Managing a Hospital’s Property

This chapter demonstrates the surprising economic power of hospitals and their prominent role in the larger society, including their relationships and conflicts with other institutions. Champagne's largest and wealthiest hospitals received income from ovens and mills; the sale of grain and wine; various kinds of rents and tithes; the sale of arable land, vineyards, and forests; and the provision of interest loans. The diversity of these hospitals' holdings is remarkable, as is the degree to which these charitable and religious institutions were engaged in various kinds of markets. Those managing the properties belonging to hospitals were very much thinking about the long-term economic growth of their institutions. In the eyes of Jacques de Vitry and other church reformers, what these hospitals were doing with the alms they received was regarded as “hoarding,” since they were not immediately dispensing alms to those most in need, but investing in income-producing fiefs, arable land, vineyards, forests, houses, mills, and various kinds of rents. While it was certainly true that the alms given to hospitals were used for pittances of food and clothing for the sick poor or to pay a hospital chaplain who supplied what was thought to be life-saving sacramental medicine or the countless other needs these institutions had, the reality was that unlike some of the weak and vulnerable guests they served, some hospitals were powerful landlords and major players in the urban economy.