14. Kings, bishops, earls, and citizens all took part in this good work. Every founder expected that every day "for ever" he and his family should be prayed for by the inmates. Some hospitals were "founded" or established as thank-offerings for escape from some great danger; some to "make up" for some wrong that had been done and could never be put right, and to show that the founder was "really sorry"; some were built for good reasons, others for selfish reasons. Nowadays we arrange fêtes and demonstrations for our hospital funds, and we are asked to buy tickets, because "it's a good cause". We get some enjoyment for ourselves and help the hospital; thus, as it were, doing good and receiving good at the same time. =Summary.=--The monasteries in the Middle Ages were the best-drained buildings. "Underground passages" often met with near old monastery ruins were, for the most part, _sewers_. The gutter which ran down the middle of the town streets formed a kind of sewer. Towns on the slope of a hill were the best drained. In the Middle Ages there were no big manufacturing towns. Each town supplied most of its own wants. Different trades had their own quarters in the town, which is shown in some old street-names. Refuse was left lying about the streets, and the dead were buried in churchyards in the town. In some cases water was brought from a distance in wooden or leaden pipes to "conduits" in the town. Most towns depended on wells, which were often tainted with sewage matter. _Leper hospitals_ were founded and placed outside the walls of nearly all the towns. Other hospitals sprang up in the towns. None of them were large, or at all like our hospitals. They were alms-houses and homes, not places where folk went to be healed. CHAPTER XXVI THE GROWING POWER OF THE TOWNS 1. Back in early Saxon times we find that the inhabitants of a town were banded together to keep the peace, thus forming a society pledged to each other--the Peace or Frith Guild. It lost nearly all its _real_ power in later Saxon and Norman times. But it did not actually die out, and it appears that from this Frith Guild what we now understand by a =corporation= took its rise. The guild was a great power in some of the Saxon towns; only those belonging to it could trade in the town, and its members were very slow to admit outsiders to share in their privileges. 2. We have seen that the free, or nearly free, =tuns= gradually came under the power of an overlord--the king, a bishop, a baron, or a monastery, as the case might be, and very little real power was left to the guild. The overlord appointed a =reeve= to look after his interests, and the government of the place was in his hands. Yet the old Frith Guild seems to have regulated matters connected with the _customs_ of the town, which did not interfere with the lord's rights.