The one monastic house for women was St. Clement's Nunnery. There were, moreover, sisterhoods in the hospitals of, for example, St. Leonard and St. Nicholas. St. Leonard's Hospital, among its many functions, was a home of royal pensioners. The townspeople were chiefly merchants and tradesmen and those they employed, and the wives and families of all of them. Men of this type, both rich and poor, rose to important positions in trade and city life, and in the King's service. Some entered the service of nobles. Great dignity was attached to the higher positions of authority in city and guild life. Trade led to wealth and increased comfort and a higher social state. Men in the King's service received preferment more often than direct monetary reward. Women had only the monastic life to enter as a profession. They could become full members of a number of the York trade-guilds. The social position of women in the retrograde fifteenth century fully agrees with the absence of women from among those who achieved notability in the city during the century. The most interesting type of citizens was that composed of the freemen, who formed the vast majority of the inhabitants. As the name implies, they were historically the descendants of the men who in earlier times were freed from serfdom. It was the freemen who, through the Mayor and Corporation, paid rent to the King for the city, its rights and possessions. There are still, it may be noted, freemen of the city, distinct from those distinguished men who have received its honorary freedom. The main privileges of the mediæval freemen included the right of trading in the city, and of voting. They also had rights over the common lands attached to the city, and they were eligible to fill the offices of local civic government if thought wealthy enough to be elected into such a "close self-elected corporation." Soldiers of the royal army were stationed in York at the Castle. The Wars of the Roses, wars of kings and nobles, lasted from 1455 to 1485 and, although York itself hardly experienced the warfare, it saw contingents of the forces of both sides, as well as the leaders and royal heads of both parties. There lived in the city a number of men in the royal service. Some worked at the administrative offices of the royal forest of Galtres, Davy Hall, where the chief officer himself dwelt. There were also the men who worked at the royal Fish Pond near which was Fishergate in which street most of these men lived. Those afflicted with leprosy, a disease which in England disappeared toward the end of the fifteenth century, dwelt apart for fear of infecting the healthy. The four hospitals outside the four main entrances to the city served to keep the disease isolated.