Again from 2006 – This is a fairly well known story due to a great book that I’ll mention later.

In the year of our lord 1247, in the City of London was founded the priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem.

As a rich person might do now for tax purposes, the land for this priory was donated by one of the sheriffs of London Simon Fitz Mary.

This priory had two reasons for being.  One was to pray for the immortal soul of Simon Fitz Mary and a few of his friends.  So today you could save taxes and feel good about it, then you could save your soul and help out a few starving friars as well.

The second job of the priory was to act as a London home for the Bishop of St. Mary of Bethlehem.  Since he actually was bishop in o-little-town-of-Bethlehem his visits to London must have been infrequent.

They stopped all together after the crusades died out and Europe lost control over the holy land.

Within 200 years instead of praying for Simon Fitz Mary the place had become a hospital for lunatics.

That’s not bad since tax deductions are only good for one year.

With time, people referred to the insane asylum less as St. Mary of Bethlehem and more as a contraction Bethlehem.

Even o-little-town had been further contracted to “bedlam” as early as the year 971 so that it was only natural that the hospital too would be called bedlam.  It’s easy to see how the name of an insane asylum might evolve into, as the definition puts it:

a scene of mad confusion and uproar

Here’s the well known part.  In his book The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester talks about James Murray, the professor in the title, and one of the prime movers and editors in the publication of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and a fellow named William Minor one of the star volunteer readers for OED.

The way it worked was that the staff at the dictionary could never hope to read all the books, much less make notes on each word, that was needed to sort out how old every word was and how many meanings it had experienced etc.  So they asked for volunteers.  Some of these volunteers did yeoman service, bringing in evidence of many thousands of words.

William Minor was one of these.

The board of the OED decided they would throw a party for these hard working volunteers and give them a little thank you memento.  The invitations went out and the party was thrown, but William Minor was unable to attend.  James Murray thought it was a shame and went to personally present the award.

He was more than a little shocked to find that the address he had been corresponding with was in fact St. Mary of Bethlehem hospital and that his star researcher was in fact locked up there for being totally off his rocker.