When our embryonic Research Group was first talking about compiling a history of the order of St Lazarus in England, I was at first highly sceptical. As a newly appointed lecturer at the University of Nottingham I was already leading a busy life and, logically, the last thing I wanted to become involved with was another project requiring a further input of time, energy and resources. However, on a damp and misty November morning in 1983 I was persuaded to make my first visit to see the earthworks at Burton Lazars, and after that fateful encounter there was no turning back. It was not so much the persuasiveness of my friends that won me over, as the spirit of the place – and after that first visit I freely admit to being hooked.My instincts told me, strongly, that this was a location that had something to offer, though what precisely that was was not at that point clear in any of our minds. The site seemed to be calling out for our involvement and attention, leading us into a dark tunnel from which there could be no escape.

Once we got started on the work of unravelling Burton Lazars we soon realised we were not the first to have initiated such enquiries. In 1674 the marquis de Louvois, Louis XIV’s minister of war and ‘grand vicar-general of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Lazarus of Jerusalem’, had dispatched an emissary to peruse records in the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey in the hope of uncovering something of the history of the Lazarites in England, but he appears to have returned to France disappointed. A little later, in the eighteenth century, Philip Burton, a lawyer and antiquarian, became preoccupied with the history of Burton Lazars and promised to give his assistance to John Gough Nichols, Leicestershire’s principal antiquary, who was writing a history of the county at about the same time. But, alas, fate intervened, and Burton was struck down, literally, while putting the finishing touches to his manuscript in 1792. ‘On the morning of the day on which he died … he rose, as was his usual custom, at six o’clock, and at five in the afternoon it pleased the Almighty to take him, while the pen was in his hand.’ The great work disappeared forever.