John Palmer's Almshouses, Magdalen Street, Exeter
Introduction
The photograph on this page of John Palmer's Almshouses, Magdalen Street, Exeter by Tom Jolliffe as part of the Geograph project.
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John Palmer's Almshouses, Magdalen Street, Exeter
Image: © Tom Jolliffe Taken: 12 Jan 2012
This stone plaque remains to remind us of the philanthropy of an Exeter baker. In the book: "Exeter, 1540-1640: the growth of an English county town" - By Wallace T. MacCaffrey the following explanation can be found: "At the close of the (fifteenth) century a baker of the city, John Palmer, built houses outside the South Gate for four poor women, with yearly pensions of 6s 8d each, and enfeoffed the endowment lands to the city." How commendable. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VuBMbEAVN7EC&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=palmer+endowment+exeter&source=bl&ots=4SJ0tx4AZQ&sig=Rf51X9DQ6wjlEaoJy1_tR-Jy6hw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=o-UaT7LSEYySOujf4bML&sqi=2&ved=0CE4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=palmer%20endowment%20exeter&f=false One wonders why our current industry Titans of Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose and Morrisons do not follow this example? One baker in Exeter can build a few houses for the poor, but our paragons of the retail trade haggle over putting in the odd slip road or extra parking for the Local Authority as it might take a few hundred thousand off the tens or hundreds of millions of annual profit.
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Image Location
Latitude
50.720306
Longitude
-3.527621