It is undoubted that the privilege of begging accorded to lepers was abused, and was claimed by numbers who feigned to be lepers[197]. The one severe edict against lepers in England was the ordinance of Edward III. for the exclusion of lepers from London in 1346; it is clear, however, from the text of the ordinance that the occasion of it was not any fixed persuasion of the need for isolating leprous subjects, but some intolerable behaviour of lepers or of those who passed as such. The mayor and sheriffs are ordered to procure that all lepers should avoid the city within fifteen days, for the reason that persons of that class, as well by the pollution of their breath, etc. “as by carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret places, detestably frequenting the same, do so taint persons who are sound, both male and female, to the great injury etc.[198]” That is the old confusion which we have already noticed in Bernard Gordonio and Gilbert; it is an edict against _lepra_ in its generic sense, and against the same class that William Clowes characterizes so forcibly in his book on the _morbus Gallicus_ in 1579. At a date intermediate between those two, in 1488, an order was made by the provost of Paris, that “lepers” should leave the city; but that is too late a date for leprosy, although not too early for syphilis. On the 24th August, 1375, the porters of the City Gates were sworn to prevent lepers from entering the city, or from staying in the same, or in the suburbs thereof; and on the same date, the foreman at ‘Le Loke’ (the Lock Hospital in Southwark) and the foreman at the leper-spital of Hackney took oath that they will not bring lepers, or know of their being brought, into the city, but that they will inform the said porters and prevent the said lepers from entering, so far as they may[199]. When all word of leprosy had long ceased in England the porters of the City Gates had the same duties towards beggars in general. Thus in Bullein’s _Dialogue_ of 1564, the action begins with a whining beggar from Northumberland saying the Lord’s Prayer at the door of a citizen. The citizen asks him, “How got you in at the gates?” whereupon it appears that the Northumbrian had a friend at Court: “I have many countrymen in the city,” among the rest an influential personage, the Beadle of the Beggars[200].