In Scotland, and in various other parts of Europe, they were obliged, for this purpose, to use a “clapper” or rattle, in order that the noise created by it might warn the healthy of the presence of an infected fellow-mortal, whilst, at the same time, they carried a “cop” or receiving dish, into which the charitable might drop their alms.[353] Muratori tells us that in Italy the lepers made their presence known at a great distance (_longe positos_) by the noise of a certain piece of wood. Marmotrecti describes more minutely the instrument as composed of wood, and formed of two or three tablets of it, which the leper struck together when seeking bread (_quas concutit leprosus quaerendo panem_).[354] In the celebrated old Scoto-Saxon poem of Sir Tristrem, composed probably about the middle of the thirteenth century,[355] and valuable (to use the words of an acute critic)[356] “for its pictures of ancient manners” and the customs “of Scotland in the days of Alexander III.,” the hero of the romance is, at one stage of his adventures in Cornwall, represented as assuming for disguise and concealment the appearance of a leper or mesel.[357] In this character the poet provides him with the usual cop and clapper (stanza 80, p. 181). Ganhardin gan fare, Into Bretaine away; And Tristrem duelled thare, To wite what men wald say; Coppe and Claper he bare, Til the fiften day, As he a mesel ware: Under walles he lay, To lithe. We have already, in the Second Part of the present paper, seen Henryson, in the sixteenth century, describing his leper heroine as arrayed With cop and clapper like ane Lazarous. And from the advice proffered by the other lepers to the weeping Cresseid after she is actually removed to the lazar-house, the importance and frequent use of the clapper is sufficiently shown— I counsall thee mak vertew of ane neid, To leir to clap thy clapper to and fro, And leir efter the law of lipper leid.[358] Into some towns the lepers seem to have been allowed the liberty of entry, provided they used their clappers, to advertise the passing inhabitants of their presence, and thus allowed them to shun the supposed danger of their contact. The magistrates of Glasgow made the carrying of clappers one of the conditions on which they admitted the occasional entrance of the inmates of the Brigend hospital into their city, one of their edicts for October 1610 running thus:—“It is statut and ordanit that the Lipper of the hospital sall gang (walk) only on the calsie (street) syde near the gutter, and sall haif clapperis and ane claith upoun their mouth and face, and sall stand afar of quhill they resaif almous, or answer under the payne of banischeing them from the toun and hospital.” One of the statutes of the Greenside hospital, Edinburgh, was to the effect—