The date of the erection of the chapel is well ascertained[69].  The hospital was founded in 1183, by Henry Plantagenet, as a priory for the reception of unmarried ladies of noble blood, who were destined for a religious life, and had the misfortune to be afflicted with leprosy.  One of their appellations was filles meselles, in which latter word, you will immediately recognize the origin of our term for the disease still prevalent among us, the measles.  Johnson strangely derives this word from morbilli; but the true northern roots have been given by Mr. Todd, in his most valuable republication of our national dictionary; a work which now deserves to be named after the editor, rather than the original compiler.  It may also be added, that the word was in common use in the old Norman French, and was plainly intended to designate a slight degree of scurvy.

To pursue this subject a few steps farther, Jamieson, who is as excellent in points of etymology as Johnson is deficient, quotes, in his Scottish Dictionary, an instance where the identical expression, meselle-houses, is used in old English;

   “...to meselle-houses of that same rond,
    Thre thousand mark unto ther spense he fond.” 
                                R. BRUNNE, p. 136.

The Norfolk farmers and dairy-maids tell us to this day of measly pork:  in Scotch, a leper is called a mesel; and, among the Swedes, the word for measles is one nearly similar in sound, maess-ling.  The French academy, however, have refused to admit meselle to the honor of a place in their language, because it was obsolete or vulgar in the time of Louis XIIIth.  The word is expressive, and no better one has supplied its place; and we may suppose that it was introduced by the Norman conquerors, and that it properly belongs to the Gothic tongues, in the whole of which the root is to be found more or less modified.  Instances of this kind, and they are many, serve as additional proofs, if proofs indeed were needed, of the common origin of the Neustrian Normans, of the Lowland Scots, and of the Saxon and Belgian tribes, who peopled our eastern shores of England.

The priory continued to be appropriated to its original purpose till 1366, when Charles Vth united it to the hospital, called the Magdalen, at Rouen, upon condition that a mass should be celebrated there daily for the repose of his soul.  In the year 1600, on the destruction of the abbey upon Mont Ste. Catherine, the monks of that establishment were allowed to fix themselves at St. Julien; but they resigned it, after a period of sixty-seven years, to the Carthusians of Gaillon, who, incorporating themselves with their brethren of the same order at Rouen, formed a very opulent community.  The monastery, previously occupied by the latter, was known by the poetical appellation of la Rose de Notre Dame:  indeed, it is thus termed in the charter of its foundation, dated