2 - Lands and Patrons

Summary

heartily beseeching you as a good lord unto me and my poor house

(Letter of Sir Thomas Norton, c.1520)

Patrons and their motives

The prosperity and well being of virtually all medieval religious orders depended on their ability to accumulate and maintain an estate consisting of both temporal and spiritual property. This chapter deals with the landed estate of the order of St Lazarus and its spiritual property is discussed in Chapter 6. For orders established at the time, the twelfth century was a golden age of opportunity, growth and expansion. Orme estimates that at least 259 out of a total of 585 hospital foundations (44 per cent) dated from the period 1080–1200; and if that period is extended to 1300 the number of foundations becomes 475, 81 per cent of the eventual total. Yet, as Satchell has pointed out, the landed endowment of leper hospitals, in particular, was far from generous and they were forced to rely on other money-raising expedients, such as alms gathering, to make ends meet. These years, stretching roughly from the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 to the fall of Acre in 1291, coincided with a widespread enthusiasm for the Crusade, and gifts of land to the military orders, if anything, outstripped those to hospital foundations of a more general nature. An order that was both leprous and military was to find itself in a unique and interesting position.

For the order of St Lazarus there are comparatively few original documents of twelfth- or thirteenth-century date to plot these acquisitions in detail. Most of the surviving charters are transcriptions appearing in a Cartulary drawn up by the master Walter de Lynton and bearing the date 12 December 1404 (Plate 8). In it Lynton states that he had ‘ordained that a book be made for the greater security of all charters etc of the hospital of Burton St Lazarus of Jerusalem in England’, but the reality does not quite match up to this optimistic expectation. Most of the documents enrolled relate to Leicestershire, and though there is a substantial section dealing with Carlton-le-Moorland, Lincolnshire, nothing isincluded for the lands held by the order in Derbyshire, Norfolk and elsewhere.