I am not aware of the existence of any similar complete list of the inmates of other British leper hospitals, to which I could refer with the view of ascertaining the occupation and rank of those that occupied them. We have scattered records, however, to show that men of riches occasionally became the victims of the disease, and passed their subsequent term of life in the leper hospitals. Thus, Jenkins, in speaking of the St. Mary Magdalene lazar-house at Exeter, states, “Richard Orange, Esq., a gentleman of noble parentage, and mayor of this city (Exeter) in 1454, being infected with the leprosy, notwithstanding his great wealth, submitted himself to a residence in this hospital, where he lived many years, and finished his days, and was buried in the chancel of the chapel. His grave, with a mutilated inscription, is still extant.”[223] Some of the leper hospitals were specially endowed for persons above the lower ranks, who happened to become affected with the disease. In 1491, Robert Pigot gave by will to the leper hospital of Walsingham, in the archdeaconry of Norwich, a house in or near that town for the use of two leprous persons “of good families.”[224] The malady was found among the clergy as well as among the laity, and some of the English leper hospitals were specially founded for the reception of leprous monks alone—as the hospital of St. Lawrence, near Canterbury, and, according to Tanner,[225] that of St. Bartholomew, at Chatham. From one of the edicts issued by Henry II. during the height of his quarrel with Archbishop Becket, it would appear that the dignitaries of the church occasionally did, or at least might, employ lepers in the high character of nuncios, for, in order to prevent Becket from putting the kingdom of England under an ecclesiastical interdict, Henry took all precautions that no official letters to that effect should be conveyed into Britain; and to secure this object the more surely, he enacted, that, if any individual did carry thither letters of interdict from the Pope or Archbishop, he should be punished “by the amputation of his feet if a regular; by the loss of his eyes and by castration, if a secular clergyman; he should be hanged if he were a layman; and burned if he were a leper” (_si Leprosus, comburatur_).[226] In the extant account of the British leper hospitals, there are still preserved some instances in which these institutions were founded by the wealthy and noble after they had themselves become the victims of the malady. The leper hospital of Mayden Bradley, in Wiltshire, was founded by a female member of the rich family of the Bysets[227]—Camden alleges by a daughter of Manasser Byset, sewer to King Henry II., after she had herself become a leper. “This hospital,” says Leland, “was builded by one of the three heirs general of the Bisets, who, being a lazar, gave her part of the town of Kidderminster _in pios usus_.”[228]