Few or none of the very early records and laws of the magistrates of Edinburgh have been preserved, but amidst some lately recovered, of a date as late as 1530, we find the following statute anent the “Leper Folke,”—“It is statut and ordanit be the Provost, Baillies, and Counsell of this burghe that na manner of Lipper persone, man nor woman, fra this tyme furth, cum amangis uther cleine personis, nor be nocht fund in the kirk, fische merket, nor flesche merket, nor na other merket within this burghe, under the pane of burnyng of their cheik and bannasing off the toune.”[344] Some of the old edicts and regulations made in regard to the diseased in London have been preserved for us by Stow. According to the record of Edward III., that king sent, in 1346, “a commandment under his Great Seal, to the mayor and sheriffs of London, willing them to make proclamation in every ward of the city and suburbs, that all leprous persons within the said city and suburbs should avoid within fifteen days, and that no man suffer any such leprous person to abide within his house, upon pain to forfeit his said house, and to incur the king’s further displeasure. And that they should cause the said lepers to be removed into some out places of the Fields, from the haunt and company of all sound people.”[345] From some of the city records it further appears that the magistrates ordered “That the lepers walk not about the streets, nor tarry there; that the keepers of the gates swear that they will not permit lepers to enter into the city.” “There was at one time,” adds Stow, “a brief for removing them from the city and suburbs. At another time there was an edict for levying a hundred shillings out of a tenement of the lepers, and delivering it to their officers for sustaining them.”[346] RESTRICTIONS PLACED UPON THE INMATES OF THE LEPER HOSPITALS. The chance of contagion was provided against by other means besides the mere separation of the infected from the community, and their banishment to the lazar hospitals. In many instances the regulations and statutes to which the lepers were subjected, as inmates of these hospitals, were strongly restrictive, and framed with a view of preventing them from spreading the disease to others by any dangerous degree of personal communication with the healthy. The occasional severity of the restrictions to which, with this view, the leper inhabitants of the hospitals were subjected, affords us a curious example both of the great dread in which the disease was held, and of the extent and stringency of the measures of medical police which the local judicatories of this country had in these times both the power and the will to exercise.