It must not be supposed that there were no lepers save those living in community. To use the old phrase, there was the man who dwelt in a several house and he who was forced to join the congregation without the camp. To lepers “whether recluses or living together” the Bishop of Norwich bequeathed five pounds (1256). Hermit-lazar and hospital-lazar alike fulfilled the legal requirement of separation. It may be noticed that the service at seclusion implies that the outcast may dwell alone. In early records, before the king habitually imposed “corrodies” on charitable institutions, pensioners are named who were not inhabiting lazar-houses. Philip the clerk was assigned a tenement in Portsmouth, which was afterwards granted to God’s House on condition that Philip was maintained for life, or that provision was made for him to go to the Holy Land (1236). Long afterwards, in 1394, Richard II pensioned a groom of the scullery from the Exchequer, but provided for one of his esquires in a hospital.[71] In hermitage and hospital alike service was rendered to the leper in his loneliness. The little cell and chapel at Roche in Cornwall is said to have been a place of seclusion for one “diseased with a grievous leprosy.” Since no leper might draw from a spring, his daughter Gundred fetched him water from the well and daily ministered to his wants. Mediæval poems tell of solitary or wandering lepers as well as of those residing in communities. In the romance _Amis and Amiloun_, the gentle knight is stricken with [p105] leprosy. His lady fair and bright expels him from his own chamber. He eats at the far end of the high table until the lady refuses to feed a _mesel_ at her board—“he is so foule a thing.” His presence becoming intolerable, a little lodge is built half a mile from the gate. The child Owen alone is found to serve Sir Amiloun, fetching food for his master until he is denied succour and driven away. Knight and page betake themselves to a shelter near a neighbouring market-town, and depend for a time upon the alms of passers-by. The next stage is that of wandering beggars.[72] In the _Testament of Cresseid_ the leper-heroine begged to go in secret wise to the hospital, where, being of noble kin, they took her in with the better will. She was conveyed thither by her father, who daily sent her part of his alms. But Cresseid could not be resigned to her affliction, and in a dark corner of the house alone, weeping, she made her moan. A leper-lady, an old inmate, tries in vain to reconcile her to her fate—it is useless to spurn herself against the wall, and tears do but double her woe—but in vain:— “Thus chiding with her drerie destenye, Weiping scho woik the nicht fra end to end.”