On the outskirts of a town seven hundred years ago, the eye of the traveller would have been caught by a well-known landmark—a group of cottages with an adjoining chapel, clustering round a green enclosure. At a glance he would recognize it as the lazar-house, and would prepare to throw an alms to the crippled and disfigured representative of the community. It is a startling fact that there is documentary evidence for the existence of over 200 such institutions in this country in the Middle Ages, though historians disagree in their conclusions on this subject, as they do on the extent and duration of the disease itself. To some, leprosy is a phantom playing upon the imagination of a terror-stricken nation; to others, an all-devouring giant stalking through the land. One writer surmises that all the _British_ leper-hospitals together did not exceed fifty, for “there might have been a leper in a village here and there, one or two in a market-town, a dozen or more in a city, a score or so in a whole diocese.” Another says that “the number of these lazar-houses, however great, was insufficient to accommodate [p036] more than a small proportion of those suffering from the disease. The rest flocked to the high roads, and exposed their distorted limbs and sores, and sought by attracting the notice of travellers to gain alms for their support.” Speaking broadly, one may say that leprosy raged from the eleventh to the middle of the thirteenth century, when it abated; that it was inconsiderable after the middle of the fourteenth; that, though not extinct, it became rare in the fifteenth; and had practically died out by the sixteenth century, save in the extreme south-west of England. * * * * *