THE BLESSED VIRGIN; THE THREE KINGS OF COLOGNE; THE HOLY INNOCENTS.—The statement referring to hospitals in general as “founded to the honour of God and of His glorious Mother” explains more than one difficult point. First, numerous as are the dedications to St. Mary, they are fewer than those of some other saints, for instance, St. Mary Magdalene. Secondly, a certain number of houses are set down as having two patrons, yet the second [p247] saint appears to eclipse the Blessed Virgin; that of Newport in Essex (given as St. Mary and St. Leonard) usually bore St. Leonard’s name and kept its fair on his festival. In many such cases there was in truth no double dedication; and although gifts were made by charter to found a hospital at Bristol “in honour of God, St. Mary and St. Mark”, later documents omit the formula and call it “the house of St. Mark.” [Illustration: _PLATE XXVII._ HOSPITAL OF ST. MARY THE VIRGIN, NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE] On the other hand many houses were dedicated solely in honour of the Blessed Virgin, including five important institutions in London alone. In addition to St. Mary (without Bishopsgate), St. Mary of Roncevalles (Charing Cross) and Our Lady of Elsyng (Cripplegate), there was St. Mary’s hospital or the House of Converts,—a witness to the doctrine of the Incarnate Christ,—and St. Mary of Bethlehem, a name chosen on account of the founder’s intense reverence for the holy Nativity. Stow quotes the deed of gift made by Simon, “son of Mary”:— “having speciall and singulor deuotion to the Church of the glorious Virgin at Bethlehem, where the same Virgin brought forth our Saviour incarnate . . . and where [to] the same Child to us there borne, the Chiualrie of the heavenly Company sang the new Hymne _Gloria in excelsis Deo_.” The Holy Innocents were commemorated in the ancient leper-house outside Lincoln. The existing chapel of an almshouse in Bristol built “in the honour of God and the Three Kings of Cologne” (Leland’s _fanam trium regum_) is the sole witness in the way of dedication in England to the veneration of the Magi. The title is said to have been the choice of an Abbot of Tewkesbury at the close of the fifteenth century. [p248]