William Hogarth’s c.1733 painting In the Madhouse
15 February 2013
Bedlam is a state of madness, confusion, or uproar. This sense of the word comes from the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London, which has served for centuries as a hospital for the mentally ill. Nowadays, it is officially known as Bethlem Royal Hospital and is run by the UK’s National Health Service.
Betleem as a form of the name of Bethlehem dates to the Old English period. It appears in the late tenth-century Blickling Homilies in the text of a sermon for Easter Sunday:
Arige us nu & miltsige se Drihten þe on engla endebyrdnesse wæs gehered, þa he on Betleem wæs acenned.
(May the Lord, who was lauded by the order of angels when he was born in Bedlam, now have pity and show mercy for us.)
But in Old English, as well as in Middle English, Bedlam was only used as the name of the town in Judea that tradition holds as the birthplace of Jesus Christ. The association with madness and confusion would not come until the sixteenth century.
The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem was founded in 1247 at Bishopsgate, just outside the walls of the City of London. (It has moved several times over the centuries, and since 1930 has been located in Beckenham, London.) It was founded as the Priory of the New Order of Our Lady of Bethlehem. The first verifiable mention of the priory being used as a hospital treating the mentally ill dates to 1402. During the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–41) under Henry VIII, the hospital was given to the City of London. And in 1547 it received a royal charter and officially became a hospital for the mentally ill.
But by then Bedlam already had a reputation for a place of insanity. In his 1528 Obedience of a Christen Man, William Tyndale wrote:
In lyke maner is it for the most parte of oure most holy religion. For they of lyke imaginacion doo thinges which they of Bedle[m] maye se / that they are but madness. […] They ascribe heven vnto their imaginacions and mad invencions / and receave it not of the liberalite of God / by the merites and deservinges of Chirst.
The more general sense of madness or uproar, disassociated from the hospital itself, was in place by the end of the sixteenth century. In a 1598 satirical poem, John Marston wrote:
Whe[n] some damn'd vice, som strange mishapen sute,
Makes youths esteeme themselues in hie repute.
O age! in which our gallants boast to be
Slaues vnto riot, and lewd luxury!
Nay, when they blush, and thinke an honest act
Dooth their supposed vertues maculate!
Bedlame, Frenzie, Madnes, Lunacie,
I challenge all your moody Empery
Once to produce a more distracted man
Then is inamorato Lucian.
That’s how the name of Jesus’s birthplace came to be associated with madness.
Sources:
Marston, John. “Satire #3.” The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres. London; Edmond Matts, 1598, 53. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. Bedlem, -leem, n.
Morris, Richard, ed. “VII. Dominica Pascha” (# 7. Easter Sunday). The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century (1874). Early English Text Society, O.S. 58, 63, & 73. London: N. Trübner, 1967, 93. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bedlam, n.
Tyndale, William. The Obedie[n]ce of a Christen Man. Antwerp: Hans Luft, 1528, fol. 36v–37v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).