A HISTORY OF LONDON prior must be obtained by the brethren before they elected a master, that they should choose a suitable person, a priest, or such as could be speedily ordained, and that the prior was to present their choice to the bishop ; the new master was to swear obedience to the prior and fealty to the prior and convent ; brothers and sisters were to be admitted by the master on his own authority, but were to take an oath of fealty to the prior and convent within three days ; the brethren and the canons were to ask alms in the name of their own house only, but if anything should be given to the brothers for the priory they were in duty bound to deliver it to the canons, who were to do the same as regards the hospital ; the master was to correct the faults of the brethren and sisters if he could, but the prior was to help him if so requested ; the master and brethren had full power to make any grants of their pro- perty without consulting the prior who in future was to have nothing to do with the hospital seal ; the ordinance of Bishop Eustace as to the offer- ing in the priory church on St. Bartholomew's Day was to remain in force, and his prohibition to the brothers to erect an altar of St. Bartholo- mew within the hospital was repeated ; but the hospital might now have a bell-tower and bells which could be rung on Easter eve at pleasure ; permission was also given to consecrate a ceme- tery in which might be buried all dying within the bounds of the hospital as well as others, pro- vided that such were not parishioners of St. Sepul- chre's, or did not die within the limits of that parish or of the priory ; the master and brethren were not henceforth to receive any allowance of food from the priory, and the master was to keep up the hospital of the sick. An appeal made in 1376 by three brothers and one of the sisters^* shows how difficult it is to arrive at a just conclu- sion in these matters. If the ordinances did not exist the natural supposition would be that they had been, as they said, wrongfully deprived for three years of an allowance of food from the priory through the collusion of the master, whereas the allowance had been stopped by authority of the bishop. It is unfair perhaps to pronounce judge- ment on the house from isolated cases relating to the conduct of individual inmates, such as that of Simon Dowel who had procured his election to the office of master by unlawful means, and was deposed by the bishop's com- missaries in consequence in 1322,^^ or that of an apostate priest who at any rate repented and desired to return in 1355'^; it is impossible, however, to avoid the feeling that the tone of a house must have been deplorable when, as in " Doc. of D. and C. of St. Paul's, A. Box 25, No. 646. " Lend. Epis. Reg. Baldock and Gravesend, fol. 49-50. ^ Ca/. Paj>. Letters, v, 574. 1375, the master, Richard de Sutton, was publicly defamed for incontinence with one of the sisters and had to confess himself guilty.^' Whether Sutton was afraid of the punishment that would be inflicted, or really had grievances against the bishop's commissaries, he appealed to the court of Canterbury and involved the bishop of London in a dispute with the archbishop over their re- spective jurisdictions. In the course of these proceedings he was excommunicated, but the punishment for his original offence is not re- corded. He was not deposed, since he is men- tioned eleven years later as resigning his post.^* The hospital was repaired by a bequest of Richard Whittington in 1423, and before 1458 the church seems either to have been rebuilt or to have had a chapel added to it by Joan, Lady Clinton, for in her will of that date she speaks of ' my new church of the hospital of West Smithfield.' *" The rebuilding of the chapel of St. Mary and St. Michael in the cemetery was due to one of the royal clerks, Richard Sturgeon,^ who died in 1456.- Testimony to the good work done in the hospital is afforded by the king's pardon granted in 1464 to the master and brethren for all acquisitions in mortmain made by them without licence in consideration of the relief there given to poor pilgrims, soldiers, sailors, and others of all nations.*^ There are indications that the brothers did not fall behind their age in attention to learning : John Mirfield used his experiences in the hospital to write a book ' Breviarium Bartholomei ' at the end of the fourteenth century ; *^ another brother received leave from the pope in 1404 to study theology for seven years at a university from which he was not to be recalled without reasonable cause,^* while among the books presented by John Wakeryng, the master, to the library in 1463, was a beautiful copy of the Bible, the work of a member of the house named John Coke." Wolsey was empowered by the brothers in 1516 *' and 1524 *' to choose a master for them. In the first instance his choice fell upon one of themselves, Richard Smith, in the second upon " Doc. of D. and C. of St. Paul's, A. Box 54, No. 36. "* Lend. Epis. Reg. Braybrook, fol. 282. " Stow, Surv. ofLond. (ed. Strype), iii, 232.
- " Nicolas, Test. Vet. 284. Stow merely says she
gave ^10 to the poor of the house and was buried there, op. cit. iii, 233.
- ' Harl. MS. 433, fol. 296.
" Stow, op. cit. iii, 233. " Cal. of Pat. 1461-7, p. 323. " Moore, A brief relation of the past and present state of St. Bartiolometv's Hospital, 2 1 . " Cal. Pap. Letters, v, 604.
- Stow says it was the fairest Bible he had seen,
op. cit. iii, 232. " Lond. Epis. Reg. Fitz James, fol. 66-70.
- ^ Ibid. Tunstall, fol. 80-6.
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