2
give me neither poverty nor riches.
(Proverbs 30: 8)
Pity would be no more
If we did not make someone poor.
(William Blake, ‘The Human Abstract’)
From the time of The Romance of the Rose (13th century), a combination of factors – religious wars, plague, the voyages of discovery to the New World and the rise of capitalist enterprise in the Renaissance amid feudal conditions – caused large-scale economic disruption, with market fluctuations and inflation, dispossession, hunger, and vagrancy, triggering in the early 16th century widespread peasant revolts, with lasting legislative consequences: much European Poor Law dates from this period.1 Some began to see Christianity not as liberation but as bondage: the rich, as their religion demanded more responsibility on their part toward the poor; the poor, as in a wealthier society prices rose and their status declined.2 European literature marks these changes.
The radiant biblical hope of poverty as history was darkened by medieval economic reality. Generosity and compassion were curbed by fear and distrust of the poor.3 Giving to the poor had low priority.4 It was not unusual to regard charity as wasted on the poor as it drained their motivation to work. Disdain for poverty and the poor spread among the European middle and upper classes, particularly when the poor, afflicted by famine and disease, abandoned their land and wandered in search of aid and work. Much European literature, evidently starting in medieval Arabic and spreading throughout Europe, concerns fraudulent beggary.5 From the 13th century, but especially after 1348, the European poor were seen as an urgent problem; from 1350 to 1500 their numbers rose steeply, with consequent fear of popular revolts; by the 16th century the harsh view of the poor was increasingly enshrined in Poor Law. These changes are reflected in literature and popular culture: Chrétien de Troyes, in Yvain (12th century), and the anonymous author of Aucassin et Nicolette depict peasants in grotesque bestial imagery; the 13th-century poet, Rutebeuf, similarly, mocks the poor and the blind of Paris; sermons, fabliaux, and medieval carnival plays often make fun of the peasants; the poems of Neidhart (early 13th century, but popular until the 16th century) also mock the peasants; 15th-century French and German literature are generally hostile to the peasants; the leading medieval French poets, Eustace Deschamps and François Villon, distrust and vilify the poor; the German poem ‘Edelmanslehre’ recommends robbing and murdering them; Deschamps’ contempt for the poor and his appeals for their repression are ‘the literary equivalent of the judicial measures being taken with regard to beggars’,6 an insight which might be applied to the entire literary genre of ‘false beggars’, which can be interpreted as the cultural arm of European Poor Law, breaking radically with Scripture.
Long before the Renaissance, enlightened European societies, including educated working people, were alive to untapped human resources which could change lives, even those of the poor – for better or worse. Only a settled, largely illiterate agrarian society with few itinerants could resign itself to widespread poverty – ‘mother of maladies’ (morborum genitrix) – as ‘normal’.7 To travel was to see something of the variety, and the potential, of human societies. Social mobility increased in the Middle Ages: many churchmen, including popes, were from humble backgrounds; men who might never have seen the world beyond their immediate villages traveled as soldiers, missionaries, colonists, and tradesmen to seek their fortunes further than at home. Within their limited world, even the most ignorant poor were occasionally made aware of injustice, for example in the tax on their harvests and through military service, from which the upper classes were exempt. Governments took the poor into legislative account chiefly when they troubled landowners and aristocrats who had parliamentary representation: for example, in time of plague, famine, war, poor harvests; when there were labor shortages; when the population grew and the poor rate went up; when there was a rise in unrest, vagrancy, and crime; when starving laborers went on the rampage; or when landowners took over public land for their private use (one-fifth of the land in England is estimated to have come in this category over the centuries; and in the medieval period, forest-land belonging to the crown covered one-quarter of the country).
Parish priests were often deeply committed to helping the poor. Biblical law required payment of a tax of one-tenth of income to the Church.8 From this tithe about one-third went on poor relief. This system was open to abuse. Chaucer’s mocking art in the depiction of churchmen and church officials in The Canterbury Tales often lies in the distance between the ascetic Christian ideal and the hypocritical reality. One such official is the Summoner who works for ecclesiastical courts, issuing summonses to those who break Church law, for example in failing to pay their tithes for the poor. The Summoner in the Prologue to the Tales, cherub-red from sexual and culinary debauchery, flagrantly pockets bribes and penances. Yet in his story he attacks friars for being, as he puts it, so filthily corrupt that they lodge (literally) up the devil’s arse. The story features a friar who hypocritically professes Christ-like poverty, piously referring to Jesus’ parable of the poor man, Lazarus, and the rich man, Dives, of whom only Lazarus will enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Luke ch. 16):
We had this worldes lust al in despit.
Lazar and Dives lyveden diversely
And divers gerdon hadden they thereby.
(lines 1876–8)9
Literary cynicism tends to follow medieval European Poor Law, which though it kept the poor alive, betrayed Scripture by accusing the poor of guilt as a class – of parasitism and fakery, a burden and threat to the social order. In evolving policies toward the poor, European societies struggled with more general difficulties in assimilating monotheist values. Having accepted Christianity and the authority of the Bible in the early Middle Ages, they then rejected Christian pacifism, asceticism, and opposition to wealth and the wealthy to fit their own evolving identities and challenges, especially from Islam; and, as European wealth grew, conceived an ideology of hatred against the Jews, progenitors of the Bible and Christianity, as hateful usurers, vengeful Judases and Shylocks, demonic enemies of humanity.10 The Jews became a ‘scapegoat for Christian failure to adapt successfully to the profit economy’.11 Insofar as the medieval economy depended on money-lending and interest, it broke biblical law (Exodus 22: 24) and undermined Christian love for the poor. From Dante’s Hell to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and later, the usurer, wielding interest as his mode of operation, is scorned and hated as anti-Christian.12 Yet, the Church, enemy of usury and slavery through its Judaic roots, was part of an economy dependent on usury through its alliances with merchants and bankers, and its centuries-long commitments to costly wars to restore the Holy Land to Christendom; the Church was also ‘the largest slave-owner in the early Middle Ages’.13 In the Middle Ages and later, poverty and anti-Semitism were often linked; the poor and the Jews were often accused of doing harm to society, of parasitism and crime. In late 14th-century France, for example, ‘beggars were accused of the same crimes as were imagined in anti-Semitic fantasies, to poison wells and kidnap and mutilate children’.14 Jews were frequently attacked and expelled, notably from England, France, Spain and Portugal, and German lands. Judas, betrayer of the savior and robber of the poor, was the stereotype of the greedy, harmful Jew, in poems such as the Latin Legend of Judas (12th century). At the same time, medieval Christianity, defender of the poor, was weakened by its obvious impotence in the Black Death and other outbreaks of plague and its failure to achieve lasting military success in centuries of crusades. The consequent rise of secular humanism and government, based on reason, led ultimately both to Jewish emancipation and to a more enlightened view of the poor.
Medieval capitalism and ambivalence toward the poor
After the introduction of pontifical taxes in the 13th century, the Church was as notable for its wealth as for its duties to the poor. The rediscovery of Roman law in the 14th century stimulated the coordination of European legal systems, which safeguarded ownership. Much public land passed to private ownership, benefiting the landed gentry at the expense of the poor. Newly discovered classical learning challenged Christian theology and ways of life. The poor were at least somewhat protected in the Judaeo-Christian tradition by ‘holy poverty’, by their entitlement to alms ‘in the name of God’. Among believing Christians, there was a surviving belief going back to the ‘Suffering Servant’ in the book of Isaiah that ‘the poor might always turn out to be God’s emissaries’.15 Yet, as the medieval Christian ‘ascetic spirit’ faded, so did the ‘halo of sanctity’ of the poor,16 as did the image of the Church, to the wealthy, worldly, and corrupt.
Medieval wealth was a mixed blessing: it brought an increasingly jaundiced view of the poor but also greater efficiency in the administration of poor relief. The poor might no longer be the guardians of the gates to the kingdom of heaven; and they themselves had to be guarded and bound by law not to hinder the accumulation and enjoyment of wealth in this world. Yet, as European societies became wealthier, the lives of the poor often improved, through Church and private enterprise, increased tithes, and charitable enterprises, including the building of hospitals, alms houses, and orphanages and the creation of societies for foundlings, abandoned mothers, itinerants, the unemployed, and the sick: ‘in a society where money played an important role, concern for the indigent was mandatory’; men of property ‘paid vast sums toward relief of the poor’.17
The mendicant orders, founded in the early 13th century, sought to embody the ideal image of Jesus in a life of apostolic poverty, rejecting lavish religious pomp and ceremony. The rapid growth of the Dominican and Franciscan orders reflected dissatisfaction with the Church of Rome. To many, their begging signified Christian spiritual authenticity, opposing the hypocrisy of the Church, its ostensible piety and austerity a front for sybaritic immersion in luxury and immorality. Still, the Church was the voice and chief support of the poor and mediator between rich and poor. In gospel-based Christianity, Church possessions belonged to the poor. Ideally, to accumulate wealth was practically un-Christian: ‘a man who accumulated superfluous wealth beyond what he needed to live in a decent and fitting fashion according to his status had no right to keep that wealth. He owed it to the poor’.18
In feudal Europe and until the 19th century, widespread extreme poverty was inescapable. The peasantry was tied permanently, it seemed, to the land.19 Children, women, and the aged and infirm suffered most. Bad harvests, backbreaking physical labor, and famine were the lot of the poor. The soil and weather, plague, high infant mortality, and death in childbirth, afflicted everyone. Ignorance of medicine and hygiene united all classes: in the mid-14th century Black Death, an estimated one-third of Europeans died; kings and queens were as vulnerable to sickness as the indigent – at times more so as they could afford doctors.20 The start of the Little Ice Age and the Black Death enhanced traditional awareness of the need to protect the poor, if not for humanitarian reasons then as an invaluable pool of labor and recruitment in wartime; and, if abused sufficiently, a threat to the existing order.21 Much literature, from Piers Plowman on, is truer to the loving spirit of the Bible than to the cold functionality of Poor Law. In William Langland’s Piers Plowman, written in the decades after the Black Plague, and reflecting the economic conditions of the period, labor is sacred and biblical egalitarianism is invoked to extol the poor. Rich and poor are united in the blood of Christ, but the rich – unless they behave with compassion and generosity toward the poor – are at a disadvantage, for not they but the poor will have their reward in the kingdom of heaven.22 Evangelical Christianity stressed the reward the poor would have for their faith. The Franciscan and Dominican orders (founded in the early 13th century) opposed Poor Law as an affront to the dignity of the poor and, therefore, of God. Millenarian movements from the time of the First Crusade aimed to rectify the injustice of poverty, if not through peaceful means then through violent apocalypse. The anonymous German Book of a Hundred Chapters (early 16th century) depicts an apocalyptic crusade bringing terror and massacre to sinners, devotees of Luxuria and Avaritia, of the Whore of Babylon in the book of Revelation, symbol of the Church of Rome: ‘The Revolutionary leaves no doubt as to who these crusading brethren are to be: they will be the common people, the poor.’23
Literature on the poor was transformed as medieval laws and customs stemming from the Bible were replaced or modified by secular parliamentary Poor Law, first codified in England in the final years of Elizabeth I.24 Printing from the mid-15th century increased the volume and flow of information and stimulated literacy in a continent whose peasantry was mostly illiterate. The growth of European cities together with institutions for the support of the poor attracted the rural poor; the urban beggar population expanded, at times perhaps reaching 10% of the total.25 The evolution of national states and cultures in the Middle Ages had potential benefit to the standing of the poor as they could be seen as a vital part of the nation, essential to the economy and to defense. New markets and jobs improved their economic conditions.26 In the 15th century, discoveries of silver in the Alps and the Erzgebirge led to increased credit. There was a boom in mining and metallurgy as well as the textile industry. By 1500 England was the leading exporter of manufactured products. Amid these changes, in an agricultural society consisting mostly of small villages whose inhabitants generally stayed where they were born, Poor Law was better than nothing. Church hierarchies tended to protect the feudal status quo, but parish priests, mostly in sparsely populated rural areas, were a lifeline to the poor: the Bible was their guiding light. Interwoven secular Poor Law and Christian charity, for all their shortcomings, helped prevent starvation of countless Europeans over the centuries.27
At the same time, Scripture-based idealization of the poor weakened in increasingly capitalist, secular states. The notion of ‘apostolic poverty’ – poverty as virtue, a path to spiritual perfection, as taught in Scripture28 – was contested in medieval Europe, together with the idea of the separation of Church and state: in an anonymous 14th-century poem, poverty is accursed: ‘O povertà – cosi sis desparsa!’29
Plague, by decreasing the population, in many places drastically, made labor scarcer and more expensive, and gave the surviving peasantry opportunities to improve their lives. A new self-awareness among the poor seems to have followed the devastation of the Black Death, and is reflected in Piers Plowman. Langland was evidently a low-level cleric who survived the Black Death as a young man and ministered to the poorest of the poor, in London and rural areas. Sympathy for the suffering poor shines through in Piers Plowman:
If we look hard, those next door are most in need,
poor folk in hovels like prisoners in pits,
weighed down with children, and the landlord’s rent.
What they earn with spinning goes on rent,
on milk and meal for gruel to feed their young,
crying to be fed, while they themselves suffer
hunger with winter-woe, waking at night to rock
the corner-cramped cradle, to card and comb the wool,
to patch and wash, to scrape the flax and wind the yarn
and peel the rushes – too pitiful to read or write in rhyme
the women’s woe in these hovels, and of the men
who hide their hunger and thirst, ashamed to beg,
to let their neighbours know their need at every meal.
I know this well, the world has taught me
what befalls those with many children and nothing
but their work to clothe and feed them, with many hands
that wait to grab their few pence. They live on bread and thin ale,
venison for them is cold meat and fish; Fridays and feast-days
a farthing’s-worth of mussels or a few cockles are a feast
for such folk. It would be a charity to help them, so burdened,
to comfort these peasants, with the lame and the blind.30
Like many men of faith, Langland was outraged by the misery of the poor. Churchmen saw alarming parallels between their time and the world of the Bible, when the injustices of the rich against the poor went too far and, as the Bible taught, were divinely punished with national disaster. Biblical warnings were seen not as a matter of faith but factual as newspaper reports. Clergymen had a rich store of biblical sources through which they could indirectly attack the rich and powerful in their sermons, with stress on the biblical notion of equality in the eyes of God, in language often borrowed from biblical prophets such as Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. There was also a familiar pious sympathy for poverty in clerical homilies. In Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, the wise old hag insists to the knight whose life she has saved that there is no shame in her poverty, for it has many virtues, for example as an incentive to work; happiness does not depend on wealth, and poverty is itself a kind of wealth for it teaches self-knowledge and knowledge of others: ‘The hye God, on whom that we bileeve,/ In wilful poverte chees to lyve his lyf’ (lines 1178–9). The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, with its spicy rollicking history of her five marriages, makes clear in ironic contrast that the pietistic virtues of poverty mean little to her, and she has looked for wealth and comfort in marriage. Nothing in Chaucer on poverty is comparable in realism to Langland’s eyewitness portrait of the life of the poor.
Plague in the 14th century weakened feudalism. When Richard II tried to impose a poll tax of one shilling per head, he set off the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 which spiraled briefly into an ideological revolt calling for equality (‘When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who was then the gentleman?’), for the abolition of serfdom and its replacement by ‘lordship divided among all men’, as well as the redistribution of the wealth of the Church.31 The radical itinerant preacher, John Ball, drew on the Bible to attack feudal society: as all share in Adam and Eve one father and one mother, all are equal. The rich had an evil advantage, said Ball, who at the time of the revolt spoke outside churches after Sunday Mass of ‘they’ – the rich – and ‘we’ – the poor:
They are clad in velvet and silk trimmed with squirrel-fur; and we are clad in poor cloth. They have wines, and spices, and good bread; and we have rye-bread, and remnants and straw, and we drink water. They have good houses and fine manors; and we have pain and toil, and till the fields in the rain and wind; and it is from us and our labor that must come the wherewithal to maintain their estate.32
Ball’s words, echoing the prophets,33 resonate in English literature, most especially in Shakespeare, satirically in Henry VI, Part 2, and with great sad profundity in King Lear and Coriolanus.34 Lear, seeing for the first time how his homeless subjects live, exposed on the stormy heath, howls, ‘I have ta’en too little care of this’.
The betrayal of the ‘holy poor’
The medieval world especially after the Black Death tended to diminish biblical love of the poor and fell short of traditional Gospel-based Christian compassion for them. Literary denigration of the poor, as we have seen, was common in European societies that had reason to suspect and fear the poor.35 In Poor Law, the medieval upper classes institutionalized a form of hypocrisy that continues to the present: of pronouncing acceptable for the poor of living standards totally unacceptable to themselves. As Christian Europe became richer, particularly with the emergence of the Reformation in the 16th century, the status of the rich grew at the expense of the poor. In the Bible, the poor are, ideally, beloved divinely appointed agents for the spiritual redemption of all; as the medieval economy changed, the poor were perceived as a different kind of resource for the rich – as tools of capitalist gain, to be exploited, ruthlessly if necessary.36 Poor Law was, in effect, the acceptance of these realities in the legal sphere.
After the Black Death, economic conditions of the European peasantry improved; wealth was more likely to be seen as a moral ‘virtue’, and poverty a sign of laziness or sin, and the absence of God’s grace. Langland frequently attacks the many types of allegedly ‘undeserving’ poor.37 In literature as in legislation from the medieval era onward, the shining biblical image of the poor was radically tarnished. European Poor Law involved systematic punishment, including flogging, branding, and mutilation. The compassionate biblical image of the poor survived in medieval drama, which evolved for centuries before its suppression and destruction in the Reformation. These plays, which were performed collectively by guilds and at times by whole communities, often depicted scenes and stories from the Bible whose moral climax was the need to be charitable to the poor in the preparation for judgment. In the Christian ideal, salvation was conditional upon alms-giving:
For man with-owt marcy, of marcy shall misse;
And he shall have marcy, that marcyfyll is.38
Many plays depicted scenes from the Bible – the story of the slavery in Egypt, for example – which could articulate the discontents of the poor. In the ‘Second Shepherds’ Tale’ (attributed to the Wakefield Master, early 15th century), a shepherd makes the following complaint:
No wonder we are poor, as things stand,
for fallow as the floor is the tilth of our land.
Troubled and tax-cramped we are, as you know, by gentry rule.39
Literature is largely silent on the social disorders in the centuries after the Black Death, which converted the Christian duty of charity to the poor into a secular state function.40 Poverty was not a major concern of surviving medieval literature, much of which was created for a small educated minority, for whom literature and art were signs of their well-to-do status. The state tended to ask not, ‘How can we answer to the needs of the poor?’ but instead, ‘What is the cost of social stability?’ Traditional Christian values of local parishes were to some extent subverted by efforts to standardize Poor Law. Any advance in government organization was unknown territory for the poor: it could mean more effective relief, or more effective exploitation of their labor, perhaps both. State welfare, influenced by the secular humanism of Renaissance politics, was increasingly a matter of realpolitik, like any other unpleasant but unavoidable business, involving calculation and diplomacy, the use of law, persuasion and force, with occasional suspicion of bribery and protection racketeering, the poor themselves being a focus of blame – with the aims of keeping costs down and preserving the status quo.
In the generations after the Black Death, as the depleted population of Europe, including the peasantry, became richer, the ‘saintly face’ of poverty in Scripture turned ugly, from moral superiority to moral suspicion, from purity to sin, from trust to accusation, from blessing to curse. The poor for their part preferred bread to Scriptural saintliness. Medieval Poor Law and literature both present the poor as Janus-faced, one side pitiful, the other threatening: as the holy Scriptural image of the crucified savior; and as dangerous parasites, immoral, dishonest, and false.41 In times of relative stability, the positive image tended to win out. In times of economic pressure, those charged with helping the poor were often overwhelmed and, not seeing the problem of poverty in terms of cause and effect, were inclined to blame the poor. Aid to the poor was often inseparable from humiliation, contrary to Scripture and the Christian spirit, and this continued as secular European states emerged and codified Poor Law.
Christian hope of redemption through charity periodically turned to nightmare that idle parasitic vagabonds (many of whom were in search of work) would swamp vulnerable parishes with their vast, unending needs. The poor were most vulnerable in times of bad harvests, war, plague and famine, unemployment and economic depression, when agriculture was disrupted, markets restricted or cut off, when wages dropped and pauperization spread. At such times, parishes could not always meet the cost of poor relief. Many poor people experienced Poor Law as demeaning and inadequate – even if it kept them alive. Scripture buckled under economic reality. The wealthy aristocratic minorities dominating European trade, politics, and culture fought their biblical image. Why should they see the despised and abject poor as their equals, created ‘in God’s image’? Why should the poor, not they, inherit the kingdom of heaven? How could they be urged to demonstrate their faith by giving all they had to the poor?42 In economic crisis, the poor were seen less as a biblical blessing than a curse, a frightful bogey-man, or an albatross of parish dependence, tainted with immorality, burdening taxpayers with self-inflicted evils. Poor Law was designed to shame the poor and punish the poor, and make them work.
Even in good times, the poor were vulnerable to a distorted image. They had no representation in government nor a voice of their own in written fiction, drama, and poetry (though they had a substantial, now mostly lost, oral tradition); and when trouble came they had scant protection in their idealized image in Scripture. As we have seen, the Bible is careful to prevent the humiliation of the poor. Parish officials inundated with beggars, and having limited funds to help them, found it hard not to humiliate them. As for the literary image of the poor, most important medieval writers, linked as they often were to the aristocracy and courts, did not generally see the poor as a fit subject. The medieval Roman Church condemned vernacular translation of the Bible as heresy: as a result, biblical outspokenness in support of the poor was mostly muted by the thick dark glass of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. In literature outside the Bible, the poor occasionally appear sympathetically, mostly in the writings of middle or upper class writers such as Dante, in The Divine Comedy (early 14th century) or Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales (late 14th century). Ulysses’ great humanist exhortation to his men before their fatal voyage into the unexplored Atlantic, in Dante’s Hell, can be taken to apply to rich and poor alike:
… for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.43
Medieval and early modern European writers rarely present the poor as victims or dissidents, or express rage at the injustice of poverty – nor does European Poor Law, which tends to be purely pragmatic, a gauge of popular fears and prejudices.
Dante in The Divine Comedy mostly ignores the hell experienced by the poor in time of civil war and economic upheaval; he writes chiefly about the famous and well-born.44 Chaucer lived through the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 but did not write of it.45 Prior to Shakespeare, the distress of the poor left few visible literary marks.
Poor Law and the degradation of the poor
From the earliest recorded legislation of poor relief, in the 14th century, a major aim was to limit vagrancy.46 In England, Acts of 1388 and 1391 allowed begging, but able-bodied poor were allowed support only in the parish where they were born. These acts, like subsequent ones, of 1598, 1601, 1662, and 1834, had less to do with Christian charity than with the fear that the poor, if not controlled, would become vagabonds, criminals, parasites, or revolutionaries.47 Vagabonds – generally those regarded by Scripture as having the greatest need – were condemned by parish overseers as morally ‘undeserving’; often they were whipped and driven away or, as ‘enemies’, locked away.48
It may be that Scriptural teachings and realpolitik inevitably clash. Already in the 13th-century The Romance of the Rose, Christian charity is challenged: ‘Foolish Generosity’ leads to Poverty.49 Political pragmatism in times of change and austerity challenged Christian idealism toward the poor. The Bible could not force compassion in government legislation. The poor man’s curse in The Romance of the Rose echoes the book of Job (3: 1): ‘Anything poor, wherever it may be, is always shamed and despised. Cursed be the hour in which a poor man was conceived, for he will never be well fed, well clothed, nor well shod; he is neither loved nor advanced in fortune.’50 Similarly, Chaucer starts his Man of Law’s Tale (late 14th century) with a prologue declaring that poverty is no sacred virtue but a shameful misfortune, to be scorned and hated: ‘O hateful harm, condicion of poverte!’51 The wise man is skeptical of gospel ‘truth’ that poverty is the gateway to the Kingdom of Heaven; instead, ‘Bet is to dyen than have indigence’ and ‘Alle the dayes of povre men been wikke’ (stanza 3).
Chaucer witnessed the start of a process extending during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), and the English civil war which followed (the War of the Roses, 1455–85), when there was steady economic disruption, food shortages, famine, epidemics, and high taxation. Constant warfare and the need to maintain standing armies threw markets out of joint and drained the European economy. The voyages of discovery, especially of Spain which mined gold and silver in the Americas, stimulated inflation. All this hurt the poor while the wealth of the nobility, land owners and the merchant class grew. In England, as elsewhere in Europe, Church institutions seemed predatory, their coffers swollen with rent from vast estates covering an estimated one-sixth of the country, by income from tithes, legacies, masses, indulgences, hallowings, and dirges.52 The hypocrisy of the Church, wallowing in wealth while teaching self-denial in imitation of Jesus, is mocked by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, in the character of the Pardoner who admits freely, even endearingly, that avarice drives him to preach – against avarice, the root of all evil: Radix malorum est cupiditas. Apostolic poverty is not for him, to ‘beggen ydelly./ I wol noon of the Apostles countrefete’ (446–7); and on his own account he is ruthless in his extortions, even from starving children and widows. Morality plays and other medieval popular culture representing traditional Christian ideals, including abhorrence of the Seven Deadly Sins, could be seen at times as thinly veiled attacks on the Church, which failed to live up to these ideals. In the allegorical Christian drama, Everyman (late 15th century), Worldly Goods declares to Everyman:
My condition is man’s soul to kill;
If I save one, a thousand I do spill.
(442–3)
The image of the poor worsened in 16th-century Europe. Church failings in dealing with rising numbers of impoverished Europeans led to a shift in responsibility for the poor to the emerging secular state. The state, constantly engaged in war, or threatened with war, was forced to take the poor into account as indispensable to the nation’s military and economic strength, and survival. From c. 1500–1650, as the Reformation emerged after long wars, extreme poverty – with large numbers of the hungry and homeless – triggered serious social unrest and threatened revolution. Against a background of war, migration, crop failure, famine and plague, the poor were blamed, in popular opinion and with the full force of the law, in total breach of the biblical spirit. By the early 16th century, hardships of the poor troubled European governments. Gone was the economic advantage which the peasantry had from scarcity of labor after the Black Death, and their social cohesion was largely destroyed. Beggary was widespread, a ‘social plague’, the ‘chief evil’ of the age.53 The years 1527–34 saw harvest failures and famine. Fear of starvation extended from England to the Mediterranean. In England, perhaps half the population could not support themselves.54 Large numbers of vagrants, dispossessed and hungry, many diseased and maimed, crippled, blind and covered with sores, were on the road.55 Among them were fallen aristocrats, clergy, and ex-soldiers.56 At this time, the first vernacular printed English Bible, by Tyndale, appeared in England – in secret, an act of heresy and subversion. Possession of Tyndale’s Bible was a capital offense, but still it reached huge numbers, including the hungry poor who found in it the promise of a better life.57
The crisis of public order peaked in the 1520s until around 1535, transforming European social policy and literature for centuries afterwards. Hunger fills the picaresque novel, a new literary genre of the early 16th century; by this time, thieves’ slang was widely used, and ‘rogue literature’, tales from the criminal world, became popular.58 In Germany, the first response of the peasants to Luther’s teachings was a refusal to pay tithes. Hunger drove the masses to violence: in Spain (1520–1), the Netherlands (1520–35), Germany and England (1525–6), and France (1529): When in 1526 the Duke of Norfolk asked to speak to the leader of a rebellious mob, they replied, ‘His name is Povertie’.59 Many parishes lacked means to care for the poor. The new invention of printing spread alarm that the crisis was out of control. The state was forced to act to prevent anarchy. Dozens of European towns forced through legislation dealing with alms and the poor – often lasting over two centuries. In the decade or so after 1530, several countries reformed their Poor Law: the Netherlands (1531), England (1531/6), France (1534), Scotland (1535), and Spain (1541).60 Much Poor Law was passed in panic, amid unrest and revolt, with limited effectiveness,61 less for the benefit of the poor than to control and police their movements, and force them into low-paid work, and with the intent to protect the ruling elites, and restore the deference and subordination of the lower classes.62 From the 16th century, the state was increasingly forced to accept the role of redistributor of wealth and defined by its power and obligation to provide for and control the poor.63
In England, the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s exposed the dependence of the poor on the Church. Christian institutions – monasteries, priories, friaries, and nunneries – had provided food, refuge, and hospital care for the poor. Much of this was swept away as the king took over Church property. The revolt which followed – the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’, the most serious rebellion of the Tudor period, led by the proverbial ‘Captain Povertie’ – exposed the threat of popular anger against the state. In popular opinion and with the full force of the law, the poor were blamed. An entire literary genre emerged in the early 16th century whose purpose was to expose the alleged crooked wiles of the poor: a notable example was the Liber Vagatorum (Book of Vagabonds, 1510).64 In Mystery plays of the period, alms-giving was extolled while the poor were ridiculed – even by humanists who taught respect for the individual.65
At the same time, it could not be doubted that the suffering of the poor was real. A secular humanistic Renaissance education could rouse fear of the impoverished, unemployed masses for they, too, were thinking, feeling creatures. A king might get his way, Machiavelli observed in The Prince (1512), through deceit and violence: why not the ordinary man? If an aristocrat wronged would seek revenge, why not a non-aristocrat – a Shylock or an Othello, perhaps – or, to go a step further, why not the common worker? Why, for that matter, should a starving beggar not use every means at his disposal – ‘the lion’s ferocity and the fox’s cunning’, to borrow Machiavelli’s description of the necessary qualities of an effective ruler – in the struggle to survive?66 Theocratic society was changing into a modern rational – at times Machiavellian – secular state. The poor were torn down from their elevated position as beloved of God: paupers were nothing but paupers, not agents of redemption from Purgatory; their needs counted only insofar as they posed a threat; religion drugged them to reality, charity was no more than expediency, a bribe to keep them quiet – certainly not to spur them to higher things. Especially in time of war, famine, and plague, the poor were made aware of their vulnerability: a spirit of free thinking in their own interests was fostered by knowledge that they could depend neither on church nor state.
Growing secular learning and science encouraged change, even revolution, for it taught that no idea should be accepted without proof, and no phenomenon – not even monarchy – was unalterably fixed by a divine plan. Humanistic critiques of the poor, such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Juan-Luis Vivés’ On the Relief of the Poor (1526), had long-term influence, particularly in the idea of reform through education and moral improvement;67 yet the classical learning and rationalism of the Renaissance did not put bread on the table of the poor. The Hebrew prophets loved the poor; the Greek philosophers did not. Plato spoke for aristocratic government, Isaiah for the hungry man. European Judaeo-Christian tradition and its biblical authority defending the poor waned with the growth of humanistic culture, science and secular learning. Again, if the rich failed in the biblical social contract, why should the poor keep it? If the rich were motivated by self-interest, why not the poor? At the end of his essay, Des Cannibals (On the Cannibals), Montaigne (1533–92) anticipates revolution by quoting approvingly the belief of South American cannibals that men are ‘halves’ of one another, but one half is treated unjustly: ‘moitiés-ci nécessiteuses pouvaient souffrir une telle injustice’. Why should one half be bloated with luxury while the other, emaciated with hunger, begs at their doors? The impoverished half should put this injustice right, strangle the privileged half or burn their houses down, ‘prissent les autres à la gorge, ou missent le feu à leurs maisons’. This recognition that the poor may be driven to attack their oppressors anticipates post-1789 literature such as Gaskell’s Mary Barton, in which a group of starving workers plot to murder the son of their employer; Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov murders a usurer; and Zola’s Germinal, in which the revolutionary, Souvarine, blows up a mine during a strike.68
Notes
1 For a discussion of evidence that war and plague, while greatly harming the poor, can also promote greater equality, see Milanovic (2015). Literary examples of this phenomenon may be found from the Hebrew Bible to Mahfouz’s The Harafish, whose opening story is set in Egypt in a time of devastating plague. On The Harafish, see pp. 224–7.
2 The upheavals of the 15th and 16th centuries cast a chill on Christian charity and love of the poor, which altered when it alteration found – as had Jewish and Muslim charity. See Wilfand (2014: ch. 6) and Geremek (1987: 209, n. 213). In comparable periods of economic trouble (e.g. during the Napoleonic wars), the rights and status of the poor are often similarly questioned. See p. 97f.
3 For a rough chronology of the decline in the standing of the European poor, see Mollat (1986).
4 See Scott (2004: 121).
5 See Geremek (1987: 195–210; 1994: 51–2), Freedman (1999: 64, 140, 289, 292), and Farmer (2002: 11, 89). On false beggars in the medieval Arabic literature, see Bosworth (1976). On unfavorable images of peasants, see Freedman (1999: 133–73).
6 Geremek (1987: 199).
7 The idea that poverty was ‘normal’ lasted until modern times. In 1795, in the debates on the question of legislation in time of famine, Edmund Burke reminded Parliament (‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’) that scarcity being inevitable every few years, legislation was futile; and Wordsworth, two years later, in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ (1797), passionately rejected legislative interference in the lives of the poor as a violation of their freedom (see pp. 121–2). The mass poverty brought by industry and the growth of cities in the next 40 years swept these arguments aside. Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837–8), responding to the spirit of legislative reform following the New Poor Law of 1834 and the advent of the 18-year-old Queen Victoria to the throne, was a watershed in depicting the life of the London poor as no longer tolerable. See pp. 101–2.
8 For laws of tithes, see Leviticus (27: 30f.), Numbers (18: 21) and Deuteronomy (14: 22). See pp. 29–30. There are some surviving European tithe barns, whose size suggests the scale of aid provided by the Church; their origins were the store-chambers for tithes in the Temple in Jerusalem (see II Chronicles 31: 11f.; Nehemiah 10: 38–40), from which distributions to the poor were made.
9 For use of the same source (Luke ch. 16), see Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848: ch. 1) and Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Book 1, ch. 13). See Smith (1980). Chaucer’s comic mockery of hypocrisy toward the poor is often recalled in Dickens. See pp. 101–2.
10 On the process of the Christianization of Europe, see Fletcher (1999); and for a broader picture of the historical background, see Wiesner-Hanks (2006). On the history of anti-Semitism, see Poliakov (1965–85), Wistrich (2010), and Lindemann and Levy (2010).
11 Little (1978: 55).
12 Dante, describing ‘the double shame of Sodom and Cahors’ (Hell xi 49), puts usurers in the same ring in Hell as homosexuals, guilty of violence against God.
13 Hill (1994: 157).
14 Dyer (1989: 238–9); also see Geremek (1987: 199–210).
15 Braudel (1994: 327). On the association of redemption with poverty in Jewish tradition, see p. 33.
16 Pirenne (1958: 529–30).
17 See Mollat (1986: 135) and Hill (1980: 121). For more on the process by which the Christian duty of charity to the poor became a state function, see, for example, Lis and Soly (1979) and Fraser (2009). On the growth of institutions for the support of the poor, see Farmer (2002: 32ff.); and on the expansion of the urban beggar population, see Geremek (1987: 194). The central importance of charity in late medieval England is seen in the location in Stratford of an impressive alms house, next to the Guildhall and near Shakespeare’s house and that of Dr. John Hall, who married his eldest daughter – respectively, in the early 17th century, the best and second-best residences in the town (all these buildings, except Shakespeare’s house, are still standing).
18 See Tierney (1959: 37f., 78). The view that Church property is held in safekeeping for the poor is maintained by Bishop Myriel (‘Bienvenu’) in Les Misérables, and it determines the fate of Jean Valjean. See p. 37. Like the Bishop, some churchmen did in fact defend theft by those in dire need as they were merely taking what belonged to them. The stories of Robin Hood, told, sung, and performed throughout England for centuries, reflect ongoing grievances of the poor and political resistance to their oppression by the civil and religious authorities (Knight and Ohlgren 1997). In the late Elizabethan age, Robin Hood was transformed into a reformer helping the poor (Wiles 1981: 53). Carlo Levi gives a remarkable description of a politically subversive (and therefore scriptless) theatrical performance in the mid-1930s by peasants in a village in southern Italy, in Christ Stopped at Eboli; see p. 216 note 33.
19 In the Middle Ages, ‘the very thought of any fundamental transformation of society was scarcely conceivable’ (Cohn 1972: 56).
20 On the demographic and economic consequences of the Black Plague, see Postan et al. (1987: 386ff.). A survey of the lives of the poor in the medieval period is given by Mollat (1986).
21 On the effects of the Little Ice Age on temperature and crops, see Fagan (2000).
22 On the reward of the poor in the afterlife, see Matthew (5: 3, 19: 23–4). Langland, for all his sympathy for the poor in the years after the Black Death, ‘condones the existence of poverty’ (Scott 2004: 231), notably in the section of Piers Plowman on ‘The Praise of Patient Poverty’ (1967: 120–5).
23 Cohn (1972: 121).
24 On Poor Law as the primary concern of Elizabethan legislation, see pp. 59f, 68–71. Thomas Hobbes, a child at the time of the passage of Elizabethan Poor Law, reflects the consensus, in Leviathan (1651: ii 30, 18): the poor were more effectively protected by law than by the ‘hazard’ of uncertain charity.
25 On the growth of institutions for the support of the poor, see Farmer (2002: 32ff.); and on the expansion of the urban beggar population, see Geremek (1987: 194).
26 On the expansion of individual charitable donations in the 12th and 13th centuries, see Geremek (1994: 36ff.). The growth of medieval European capitalism is described in the chapters by Spufford, Nef, and Carus-Wilson in The Cambridge Economic History, vol. 2 (Postan et al. 1987: 674ff., 735f., 860). The rise to pre-eminence of English cloth-manufacturing, especially in the West Country, is prefigured in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (late 14th century): ‘In cloth-making she had a bent/ That bettered Ypres and Ghent’.
27 See Marshall (1982: 78). Even the workhouse, starting from Bridewell (mid-16th century), could rouse gratitude among the poor as it was ‘infinitely preferable to what their situation would have been outside’ (Higginbotham 2012: 7). According to Slack (1988: 206f.), English Poor Law, for all its failings, was a ‘major achievement’ as England emerged as the only Protestant country with a welfare system paid for by taxation. Elsewhere, the poor were given charity, not payments deriving from local taxation. In addition to parliamentary Poor Law, the calendar had fixed days for ritual begging, such as St. Bartholemew’s Fair, May Day, Shrove Tuesday, Guy Fawkes Night, and Christmas, when beggars used ‘the rhetoric of Christianity, hospitality and nationalism to prise open the closed hands of the financially secure’ (Hitchcock 2004: 208). The workhouse in literature is commonly associated with Dickens’ scathing social criticism; for a more balanced view, of gratitude for charitable kindness combined with repugnance at being buried alive, see Conrad’s The Secret Agent, ch. 8.
28 On apostolic poverty, see Hazell (2009: ch. 4). On conflicting attitudes toward the poor in Piers Plowman, see Hazell (ibid., 192–5, 202–3). Though the ploughman is a Christian archetype, Piers Plowman challenges the poverty of Jesus and his disciples.
29 Quoted by Geremek (1994: 31).
30 Langland (1967: 103–4), translated by David Aberbach from ‘The Pardon sent from Truth’ (X 10–37). On Piers Plowman and the poor, see Scott (2004), Crassons (2010), and Steiner (2013).
31 It seems likely that the immensely popular stories of the outlaw, Robin Hood – who ‘dyde pore men moch god’ – which were recited, sung, and performed throughout England for centuries, were linked to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Knight and Ohlgren 1997: 81–2, 148). On Robin Hood, see p. 55 note 18. Censorship meant that the subversiveness of these stories had to be toned down, at least in the written survivals, which evidently date mostly from the late 16th century.
32 Quoted by Mollat and Woolf (1973: 190–1).
33 On prophetic attacks on social injustice, see pp. 31–2, 35.
34 On Jack Cade, the absurd mid-15th-century revolutionary, in Henry VI, Part 2, see p. 67. Shakespeare does not totally disregard the moral justification of Cade’s revolt, one of hundreds (though mostly smaller) in English history. Cade’s line, ‘Adam was a gardener’ (IV ii 146), recalls the famous couplet associated with the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who was then the gentleman?’ Similarly, Cade strikes home in alluding to legal bias against the poor (‘kill all the lawyers’), to confiscation by well-to-do landowners of public land and enclosing it for their own private use (‘in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass’), and to discrimination in court in favor of the literate, as a man who could read could escape the penalty for a first felony (‘because they could not read, thou hast hanged them’). Yet in Shakespeare, it is the aristocrats, not workers and revolutionaries, who make the strongest case for the poor (on King Lear and Coriolanus, see pp. 68–71). For complaints at inequality similar to those of John Ball at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, in modern literature, see pp. 141, 161.
35 On the denigration of the poor in medieval literature, see pp. 42–3.
36 The split view of the poor represented by the Bible and Greek philosophy, rediscovered in the Middle Ages, is analogous to that between Hebraism and Hellenism on the issue of slavery. On the Aristotelian view of slaves as animated tools, see Ethics (I iv); see pp. 31, 189.
37 Shakespeare is notably free of attacks on the ‘undeserving poor’. See Chapter 3.
38 Quoted by Duffy (1992: 358) from the York cycle. Doles to the poor appear in huge numbers of wills (ibid., 360–2).
39 Adapted from medieval English by David Aberbach (Happé 1975: 266). In England, the last recorded Mystery plays date from 1580, at Coventry (ibid., 24).
40 In Britain, after a period of population increase from 1150, the population dropped steeply with the Black Death of 1348–50, from an estimated 5 million to 2.5 million and evidently remained at that level through the war-torn 15th century, until the 1520s (Dyer 2002: 235, 265–6). On the transformation of Christian charity into a state function, see p. 56 note 27.
41 On dishonest beggars in 13th-century Paris, see Geremek (1987: 195–210) and Farmer (2002: 64–9, 124–5). Suspicion of false beggars was linked to the wider problem of deceit in the marketplace (ibid., 67–9). The hierarchical nature of medieval society encouraged the distinction, which survived to the modern era, between the able-bodied and disabled poor (ibid., 67). The working poor, however, could see that ‘the daily existence of disabled beggars was a strenuous struggle for survival rather than a life of ease’ (ibid., 72).
42 In Oscar Wilde’s story, ‘The Happy Prince’, the prince follows Christian teachings by giving up everything to help the poor: ‘sacrifice is close to suicide’ (Ellmann 1987: 410); on this story, see p. 15.
43 Dante, Hell (xxvi 118–20), (1973: 236). Yet, Elizabeth Gaskell, in Mary Barton (ch. 8), writes that even Dante could not conceive a hell such as that suffered by the Manchester laborers; Hugo, in Les Misérables (1862), describes Jean Valjean as a man whom penal servitude has robbed of hope, like the sufferers in Dante’s Hell (1983: 99); Marx, in Capital (1867), writes of the manufacture of lucifer matches with phosphorus as an occupation for which only desperate widows would deliver their half-starved, uneducated children: ‘Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture’ (1934: 248); and Carlo Levi, too, draws on Dante to express the sufferings of the Italian peasants in the 1930s. See p. 207.
44 Dante, in focusing on the misfortunes of the well-born rather than the poor, follows biblical precedent (e.g. in the Book of Job). See p. 73, notes 32 and 37. In Shakespeare, too, the sufferings of the poor are often communicated via the experiences of the nobility. See pp. 66–71.
45 Though Chaucer has much sympathy for common people (Hazell 2009: 93ff.), his only reference to the Peasants’ Revolt is in ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, in which Jack Straw, a leader of the revolt, hunts down foreign workers in the wool trade, the Flemings. Chaucer’s friend, the poet John Gower, in Vox Clamantis (Book 1) compares the rebellious peasants to wild animals (Brewer 1977: 49–50). This kind of imagery to describe the working class is familiar in literature, e.g. in Chrétien de Troyes, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Zola’s Germinal, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli. See pp. 58 note 68, 69, 104, 144, 191, 210, 214 note 11.
46 On Poor Law and vagrancy, see Fraser (2009).
47 In Germany, as in England, much desacralization of poverty and charity occurred at the time of the Reformation. On German social policy from the 16th century, see Frohman (2008). In England, perhaps more strikingly than in any other country, there seems to be a correspondence between Poor Law enactments and major literary works on the poor, including Piers Plowman, King Lear, Pilgrim’s Progress, Lyrical Ballads, and Oliver Twist.
48 On the cruel treatment of the poor, see Braudel (1994: 328).
49 The Romance of the Rose (1995: 149, 180). Among folk beliefs in the Talmud, the demon appointed over poverty is Folly (Nabal) (Pesachim 111b).
50 The Romance of the Rose (1995: 37).
51 Orwell chose this as the epigraph to Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).
52 On Simon Fish’s attack on the profligate Roman Church in the time of Henry VIII, see p. 62.
53 See Pirenne (1958: 530) and Geremek (1994: 190).
54 On estimated numbers of the impoverished in the early 16th century, see Beier (1983: 13).
55 Dyer (2002) argues that anxiety over vagrancy and other social evils might have been exaggerated as the population was still low, the textile and metal industries were thriving and required labor, and what was considered vagrancy was in many cases the mobility of the workforce. A darker picture emerges when other factors are taken into account, including famine, plague, war, and inflation, the ensemble creating a perfect storm of social unrest.
56 On demobilized soldiers and sailors in English literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, see Woodbridge in Beier and Ocobock (2008: ch. 2).
57 On the effect of Bible translation in the 16th century, see pp. 26–8.
58 Well-known authors of ‘rogue literature’ included: Robert Copland (?–1515), Thomas Harman (mid-16th century), Robert Greene (1558–92), and Thomas Dekker (c. 1572–1632).
59 See Carus-Wilson in Postan et al. (1987: 688). In the 1536–7 revolt against the dissolution of the monasteries, the mis-named ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’, one of the ‘leaders’ was ‘Captain Povertie’ (Hoyle 2001: 253–4).
60 On Poor Law legislation in the early 16th century, see Lis and Soly (1979: 87–8, 92). For a time-chart of poor relief reforms from the 15th to the 18th centuries, see Jütte (1994: 201–3). Most were passed in the 16th century.
61 Ironically, in the late medieval period, Europe saw itself as the ‘poor neighbor’ to countries which in the 20th century were looked upon as the ‘Third World’ – including India, China, and Black Africa – but at the time of the Reformation promised untold riches, inspiring the first European voyages of discovery (Arnold 1983: 7).
62 On Poor Law as an instrument of containment of the disorderly poor, see Beier (1983: 16, 36) and Wrightson (1982: 181). In Hill’s view (1980: 119), the prolonged depression of the 1520s and 1530s, together with Poor Law, flogging and houses of correction, broke the spirit of the poor.
63 On changes in the role of the state in the 16th century, see Nelson (2010: ch. 2).
64 On false beggars, see Index, ‘the poor: fakes’.
65 On the poor in Mystery plays, See Mollat (1986: 256).
66 Machiavelli’s emphasis upon political self-interest, like Adam Smith’s on economic self-interest, could be applied to the poor; if politicians and traders operated on the basis of what profited them, why should the oppressed, impoverished masses not function on the same principle, and rise in revolt?
67 On the influence of More and Vivés on social policy, see Todd (1987).
68 Of the miners’ desperation in Germinal, Zola writes: ‘Since they were being hunted like wolves, they ought themselves to act with wild revolutionary violence’ (1998: 280).