-75 1275-1300
Paris Region = the four departments
comprised by modern
a
The figure in brackets represents the number of houses known to have
founded during the quarter century in question as distinct from first reaching
a surviving record of it. Notice that
the proportion which this figure represents declines sharply during the period
as a whole. This may suggest 1) that the
rate of foundation probably reached its peak somewhat earlier than the figures
for the first references would suggest; but 2) that the appearance of leper
houses in England after the Norman Conquest is not simply an illusion produced
by superior recording, since all of those known to have existed by 1100 and 2/3
of those by 1125 were founded by 1075 and 1125.
The more fragmentary records of the pas de Calais, carefully collected
by M Bourgeois convey a similar impression.
Source:
TOWARDS SEGREGATION
The foundation of shelters and
hospitals for lepers on this scale was obviously a great charitable endeavour.
Some historians have been content to view it in that light alone. The
foundations of the AngloNorman period in England, for instance, have recently
been described as a `momentous break-through to institutional care,' part of a
movement in which `the country's rulers enthusiastically embraced challenges in
governmental administration, labor-saving technology and public welfare,' `a
significant triumph of ingenuity over need ... reveal[ing] a whole new era in
social welfare.'[14]
It is no part of my argument to deny the reality of compassionate motives in
these foundations and in many of the other changes which overtook the treatment
of lepers in our period. The stylized preambles of charters of donation, at
most reflecting such current moral platitudes as that lepers needed charity all
the more because segregation intensified their poverty, will not be taken too
seriously as evidence of individual sentiment and motive. But Eadmer's account
of Lanfranc's foundation of St Nicholas, at Harbledown near
Outside the western gate of the city, but further
away from the northern gate, on the
shelving side of the hill, he constructed wooden houses and assigned them to the use of lepers. Here also, as elsewhere, the men were kept separate and
not allowed to associate with the
women. To these lepers he had all that they
needed according to the nature of their disease supplied from his own resources and for this service he
appointed men of such character that,
at any rate in his opinion, nobody would question their skill, their kindliness, or their patience.[15]
However, although
such instances might be multiplied easily enough, it remains the case that these
foundations took place in a context of rising hostility to lepers,
and a growing conviction that they should be segregated from the community at
large. How far the foundations should in themselves be regarded as evidence of
these sentiments is a more difficult question. The establishment of ; I hospital did not necessarily mean that segregation was being introduced for the first time. The hospital at St
Omer, for instance was established
in 1106 on land which had been reserved for the used of lepers since the time of Count Robert I of
It has been
observed with justice that since the strongest sanction which the statutes of most
thirteenth-century leper houses provided against
persistent infringement of the rules was expulsion, segregation can hardly
have been the principal object of the foundations. Conversely, one of the main sources of benefaction
was the lepers themselves, who gained admission (or the promise of
admission) to the hospitals in that way.
This, however, only means that life in a leper hospital was better than the alternative, which is scarcely a contentious point. The image of the wandering
leper with his bell or clapper to
warn of his approach and the begging bowl which none but he would touch is one of the most familiar and
painful that the medieval world has to
offer, and life in the leper villages whose existence is abundantly testified by twelfth-century place-names can hardly
have been much better.[17]
Nor were the lepers alone in their misery.
Around 1200 the rules of the general hospital of St Jean at Angers prohibited the admission of lepers,
sufferers from ergotism (St Antony's
fire, brought on by eating grain infected by fungus), paralytics, those who had been mutilated in
punishment for theft, the violent, and
children too young to attend to their own needs. As M. Bienvenu observes, we know that the lepers had
somewhere else to go, but we know
nothing about the rest.[18]
In other words, the anxiety of the
leper to be admitted to the lazar house, or not to be expelled from it, and the degree of charitable
achievement which its foundation and
maintenance represented, must be very largely a measure both of the rigour with which segregation was being insisted on and the horrors which attended it.
It is extremely
difficult to estimate how generally or how strictly segregation was
enforced in the high Middle Ages. We have already met a small group
of people who as lepers were excluded from office in the tenth and
eleventh centuries. To it might be added famous examples of royal and noble lepers who were not, like
Baldwin, the leper king of Jerusalem
(1174-85) or Constance of Brittany (d. 1201), but probably not Robert
the Bruce or King Henry IV. The powerful were
both more vulnerable to political hostility and more able to secure exemption from the laws that governed others,
according to circumstance, than
ordinary people, whose situation is hard to discern.
The principle of segregation had
remained alive since the time of Rothari, and
provided the inhabitant of
These few
incidents will show how difficult it is to guess from the context of these
occasional anecdotes about lepers in the eleventh century sources,
which are in any case by no means numerous, what their circumstances were. But it
is clear that segregation was not then universal, and did not become so for some
time. The charter by which Bonhomme
the leper gave land to St Aubin at Angers in 11231 shows that he was
living in freedom; in the same area towards the end of the century Pierre Manceau seems to have been under more pressure when he obtained his lord's permission to
give himself and his goods to an
almonry as an alternative to entering a leper hospital. The Life of
St Steven of Obazine tells of a leper who shared a house with a cripple at Pleaux in the
On the other
hand, there are undoubted signs of increasing nervousness of the contagion of
leprosy, and the rapidity with which it could spread, from the beginning of the
twelfth century. Some of the clearest came from the
Waleran's foundation exhibits another
characteristic which may suggest that the
establishment of leper houses responded in some degree to a perceived collective need, in the provision that a stated number of lepers would be supported by regular
collections of money and food from
the inhabitants of Pont Audemer. If they failed to maintain their contributions
the count would retaliate by reserving to
himself the right to nominate inmates.[24]
The construction of a chapel dedicated to St
Lazarus for the use of lepers at
Some time
between 1146 and 1169 Arnulf of Markene,
lord of Ardres near Calais, founded a leper house at Lostebarne, and hi neighbour Arnulf
of Guines (d. 1169), touched by his
example and b `pity for the poor of Christ, deprived of the use of their
limbs an tainted by leprosy,' founded another nearby, at Spelleke. The latter was given a
chapel and surrounded by a wall in the time of ii founder's son,
Baldwin (d. 1205), and between 1194 and 1203 it was decided that `throughout
the lands of Guines women tainted b leprosy would be taken to Lostebarne, where they would be fed
fd the remainder of their lives, and men to
Spelleke, where calling dai on death
in their hoarse voices they would eat their bread wretchedness until their final breath.'[27]
It does not seem unduely fanciful to see over the half-century or so
in which those events transpired a transition from a relatively
compassionate to a relatives stern attitude to the lepers and a greater
degree of coercion in then confinement. If
so it is consistent with such indications as are evident from elsewhere in north-western
THE LIVING DEAD
The reinforcement of the law of
segregation which was provided by Lateran
III was most cruelly expressed in the ritual of separation from the community, modelled on the rite for the
dead, which it ordained, and of
which it provided a number of models. At Amiensi and elsewhere, the leper was required to stand in an open grave while the ritual was read by the priest; in other places
it sufficed to throw a few spadefuls
of earth over his head by way of conclusion. Then the priest would transfer to the vernacular to spell
out in circumstantial detail the
implication of what had occurred:
I forbid you
ever to enter the church or monastery, fair, mill, market-place or company
of persons ... ever to leave your house without your
leper's costume . . . to wash your hands or anything about you in the stream or fountain. I
forbid you to enter a tavern ...
I forbid you, if you go on the road and you meet some person who speaks to you, to fail to
put yourself downwind before you
answer ... I forbid you to go in a narrow
lane so that if you should meet
anyone he might catch the affliction
from you ... I forbid you ever to
touch children or give them
anything. I forbid you to eat or drink from any dishes but your own. I forbid
you to eat or drink in company, unless with lepers.[28]
During the thirteenth century these
injunctions were translated into a variety of local and municipal regulations
for the control and isolation of lepers,
such as those which forbade them to walk the streets of London in 1200, Paris and Sens in 1202, Exeter in 1244, whose ruthless though spasmodic enforcement is
regularly attested by tales of the
expulsion of lepers from towns and cities, individually and en
masse, which occur regularly in the
following centuries. They were
paralleled by detailed regulations for the conduct of the privileged among them, the inhabitants of leper
houses, which separated the sexes,
laid down minute instructions for their daily behaviour, forbade them the amusements of drink, gambling, chess and so forth.[29]
The most fearful
dimension of the leper's death to the world, however, was the loss which it
carried of worldly protection and property. There was a good deal of
variation in its extent.[30] In
Leprosy was now
in retreat. In 1342 the property of the leper house at Ripon was
assigned to the poor after a royal inquisition ascertained that there were
no longer lepers to use it, and all over Europe similar process, culminating in
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reversed the tide of donation which we have traced
in the the twelfth and thirteenth.[31]
But the image of the leper as the me repellent, the most dangerous and most desolate of
creature representing the last degree of human degradation, which though
certainly not devised in those centuries
was then given precise social and
legal form, remained so firmly established that the terror lid being found to suffer from the disease has
remained one of the most powerful obstacles to its control and treatment up to
the present day.
The Common Enemy
For Christians
the living death of leprosy was an object of admiration and even envy, as
well as terror. The leper had been granted the special grace of entering upon
payment for his sins in this life, and could therefore look forward to earlier
redemption in the next. Orderic Vitalis
tells of a monk who was so overcome by the extent of his sins that he
prayed, successfully, to be afflicted by leprosy, and the biographer of
Yvette of Huy says that she yearned for the disease. Conversely, the
ninth-century rule of St Grimlaicus laid down that when a hermit was
immured in his cell, never to leave it again, the office for the
dead was to be read over him, as Lateran III would prescribe for the leper.[32]
Like hermits and monks lepers were often called pauperes Christi, and the strict rules
governing the conduct of leper houses were
in part a reflection of the idea that lepers constituted a quasi-religious order. It was this ambivalance about their condition, as well as its physically
revolting character, that lent extra merit
to the practice of washing the sores and kissing the lesions of lepers which during this period became a
general, almost a fashionable,
religious exercise. One of its early enthusiasts was Henry I's wife Matilda, whose devotion on one occasion
prompted a courtier to ask what the
king's feelings would be if he knew where last her lips had been.[33]
The idea of
leprosy as a punishment for sin is by no means exclusively Christian. Among
Hindus in the Himalaya region today it is held to be the result of offences
in a past incarnation so vile that punishment for them will be visited not
only on the leper but on any who approach him, and the Zande of the
The association
with sexual misconduct was especially strong Odo of Beaumont was segregated as
a leper after contracting gonorrhea in the brothels he enjoyed, as was another
Norman knight who sought the help of St Edmund at Bury.[35] During
the papal revolution in the eleventh-century simoniacs,
representing the great threat of lay
control against which the church was struggling, we often described as lepers.
One sin above all was identified with leprosy,
and had been sine patristic times:
You too are a leper, scarred by heresy, excluded from communion by the judgment of the priest, according to the law, bare-headed, with ragged clothing, your body covered by an infected and filthy garment. It befits you to shout unceasingly that you are a leper, a heretic and unclean, and must live alone outside the camp, that is outside the church.[36]
These words were
addressed to the great heretical preacher, Henry of Lausanne, by a
monk named William, who engaged him in debate somewhere in the
The analogy
between heresy and leprosy is used with great regularity and in great detail by
twelfth-century writers. Heresy spreads like leprosy, running far and
wide, infecting the limbs of Christ as it goes. When the Count of Toulouse asked the
pope for help against the Cathars who were establishing themselves in the city in 1177 he said that `the putrid tabes of
heresy' prevailed there. The tabes was
the sore of the leper and, according to Isidore, when it became putrid death was inevitable. Heresy, like
leprosy, was spread by the poisoned
breath of its carrier, which infested the air and was thus enabled to attack the vitals of those who
breathed it, but was also and more efficiently transmitted as a virus - that is, in seminal fluid. Against so insidious an infection nothing less
than fire was effective; when the
leper died the hut in which he had lived and all his belongings were burned. When heretics were
discovered in England in 1163 they
were driven from the camp - expelled
from Oxford, where they were tried -
and by royal command refused food and shelter
so that they soon perished in the winter's cold; the hut in which they had lived was dragged outside the town
and burned, and, said William of
Newburgh, whose account is suffused by a sustained use of the metaphor, the result of this treatment
was that the disease did not appear
in England again.
If leprosy and heresy were the same disease it was to be expected that their carriers should have the same characteristics. The leper's tattered and filthy clothing, staring eyes and hoarse voice are also part of the standard depiction of the wandering preacher and the wandering heretic - all, as it were, pauperes Christi, or claiming to be. So was lasciviousness and the means to gratify it. Leprosy was believed to be sexually transmitted and inherited, to increase the sexual appetite and to cause swelling in the genitals. Hence the separation of the sexes in the leper hospitals and the strong emphasis in thirteenth-century municipal legislation on banning lepers from brothels; and hence the horror of Isolde's fate in the versions Tristan by Beroul (c. 1160-70) and Eilhart von Oberge (c. 1170-80) where she is punished for her adultery by being handed over to band of lepers. `I have here a hundred companions,' says their leader in Beroul, `Give Isolde to us and she will be held in common. Never will a woman have worse end.'[37] The metaphor of seduction w freely used in association with heresy, and sexual libertinism ascribed as a matter of course to heretics and their followers. `Women an young boys - for he used both sexes in his lechery - became a excited by the lasciviousness of the man that they testified publicly to his extraordinary virility,' according to the Le Mans chronicler’s account of how Henry of Lausanne established his sway over the people of that city.[38]
By the time those words were
written the suggestion that heretics met by night for secret orgies in which they were visited
by the Devil and had
intercourse with him had already been revived from the writings of the fathers (where
it had been particularly associated with the Manichees) to assist in denouncing the clerks of
Orleans and th followers
of Clementius of Bucy, interrogated by Guibert of Nogern in 1114. This became the coven
upon which the great witch craze of the later middle ages was founded. We have already
seen how anti-semitism contributed to
its formation in the elaboration of the idea also pioneered by Guibert - that
there was a special link between the Devil
and the Jews, sexually bonded and characterized by the seduction of Christians into the Devil's service
by means of Jewish wiles. Jews were also held to resemble heretics and
lepers in bein associated with filth, stench and putrefaction, in exceptional
sexual voracity and endowment, and in the
menace which they presented in consequence
to the wives and children of honest Christians. A conspiracy between Jews and lepers was alleged to
have poisoned the wells of