‘Go and see the miseries of our poore brethren’, insisted John Rogers, minister of Dedham (Essex), a community said in 1628 to consist ‘onlie of a number of Clothyers and a great Companye of poore people w[hi]ch are by them sett on worke’.

‘If our heart be not made of an Adamant’, Rogers argued, ‘this will move us.’ Such vivid descriptions of unrelieved poverty, drawing as they did on a venerable tradition of clerical exhortation in which rehearsal of the miseries of the poor was intended to inspire compassion, were missionary in intent. ‘See’, John Downame lamented in 1616, ‘their small provision, hungrie fare, thinne cloathes, and hard lodging, the children crying for hunger, and the parents out crying them because they have no food to give them.’ Downame's description of poverty also, however, betrayed the contemporary tendency to classify ‘the poore’, in this case into three categories: ‘some lying in straw for want of beddes; others drinking water instead of drinke; and a thirde sorte neere starved with hunger for want of bread, or escaping that, quaking or shivering with cold for lack of fire’. For these early Stuart clergymen, then, the poor were readily identified and their plight easily improved. So long as the rich were compassionate, misery could be mitigated.