Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !

Updated: June 20, 2025


The servant class included some condemned criminals and political offenders, and some educated and cultured people who had fallen on evil times; but they came mostly from the jails, the almshouses, or the London streets.

He did wonders upon the estate; model cottages seemed to rise by magic in place of the wretched tenements inhabited by poor tenants; schools, almshouses, churches, all testified to his zeal for improvement. People began to speak with warm admiration of the Earlescourt estate and of their master.

I fancied myself again engaged in all the pursuits of our much-loved home; I was playing the harp, you were accompanying on the piano as usual; we walked out in the shrubberies; we took an airing in the carriage; all the servants were before me; we went to the village and to the almshouses; we were in the garden picking dahlias and roses; I was just going up to dress for a very large dinner-party, and had rung the bell for Simpson, when I woke up, and found myself in a log-hut, with my eyes fixed upon the rafters and bark covering of the roof, thousands of miles from Wexton Hall, and half-an-hour longer in bed than a dairy-maid should be."

These almshouses were then erected and endow'd by Richard Winwood, son and heir of Right Hon'ble Sir Ralph Winwood, Bart., Principal Secretary of State to King James y'e First."

Ewelme, in Oxfordshire, is a very attractive village with a row of cottages half a mile long, which have before their doors a sparkling stream dammed here and there into watercress beds. At the top of the street on a steep knoll stand church and school and almshouses of the mellowest fifteenth-century bricks, as beautiful and structurally sound as the pious founders left them.

He said he had found the paper in a secret drawer some time after Mr Masterman's death, and that my mother being dead, and I being supposed to be dead, he did not see any use in making known so disagreeable a circumstance; but that, now I had re-appeared, it was his duty so to do, and that he would arrange the matter for me, if I pleased, with the corporation of the town, to whom all Mr Masterman's property had been left in trust to build an hospital and almshouses.

I fancied myself again engaged in all the pursuits of our much-loved home; I was playing the harp, you were accompanying me on the piano as usual; we walked out in the shrubberies; we took an airing in the carriage; all the servants were before me; we went to the villages and to the almshouses; we were in the garden picking dahlias and roses; I was just going up to dress for a very large dinner-party, and had rung the bell for Simpson, when I woke up, and found myself in a log-hut, with my eyes fixed upon the rafters and bark covering of the roof, thousands of miles from Wexton Hall, and half an hour longer in bed than a dairy-maid should be."

The Goldsmiths have a very palatial pile of almshouses at Acton Park, called Perryn's Almshouses, with a grand entrance portico, and most of the London companies provide in this way homes for their decayed members, so that they may pass their closing years in peace and freedom from care.

It is not now the fashion to found almshouses. We build workhouses instead, vast ugly barracks wherein the poor people are governed by all the harsh rules of the Poor Law, where husband and wife are separated from each other, and "those whom God hath joined together are," by man and the Poor Law, "put asunder"; where the industrious labourer is housed with the lazy and ne'er-do-weel.

There was the old Red Lion Inn to see, too, where Abbot Whiting lay the night before his execution, which was a murder; and the Women's Almshouses, and a dozen other things which tourists are expected to see besides many dozen which they are not; and it is for the latter that Ellaline and I have a predilection.

Word Of The Day

hoor-roo

Others Looking