Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Chariot" to "Chatelaine" / Volume 5, Slice 8

by Various

(1) The Church as Legatee.—The church building among the Teutonic races was not held by the bishop as part of what was originally the charitable property of the church. It was assigned to the patron saint of the church by the donor, who retained the right of administration, of which his own patronage or right of presentation is a relic. Subsequently, with the study of Roman law, the conception of the church as a persona ficta prevailed; and till the larger growth of the gilds and corporations it was the only general legatee for charitable gifts. As these arise a large number of charitable trusts are created and held by lay corporations; and “alms” include gifts for social as well as religious or eleemosynary purposes. (2) Freedom from Taxation and Service.—Gifts to the church for charitable or other purposes were made in free, pure and perpetual alms (“ad tenendum in puram et perpetuam eleemosynam sine omni temporali servicio et consuetudine”). Land held under this frankalmoigne was given “in perpetual alms,” therefore the donor could not retract it; in free alms, therefore he could exact no services in regard to it; and in pure alms as being free from secular jurisdiction (cf. Pollock and Maitland). (3) Alienation and Mortmain.—To prevent alienation of property to religious houses, with the consequent loss of service to the superior or chief lords, a licence from the chief lord was required to legalize the alienation (Magna Carta, and Edw. I., De viris religiosis). Other statutes (Edw. I. and Rich. II.) enacted that this licence should be issued out of chancery after investigation; and the principle was applied to civil corporations. The necessity of this licence was one lay check on injurious alienation. (4) Irresponsible Administration.—Until after the 13th century, when the lay courts had asserted their right to settle disputes as to lands held in alms, the administration of charity was from the lay point of view entirely irresponsible. It was outside the secular jurisdiction; and civilly the professed clergy, who were the administrators, were “dead.” They could not sue or be sued except through their sovereign—their chief, the abbot. They formed a large body of non-civic inhabitants free from the pressure and the responsibilities of civil life. (5) Control.—Apart from the control of the abbot, prior, master or other head, the bishop was visitor, or, as we should say, inspector; and abuses might be remedied by the visit of the bishop or his ordinary. The bishop’s ordinary (2 Henry V. i. 1) was the recognized visitor of all hospitals apart from the founder. The founder and his family retained a right of intervention. Sometimes thus an institution was reorganized, or even dissolved, the property reverting to the founder (Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, vi. 2. 715). (6) Cy-près.—Charities were, especially after Henry V.’s reign, appropriated to other uses, either because their original purpose failed or because some new object had become important. Thus, for instance, a college or hospital for lepers (1363) is re-established by the founder’s family with a master and priest, quod nulli leprosi reperiebantur; and a similar hospital founded in Henry I.’s time near Oxford has decayed, and is given by Edward III. to Oriel College, Oxford, to maintain a chaplain and poor brethren. Thus, apart from alienation pure and simple, the principle of adaptation to new uses was put in force at an early date, and supplied many precedents to Wolsey, Edward VI. and the post-Reformation bishops. The system of endowments was indeed far more adaptable than it would at first sight seem to have been. (7) The Sources of Income.—The hospitals were chiefly supported by rents or the produce of land; or, if attached to monasteries, out of the tithe of their monastic lands or other sources of revenue, or out of the appropriated tithes of the secular clergy; or they might be in part maintained by collections made, for instance, by a commissioner duly authorized by a formal attested document, in which were recounted the indulgences by popes, archbishops and bishops to those who became its benefactors (Cobbe, p. 75); or, in the case of leper hospitals, by a leper with a “clapdish,” who begged in the markets; or by a proctor, in the case of more important institutions in towns, who “came with his box one day in every month to the churches and other religious houses, at times of service, and there received the voluntary gifts of the congregation”; or they might receive inmates on payment, and thus apparently a frequent abuse, decayed servants of the court and others, were “farmed out.” (8) Mode of Admission.—The admission was usually, no doubt, regulated by the prior or master. At York, at the hospital of St Nicholas for the leprous, the conditions of admission were: promise or vow of continence, participation in prayer, the abandonment of all business, the inmate’s property at death to go to the house. This may serve as an example. The master was usually one of the regular clergy. (9) Decline of the Hospitals.—It is said that, in addition to 645 monasteries and 90 “colleges” and many chantries, Henry VIII. suppressed 110 hospitals (Speed’s Chronicle, p. 778). The numbers seem small. In the economic decline at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries many hospitals may have lapsed.

In the 15th century the towns grew in importance. First the wool trade and then the cloth trade flourished, and the English developed a large shipping trade. The towns grew up like “little principalities”; and for the advancement Gild and municipal charities. of trade, gilds, consisting alike of masters and workmen, were formed, which endeavoured to regulate and then to monopolize the market. By degrees the corporations of the towns were worked in their interests, and the whole commercial system became restrictive and inadaptable. Meanwhile the towns attracted newcomers; freedom from feudal obligations was gained with comparative ease; and a new plebs was congregating, a population of inhabitants not qualified as burghers or gild members, women, sons living with their fathers, menial servants and apprentices. There was thus an increasing restriction imposed on trade, coupled with a growing plebs. Naturally, then, lay charities sprang up for members of gilds, and for burghers and for the commonalty. Men left estates to their gilds to maintain decayed members in hospitals, almshouses or otherwise, to educate their children, portion their daughters, and to assist their widows. The middle-class trader was thus in great measure insured against the risks of life. The gilds were one sign of the new temper and wants of burghers freed from feudalism. Another sign was a new standard of manners. Rules and saws, Hesiodic in their tone, became popular—in regard, for instance, to such a question as “how to enable a man to live on his means, and to keep himself and those belonging to him.” The boroughs established other charities also, hospitals and almshouses for the people, a movement which, like that of the gilds, began very early—in Italy as early as the 9th century. They sometimes gave outdoor relief also to registered poor (Green i. 41), and they had in large towns courts of orphans presided over by the mayor and aldermen, thus taking over a duty that previously had been one of conspicuous importance in the church. As early as 1257 in Westphalian towns there was a rough-and-ready system of Easter relief of the poor; and in Frankfort in 1437 there was a town council of almoners with a systematic programme of relief (Ratzinger, p. 352). Thus at the close of the middle ages the towns were gradually assuming what had been charitable functions of the church.

While a new freedom was being attained by the labourer in the country and the burgher in the town, the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient supply of labour for agriculture must have been constant, especially at every visitation of Statutory wage control. plague and famine. In accordance with a general policy of state regulation which was to control and supervise industry, agriculture and poor relief and to repress vagrancy by gaols and houses of correction, the state stepped in as arbiter and organizer. By Statutes of Labourers beginning in 1351 (25 Edw. III. 135), it aimed at enforcing a settled wage and restraining migration. From 1351 it endeavoured to suppress mendicity, and in part to systematize it in the interest of infirm and aged mendicants. Each series of enactments is the natural complement of the other. In the main their signification, from the point of view of charity, lies in the fact that they represent a persistent endeavour to prevent social unsettlement and in part the distress which unsettlement causes, and which vagrancy in some measure indicates, by keeping the people within the ranks of recognized dependence, the settled industry of the crafts and of agriculture, or forcing them back into it by fear of the gaol or the stocks. The extreme point of this policy was reached when by the laws of Edward VI. and Elizabeth the “rogue, vagabond or sturdy beggar” was branded with an R on the shoulder and handed over as a bondman for a period to any one who would take him. On the other hand, it was desired that relief should be a means of preventing migration. In any time of general pressure there is a desire to organize mendicity, to prevent the wandering of beggars, to create a kind of settled poor, distinguished from the rest as infirm and not able-bodied, and to keep these at least at home sufficiently supported by local and parochial relief; and this, in its simpler form all the world over, has in the past been by response to public begging. The argument may be summed up thus: We cannot have begging, which implies that the beggar is cared for by no one, belongs to no one, and therefore throws himself on the world at large. Therefore, if he is able-bodied he must be punished as unsocial, for it is his fault that he belongs to no one; or we must make him some one’s dependant, and so keep him; or if he is infirm, and therefore of no service to any one—if no one will keep him—we must organize his mendicity, for such mendicity is justified. If he cannot dig for the man to whom he does or should belong, he must beg. Then out of the failure to organize mendicity—for relief of itself is no remedy, least of all casual relief—a poor-law springs up, which, afterwards associated with the provision of employment, will, it is hoped, make relief in some measure remedial by increasing its quantity by means of compulsory levies. This argument, which combined statutory wage control and statutory poor relief, seems to have been firmly bedded in the English legislative mind for more than two centuries, from 1351 till after 1600; and until 1834 these two series of laws effectually reduced the English labourer to a new industrial dependence. To people imbued with ideas of feudalism the way of escape from villenage seemed to be not independence, but a new reversion to it.

Many elements produced the social and economic catastrophe of the 16th century, for the condition into which the country fell can hardly be considered less than a catastrophe. With the growing independence of the people there was The decadence. created after the 13th century an unsettled “masterless” class, a residue of failure resulting from social changes, which was large and important enough to call for legislation. In the 15th century, “the golden age of the English labourer,” the towns increased and flourished. Both town and country did well. At the end of the century came the decadence. The measure of the strain, when perhaps it had reached its lowest level, is indicated by the following comparison: “The cost of a peasant’s family of four in the early part of the 14th century was £3:4:9; after 1540 it was £8” (Rogers, Hist, of Agric. and Prices, iv. 756).

The cause of this has now been fairly investigated. The value of land in the 13th century generally depended chiefly on “the head of labour” retained upon it. Its fertility depended on mainoeuvre (manure). To keep labour upon it was therefore the aim of the lord or owner. The enclosing of lands for sheep began early, and in the time of Edward III., in the great days of the woolstaple, must have been extensive. So long as the demand for the exportation of wool, and then for its consumption at home in the cloth trade, continued, the towns prospered, and the enclosures did not become a grievance. Even before the reign of Henry VII., with the decay of trade, the towns decayed, and their population in some cases diminished extraordinarily. This reacted on the country, where the great families had already become impoverished, and were hardly able to support their retainers. In Henry VIII.’s time the lands of the religious houses were confiscated. Worked on old lines, the custom of tillage remained in force on them. Accordingly, when these estates fell into private hands they were transferred subject to the condition that they should be tilled as heretofore. The condition was evaded by the new owners, and the disbandment of farm labourers went on apace. In England and Wales these changes, it is said, affected a third of the country, more than 12,000,000 acres, if the estimates be correct, or rather a third of the best land in the kingdom. With towns decaying, the effect of this must have been terrible. What were really “latifundia” were created, “great landes,” “enclosures of a mile or two or thereabouts ... destroying thereby not only the farms and cottages within the same circuits, but also the towns and villages adjoining.” A herdsman and his wife took the place of eighteen to twenty-four farm hands. The people thus set wandering could only join the wanderers from the decaying towns. At the same time the economic difficulty was aggravated by a new patrician or commercial greed; and once more the land question—the absorption of property into a few hands instead of its free exchange—led to lasting social demoralization. A few years after the alienation of the monasteries the coinage (1543) was debased. By this means prices were arbitrarily raised, and wages were increased nominally; but nevertheless the price of necessaries was “so enhanced” that neither “the poor labourers can live with their wages that is limited by your grace’s laws, nor the artificers can make, much less sell, their wares at any reasonable price” (Lamond, The Commonweal of this Realm of England, p. xlvii). No social reformation, such as the charitable instincts of Wycliffe, More, Hales, Latimer and other men suggested, was attempted, or at least persistently carried out. In towns the organization of labour had become restrictive, exclusive and inadaptable, or, judged from the moral standpoint, uncharitable. There had been a time of plenty and extravagance, of which in high quarters the famous “field of the cloth of gold” was typical; and probably, in accordance with the frequently observed law of social economics, as the advance in wages and their purchasing power in the earlier part of the 15th century had not been accompanied by a simultaneous advance in self-discipline and intelligent expenditure, it resulted in part in lessened competence and industrial ability on the part of the workmen, and thus in the end produced pauperism.

The poverty of the country was very great in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth. Adversity then taught the people new manners, and households became more simple and thrifty. In the reign of James I., with enforced economy and thrift, a “slow but substantial improvement in agriculture” took place, and a new growth of commercial enterprise. The vigour of the municipalities had abated, so that in Henry VIII.’s time they had become the very humble servants of the government; and the government, on the other hand, had become strongly centralized—in itself a sign of the general withdrawal of self-sustaining activity in all administration, in the administration of charitable relief no less than in other departments. A system of endowed charities had been built up, supported chiefly by rents from landed property. These now had disappeared, and thus the means of relief, which Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth might have utilized at a time of general distress, had been dissipated by the acts of their predecessors. The civil independence of the monasteries and religious houses might have been justified, possibly, when they were engaged in missionary work and were instilling into the people the precepts of a higher moral law than that which was in force around them. But afterwards, as the ability and intelligence of the community increased, their privileges became more and more antagonistic to charity, and tended to create a non-social and even anti-social ecclesiastical democracy actuated by aims and interests in which the general good of the people had little or no place. There was a growing alienation between religious tradition and secular opinion, as Lollardism slowly permeated the thought of the people and led the way to the Reformation. While this alienation existed no national system of charity, civic and yet religious, could be created. But worse than all, the ideal of charity had been degraded. A self-regarding system of relief had superseded charity, and it was productive of nothing but alms, large or small, isolated and unmethodic, given with a wrong bias, and thus almost inevitably with evil results. Out of this could spring no vigorous co-operative charity. Charity—not relief—indeed seemed to have left the world. The larger issues were overlooked. Then the property of the hospitals and the gilds was wantonly confiscated, though the poor had already lost that share in the revenues of the church to which at one time they were admitted to have a just claim. A new beginning had to be made. The obligations of charity had to be revived. A new organization of charitable relief had to be created, and that with an empty exchequer and after a vast waste of charitable resources. There were signs of a new congregational and parochial energy, yet the task could not be entrusted to the religious bodies, divided and disunited as they were. In their stead it could be imposed only on some authority which represented the general community, such as municipalities; and in spite of the centralization of the government there seemed some hope of creating a system of relief in connexion with them. They were tried, and, very naturally, failed. In the poverty of the time it seemed that the poor could be relieved only by a compulsory rate, and the administration of statutory relief naturally devolved on the central government—the only vigorous administrative body left in the country. The government might indeed have adopted the alternative of letting the industrial difficulties of the country work themselves out, but they had inherited a policy of minute legislative control, and they continued it. Revising previous statutes, they enacted the Poor Law, which still remains on the statute book. It could be no remedy for social offences against charity and the community. But in part at least it was successful. It helped to conceal the failure to find a remedy.

Part VI.—After the Reformation

During the Reformation, which extended, it should be understood, from the middle of the 14th century to the reign of James I., the groundwork of the theory of charity was being recast. The old system and the narrow theory on which The Reformation theory of charity. it had come to depend were discredited. The recoil is startling. To a very large extent charitable administration had been in the hands of men and women who, as an indispensable condition to their participation in it, took the vows of obedience, chastity and “wilful” poverty. Now this was all entirely set aside. It was felt (see Homilies on Faith and Good Works, &c., A.D. 1547) that socially and morally the method had been a failure. The vow of obedience, it was argued, led to a general disregard of the duties of civic and family life. Those who bound themselves by it were outside the state and did not serve it. In regard to chastity the Homily states the common opinion: “How the profession of chastity was kept, it is more honesty to pass over in silence and let the world judge of what is well known.” As to wilful poverty, the regulars, it is urged, were not poor, but rich, for they were in possession of much wealth. Their property, it is true, was held in communi, and not personally, but nevertheless it was practically theirs, and they used it for their personal enjoyment; and “for all their riches they might never help father nor mother, nor others that were indeed very needy and poor, without the license of their father abbot” or other head. This was the negative position. The positive was found in the doctrine of justification—the central point in the discussions of the time, a plant from the garden of St Augustine. Justification was the personal conviction of a lively (or living) faith, and was defined as “a true trust and confidence of the mercy of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and a stedfast hope of all good things to be received at His hands.” Without this justification there could be no good works. They were the signs of a lively faith and grew out of it. Apart from it, what seemed to be “good works” were of the nature of sin, phantom acts productive of nothing, “birds that were lost, unreal.” So were the works of pagans and heretics. The relation of almsgiving to religion was thus entirely altered. The personal reward here or hereafter to the actor was eliminated. The deed was good only in the same sense in which the doer was good; it had in itself no merit. This was a great gain, quite apart from any question as to the sufficiency or insufficiency of the Protestant scheme of salvation. The deed, it was realized, was only the outcome of the doer, the expression of himself, what he was as a whole, neither better nor worse. Logically this led to the discipline of the intelligence and the emotions, and undoubtedly “justification” to very many was only consistent with such discipline and implied it. Thus under a new guise the old position of charity reasserted itself. But there were other differences.

The relation of charity to prayer, fasting, almsgiving and penance was altsred. The prayerful contemplation of the Christ was preserved in the mysticism of Protestantism; but it was dissociated from the “historic Christ,” from the fervent idealization of whom St Francis drew his inspiration and his active charitable impulse. The tradition did not die out, however. It remained with many, notably with George Herbert, of whom it made, not unlike St Francis, a poet as well as a practical parish priest; but the absence of it indicated in much post-Reformation endeavour a want, if not of devotion, yet of intensity of feeling which may in part account for the fact that sectarianism in relief has since proved itself stronger than charity, instead of yielding to charity as its superior and its organizer. Fasting was parted from prayer and almsgiving. It was “a thing not of its own proper nature good as the love of father or mother or neighbour, but according to its end.” Almsgiving also as a “work” disappeared and with it a whole series of inducements that from the standpoint of the pecuniary and material supply of relief had long been active. It was no wonder that the preachers advocated it in vain, and reproached their hearers with their diminished bounty to the poor; the old personal incentive had gone, and could only gradually be superseded by the spontaneous activity of personal religion very slowly wedding itself to true views of social duty and purpose. Penance, once so closely related to almsgiving, passed out of sight. Charity, the love of God and our neighbour, had two offices, it was said, “to cherish good and harmless men” and “to correct and punish vice without regard to persons.” Correction as a means of discipline takes the place of penance, and it becomes judicial, regulating and controlling church membership by the authority of the church, a congregation, minister or elder; or dealing with laziness or ill-doing through the municipality or state, in connexion with what now first appear, not prisons, but houses of correction.

The religious life was to be democratic—not in religious bodies, but in the whole people; and in a new sense—in relation to family and social life—it was to be moral. That was the significance of the Reformation for charity.