OLD HOSPITALS AND ALMSHOUSES


There are in many towns and villages hospitals--not the large modern
and usually unsightly buildings wherein the sick are cured, with wards
all spick and span and up to date--but beautiful old buildings
mellowed with age wherein men and women, on whom the snows of life
have begun to fall thickly, may rest and recruit and take their ease
before they start on the long, dark journey from which no traveller
returns to tell to those he left behind how he fared.

Almshouses we usually call them now, but our forefathers preferred to
call them hospitals, God's hostels, "God huis," as the Germans call
their beautiful house of pity at Lübeck, where the tired-out and
money-less folk might find harbourage. The older hospitals were often
called "bede-houses," because the inmates were bound to pray for their
founder and benefactors. Some medieval hospitals, memorials of the
charity of pre-Reformation Englishmen, remain, but many were
suppressed during the age of spoliation; and others have been so
rebuilt and restored that there is little left of the early
foundation.

We may notice three classes of these foundations. First, there are the
pre-Reformation bede-houses or hospitals; the second group is composed
of those which were built during the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth,
James I, and Charles I. The Civil War put a stop to the foundation of
almshouses. The principal landowners were impoverished by the war or
despoiled by the Puritans, and could not build; the charity of the
latter was devoted to other purposes. With the Restoration of the