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 fl imsy 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, infi rmaries, 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 fi rewood 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 offi cial 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 benefi ts
they provided did not outweigh their moral detriments. Harsh punishments were set
for prostitution, including public fl ogging 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 offi cial 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 infl uenced or bribed to overlook such activities. For Italian
city authorities, this fl uid situation was more worrisome, and they tended to favor
regulation over suppression. They also viewed selling sex as a signifi cant 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.
SOURCE 17 Act calling for the punishment of vagabonds
and beggars
Local, regional, and national governments in
the sixteenth century enacted a variety of “poor
laws” in an attempt to solve the problems of
poverty. Most of these called on villages and
towns to care for their own “worthy poor,” such
as orphans and blind people, and ordered ablebodied
poor to be set to work. The following is
a typical law, passed in England in 1536, during
the reign of Henry VIII. Along with distinguishing
between the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor, the
act prohibits people from giving to the poor outside
of the offi cial government “dole” in order to
centralize poor relief and prevent what in recent
times has been labeled “welfare fraud.” Laws
such as this were motivated both by increases in
the actual numbers of the poor, and by changes
in attitudes toward them, as fi rst Protestant and
then many Catholic authorities came to regard
beggars not as opportunities to show one’s
Christian charity, but as dangerous vagrants to
be expelled or locked up.
An act for punishment of sturdy vagabonds
and beggars… it is therefore now ordained
and established and enacted … that all the
governors and ministers of … cities, shires,
towns, …hamlets, and parishes, as well
within liberties as without, shall not only
succour, fi nd, and keep all and every of the
same poor people by way of voluntary and
charitable alms … , in such wise as none of
them of very necessity shall be compelled
to wander idly and go openly in begging
to ask alms in any of the same cities, shires,
towns, and parishes, but also to cause and to
compel all and every the said sturdy vagabonds
and valiant beggars to be set and kept
to continual labour, in such wise as by their
said labours they and every of them may get
their own livings with the continual labour
of their own hands…
Item, it is ordained and enacted … that all
and every the mayors, governors, and head
offi cers of every city, borough, and town
corporate and the churchwardens or two
others of every parish of this realm shall in
good and charitable wise take such discreet
and convenient order, by gathering and
procuring of such charitable and voluntary
alms of the good Christian people within
the same with boxes every Sunday, holy day,
and other festival day or otherwise among
themselves, in such good and discreet wise
as the poor, impotent, lame, feeble, sick, and
diseased people, being not able to work, may
be provided, helped, and relieved; so that in
no wise they nor none of them be suffered
to go openly in begging, and that such as be
lusty, or having their limbs strong enough to
labour, may be daily kept in continual labour,
whereby every one of them may get their
own substance and living with their own
hands…
And for the avoiding of all such inconveniences
and infections as oftentime have and daily
do chance amongst the people by common
and open doles, and that most commonly
unto such doles many persons do resort which
have no need of the same, it is therefore
enacted … that no manner of person or persons
shall make or cause to be made any such
common or open doles, or shall give any ready
money in alms, otherwise than to the common
boxes and common gatherings … , to and for
the putting in … due execution … this present
act, upon pain to … forfeit ten times the value
of all such ready money as shall be given in
alms contrary to the tenor and purport of the
same; and that every person or persons of this
realm, bodies politic corporate, and others
that be bound or charged yearly, monthly,
or weekly to give or to distribute any ready
money, bread, victual, or other sustentation
to poor people in any place within this realm,
shall … give and distribute the same money or
the value of all such bread, victual, or sustentation
unto such common boxes, to the intent
the same may be employed towards the relieving
of the said poor, needy, sick, sore, and
indigent persons, and also towards the setting
in work of the said sturdy and idle vagabonds
and valiant beggars…
(27 Henry VIII, c. 25)
In both Catholic and Protestant areas, authorities hoped that voluntary
contributions would provide enough money for poor relief, but they
also recognized that compulsory contributions might be necessary, especially
during times of famine or epidemic diseases. Poor people could only collect
support in their home parish or town, however, not in other cities where they
may have migrated to look for work. Poor laws in many places made sharp distinctions
between the “worthy poor” – orphans, widows, the elderly, working
families with many children, those whom illness or accidents had incapacitated,
respectable people who had fallen on hard times – and the “unworthy poor” –
vagrants and idlers who came from somewhere else. The worthy poor were to be
taken care of in their own homes or in municipal hospitals, and the unworthy poor
sent to workhouses, where they were often joined by debtors and people awaiting
sentences.
Workhouses and jails could never hold all of the poor, and other sorts of punishments
were used as well, particularly for those who combined begging and vagrancy
with other criminalized activities. Flogging, branding, and bodily mutilation – such
as slitting nostrils, slicing cheeks, amputating ears or noses – were common punishments
imposed throughout Europe into the eighteenth century. Repeat offenses or
more serious crimes might merit execution, most commonly by hanging, but also
by more grisly means such as burial alive, burning at the stake, or breaking at the
wheel.
Executions were public ceremonies, in which the convicts were marched through
city streets on busy market days to a permanent gallows, accompanied by armed guards
and clergy. Particularly notorious or famous criminals would draw a huge crowd, and
their penitent speeches from the gallows would be recorded, printed, and sold as cheap
broadsheets. The executions of even everyday criminals offered the possibility of a
good speech and a grisly spectacle, so were popular forms of entertainment. At the
middle of these events was the public executioner, who also carried out fl oggings and
other corporal punishments. He was often well paid (and strong-armed), but was
considered socially dishonorable; executioners were often required to live outside city
walls, and their children could not enter craft guilds or marry those from honorable
occupations.
Banishment and penal servitude were other punishment options for vagrants and
criminals. Beggars and thieves might be fl ogged, and then ordered to leave a city and
its territory for a specifi ed period of years. In the late fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries,
France, Spain, and the Italian city-states began to sentence men to galley service – rowing
in the increasingly large military ships; by the seventeenth century galley labor was
the most common punishment for male convicts in France. Galleys were particularly
important in naval battles in the Mediterranean, though they were less signifi cant in
the Atlantic. Ship design and naval technology changed signifi cantly in the eighteenth
century, and galleys were no longer effective, leading France and Spain to abolish galley
service in 1748. During its heyday, galley service provided a model for land-based
penal servitude, when convicts were sentenced to work in mines and dockyards, or
on plantations. Such sentences removed convicts not only from their home city, but
from Europe itself, as colonial empires provided fi rst Spain and then England with a
new means of ridding themselves of those considered undesirable. The transportation
of convicts also brought a profi t to governments, as mine and plantation owners paid
more for workers than it cost to transport them.
World History
