The chief natural cause of the depression of the working class was the rise in prices. Wages have always shown themselves more sluggish in movement than commodities. While money wages, therefore, remained nearly stationary, real wages shrank throughout the century. In 1600 a French laborer was obliged to spend 55 per cent. of his wages merely on food. A whole day's labor would only buy him two and one half pounds of salt. Rents were low, because the houses were incredibly bad. At that time a year's rent for a laborer's tenement cost from ten to twenty {557} days labor; it now costs about thirty days' labor. The new commerce robbed the peasant of some of his markets by substituting foreign articles like indigo and cochineal for domestic farm products. The commercialization of agriculture worked manifold hardship to the peasant. Many were turned off their farms to make way for herds of sheep, and others were hired on new and harder terms to pay in money for the land they had once held on customary and not too oppressive terms of service and dues.
Under all the splendors of the Renaissance, with its fields of cloth of gold and its battles like knightly jousts, with its constant stream of adulation from artists and authors, with the ostentation of the new wealth and the greedily tasted pleasures of living and enjoying, an attentive ear can hear the low, uninterrupted murmurs of the wretched, destined to burst forth, on the day of despair or of vengeance, into ferocious clamors. [Sidenote: No pity for the poor] Nor was there then much pity for the poor. The charity and worship for "apostolic poverty" of the Middle Ages had ceased, nor had that social kindness, so characteristic of our own time that it is affected even by those who do not feel it, arisen. The rich and noble, absorbed in debauchery or art, regarded the peasant as a different race—"the ox without horns" they called him—to be cudgeled while he was tame and hunted like a wolf when he ran wild. Artists and men of letters ignored the very existence of the unlettered, with the superb Horatian, "I hate the vulgar crowd and I keep them off," or, if they were aroused for a moment by the noise of civil war merely remarked, with Erasmus, that any tyranny was better than that of the mob. Churchmen like Matthew Lang and Warham and the popes oppressed the poor whom Jesus loved. "Rustica gens optima flens" smartly observed a canon of Zurich, while Luther blurted out, {558} "accursed, thievish, murderous peasants" and "the gentle" Melanchthon almost sighed, "the ass will have blows and the people will be ruled by force."
There were, indeed, a few honorable exceptions to the prevalent callousness. "I praise thee, thou noble peasant," wrote an obscure German, "before all creatures and lords upon earth; the emperor must be thy equal." The little read epigrams of Euricius Cordus, a German humanist who was, by exception, also humane, denounce the blood-sucking of the peasants by their lords. Greatest of all, Sir Thomas More felt, not so much pity for the lot of the poor, as indignation at their wrongs. The Utopia will always remain one of the world's noblest books because it was almost the first to feel and to face the social problem.
[Sidenote: Pauperism]
This became urgent with the large increase of pauperism and vagrancy throughout the sixteenth century, the most distressing of the effects of the economic revolution. When life became too hard for the evicted tenant of a sheep-raising landlord, or for the déclassé journeyman of the town gild, he had little choice save to take to the road. Gangs of sturdy vagrants, led by and partly composed of old soldiers, wandered through Europe. But a little earlier than the sixteenth century that race of mendicants the Gipsies, made their debut. The word "rogue" was coined in England about 1550 to name the new class. The Book of Vagabonds, [Sidenote: 1510] written by Matthew Hütlin of Pfortzheim, describes twenty-eight varieties of beggars, exposes their tricks, and gives a vocabulary of their jargon. Some of these beggars are said to be dangerous, threatening the wayfarer or householder who will not pay them; others feign various diseases, or make artificial wounds and disfigurations to excite pity, or take a religious garb, or drag chains to show that they had escaped from galleys, or have other plausible tales of woe and {559} of adventure. All contemporaries testify to the alarming numbers of these men and women; how many they really were it is hard to say. It has been estimated that in 1500 20 per cent. of the population of Hamburg and 15 per cent. of the population of Augsburg were paupers. Under Elizabeth probably from a quarter to a third of the population of London were paupers, and the country districts were just as bad. Certain parts of Wales were believed to have a third of their population in vagabondage.
In the face of this appalling situation the medieval method of charity completely broke down. In fact, with its many begging friars, with its injunction of alms-giving as a good work most pleasing to God, and with its respect for voluntary poverty, the church rather aggravated than palliated the evil of mendicancy. The state had to step in to relieve the church.
[Sidenote: State poor-relief, 1506]
This was early done in the Netherlands. A severe edict was issued and repeatedly re-enacted against tramps ordering them to be whipped, have their heads shaved, and to be further punished with stocks. An enterprising group of humanists and lawyers demanded that the government should take over the duty of poor-relief from the church. Accordingly at Lille a "common chest" was started, the first civil charitable bureau in the Netherlands. [Sidenote: 1512] At Bruges a cloister was secularized and turned into a school for eight hundred poor children in uniform. A secular bureau of charity was started at Antwerp. [Sidenote: 1521]
Under these circumstances the humanist Lewis Vives wrote his famous tract on the relief of the poor, [Sidenote: January, 1526] in the form of a letter to the town council of Bruges. In this well thought out treatise he advocated the law that no one should eat who did not work, and urged that all able-bodied vagrants should be hired out to artisans—a suggestion how welcome to the capitalists eager to {560} draft men into their workshops! Cases of people unable to work should also be taken up, and they should be cared for by application of religious endowments by the government. Vives' claim to recognition lies even more in his spirit than in his definite program. For almost the first time in history he plainly said that poverty was a disgrace as well as a danger to the state and should be, not palliated, but extirpated.
While Vives was still preparing his treatise the city of Ypres [Sidenote: 1525] (tragic name!) had already sought his advice and acted upon it, as well as upon the example of earlier reforms in German cities, in promulgating an ordinance. The city government combined all religious and philanthropic endowments into one fund and appointed a committee to administer it, and to collect further gifts. These citizens were to visit the poor in their dwellings, to apply what relief was necessary, to meet twice a week to concert remedial measures and to have charge of enforcing the laws against begging and idleness. All children of the poor were sent to school or taught a trade.