Page:The histories of Launceston and Dunheved, in the county of Cornwall.djvu/57

ST. LEONARD'S HOSPITAL. 41 chaplain, and valuable lands, on which they certainly erected a hospital, whose history we shall shortly attempt to trace. Briend Fitz Count may have assisted the lepers of Gillemartin in building their chapel on that land a hundred years before Robert Fissacre and his Convent, with the assent of Richard Earl of Cornwall, promulgated their Charter. We have ventured on these observations to show that the tradition, which even the careful Dr. Oliver adopts, of the site of a leper hospital having been transferred from Launceston to Gillemartin, may admit of some doubt. " He is a leprous man . . . his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean. ... He shall dwell alone ; without the camp shall his habitation be." (Lev. xiii. 44.) The terrible Eastern scourge of leprosy is generally sup- posed to have been brought into Europe by the Crusaders. The Crusades began in 1096, and ended in 1291. Richard, Earl of Cornwall, as is well known, took a very prominent part in this " Holy War," and had himself ransomed Jeru- salem in the year 1241. We are, therefore, disposed to think him rather the moving cause than a bare assentient to Prior Robert's charter. Almost immediately after the foundation of St. Leonard's Hospital, this same Earl, by his own charter, directed the "free burgesses of Dun- heved " to pay, of his alms, one hundred shillings yearly " to the Lepers of St. Leonard at Launceston." It is true that the Church had, in 1 179, issued its bene- volent permission to lepers to erect churches and inclose cemeteries for themselves, and to have their own priests. W T e find among the proceedings of the Lateran Council, held in that year under Pope Alexander III. at Rome, the following decree : "Whereas the Apostle says, that greater honour is to be paid to the weaker members, on the con-