The English hospital, 1070-1570

The first English hospitals appeared soon after the Norman Conquest.

By the year 1300 they numbered over 500, caring for the sick at every level of society, from the gentry and clergy to pilgrims, travellers, beggars and lepers.

Excluded from towns but placed by main highways where they could gather alms, they had a complex relation with medieval society, cherished yet marginalized, self-contained yet also parasitic.This text traces when and why they originated and follows their development through the crisis periods of the Black Death and the English Reformation when many disappeared.

Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster explore the hospitals' religious, charitable and medical functions, examine their buildings, staffing and finances, and analyze their patients in terms of social background and medical needs.

They reconstruct the daily life of hospitals, from worship to living conditions, food and care.

The general survey is complemented by a regional study of hospitals of the southwest of England, including detailed histories of all the recorded institutions in Cornwall and Devon.