The evidence, however, left us by the older authorities and physicians on this point, is an evidence of opinion rather than of facts. They have bequeathed to us merely their own dogmatic inferences, without vouchsafing to state any of the individual data upon which their general deductions were founded. As far, however, as we may judge by a few loose fragments which we may still gather up from amid the imperfect and scattered records of the disease, the European leprosy, if it were contagious, when epidemic in the middle ages, was at least less so than the combined medical and popular belief of those times would seem to represent it. In the Edinburgh hospital in 1590, two of the lepers’ wives lived uninfected with their husbands; and a few of the English leper hospitals, as those of Ripon, St. Magdalene, Exeter, and St. Bartholomew, near Oxford, were endowed for the purpose of serving as retreats at one and the same time both for the merely poor and the truly leprous. Individuals stricken with leprosy were sometimes looked upon by the superstitious spirit of the age as persons directly smitten by the hand of God; and we find in history traces of rich and noble, and even of royal devotees, endeavouring to expiate their sins and propitiate the good will of Heaven, by occasionally devoting themselves, and that with perfect impunity, to such duties to the sick as offered the most certain means of calling down the disease upon their own bodies, provided it had been at all so contagious as was generally supposed. Saint Louis (Louis IX.) of France visited the leper hospitals every third month, personally rendered the most abject services to their inmates, fed them, and bathed their sores with his own hands.[318] Henry III. of England is reported to have annually, on Shrove Tuesday, engaged in the same duties.[319] Robert II., the son of Hugh Capet, enacted the devotee in the same manner, imprinting kisses with his lips on the hands of the lepers (_ore proprio figens leprosorum manibus oscula, in omnibus Deum collaudabat_).[320] The old English historian, Matthew Paris, relates, in his usual quaint and gossiping style, an anecdote illustrative of a similar degree of charitable penance and defiance of contagion being practised by the Scottish Princess Matilda, the queen of Henry I. of England. Speaking of some transactions in the year 1105, he observes—