Legendary Essex note: Information on the Leper Stone below is from the excellent Hidden East Anglia website.
‘Beside the main road, at the north end of Newport, is the largest known sarsen stone in the county (TL519349). A glacial erratic like many others in Essex, this one has, at some time, been deliberately raised upright, to look for all the world like a genuine standing stone. The common name for it is the Leper Stone, but there seem to be no known early references to it. The stone was said to have been blown over at the end of the 18th century in a huge storm. The locals saw this as a bad omen, and made sure that it was restored to its earlier position.1 See it on Google Street View HERE.
Very close by is a section of clunch-built wall, the last remnant of what was said to be an ancient leper hospital.2 As there is a small hollow or depression on the top edge of the stone, the idea has arisen that coins were left there, washed in water or vinegar, as alms for the lepers. Alternatively, coins were placed there by the lepers themselves, as payment for provisions left for them by the villagers.3
There was indeed the hospital of St. Mary and St. Leonard close by the stone, founded in the 12th century.4 However, there’s no evidence that it was an isolation hospital for those suffering from leprosy. I tend to think that the tradition is a product of 19th century antiquarians, who put the stone and the hospital together and came up with ‘lepers’. All over the country can be found ‘plague stones’, where similar tales are told of alms left for, or payments left by, sufferers of various plagues over the centuries. There are a number in Norfolk and Suffolk, such as at Feltwell, Bury St. Edmunds and Stuston. Very often these are actually medieval cross-bases, or old church fonts that have been dumped by the roadside – but just about any old lump of stone with a hollow in the top seems to have been fair game for this legend.
