Nicholas, lies upon the southern and western side of the last hill
before the western gate of the city. It was founded in 1084 by
Archbishop Lanfranc, and no doubt for a time served as a hospital for
Lepers, but it was soon appropriated for the use of the sick and
wayfarers generally, and though nothing save the chapel remains to us
from Lanfranc's day, the whole place is so full of interest that no
one should pass it by.

The chapel became in time the parish church of this little place on
the hillside which grew up about the hospital which itself was
probably placed here on account of the spring of water known as St
Thomas's or the Black Prince's well, south and west of the building.
Most of the chapel is of Norman building, the western doorway for
instance, the pillars and round arches on the north of the nave dating
from Lanfranc's time. But the south side is later, of the thirteenth
century, and the font and choir are later still, being Perpendicular
fifteenth century work.

The hospital, however, as we see it, is a rebuilding of the
seventeenth century, but it was fundamentally restored in the
nineteenth. In the "Frater Hall," however, are some interesting
remains of the old house, among them a fine collection of mazers and
two bowls of maple wood, in one of which lies perhaps the very
crystal which Erasmus saw, and which was set in the upper leather of
the shoe of St Thomas.

Below the hospital in the orchard is the old well known as St
Thomas's. Above it grows an elder, surely a relic of the days of the
Pilgrimage. For the elder was known as the wayfaring tree and was
sacred to pilgrims and travellers. It is not strange then, that it