There’s an architectural oddity in the church of Saint Thomas a Beckett at the bottom of Cliffe High Street.
At the far end of this 11th century (possibly part Saxon) holy building, pointed directly at the altar is found a gap in the wall, and it looks more like a small tunnel really.
Known in some church’s as a ‘Squint’, this is actually called a Leper’s slit.
The design can fool you because it was built into the original church, when the aisle was much narrower and the walls closer in.
Later extensions added separate walls, so the slit, or squint appears to go from nowhere to nowhere inside the building.
But in the early church, the slit went onto the street and it is the way that lepers, and later those suffering from bubonic plague, received communion. They stood outside and the priest pushed the sacramental wine and bread along the slit to the infected supplicants.
Originally lepers mixed with others without any problems, but in 1179, the Pope ordered churches and the hospices they operated, to separate lepers from the rest of society. So, hospitals and chutch congregations were segregated. Hence Lepers’ slits appeared just like the one at St Thomas’s.
The devastating disease probably came to Lewes around the 10th century. It was first recorded in England as early as the 4th century but was only widespread and gripped the nation by the 11th.
At first, people with leprosy were considered to be suffering purgatory on earth and were treated kindly by their fellow citizens.
But over 500 years, the disease spread rapidly, fear gripped the church and attitudes changed.
Even so, the squint gave lepers an opportunity to take communion, while leaving people inside the church feeling safe from infection.
The Cluniac Priory in Southover first brought real and effective medical treatment to Lewes. Built by William de Warrene and his wife Gundrada in 1079, the Priory also had a (now demolished)
St Nicholas Hospice, which was used for treatment of lepers and the smaller leper house of St James Hospital which remains to this day almost intact on Southover High Street.
The building first housed elderly and infirm monks from the Priory but like many other buildings of its kind throughout England, was converted to a hospital in the 14th century.
Many of these hospitals disappeared when Henry VIII tore down monasteries, but this one in Lewes remains, with many of its original features.
Lepers were used to maintain monastery gardens such as those still extant in Lewes Priory Grounds, which produced medicinal herbs, fresh fruit and vegetables and other plants deemed helpful in the treatment of leprosy.
Lewes Priory had an infirmary, a second hospice built in 1150, now The Church of St John the Baptist in Southover and the small extant chapel on Southover High Street.
It was just as well that medical testament enjoyed such rapid development from leprosy, because a more terrifying and horrific disease was on the way. The Black Death.
Probably brought across the by traders, fleas entered the country at medieval ports, of which Lewes was one and the village of Hamsey another.
Leaping aboard rats, like jockeys vaulting into the saddle on a racehorse, these fleas devastated communities across Britain in 1349.
Called the Black Death from the colour of the foreign rats which carried these fleas, the nation lost almost half its population and towns and villages were ravaged by Bubonic Plague.
Villagers moved away from graveyards in which plague victims were buried, leaving church buildings isolated from their congregations.
Hamsey church and village are a living example of this practice, where the church is located away from the village, which became a ghost community from a thriving Saxon port, as a result of the savagery of the plague.
The monks of Lewes priory suffered badly, contagion being free to run riot through their closely packed dormitories, causing the loss of one of their two Priors. The same happened to monasteries at Battle and Hastings Sussex was one of the first places in Britain to be infected by the plague, mainly because of its ports. But also due to Illegal wool trading with the continent. But so little was known of the disease that dried frogs, vinegar baths and blood letting were all tried as cures to no avail.
The plague lasted for five long years and contributed to the famous quaffing of wine from Lewes castle vaults as the Black Death ravaged the workforce and so the economy, leading to the Peasants Revolt of 1381.
Lewes was probably not a large town in those days and the effects of the plague devasted the local economy as contributions to the 100 years’ war with France were increasingly demanded by the King and the loss of a workforce from plague deaths hit the country hard..
A second bout of plague swept England in the mid 1600’s. The famous diarist John Evelyn, who spent his childhood in Southover Grange witnessed the suffering the disease brought on.
He recorded that 10,000 victims weekly perished and coffins were left in the streets, shops shut, the City of London silent, a dreadful terror wrapped around the country with everyone wondering fearfully who might be next.
The Great Fire of London of 1666, while ravaging London’s centre, was a blessing in disguise. Not only did it rid the capital of the plague, but also the unhygienic and germ-ridden crowding that obviously openly invited disease.
Lewes survived the plague and mysteriously leprosy almost died out.
It did its damndest though to get rid of Lewes before it waned, but the community was very resilient to its threat and outlived it.
But not without the help of priests and medical people, who built hospitals, hospices and yes, Leper’s Slits and left them as monuments in Lewes to a past age when the Black Death launched a vicious attack on England but was eventually rebuffed by these early medieval doctors.
“The Slit or Squint appears to go from nowhere to nowhere”