ABSTRACT
This chapter and the next are mainly about money. What appear, on the surface, to be political manoeuvres and power struggles, prove upon closer inspection to have had money as their motive. The Priory of St Mary of Bethlem was founded in order to raise money. Bethlem was seized for the King in the I 370s, and quite possibly in the 1340S as well, in order to prevent money reaching the papal court at Avignon and thence finding its way into the hands of the French. The whole purpose of Bethlem probably changed after 1350 because it was prevented from raising money for its mother-house and, in so doing, for its own support. The need to find new sources of support altered the behaviour of its Masters, who from the late fourteenth century onwards were royal clerks or other royal servants who delegated the business of administering the Hospital to laymen. Money was behind the tussles over who had the right to appoint to the Mastership (patronage) of the fourteenth-century Hospital; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, patronage enabled kings and civic magistrates to reward their servants and to buy new friends at someone else's expense. It was money which provoked the very serious quarrels between the Governors of the Hospital of Bethlem and its last independent Master, Dr Helkiah or Hilkiah Crooke. Money, it could be said, ultimately led the City to opt for direct management of Bethlem, and thus to make the first move towards a more modern-looking institution.
