" I ought to end by looking at what this hospital actually did. The lack of evidence makes it difficult to discuss the extent to which the hospital was committed to practical works of charity, and whom it tried to help. There are indications, of course, and it is quite clear that any commitment to care for the infirm diminished drastically during the fourteenth century. But even in the early days there were those considered suitable inmates, and those who were unsuitable, as one extended anecdote makes plain. This is the first reference we have to the hospital, which I mentioned earlier. It comes at the end of a long story about a case at law from the Miracles of St Wulfstan, written down about 1240. The basic facts of the story are true, it would seem - certainly the case did come up before the royal justices in 1221. Only the latter part of the story, as I say, concerns us, strictly speaking, but the story is so good that I thought you would like to hear it all.

The central character is one Thomas of Eldersfield, a free tenant of the manor of Eldersfield, near Tewkesbury, who had purchased his land with money he had saved working in the household of Geoffrey fitz Peter, who had been chief justiciar. He was a local man, having been raised at nearby Tirley; his father Estmer lived at Northway, near Ashchurch. He found himself having an affair with the wife of Robert of Northway, the lord of this nearby manor - an affair which went on for two years, until Thomas confessed it to his priest. Advised to stop it at once, and do penance for his sin, he did as he was told. The woman - whose name was not important to the monk who wrote this all down - wasn't to be cast aside so easily, and persistently tried to reopen the affair. When her husband died she proposed marriage to Thomas - but he still refused her. Perhaps not surprisingly, her love began to turn to hatred. She married a man called George, and he, too, conceived a deep hatred for Thomas as his wife's former lover - it was a matter for common gossip. Yet these people all lived in the same small social circle, and evidently saw each other frequently. Strange as it may seem, George and Thomas spent the whole of Whit Sunday 1217 drinking together at the ale-house. They were obviously drunk when they left - certainly they began to quarrel. George began to punch Thomas, and to hit him with his stick: Thomas, in self-defence, began to wave about the axe he just happened to have taken to the pub, and he struck George a minor blow, that drew blood: and that was enough for him to begin telling everyone that Thomas had assaulted him with a weapon, a serious charge. He raised the hue and cry, claiming that Thomas had dealt him a deadly wound whilst trying to break into his house. Thomas had run home to Eldersfield by this time, so George had him arrested and hauled off to gaol at Gloucester, from which he could only extricate himself with much difficulty. Having accused Thomas of a felony, George had him arrested several times, and Thomas could only stave off trouble by buying himself out of prison every time. What everyone was waiting for was the royal justices, who were the only people who could try a felony. Well, finally in 1221 the King's justices came around, and heard the case. The local jury found for George, and now George (as the accuser) had to fight a duel with Thomas - which happened a few days later when the court arrived at Worcester.

We are told that a large crowd of Worcester people streamed out of the Sidbury gate to watch the duel - it was to take place in a meadow called Kingsmead, south of the castle, which sounds to have been a traditional place for judicial duels. Thomas seems not to have been much of a fighter, and came out weeping; George clearly was, because he was confident. One wonders if he hadn't engineered the whole business, knowing it would come to this in the end. Thomas put his trust in the Virgin Mary and in St Wulfstan as the local saint, but they didn't do him much good, because the fight went against him. Soon he was badly wounded, with one eye almost hanging out, and was forced to submit. By the rules of the duel, his weapons, armour and clothes were claimed by his opponent, so that he was brought naked before the justices. He had been shown to be guilty of a felony, and we would expect him to have been hanged. But we are told they decided to be merciful, and instead sentenced Thomas to be mutilated - to be blinded and castrated. This was to be carried out on the spot, and not by court officials but by the accusers - George and his friends, who set to enthusiastically. The damaged eye came out easily enough, but the other was more intractable: blinding meant the physical tearing out of the eyeball, and they had to re-sharpen the blinding tools several times before they could get the job done. After that the castration was easy, which they did roughly - and then tossed the testicles into the watching crowd. At the front was a gang of youths, who began to kick them backwards and forwards between the girls who had come with them.

Well, the spectators wandered back to the city, leaving Thomas on the ground, naked and bleeding copiously. He was no-one's responsibility, though when the dogs of the town started to move in on him some of the last people to leave the field took hold of his arms and legs and dragged him a little way towards the city. A woman took pity on him, and had him carried in a basket to St Wulfstan's Hospital which wasn't so far away; but the master and brethren wouldn't let him in - he wasn't their sort of person at all - so he was dumped in the street outside, and left to die. But there was another woman, called Isabel, who worked with the poor in the hospital, nursing the dying and laying out the corpses, and she hid him away in a niche in the wall just inside the gate, and came to him every day to clean his wounds and feed him. Thomas prayed for ten days, until at last, this being the eve of the Assumption of the Virgin, he heard the sound of vespers being sung at the Cathedral and he proceeded to have a vision of being blessed by the Virgin and St Wulfstan - whereupon he discovered he could see. By a miracle, eyeballs, like two tiny plums, were beginning to grow again; not only that, new testicles, too, were growing. When his recovery was complete, he was acceptable to the Hospital, and was admitted as one of the brothers. Not surprisingly, he was the object of a lot of interest; the bishop of Rochester on pilgrimage to St Wulfstan's tomb came to look, and indeed to feel, and went away proclaiming a miracle.

Amongst the many merits of this story is the evidence it provides for the continued use of mutilation as a punishment in the early thirteenth century; within a few years hanging had become the uniform fate of anyone convicted of a felony. But for present purposes it provides a useful reminder that a very clear distinction was drawn between the deserving sick and the undeserving: that, as I suggested at the beginning, although this hospital, and others like it, existed to relieve the suffering of the poor and dying, it was very selective in its help."

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