Blessed Be the Landless, Widowed, and Unemployed: Poor Relief in England and France from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

Blessed Be the Landless, Widowed, and Unemployed:Poor Relief in England and France from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Centuries Elizabeth Mazzola (bio) Keywords medieval poverty, early modern poverty, community, belonging, charity Anne M. Scott, ed. Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France (Ashgate, 2012) 335 pp + xviii $149.95. Anne M. Scott, ed. Experiences of Charity, 1250–1650 (Ashgate, 2015) 305 pp + xv $138.00. The earliest uses of the word "peasant" designated people who worked the soil, whose families derived their bread, along with many of their traditions and concerns, from a close and fruitful association with the land. But with developments in trade, agriculture, and the marketplace in the later medieval period, this intimate connection with the earth was sharply and sometimes violently cut away. Many people once bound to the rhythms of the seasons found themselves hungry and destitute, their ties to the land and their communities emptied out, their relationships with their neighbors and to their futures now tenuous or absent altogether. Chronicling the woes of the poor in Piers Plowman (1365?–90?), William Langland also describes a people who "lakken inwitte" (C 9.73); the indigence that has overtaken them also robs them of intelligence and the ability to care for themselves. Even in Langland's remarkably sympathetic poem, poverty is seen in terms of failure rather than [End Page 133] in terms of theft, displacement, or bad luck, and the poor's miserable condition is sad and hard but explicable and not entirely unfair. Thomas More's Utopia excoriates the sixteenth-century practice of enclosures that replaced farms with pastures and made many rural people poor by pushing peasants off the land. But few other contemporary accounts looked for the root causes of poverty, preferring instead to think about ways of ameliorating it through charitable practices and other kinds of poor relief. With an increasingly secular and bureaucratized state, this assistance was often formalized and institutionalized and overseen by administrators eager to differentiate between the deserving and undeserving poor, the unfortunate and the criminal. Two new scholarly anthologies help us chart the changing experience of poverty in the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries as well as the concomitant transformation in the forms of help that neighbors, statesmen, and parishioners sought to provide. Both collections are edited by Anne C. Scott and feature a range of remarkable essays on poor boxes and inoculation programs, deathbed provisions, and funding for almshouses. Prisons and workhouses gradually assumed the task of housing some of the poor, but there were more compassionate and creative responses, too. The Nevers Foundation was established in 1573 to provide dowries for young women, for instance; apprenticeships were another means of improving one's station, as the efforts of the poor to pursue such training for their children repeatedly attested. Taken together, the two anthologies also powerfully challenge historian Bronislaw Geremek's important arguments in Poverty (trans. 1994), which view social disintegration as the primary cause of medieval poverty. The essays collected by Scott, in contrast, often represent the poor as parts of their communities, and their prayers, goals, health, and souls as important to donors, charitable institutions, and civil authorities. Yet, Geremek also maintains that the medieval poor were transformed by law and policy and institutional practices from needy people into people who were somehow lacking (Langland's reference to those who "lakken inwitte" exemplifies a broader mindset), an important shift in thinking that might be more explicitly handled by the anthologies' contributors. This reader also found herself occasionally wishing that the authors would more deeply consider how poverty was regularly reproduced even as it was deliberately cordoned off; and how poor people, often as a result, were judged to also be inferior. Disadvantages are cultural productions, too, and so the plight of the poor remained a perennially interesting if challenging problem to the medieval [End Page 134] imagination: the position of being wealthy enough to give generously to the poor took turns with the position of the pauper Christi, the saint who adopted poverty as a way to emulate Christ. Poor people thus had to compete with contradictory ideas about poverty's meaningfulness or virtue in...