It will have been inferred, from many particulars given, that the segregation of lepers in the Middle Ages was far from complete, and that many ministered to them without fear and without risk. The same hospital received both _leprosi_ and others, the hospitals were served by staffs of chaplains, clerks and sometimes women attendants; and yet nothing is anywhere said of contagion being feared or of the disease spreading by contagion. The experience of these medieval hospitals was doubtless the same as in the West Indies and other parts of the world in our own day. It is true that the medical writers pronounce the disease to be contagious, _ut docet Avicenna_; but the public would seem to have been unaware of that, and they certainly lost nothing by their ignorance of the medical dogma, which, in the text-books, is merely the result of a concatenation of verbalist arguments. At the same time it is clear that there was a certain amount of segregation of the leprous. The inmates of the hospital at Lincoln are significantly described as “de ejectibus” of the city. The third Lateran Council based one of its decrees upon what must have been a common experience, namely, that lepers were unable to mix freely with others, and that they were objected to in the same church, and even as corpses in the same churchyard. There are some particular indications of that feeling to be gathered from the chroniclers. One of the most remarkable histories is that of a high ecclesiastic in the pre-Norman period. In the year 1044, Aelfward, bishop of London, being stricken with leprosy (_lepra perfusus_) sought an asylum in the monastery of Evesham, of which he was the prior. The monks may have had more than one reason for not welcoming back their prior; at all events they declined to let him stay, so that he repaired to the abbey of Ramsey, where he had passed his noviciate and been shorn a monk. He carried off with him from Evesham certain valuables and relics; and his old comrades at Ramsey, undeterred by his leprosy or counter-attracted by his treasures, took him in and kept him until his death. The incident can hardly be legendary for it is related in the annals of Ramsey Abbey by one who wrote within a hundred years of the event[194]. Another case, which may also be accepted as authentic, is given by Eadmer in his _Life of Anselm_. Among the penitents who sought counsel and consolation of Anselm while he was still abbot of Bec in Normandy, with a great name for sanctity, was a certain powerful noble from the marches of Flanders. He had been stricken with leprosy in his body, and his grief was all the greater that he saw himself despised beneath his hereditary rank, and shunned by his peers _pro obscenitate tanti mali_[195].