In addition to the preceding direct medical evidence, it may not be considered irrelevant to the present question to remark that, in most of the lazar-house charters and notices in England and Scotland that I have had access to, the inmates of these institutions are described by the adjective _leprosus_, or by some application of the corresponding noun _lepra_, as “lepra percussi,” “infecti lepra.” I have, however, met with one very striking exception to this general rule, and I allude to it here as confirmatory of what I have stated with regard to the nature of the disease for which these leper hospitals were instituted in our own country. The leper hospital of Sherburne was, as I have already had occasion to mention, endowed for sixty patients, and was hence one of the largest in England. It was founded in 1181 by Hugh Pudsey, “the jollie Bishope of Durham.” In a MS. History of the Durham Cathedral and Diocese, in the Bodleian Library,[196] the inmates of the Sherburne Hospital, instead of being termed _Leprosi_, are directly designated _Elephantuosi_. In speaking of the acts of Bishop Pudsey, the MS. states, amongst other things, that he constructed the hospital of Sherburne, and planted in it lepers collected from all parts of the bishoprick. (_Elefantuosos_, in Episcopatu suo circumquaque collectos, ibidem instituit.) NATURE OF THE LEPROSY OF SCOTLAND. I have hitherto said nothing to show that the disease in Scotland was of the nature of Greek elephantiasis. During the earlier ages at which it prevailed in this country, medicine was little cultivated, and we have no professional work of any kind left us by the Scottish physicians of that period, from which to derive any evidence on this subject.[197] Amidst this dearth, however, of medical writings during the middle ages in Scotland, it gives me pleasure to refer to a passage in one of our earliest Scotch poets, affording proof that the leprosy of this country was, as on the continent, truly the Greek elephantiasis. It is well known to the lovers of early Scotch literature that Henryson, a schoolmaster of Dunfermline, who wrote before the year 1500, composed, among other things, _The Testament of Cresseid_ as a sequel to the _Troilus and Cresseid_ of his immediate predecessor Chaucer.[198] Indulging, like his English prototype, in the wildest forms of anachronism, the Scottish poet confessedly subjects, in almost every particular, the ancient and foreign characters of the piece to the manners, incidents, and institutions of his own times, and of his own country. In this spirit he afflicts, at last, the fickle and unfortunate Cresseid with leprosy, as perhaps the most appalling of dooms to which he could consign her. The poet afterwards sends her “unto yone hospitall at the tounis’ end.” The particular symptoms which he makes Saturn invoke upon Cresseid, to transform her into a leper, are exactly the most marked symptoms of Greek elephantiasis: