At Augsburg the town council issued orders concerning the poor-law system in 1459, 1491 and 1498. Those of 1491 and 1498 sought to regulate and prevent any overlapping in the distribution of the municipal doles, the “holy alms which are compassionately given and bestowed daily in many different parts and corners of the city”; to these were subjoined measures for enforcing strict supervision of those who received assistance and for excluding the undeserving; whoever was able to work but refused to do so was shut out, in order that the other poor people might not “be deprived of their bodily sustenance.” A third and still better set of poor-law regulations appeared in 1522. They provided for a stricter organisation of the distribution of the monies, and made the supervision of those in receipt of help easier by the keeping of registers of the poor and by house to house visitations. Beggars at the church doors were placed under special control. No breach with the ecclesiastical traditions of the past is apparent in the rules of 1522, in spite of the influence of the religious innovations in this town. From the civil standpoint, however, they, like the poor laws generally drawn up at the close of the Middle Ages, display a “thorough knowledge of the conditions and are true to a well-tried tradition of communal policy.” The principal author of this piece of legislation was Conrad Peutinger, the famous lawyer and statesman who since 1497 had been town clerk. He died greatly esteemed in 1547, after having done more to further than to check the religious innovations in his native town by his uncertain and vacillating behaviour.
From the Nuremberg mendicancy regulations Johannes Janssen quotes certain highly practical enactments which belong to the latter half of the 14th century. The so-called “meat and bread foundations,” which had been enriched by the Papal Indulgences granted to benefactors, were not available for any public beggars, but only for the genuine poor. In 1478 the town council issued a more minute mendicant ordinance. Here we read: “Almsgiving is a specially praiseworthy, virtuous work, and those who receive alms unworthily and unnecessarily lay a heavy burden of guilt on themselves.” Those allowed to beg were also obliged at least “to spin or perform some other work according to their capacity.” Beggars from foreign parts were only permitted to beg on certain fixed days in the year. Conrad Celtes, the Humanist, in his work on Nuremberg printed in 1501, boasts of the ample provision for widows and orphans made by the town, the granaries for the purpose of giving assistance and other arrangements whereby it was distinguished above all other towns; families of the better class who had met with misfortunes received yearly a secret dole to tide them over their difficult time.[135]
New regulations concerning the poor, more comprehensive than the former, appeared at Nuremberg in 1522. These deal with the actual needs and are in close touch with the maxims of government and old traditions of the Imperial cities. In them all the earlier charitable, social and police measures are codified: the restriction of begging, the management of the hospitals, the provision of work and tools, advances to artisans in difficulties, granaries for future famines, the distribution of alms, badges for privileged beggars, etc. The whole is crowned by the Bible text, so highly esteemed in the Catholic Middle Ages: “Blessed is he that hath pity on the poor and needy, for the Lord will deliver him in the evil day.” “Our salvation,” so we read when mention is made of the relief funds, “rests solely in keeping and performing the commandments of God which oblige every Christian to give such help and display such fraternal charity towards his neighbour.”[136] At Nuremberg the new teaching had already taken firm footing yet the olden Catholic conception of the meritorious character of almsgiving is nevertheless recognisable in the regulations of 1522.[137]
At Strasburg a new system, dating from 1523, for regulating the distribution of the “common alms” was established in harmony with the great traditions of the 15th century, and above all with the spirit and labours of the famous Catholic preacher Geiler of Kaysersberg (†1510). Janssen has given us a fine series of witnesses, from Geiler’s sermons and writings, of the nature at once religious and practical of his exhortations to charity.[138] Charity, he insists, must show itself not merely in the bestowal of temporal goods; it is concerned above all with the “inward and spiritual goods, the milk of sound doctrine, and instruction of the unlearned, the milk of devotion, wisdom and consolation.” He repeatedly exhorts the authorities to stricter regulations on almsgiving.
After various improvements had been introduced in the poor law at Strasburg subsequent to 1500, the magistrates—the clergy and the monasteries not having shown themselves equal to their task—issued a new enactment, though even this relied to a great extent on the help of the clergy. The regulations of Augsburg and Nuremberg were the most effectual. It was only later, after the work of Capito, Bucer and Hedio at Strasburg, that, together with the new spirit, changes crept into the traditional poor-law system of the town.
All the enactments, dating from late mediæval times prior to the religious innovations, for the poor of the other great German towns, for instance, of Ratisbon (1523), Breslau (1525) and Würzburg (1533) are of a more or less similar character. Thus, thanks to the economic pressure, there was gradually evolved, in the centres of German prosperity and commercial industry, a sober but practical and far-sighted poor-law system.[139]
It was not, indeed, so easy to get rid of the existing disorders; to achieve this a lengthy struggle backed by the regulations just established would have been necessary. Above all, the tramps and vagabonds, who delighted in idleness and adventure and who often developed dangerous proclivities, continued to be the pest of the land. The cause of this economic disorder was a deep-seated one and entirely escapes those who declare that beggary sprang solely from the idea foisted on the Church, viz. that “poverty was meritorious and begging a respectable trade.”
Luther’s Efforts. The Primary Cause of their Failure
The spread of Lutheranism had its effect on the municipal movement for the relief of the poor, nor was its influence all for the good.
In 1528 and 1529 Luther twice published an edition of the booklet “On the Roguery of the False Beggars” (“Liber vagatorum”), a work dating from the beginning of the 16th century; in his preface to it he says, that the increase in fraudulent vagrancy shows “how strong in the world is the rule of the devil”; “Princes, lords, town-magistrates and, in fact, everybody” ought to see that alms were bestowed only on the beggars and the needy in their own neighbourhood, not on “rogues and vagabonds” by whom even he himself (Luther) had often been taken in. Everywhere in both towns and villages registers should be kept of the poor, and strange beggars not allowed without a “letter or testimonial.”[140]