The Guild - list of members

77 Active members.

A very great number of leprosaria, or leper hospitals, sprang up in the Middle ages, particularly in England, where there were 250 by A.D. 1230. The first recorded leprosarium was in Harbledown. (See Leper colony.) These institutions were run along monastic lines and, while lepers were encouraged to live in these monastic-type establishments, this was for their own health as well as quarantine. Indeed, some medieval sources indicate belief that those suffering from leprosy were considered to be going through Purgatory on Earth, and for this reason their suffering was considered more holy than the ordinary person's. More frequently, lepers were seen to exist in a place between life and death: they were still alive, yet many chose or were forced to completely separate themselves from mundane existence.
The word "leprosy" derives from the ancient Greek words lepros, a scale, and lepein, to peel. The word came into the English language via Latin and Old French. The first attested English use is in the Ancrene Wisse, a 13th-century manual for nuns ("Moyseses hond..bisemde o þe spitel uuel & þuhte lepruse." The Middle English Dictionary, s.v., "leprous"). A roughly contemporaneous use is attested in the Anglo-Norman Dialogues of Saint Gregory, "Esmondez i sont li lieprous" (Anglo-Norman Dictionary, s.v., "leprus").





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