almoners," some of whom appear to have so held their lands from the time of Edward the Confessor.*

Still further provision of this kind was made in ancient times. Many branches of the king's revenue were charged with alms. "This alms was called eleemosyna constituta, the settled alms. To this may be added the decimæ constitutæ. These the accountant constantly paid out of the revenue within his receipt to which they were affixed, and had an allowance thereof upon his account."†

Substantially, however, provision for the poor seems to have been a charge on the revenue of the Church from very remote times till the reign of Henry VIII.

The early fourfold division, which has been mentioned, extended to the oblations, or offerings, of the parishioners as well as to their tithes ; and the Church of England has retained, both in her Book of Common Prayer and her Rubric, manifest traces of the ancient right of the poor to a share in this part of the parochial income of the clergy.

The Sentences exhort us to relieve the poor: "Give alms of thy goods, and never turn thy face from any poor man ; and then the face of the Lord shall not be turned away from thee." "He that hath pity upon the poor, lendeth to the Lord." "Blessed is the man that provideth for the sick and needy; the Lord shall deliver him in the time of trouble." And, according to the Rubric, "while these sentences are in reading, the deacons, churchwardens, or other fit persons, are to receive the alms for the poor, and other devotions of the people." By "other devotions of the people" is supposed to be indicated the share of the clergy in these offerings.§

The Church in England, therefore, from the first conversion of the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, during a long

*Domesday Book: Elemosinæ Regis, Midd. 130 b., Leic. 231., Warw. 244. Elemosinarii Regis, Dors. 79., Midd. 130 b., Bedf. 218 b., Northampt. 222 b. † Madox, History of the Exchequer, vol. i. p. 348. ed. 1769.

Such a division is confirmed by Innocent III., in 1199, ap. Harduin, tom. ii. Concil. p. 1010. "Decernimus ut decimæ seu oblationes fidelium tam pro vivis quam pro defunctis in quatuor partes dividantur: quorum una sit episcopi, alia ecclesiarum, tertia pauperum, quarta clericorum."

§ Wheatly on the Common Prayer, vi. 10. 1.

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course of centuries, was not only accustomed, but bound, to provide for the maintenance of the poor. Although, by some means or other, the Church of England, at an early period, was relieved from the duty of repairing the fabric of the church, and that burden thrown on the laity, yet, for centuries, both before and after the Conquest, ample provision for the poor was still found in the rich and splendid endowment of the clergy. It was only when the country had made great progress towards emancipation from feudal servitude and oppression, and when great changes in population had already taken place, accompanying the growth of new towns and boroughs, and the decay of old ones, that the patrimony of the poor," as the Church revenue was called, failed to effect the great object of charity which it was originally intended to fulfil. The pauperism and vagrancy which thus spread throughout England, had frequently, in the latter part of the fifteenth, and the early part of the sixteenth, century, attracted the attention of the legislature, before the suppression of the monasteries. To whatever extent the secular clergy may have ceased to administer any definite part of their income as relief for the poor, there can be no doubt that the suppression of the monasteries would add greatly to the claims made on the laity, charitably to contribute to the relief of destitution. And it is equally certain that provision for the maintenance of all the sick, aged, and otherwise impotent poor, was still largely made out of the vast possessions of the monasteries, down to the very day of their confiscation by an arbitrary and rapacious monarch.

CHAP. V.

PAUPER LEGISLATION BEFORE THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH.

Il y a deux sortes de peuples pauvres: ceux que la dureté du gouvernement a rendus tels; et ces gens-là sont incapables de presque aucune vertu, parceque leur pauvreté fait une partie de leur servitude: les autres ne sont pauvres que parcequ'ils ont dédaigné ou parcequ'ils n'ont pas connu les commodités de la vie; et ceux-ci peuvent faire de grandes choses, parceque cette pauvreté fait une partie de leur liberté. — MONTESQUIEU.

It is highly probable that, from the time of the Conquest till the reign of Edward III., England was little troubled with either vagrant beggars or paupers. The "patrimony of the poor" was found in the possessions of the Church; and each lord maintained his serfs or villeins much as each proprietor of a West India sugar plantation, in more recent times, has maintained his slaves. It is not till after Edward III.'s wars in France, and after the industry and wealth of towns came into existence, that we first notice traces of any considerable class of free labourers.

The destructive plague, which ravaged Europe in the year 1348*, greatly thinned the ranks of these free labourers in

* This pestilence is mentioned in a poem, entitled Les Adventures advenues en France:

"En l'autre année advint si grant mortalité

Qu'il mouru bien le tiers de la Crestienté !

Après le mortuaire, fu le temps si très chier,

Que poures gens n'avoient pas grantment à mengier."

Probably the number, "there died at least the third of Christendom," is not a poetical exaggeration, at all events, so far as the labouring population is concerned. We are told, in more recent times, that an ordinary visitation of the plague used to carry off one-fifth of the inhabitants of a great city: see Sir William Petty, Political Arithmetic, p. 118. ed. Dublin, 1769. And Boccaccio's immortal description of this very plague of 1348, as it devastated Florence, shows that it visited the poor with far greater destruction than fell on any other

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England. Hence the demand for labour became greater than the supply, and the result was that its wages rose. This was natural and just, but between the lords and their, villeins, very shortly before, there had been "no judge but God;" and the lords seem now to have determined to retain the free labourer in a state of permanent subjection, which would render his condition not a whit better than that of the slavery from which he had been freed. The Statute of Labourers, promulgated in 1350 (25 Edward III.), and frequently confirmed and extended by subsequent statutes, furnished the machinery by which the wages of labour were arbitrarily defined for upwards of two centuries.

The excess of demand over supply in the labour market, the natural consequence of pestilence and depopulation, produced inconvenience to the employers of labour; and they obtained a very full measure of protection to their own interests, at the expense of the interests of others, by an enactment that every one should serve at the wages which were accustomed to be given, in the place where he cometh to serve," in the twentieth year of the king's reign, or five or six common years next before. The "lords were to be

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class of society. "Della minuta gente, -era il ragguardamento di molto maggior miseria pieno perciocchè essi il più - ritenuti nelle lor case,―a migliaja per giorno infermavano; e non essendo nè serviti, nè atati d'alcuna cosa, quasi senza alcuna redenzione tutti morivano : ed assai n' erano, che nella strada pubblica, o di dì, o di notte finivano." De Foe, in his History of the Plague of London, tells us that "it was chiefly among the poor," and that, where the poor could get employment, “they pushed into any kind of business, the most dangerous, and most liable to infection; and if they were spoken to, their answer would be, - I cannot starve, I had as good have the plague as perish for want. This adventurous conduct of the poor, was that which brought the plague among them in the most furious manner; and this, joined to the distress of their circumstances, when taken, was the reason why they died so by heaps." A parallel to the proportion of one-third, as given by the middle-age poet, is furnished by statistical investigation of the recent diminution in the population of Ireland. During the latter half of the decennial period ending in 1851, about one-third of the whole population of the province of Connaught has been swept away; and a large proportion of that desolation has been due to the ravages of famine, and the disease which followed in its train. This has happened notwithstanding the gigantic benevolence of the imperial legislature, and the noble efforts of Christian charity, to relieve Irish suffering, made by the British people.

preferred before other claimants for such services, and a refusal, &c. to serve, was punished by imprisonment till surety was found to serve as required.

Wearisome and painful would be the task of examining the oppression exercised over the whole class of labourers from the early part of the fourteenth century till the end of the fifteenth. The legislation on the subject of these poor helots, seems throughout to be selfish and unjust. The labourer was never to better his condition. Imprisonment and branding on the forehead with a hot iron was the lot of the fugitive servant, although he had never consented to enter into the service of his lord, and had been compelled to do so for wages less than he was justly entitled to receive. Even "artificers, and people of mysteries," were liable to be pressed by the lord to get in his harvest*, and if a poor labourer's unmarried daughter of eighteen or twenty years of age, had been "required to serve" any master, she must, under the statutory provisions, either have gone into the service, or have been committed to gaol for refusing. No child could be apprenticed to any useful craft, unless its parents were owners of land yielding a certain amount of yearly rent; and the compulsory service, such as has been described, paid for by a rate of wages below the just level, would be a perpetual cause why servants should have endeavoured to free themselves from their bondage, and why the "valiant beggars,” of whom we read, should have so greatly increased throughout the country.

It has been observed †, that we cannot be surprised, that the lords should have endeavoured to preserve some affinity between the new class of villeins, whose earnings they tried to limit, and the old ones, whose persons they had before controlled. "All the restrictions of the legislature on personal industry, evince a disposition of this kind; and various statutes to regulate wages, dress, and apparel, seem to have been framed with the same view, namely, to curb the aspiring exertions of industry and independency.”‡

*13 Rich. II. c. 3. Eden, vol. 1. p. 42.

Eden, State of the Poor, vol. i. p. 41.