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There is a moment in Warner’s novel when the bishop’s clerk journeys to a leper house and participates in an impromptu recital of Ars Nova, a new style of polyphonic music.

Among them was Codsall Well, near Codsall Wood, supposed in olden times to be efficacious in cases of leprosy, and adjacent to which once stood a Leper House, replaced at a later period by a “Brimstone Ale-house,” so-called because the water was sulphureous. 

The first allusion—the only one in the Bible—we have to a Lazar, or Leper house, occurs in 2 Kings, xv.,

In 1491, Robert Pigot gave by will to the Leper House of Walsingham, in the Archdeaconry of Norwich, a house in, or near that town, for the use of two Leprous persons “of good families.”

Semler quotes a Bull, issued by one of the Bishops of Rome, appointing every Leper House to be provided with its own burial ground and chapel; as also ecclesiastics; these in the middle ages were probably the only physicians of the body, as well as of the soul—some appear to have devoted themselves as much to the study of medicine as to that of theology.