ABSTRACT
Much of this early seventeenth-century account of Bethlem's foundation is nonsense: the product of a little knowledge and a lot of guesswork. This is not surprising. Sources of evidence for London as a whole in the first half of the thirteenth century are scant. The early records of the Priory or House, later Hospital, of St Mary of Bethlem have vanished; the foundation charter survives only in a copy, embedded in the record of an early fifteenth-century visitation. The earliest London chronicles tell us something, but only about matters which seemed important to the chroniclers. To make matters worse, chroniclers had their biases. It is on the basis of hostile chronicle evidence that the character of the founder, Simon fitzMary, has been judged and his motives deduced. Almost everything we know about him comes from a London chronicle attributed to an alderman who served a few decades after fitzMary's time, Arnold fitzThedmar. In the opinion of one of its editors, this chronicle was written - or, more probably, written down in its present form - in 1274, some fifteen years after fitzMary was forced out of the city political scene.2 The chronicler was certainly partisan, though not blindly so, in his championship of the City and its privileges, and he has been used largely uncritically by historians of London politics. On the basis of fitzThedmar's account, fitzMary has been portrayed by modern historians as a royalist trojan horse within the City's walls, prepared to allow himself to be used in Henry Ill's several assaults on the City's privileges and liberties.3
