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About a quarter of a mile to the north-west of Wimborne stands the chapel of #St Margaret's Hospital#. The date of the foundation of this hospital is uncertain; tradition has it that it was founded by John of Gaunt, son of Edward III., but this is without doubt wrong, as documents the character of which seem to indicate an early thirteenth-century date have been found, from which it appears that this hospital existed at that time, and was set apart for the relief and support of poor persons afflicted with leprosy.
We are first led past some mediæval tombs in the N. transept, then by those of the family of St. Louis, which include that of his eldest son, one of the most beautiful creations of thirteenth-century sculpture. Our own Henry III. who attended the funeral is figured among the mourners around the base which are only partially seen from afar.
It will hardly be believed that the magnificent stalls which were formerly ranged in the octagon, and at a later period in the presbytery, were once painted all over with a mahogany colour. They are the finest Decorated stalls in England, the beautiful ones at Winchester being of late thirteenth-century date. The carved panels in the upper parts are new, and are the gifts of individual donors.
The portal, of red sandstone, is of inferior thirteenth-century workmanship, with statues of Faith and Charity on either side. The façade is flanked by two square towers. The interior is curiously arranged with a cordon of sculpture, high in the vaulting. The capitals of the pillars are likewise ornamented with highly interesting and ornately sculptured capitals.
This church is known as the Badia, and its delicate spire is a joy in the landscape from every point of vantage. The Badia is very ancient, but the restorers have been busy and little of Arnolfo's thirteenth-century work is left.
Under the string beneath the rose window are three windows grouped as a triplet, with no label moulding. The centre light is higher than the others. Though each has been much repaired, the early thirteenth-century detail has been retained. The abaci of the capitals are square. The windows have no tracery, and are probably quite fifty years earlier in date than the large rose above them.
It has been bombarded often but not utterly destroyed, and from there they ran out four miles to Festubert, because the little that the Germans have left of the thirteenth-century church and village, burns with an eternal flame of interest.
The appearance of emancipated villeins side by side with earls and prelates in the great council of the realm is the most significant fact of thirteenth-century English history.
These long moral treatises on the seven deadly sins and the even deadlier virtues were very popular in the Middle Ages. The best known to English readers occurs in the Parson's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and is taken from the Somme de Vices et de Vertus of Frère Lorens, a thirteenth-century author.
Others were four or five times as spacious; they were twice or nearly twice as large as mediaeval Oxford, no mean city in thirteenth-century England. Most of them, doubtless, grew beyond their first limits; a few spread as far as a square mile, twice the extent of mediaeval London. Similarly the 'insulae' varied from town to town. In one, Timgad, they were only 70 to 80 ft. square.
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