While it cannot be maintained that lepers were tolerated or looked upon with indifference, yet it was for other reasons than fear of contagion that they were objectionable. The prejudices against them have been already illustrated from periods as early as the eleventh century. They were, to say the least, undesirable companions, and in certain occupations they must have been peculiarly objectionable. Thus, on the 11th June, 1372, in the city of London, John Mayn, baker, who had often times before been commanded by the mayor and aldermen to depart from the city, and provide for himself some dwelling without the same, and avoid the common conversation of mankind, seeing that he the same John was smitten with the blemish of leprosy--was again ordered to depart[201]. It does not appear whether the baker departed that time, nor is there any good diagnosis of his leprosy; there was certainly a prejudice against him, but the occasion of it may have been nothing more than the eczematous crusts on the hands and arms, sometimes very inveterate, which men of his trade are subject to. It is clear also from a singular case in the _Foedera_, that a false accusation of leprosy was sometimes brought against an individual, perhaps out of enmity, like an accusation of witchcraft. In 1468 a woman accused of leprosy appealed to Edward IV., who issued a chancery warrant for her examination. The writ of 3rd July, 1468, is to the king’s physicians, “sworn to the safe-keeping of our person,” William Hatteclyff, Roger Marschall, and Dominic de Serego, doctors of Arts and Medicine; and the subject of the inquisition is Johanna Nightyngale of Brentwood in Essex, who was presumed by certain of her neighbours to be infected by the foul contagion of _lepra_, and for whose removal from the common intercourse of men a petition had been laid in Chancery. She had refused to remove herself to a solitary place, _prout moris est_; the physicians are accordingly ordered to associate with themselves certain legal persons, to inquire whether the woman was leprous, and, if so, to have her removed to a solitary place _honestiori modo quo poteris_. On the 1st of November, 1468, the court of inquiry reported that they found the woman to be in no way leprous, nor to have been. The woman had been brought before them: they had passed in review twenty-five or more of the commonly reputed signs of _lepra_, but they had not found that she could be convicted of leprosy from them, or from a sufficient number of them; again, passing in review each of the four species of lepra (_alopecia_, _tinia_, _leonina_, and _elephantia_) and the forty or more distinctive signs of the species of _lepra_, they found not that the woman was marked by any of the species of _lepra_, but that she was altogether free and immune from every species of _lepra_[202]. Laws against Lepers.