There can be no question, then, that persons adjudged leprous were shunned, driven out or ostracised by public opinion, and even legislated against. The reality of these practices should not be confounded with a real need for them. Least of all should they be ascribed to a general belief in the contagiousness of the disease. In practice no one heeded the medical dogma of leprous contagion, because no one attached any concrete meaning to it or had any real experience of it. There was prejudice against lepers, partly on account of Biblical tradition, and partly because the “terribilis aspectus” of a leper was repulsive or uncanny. Further, in genuine leprosy, the most wretched part of the victim’s condition was not his appearance (which in a large proportion of cases may present little that is noticeable to passing observation), but his unfitness for exertion, his listlessness, and depression of spirits, owing to the profound disorganisation of his nerves. A leprous member of a family would be a real burden to his relatives; and in a hard and cruel age he would be little better off than the stricken deer of the herd or the winged bird of the flock. To become a beggar was his natural fate; and as a beggar he became privileged, by royal patent or by prescription, while beggars in ordinary were under a ban.
It is undoubted that the privilege of begging accorded to lepers was abused, and was claimed by numbers who feigned to be lepers[197]. The one severe edict against lepers in England was the ordinance of Edward III. for the exclusion of lepers from London in 1346; it is clear, however, from the text of the ordinance that the occasion of it was not any fixed persuasion of the need for isolating leprous subjects, but some intolerable behaviour of lepers or of those who passed as such. The mayor and sheriffs are ordered to procure that all lepers should avoid the city within fifteen days, for the reason that persons of that class, as well by the pollution of their breath, etc. “as by carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret places, detestably frequenting the same, do so taint persons who are sound, both male and female, to the great injury etc.[198]” That is the old confusion which we have already noticed in Bernard Gordonio and Gilbert; it is an edict against _lepra_ in its generic sense, and against the same class that William Clowes characterizes so forcibly in his book on the _morbus Gallicus_ in 1579. At a date intermediate between those two, in 1488, an order was made by the provost of Paris, that “lepers” should leave the city; but that is too late a date for leprosy, although not too early for syphilis. On the 24th August, 1375, the porters of the City Gates were sworn to prevent lepers from entering the city, or from staying in the same, or in the suburbs thereof; and on the same date, the foreman at ‘Le Loke’ (the Lock Hospital in Southwark) and the foreman at the leper-spital of Hackney took oath that they will not bring lepers, or know of their being brought, into the city, but that they will inform the said porters and prevent the said lepers from entering, so far as they may[199].