7 g. Advancement of capital without interest.
Perhaps the charity which was most peculiar to the seventeenth century was that of lending sums of money to set young tradesmen and artificers up in business for themselves.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries capital was growing a more and more important factor in production and it was becoming an increasingly difficult thing for the young journeyman to become a master.
We must remember that six to twelve per cent. was the ordinary rate of interest at the time. The difficulty of paying so much probably prevented many poor young men from starting business. Moreover all through the Middle Ages lending money for interest was considered contrary to Christian morality, and many men still held to the old opinion. In great numbers of places therefore funds were bequeathed to what have been termed "Lending Cash Charities." Sums were lent to young men, or sometimes to older men who had lost their capital, either for no return or at what was then a low rate of interest, and the borrowers had to find security for the repayment of the original sum. Many of the City Companies are responsible for the administration of very considerable sums of this kind. The Haberdashers' Company alone possesses £2510 which ought to be lent gratis and which was bequeathed by many different donors between the years 1569 and 1638. The Mercers' Company possesses at least twenty-one gifts of this kind. One of the most considerable of these is that of Lady Campbell, who in 1642 bequeathed £1000 which was to be lent gratis on good security to eight young men of the Mercers' Company; shopkeepers of the mercery were to be preferred, and next to them silkmen[568].
Not only the City Companies but also the town rulers of most provincial towns and sometimes parish authorities were trustees for such charities. At Ipswich bequests of this kind are especially numerous; they are much smaller in amount than those of London, but they are typical of the kind of charity that once existed in almost every town in which old records remain. In common with twenty-three other towns, Ipswich had an interest in Sir Thomas White's will and received in its turn £100 to be lent to four poor tradesmen. Besides this no less than eleven other legacies of this sort were received before 1635. Amongst these Mrs Alice Scrivener gave £100 to be lent gratis to ten people for four years, Christopher Cock gave £100 to be lent to four clothiers for five years, and John Barrett £20 to four shoemakers without interest[569]. At Reading the same kind of thing was done; in 1626 Mr Ironside left £100 to be lent gratis to two clothiers and two shopkeepers, and in 1633 Richard Johnson gave £100 for four tradesmen for twelve years[570]. At Oxford there were once many sums for such loans, but these have most of them either been lost or are used for other purposes[571].
In Barnstaple, Bristol, Newbury, Lichfield, Wolverhampton and Colchester[572] there were similar bequests, and apparently in most towns charitable funds of this kind were in existence during the reigns of the earlier Stuarts. It was one of the ways in which the philanthropists of the time endeavoured to give employment, only in this case it was not to the vagrant, but to the householder or skilled workman. Usually these sums were given by private people and administered by the town. But at Hitchin we find something of the kind suggested as a method of poor relief. The justices in their report recount the sufferings of the poor during the plague, and say that "three poore tradesmen who were shutt up And haue lost their custome and spent their meanes haue petitioned for stock to put them into Trade againe[573]." The matter was not yet decided, but from the justices' language it is clear that they regarded it as quite within their power to grant relief in this manner. John Lock, tailor of London, bequeathed gifts of £5 to £10 to the apprentices of Bridewell with a similar object, and, having regard to the circumstances of the time, few charities would probably have had a better effect if they had been honestly administered.
We thus see that many different methods were employed to relieve the old, to train the young and to give work to the able-bodied. The examples we have already given afford some evidence that legal poor relief had become well established in many districts, but it was not equally well administered at all times and in all places. We will now inquire when and how the administration of the law was improved, and the answer to this question may suggest the reason why the history of the English Poor Law is different to that of the rest of Western Europe.