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Lord Leyster's Hospital, Warwick
Photograph: J. Valentine (1870)
Source: RIBA British Architectural Library Photographs Collection

Despite being long criticised for its great wealth and corruption, the Catholic Church played a central role in Medieval society. The monasteries, priories and guilds had long provided education, health care and charity. However, by 1547 these were shut: new sources for these services were required. Thus, over the next few decades, a great number of new schools and almshouses were founded by noblemen and merchants.

Lord Leyster’s Hospital, Warwick, founded in 1571 to care for old and infirm soldiers and their wives, is one of the best preserved. This early photograph from 1870, reveals its prominent position, raised above the street by the town’s Medieval west gate. This hotchpotch group is far from a modern hospital. Mostly half-timbered, the buildings were attached to the late Medieval chapel over the gate: then, as now, the hospital cared for its inhabitants’ spiritual as well as physical health.

Thankfully, because of its location on the edge of the town, the hospital survived Warwick’s great fire of 1694, and apart from losing the trees seen in this photograph, little of the exterior has changed.