succouring them profitably, so as he might at their need.
He began then to build and found hospitals or houses for poor people to lie in, edified minsters of religion, and gave yearly to other poor sufferers in divers places in the realm much money, pecunies or silver. He founded many convents of the order of friars preachers, and to many other poor religious builded churches, cloisters, dortoirs, and other edifices convenable, gave for God largely alms to the blind, beguines, daughters of God, and releved the minster of many a poor nunnery. He enriched many a church founded by him with great revenues and rents, in which he many times exercised the office of charity and of marvellous humility, humbly and devoutly serving the poor with his own hands by great misericorde.
When he came in Paris, or in other cities, he visited the hospitals and other small houses where poor people lay in; and without abomination of deformity ne of ordure or filth of some patient or sick, administered, many times kneeling, giving meat to the poor with his own hands. In the abbey of Royalmont, which he founded and endowed with great revenue and rents, is showed notorily that such and semblable alms he made there many times.
And yet greater marvel, a monk of the said abbey, a leper, an abominable, and as then deprived both of nose and eyes by corruption of the said sickness, the blessed S. Louis administered, humbly putting, kneeling, with his own hands both meat and drink within the mouth of the said leper without any
