A bishop's son ran England's oldest almshouse for decades on an income Trollope turned into The Warden

Henry de Blois, Bishop of Winchester, founded the Hospital of St Cross about 1136. The charter provided for 13 poor men to be housed, clothed and fed, and for 100 poor men to be fed at dinner every day and to take home the leftovers. In 1445 Cardinal Beaufort added an almshouse of "Noble Poverty," but his endowments were lost. In 1808 Francis North, later 6th Earl of Guilford, became Master. His father, Brownlow North, was Bishop of Winchester from 1781 to 1820; that the bishop made the appointment is reported but not confirmed^†. North was also Rector of St Mary's, Southampton, where a local history journal calls him "a notorious absentee pluralist." The county history lists no new Master until 1855. In 1849 the Rev. Henry Holloway, vicar of St Faith's, Winchester, examined the hospital's finances. North's income was estimated at over £2,000 a year. Trollope's novel The Warden (1855) has a warden paid £800 from a medieval charity, and Wikipedia records that it drew on the St Cross inquiry. The Victoria County History records a Queen's Bench case on abuses of the charity in 1851 and calls the hospital's 1696 rules a "barefaced and shameless document." A new scheme was made in 1855 to 1857; the Hampshire Field Club's history says it ended centuries of misappropriation. St Cross still houses elderly men called the Brothers. Any visitor may still ask at the Porter's Lodge for the Wayfarer's Dole, a horn of beer and a piece of bread.