London in the Time of the Tudors

by Walter Besant

I do not know whether this proposed House of Correction was erected or not.

The present seems the best place and time to speak of systematic attempts at Poor Relief.

The relief of the poor was a duty enjoined on all men. Almsgiving was considered especially a virtue becoming to kings and princes. Alfred gave alms continually. The Monastic Houses never turned away a beggar without a meal to speed him on his way. Rich and noble persons kept open house at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide. Already the custom was commenced of leaving lands or money to the church or to the monastery saddled with the condition of alms to be bestowed on the anniversary of the donor. By the laws of Ethelred, which probably only confirmed a custom, the third part of the tithe due to the Church was to be set aside for the use of the poor. In the Canons of Ælfric the same proportion is enjoined to be so reserved. And in all the Monastic Houses a certain part of the revenues was expended on the Almonry or the Infirmary.

The custom of giving indiscriminately to any vagrant who demanded alms, created a class of “masterless” men who would do no work and wandered about the country. It took some centuries of this growing evil before men could be brought to connect vagrancy with indiscriminate almsgiving. At first the efforts made to repress vagrancy were directed towards compulsory work. No one dared to maintain, perhaps no one dared to think, that it was wrong to give alms to a beggar merely because he was a beggar; but every one understood that the labourer must somehow be made to work. Had the Clergy and the Monastic Houses perceived the truth, vagrancy might have been reduced to a few companies of outlaws and marauders. But we cannot blame the clergy of the thirteenth century for failing to understand what the clergy of the present century are still unable to understand. When the law interfered, the situation was wellnigh desperate. The Black Death of 1348–50 had made labour scarce and wages high. The necessity of suppressing able-bodied begging and of sending the able-bodied beggar back to his native place and his proper work was forced upon the Government. The Labour Statutes endeavoured to force men to work and to keep down wages. In the fourteenth century, just as to-day, there was a natural limit imposed upon wages by the price of grain and food. The rustic who understood nothing about this limit, naturally desired higher and still higher wages; if he could not get this increase in his own parish, he went elsewhere: he begged his way; he found food at the monastery; he tasted the joys of food which was got without any work for it; he therefore easily dropped into the condition of the masterless man and the able-bodied beggar.

In 1349 the law stepped in. No one must give alms, money, or food to the able-bodied, so that for lack of bread they might be compelled to work. The rustics, in order to escape the terrors of this law, ran about the country from place to place. They pretended to be lame, blind, dumb, paralysed; in this disguise they wandered about begging with impunity unless they were detected. They pretended (case of impostor—Riley) to go on pilgrimage: they joined companies of pilgrims, begging by the way, and so got along for a time without working. Therefore in 1388 other laws were framed. Nobody was allowed to beg at all without a letter granting him a license; nobody was allowed to go on pilgrimage without a license; nobody was to go anywhere outside his own part of the country without a license. If any were found without such warrant or permission they were clapped into the stocks. The Act endeavoured to put a stop not only to able-bodied vagrancy, but also to beggars who were crippled or afflicted, for they, too, were forbidden to roam.

The citizens of London were especially severe on masterless men.

The law, at the same time, recognised the duty of relieving the impotent, and the deserving poor, and the right of these to demand relief. Wherever they were found they were compelled to go back to the place to which they belonged by birth.

Nothing could be better or more effectual than these laws if they could have been enforced. But how were they to be enforced? Where were the police who might patrol the roads? How were the villagers disposed towards laws which made them accept whatever wages the Lord of the Manor chose to give them? In the City of London what were the opinions of the working class, of the craftsmen? And how could the Alderman in his ward ascertain that every man was following his own craft? No doubt the power of arresting, punishing, and sending to their own villages the wandering rustic, had the effect of keeping down the number of the beggars. In a short time, too, the natural increase of the population relieved the scarcity of labour. Moreover the relief of the poor by each parish was ordered by the setting aside of a portion of the tithe for their benefit (a revival of the Saxon law); and in those cases where the tithes went to a monastic house, the same portion should be payable by the monks or nuns. The jealousy with which the religious Orders were already regarded is shown by the enactment of this provision by Richard II. and its confirmation by Henry IV.

If the laws against grants of the fourteenth century had been enforced there would have been an end of the evil. Unfortunately, they could not be enforced. In the country there was no kind of Police; in London the City had outgrown the old government by Aldermen and Ward, and the people were overflowing the City boundaries and were beyond the jurisdiction of the Mayor. Now the control of the county would not be very effective, say, at Wapping or at Bermondsey, when the people began to settle there. During the whole of the fifteenth century the demand for able-bodied men for the war in France first, and the Civil wars next, was so great that there seem to have been few vagrants in the country. Indications, however, are by no means wanting of a “masterless” element in London.

The cessation of the wars threw a large number of men out of employment; worse than this, it found them unwilling or unable to settle down again to steady work. Other causes also operated to produce the same result. The English nobles had ceased to maintain their large retinues: no longer did an Earl of Warwick ride into London with seven hundred gentlemen and men-at-arms; Sir Thomas More says expressly that the men who formerly had been in this kind of service either starved or became thieves. Again, the changes in the industrial condition of the country threw many people out of work: lands formerly arable were turned into pasture; sheep runs took the place of cornfields; one shepherd was wanted instead of half-a-dozen labourers. There was again a great rise in prices, owing to the influx of silver. In fifty years provisions of all kinds were doubled in price while wages rose only thirty per cent. Add to these causes the continuance of indiscriminate almsgiving.