The control of servants and journeymen was important to urban elites, but they were more worried about the large numbers of people who neither lived nor worked in households of responsible, tax-paying citizens. Tax records from early modern cities indicate that half or even more households did not own enough to pay any taxes at all. These were people - married, single, or widowed - who lived in attics and cellars, in
Rooms they shared, or in flimsy housing just inside or just outside the city walls. They supported themselves any way they could. Men repaired houses and walls, dug ditches, and hauled goods from ships; women laundered clothing, spun wool, and cared for invalids; children carried messages or packages around the city or the surrounding countryside. The poor found work in city orphanages, infirmaries, and hospitals, where the poor made up most of the patients as well as being the care-givers. They made and sold small simple items that were unregulated by guilds, such as wooden dishes, pins, or soap. They gathered nuts or firewood outside city walls, carried them through the gates, and sold them for a few pennies. They bought eggs from villagers, cooked them in a small pot on a charcoal brazier, and sold them as a quick meal. They bought and sold used clothing and household articles, or worked in taverns and inns. Sometimes they engaged in criminal activities, stealing merchandise from houses or wagons and then fencing it, or cutting the strings of money-pouches or purses. Or they did all of these at once, taking advantage of whatever opportunities they could.
For women, and some men, selling sex for money - what later came to be called prostitution - could provide a living or augment other work. As discussed in chapter 2, in 1450 most major cities in Europe and many of the smaller ones had an official brothel or an area of the city in which selling sex was permitted, but over the following centuries such activities were restricted. Many cities set down strict rules for the women and their customers, and in the sixteenth century most Protestant and then Catholic cities in northern Europe closed their municipal brothels, arguing that the possible benefits they provided did not outweigh their moral detriments. Harsh punishments were set for prostitution, including public flogging and incarceration in prison or a syphilis hospital. Selling sex was couched in moral rather than economic terms, as simply one type of “whoredom,” a term that also included premarital sex, adultery, and other unacceptable sexual activities. Religious reformers such as Luther described women who sold sex in very negative terms, and also regarded “whore” as the worst epithet they could hurl at their theological opponents.
Closing the official brothels did not end the exchange of sex for money, of course, but simply reshaped it. Smaller, illegal brothels were established, or women moved to areas right outside city walls, such as Southwark and Bankside outside London. Police and other authorities were influenced or bribed to overlook such activities. For Italian city authorities, this fluid situation was more worrisome, and they tended to favor regulation over suppression. They also viewed selling sex as a significant source of municipal income. From 1559 until the mid-eighteenth century in Florence, for example, all women registered as prostitutes were required to contribute an annual tax based on their income which went to support a convent for those women who wished to give up prostitution; payment of extra taxes would allow a woman to live where she wished in the city and wear whatever type of clothes she chose.
Hauling, day labor, peddling, stealing, selling sex, and other types of short-term work were often not enough to support an individual or a family, particularly when rising prices made bread and other foodstuffs increasingly expensive. By the late sixteenth century, three-quarters of a poor family’s income went for food, about half of that for rye bread, wheat bread being far too expensive. The only options were begging and charity, but attitudes toward beggars and toward the poor grew harsher in the sixteenth century. Cities passed laws prohibiting begging, and many opened workhouses where the able-bodied poor were put to work at simple tasks, such as spinning wool or beating hemp; London’s Bridewell opened in the 1550s, and Amsterdam’s workhouse in the 1590s. To make sure they did not decline into the sin of idleness, orphaned boys were apprenticed to learn a trade and orphaned girls sent into domestic service.
Poor relief was handled by a combination of institutions: private philanthropic organizations, monasteries, voluntary charitable groups, city and village agencies, parish (and, in Catholic areas, episcopal) councils. Beginning in the 1520s, both Protestant and Catholic cities in western Europe tried to centralize and consolidate the dispensation of charity, control begging, and put everyone who could to work. They often established “common chests” or central collections of alms and gifts, and appointed men and women as overseers of the poor, to visit people in their homes and run almshouses. In Catholic areas, orders such as the Franciscans who survived by begging opposed the new poor laws, arguing that the poor had a right to beg and that begging allowed people to show their Christian charity. Most Catholic clergy and rulers did not have such misgivings, however; acts of mercy such as donating to the poor were certainly meritorious good deeds, but they were to be funneled through structures established and controlled by bishops. Franciscans and other mendicant orders were allowed to beg, but Catholic rulers preferred that they solicited contributions through personal appeals, not on the streets.
World History
