A monstrous Ordinance of the Scottish Parliament at Scone in 1386 is recorded in the _Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland_: 'Gif ony man brings to the market corrupt swine or salmond to be sauld, they sall be taken by the bailie, and incontinent, without ony question, sall be sent to the lepper folke; and gif there be na lepper folke, they sall be destroyed all uterlie.' The Rev. W. Denton, in quoting this instance of horrible cruelty, writes: 'Sir Walter Scott must have had instances of such economy in his mind when he put into the mouth of John Girder the directions--"Let the house be redd up, the broken meat set by, and if there be ony thing totally uneatable, let it be gien to the puir folk."--_Bride of Lammermuir._'[163] Men sometimes took advantage of a charge of leprosy to injure an enemy. In 1468, Johanna Nightyngale, of Brentwood, in Essex, was accused of leprosy. She refused to remove herself to a solitary place, and appealed to Edward IV., who issued a Chancery warrant for her examination by his physicians and certain lawyers to be associated with them. The court of inquiry reported that they found the woman to be in no way leprous, nor to have any sign of lepra. The case is recorded in Rymer's _Foedera_.[164] There was another evil caused by the privilege of begging which was accorded to lepers, for men sometimes pretended to be lepers in order to avail themselves of this privilege. It is worthy of mention, in passing, that the two districts of London which have given their names to the extremes of high and low life--viz., St. James's and St. Giles's--both have their origin in the leper hospitals of the Middle Ages. _The Plague._--The greatest scourge among the epidemics which have devastated the world is the Eastern bubonic plague, which entered Europe for the first time in the fourteenth century. All epidemics, when they find a new field, appear to be specially virulent, and this was the case with the first appearance of the plague, which so terrified the inhabitants of Europe that they applied to it this ominous name; but the epidemic of 1349 has of late years received the new name of the Black Death, which distinguishes it in the popular mind from the later visitations. The name, which came from Germany, will not be found in the old descriptions of the plague in England. A writer in the _Quarterly Review_ says: 'The term "Der Schwarze Tod" may have been used in Germany in the fourteenth century, but it does not seem to have been current in England before Hecker's work [on Epidemics] was translated into English in 1833.'[165]