Another foundation of Henry II.’s reign was the leper-hospital of St Mary Magdalen at Sponne, outside the walls of Coventry. It was founded by an Earl of Chester, who, having a certain leprous knight in his household, gave in pure alms for the health of his soul and the souls of his ancestors his chapel at Sponne with the site thereof, and half a carucate of land for the maintenance of such lepers as should happen to be in the town of Coventry. There was one priest to celebrate, and with him were wont to be also certain brethren or sisters together with the lepers, praying to God for the good estate of all their benefactors. “But clear it is,” says Dugdale, “that the monks shortly after appropriated it to their own use.” However, they were in time dispossessed by the Crown, to which the hospital belonged until the 14th of Edward IV[178]. One of the most typical as well as earliest foundations was the hospital of the Holy Innocents at Lincoln, endowed by Henry I. We owe our knowledge of its charter to an inquisition of Edward III. It was intended for ten _leprosi_, who were to be of the outcasts (_de ejectibus_) of the city of Lincoln, the presentation to be in the king’s gift or in that of the mayor or other good men of the city, and the administration of it by a master or warden, two chaplains and one clerk. In the space of two centuries from its foundation the character of its inmates had gradually changed. Edward III.’s commissioners found nine poor brethren or sisters in it; only one of them was _leprosus_, and he had obtained admission by a golden key; also the seven poor women had got in _per viam pecuniam_. In Henry VI.’s time provision was made for the possibility of lepers still requiring its shelter--_quod absit_, as the new charter said. In the same reign (end of Henry I.) the hospital of St Peter was founded at Bury St Edmunds by abbot Anselm, for priests and others when they grew old and infirm, leprous or diseased. The other hospital at Bury, St Saviour’s, had no explicit reference to leprosy at all. It was founded by the famous abbot Samson about 1184, for a warden, twelve chaplain-priests, six clerks, twelve poor gentlemen, and twelve poor women. About a hundred years later the poor sisters had to go, in order to make room for old and infirm priests. Sometime before his death in 1139, Thurstan, archbishop of York, founded a hospital at Ripon for the relief of “all the lepers in Richmondshire;” the provision was for eighteen patients, a chaplain and sisters. At an uncertain date afterwards the house was found to contain a master, two or three chaplains and some brethren, who are not styled _leprosi_; and from the inquisition of Edward III. we learn that its original destination had been for the relief as much of the poor as the leprous (_tam pauperum quam leprosorum_), and that there was no leprous person in it at the date of the inquisition.