Instances may be quoted to show that the name of leper was flung about somewhat at random. Thus, in an edict issued by Henry II., during the absence of Becket abroad for the settlement of his quarrel with the king, it was decreed that anyone who brought into the country documents relating to the threatened papal interdict should have his feet cut off if he were a regular cleric, his eyes put out if a secular clerk, should be hanged if a layman, and be burned if a _leprosus_--that is to say, a beggar or common tramp. Again, in the charges brought for Henry III. against the powerful minister Hubert de Burg in 1239, one item is that he had prevented the marriage of our lord the king with a certain noble lady by representing to the latter and to her guardian that the king was “a squinter, and a fool, and a good-for-nothing, and that he had a kind of leprosy, and was a deceiver, and a perjurer, and more of a craven than any woman[157]” etc.
There is also a curious instance of the term leprous being applied to the Scots, evidently in the sense in which William of Malmesbury, and many more after him, twitted that nation with their cutaneous infirmities. When the Black Death of 1348-9 had reached the northern counties of England, the Scots took advantage of their prostrate state to gather in the forest of Selkirk for an invasion, exulting in the “foul death of England.” Knighton says that the plague reached them there, that five thousand of them died, and that their rout was completed by the English falling upon them[158]. But the other contemporary chronicler of the Black Death, Geoffrey le Baker[159], tells the story with a curious difference. The Scots, he says, swearing by the foul death of the English, passed from the extreme of exultation to that of grief; the sword of God’s wrath was lifted from the English and fell in its fury upon the Scots, “et [Scotos] per lepram, nec minus quam Anglicos per apostemata et pustulos, mactavit.” The _apostemata_ and _pustuli_ were indeed the buboes, boils and carbuncles of the plague, correctly named; but what was the _lepra_ of the Scots? It was probably a vague term of abuse; but, if the clerk of Osney attached any meaning to it, it is clear that he saw nothing improbable in a disease called _lepra_ springing up suddenly and spreading among a body of men.