A History of Doughty's Hospital, Norwich, 1687-2009 extract
Table of Contents
Part I: The historical foundations of social welfare
1 The origins of the almshouse in medieval England
2 Early modern philanthropy and poor relief
3 Medieval and early modern Norwich
Part II: Doughty’s Hospital, 1687–1833
4 The bequest of William Doughty
5 In and out of the fire: the achievement of financial stability
6 Managing the institution
Part III: The age of Victorian philanthropy, 1833–1908
7 Social welfare in nineteenth-century England
8 Philanthropy in Victorian Norwich
9 Doughty’s Hospital and the rise of state regulation
10 Finance and refurbishment
11 Of masters and men
Part IV: The age of modern welfare, 1908–90
12 Philanthropy in the age of modern welfare
13 Twentieth-century Norwich
14 Doughty’s and the welfare state
15 Finance and development, 1908–90
16 Staffing Doughty’s
17 Doughty’s residents
Part V: Into the twenty-first century
18 Housing policy and the rise of the voluntary sector
19 Twenty-first-century Norwich
20 Rules and regulations
21 From bedsits to bedrooms
22 ‘Inside out and all change’: evolving staffing structures
23 Modern-day residents
Extract from A History of Doughty’s Hospital
Taken from Chapter 1: The origins of the almshouse in medieval England
Almshouses have existed, in various forms, for over a thousand years. They originated as places that provided care for the sick poor, and were usually attached to monasteries...
English monasteries were, of course, not only a component of international Christianity, but of European Catholicism, and were thus subject to the edicts of the wider Church. While England was suffering the depredations of the Danish invasions in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, the Synod of Aix held in 816 was busy establishing the social and moral duties of the monastic houses, to be performed alongside their educational functions. The Synod was a meeting of Catholic officials which stated that the Church had an obligation to provide care and alms for both the poor and the sick.1 These alms, in the form of food or money, were often distributed at the gates of the monasteries but gradually the practice of providing board and lodging for travellers became more common, while aged and sick monks were also cared for on-site in a ‘farmery’, the origins of the modern word ‘infirmary’. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries these two practices often merged, as monasteries began to minister also to lay people who were sick or feeble, though this usually took place in separate establishments administered by the monks and lay brethren.2 These lodgings were commonly known as ‘hospitals’, although they are far removed from modern medical hospitals. The label ‘hospital’ came from the word ‘hospitality’, and simply meant a place that provided care and lodgings for those in need, as well as rest for travellers.3 While some historians have argued that they pre-date the Norman Conquest, hard evidence to support such claims is difficult to find, and the earliest clear records of hospitals as free-standing institutions occur in the 1070s. It was probably in 1077 that Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, established the very first of these, in a ‘decent and ample house of stone’ outside the walls of the City of Canterbury, with separate quarters for men and women suffering from infirmity.4
During the course of the medieval period, many different types of hospital were established, their form and function varying according to the local incidence of disease, proximity to large towns or to sites of pilgrimage, as well as according to the aspirations of founders and patrons.5 In the eleventh century, lazar houses – named after the international hospital order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem – began to appear as places to care for those with leprosy...
Hospitals for the sick poor more generally were founded alongside leper houses, and these in turn can be broadly distinguished from the later almshouses which catered more specifically for the elderly, local poor. Although medieval hospitals had begun as an extension of monasteries, it was not long before wealthy men and women began endowing hospitals or almshouses of their own. Royalty led the way: the hospital of St Leonard’s in York was endowed by King Athelstan in 986 and dedicated to St Peter, only to be re-founded by King Stephen in 1145. Stephen’s wife Matilda founded St Catherine By The Tower in London in 1148 and this hospital continued to receive royal patronage, with Henry VIII founding the Guild of Barbara on the site and sparing the hospital from dissolution after his split from Rome in 1539.6 Hospitals were also founded by the landowning gentry, petty knights and baronets, the clergy, merchants, Lord Mayors and aldermen, and other private philanthropists. For example, St Cross Hospital at Winchester was founded by the Bishop of Winchester, Henry de Bois, in 1136.7 There was a degree of self-interest in establishing a hospital, both for the clergy and for wealthy members of the laity, for the Catholic Church stressed the importance of good works – deeds such as giving money to the poor and the needy – which would assure the benefactor a place in heaven.8 Bedehouses were founded upon this principle. They were almshouses, established by a single person, whose inmates were expected to pray for the soul of their founder, further ensuring the safety of the soul of the benefactor.9 It was from the early thirteenth century that lay foundations became more common, until they were soon the largest group among this array of institutions, and this coincided with the shift from lazar houses to non-leper hospitals. East Anglia, Yorkshire and Gloucestershire were the most active areas for lay foundations, followed by Northumberland and Durham, Shropshire, Kent and Wiltshire, and towns were the most favoured locations.10 Some of these catered mainly for the poor and impotent, who formed the most important category of inmate, others for the sick and some for travellers – but most were multi-functional institutions which provided relief for all of these categories of the needy. Occasionally they would discriminate against particular classes of person, and occasionally they would discriminate in favour of particular groups, but selectivity was not at its height until the later middle ages. This phase of hospital foundation appears to have run out of steam by the mid-thirteenth century, as far as we are able to tell from the available records, and some may have been lost completely, or were amalgamated, as a result of the dramatic mortality during the Black Death of 1348–9, when perhaps one-third of the population of the country succumbed to plague.11 A new phase of foundations has been detected from the very late fourteenth century, however, and it was now that the almshouse – as an institution specifically dedicated to the local, often elderly, poor – started to make its appearance.
1. B. Bailey, Almshouses (Robert Hale: London, 1988), p. 15.
2. B. Howson, Houses of noble poverty: a history of the English almshouse (Bellevue Books: Sunbury-on-Thames, 1993), pp. 17–18.
3. H. Caffrey, Almshouses in the West Riding of Yorkshire 1600–1900 (Heritage: King’s Lynn, 2006), p. 2; W.H. Godfrey, The English almshouse with some account of its predecessor the medieval hospital (Faber and Faber: London, 1955), p. 15.
4. N. Orme and M. Webster, The English hospital 1070–1570 (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 19–22.
5. S. Sweetinburgh, The role of the hospital in medieval England. Gift-giving and the spiritual economy (Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2004), p. 19; Bailey, Almshouses, p. 16.
6. Howson, Houses of noble poverty, p. 28.
7. Godfrey, English almshouse, p. 17.
8. Bailey, Almshouses, p. 27.
9. Ibid., p. 16.
10. Sweetinburgh, Role of the hospital, pp. 31–2.
11. For an excellent and readable account see P. Ziegler, The Black Death (Penguin edition: Harmondsworth, 1970, first published 1969).