1 - Questions and contexts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
Jesus' words, ‘for ye have the poor always with you’, must have seemed directed particularly at the inhabitants of early modern Europe. In late seventeenth-century England, a rural yeoman wrote of ‘The Multitude of Poore that dayly lie in every coner of the Streets notwithstanding the great Collections in every Parish’; while in Venice, the chronicler Marino Sanudo recorded the usual winter-time swarms of children crying, ‘Give us bread! We're dying of hunger and cold’, as well as his impressions of the intensified conditions of the 1528 famine: ‘Impossible to listen to mass in peace, for at least a dozen beggars will surround you; impossible to open your purse without an immediate plea for money. They are still there late in the evening, knocking on doors and crying, “I'm dying of hunger!”’ Contemporaries clearly thought themselves besieged by a rising tide of poverty.
According to the best historical analysis, they were not wrong. In the European countryside, levels of poverty had reached unheard-of heights by the beginning of the sixteenth century and did not abate until the start of the seventeenth century. The number of peasants in Languedoc unable to feed their families doubled between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Over half of the rural population of New Castile were landless labourers in the 1570s, and the English peasantry possessing only a cottage and garden rose from 11 per cent in 1560 to 40 per cent after 1640.
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- Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700 , pp. 1 - 17Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004