The instances which have been detailed in the last few pages, perhaps not without risk of tediousness, have not been chosen to give a colour to the view of medieval leprosy; they are a fair sample of the whole, and they include nearly all those leper-hospitals of which the charters or other authentic records are known[185]. It is possible by using every verbal reference to leprosy that may be found in connexion with all the five hundred or more medieval English hospitals in Bishop Tanner’s _Notitia Monastica_ or in Dugdale’s _Monasticon_, to make out a list of over a hundred leper-hospitals of one kind or another. But there are probably not thirty of them for which the special destination of the charity is known from charters or inquisitions; and even these, as we have seen, were not all purely for lepers or even mainly for lepers. As to the rest of the list of one hundred, the connexion with leprosy is of the vaguest kind. Thus, four out of the five hospitals in Cornwall are called lazar-houses or leper-hospitals, but they were so called merely on the authority of antiquaries subsequent to the sixteenth century. The same criticism applies almost equally to the eight so-called leper-hospitals, out of a total of fourteen medieval hospitals of all kinds, in Devonshire. It is clear that “lazar-house” became an even more widely generic term than the terms _lepra_ and _leprosus_ themselves[186]. Thus our doubts as to the amount of true leprosy that once existed in England, and was provided for in the access of chivalrous sentiment that came upon Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tend to multiply in a compound ratio. We doubt whether many of the so-called leper-houses or lazar-houses in the list of one hundred, more or less, that may be compiled from the _Monasticon_, were not ordinary refuges for the sick and infirm poor, like the three or four hundred other religious charities of the country. We know that, in some instances of leper-hospitals with authentic charters, the provision for the leprous was in the proportion of one to three or four of non-leprous inmates. We know that as early as the end of the thirteenth century the _leprosi_ were disappearing or getting displaced even from hospitals where the intentions of the founder were explicit. And lastly we doubt the homogeneity of the disease called _lepra_ and of the class called _leprosi_.