From the thirteenth to the seventeenth century a conspicuous feature in the line of road leading northward from Bishopsgate was the Priory of Bethlehem, with its square-towered church, its gabled houses for the brethren and sisters' habitations, and its gardens, situated at the eastern edge of the moorland of Fensbury, a little beyond St. Botolph's Church, and facing what are now New Street and Devonshire Place. It was then built quite in the country, with the fens behind, fields in front, and no houses beyond it. The roadway in front was nothing more than a beaten trackway, almost impassable in winter, which when houses came to be built along it, and it assumed the semblance of a street, was called Bedlam Gate. There is no view extant of the priory, excepting the bird's-eye view in Aggas' Map, _temp._ Elizabeth, where there is a continuous line of houses along Bedlam Gate and onward to St. Leonard's Church, Shoreditch, where the road apparently terminated; eastward is the Spittel Fyeld, with archers and cattle; and westward, Finsburie Fyeld, with windmills, bowmen practising at the butts, and women spreading out linen to dry. The priory was founded in 1246 by Simon Fitz-Marie, sheriff of London in the same year, for brethren and sisters, canons of the Order of the Star of Bethlehem, subject to the Bishop of Bethlehem, to whom they had to pay one mark yearly at Easter. Their habit was a black gown with a star embroidered on the breast. When it became a hospital for lunatics is not known, but there are records of sick persons being nursed there in 1330, and of insane patients in 1403, when six of the latter and three of the former were maintained in the house. Weaver tells us that at one time there was "a house for distraught and lunaticke people" at Charing Cross, and that some king, he did not know who, not liking to have an establishment of people of that class so near his palace, packed them off to Bethlem Priory, which was probably the beginning of its career as a hospital for the insane.