One change, one result, of the Suppression, everybody can understand. This was the closing of the Hospitals. London was full of Hospitals, but they were Religious Houses. St. Bartholomew’s, attached to the Priory; St. Thomas’, Southwark; St. Mary Spital; Elsing Spital for the blind; St. Mary of Bethlehem for the insane; the House on Tower Hill also for the insane; the House of St. Augustine Papey for old priests; the Infirmary in every Monastic House;—all these provided for the sick poor. I have no doubt, though on the subject I have no information, that the Companies, which certainly took care of their sick and their infirm, must have done so through the existing Hospitals. When the Houses were closed, what became of the sick? It is commonly believed that they were turned into the street, no one caring for them. This was certainly not the case. The Companies cared for their own; the City cared for its freemen and their families; would the City, which maintained a debtors’ prison for its freemen, so that they should not be confined with the general herd, suffer its sick and poor to starve? There was a residuum of those who were not free, namely, the vagabonds and masterless men and women. For them there was a time of great misery; when they were ill there was no one to visit them; no hospital where they might be taken; no hands to minister and alleviate; no voice to console and to fortify. And we know nothing, and cannot estimate the suffering because there were no journalists to publish the things they saw; and the sick and poor lay unheeded and starved, and died unknown and uncared for in the dirt and misery of the Tudor slum. There is no doubt, also, that the open house kept by such a monastery as the Holy Trinity, where the poor received every day the broken meat and a great deal more, was greatly missed and deplored by the whole company of the masterless. What with daily open house at the greater monasteries, the broken meats of the smaller, the doles and charities of the parish, the “mind days” with their loaves and gifts to the poor, bequeathed by rich citizens, a family which objected to work might rub along in solid and well-fed comfort all the year round. And this resource, looked upon as certain and unfailing like a perennial spring, was suddenly stopped. Then all these people had to work, or to beg, or to rob. The streets became pestered with sturdy beggars: the by-places of Elizabethan Literature present most vivid pictures of the companies of beggars, impostors, rogues and vagabonds. They were the people whom the monks and nuns had fed without asking questions; the folk who would not work; the people turned out of the monasteries; ex-friars; ex-chantry priests; former makers of images, crucifixes, beads, candlesticks and the rest: these were the people who felt most bitterly the abolition of indiscriminate charity and the cruel choice offered them under the new order of work; mendicancy with the whip, or crime with the gallows.