CHARITY AND CHARITIES 677 it was the only general legatee for charitable gifts. As these arise parative ease ; and a new plebs was congregating, a population a large number of charitable trusts are created and held by lay of inhabitants not qualified as burghers or guild members, women, •corporations; and “alms” include gifts for social as well as soils living with their fathers, menial servants, and apprentices. religious or eleemosynary purposes. (2) Freedom from Taxation I here was thus an increasing restriction imposed on trade, coupled ■and Service.—-Gifts to the Church for charitable or other purposes with a growing plebs. Naturally, then, lay charities sprang up were made in free, pure, and perj^etual alms (“ad tenendum in for members of guilds, and for burghers and for the commonalty. puram et perpetuam eleemosynam sine omni temporali servicio et Men left estates to their guilds to maintain decayed members, to •consuetudine ”). Land held under this franJcalvioignc was given educate children, portion their daughters, and assist their “in perpetual alms,” therefore the donor could not retract it; wir ows. their The middle-class trader was thus in great measure in free alms, therefore he could exact no services in regard insured against the risks of life ; and so large a stake did these to it; and in pure alms as being free from secular jurisdiction n the C0lmtl tha (cf. Pollock and Maitland). (3) Alienation and Mortmain — tnat iw it-iVv had 7 t itinstead has beenofargued Rogers, iv. 5) they been preserved abolished in Edward do prevent alienation of property to religious houses, with the . s reign the enactment of Queen Elizabeth’s poor-law might consequent loss of service to the superior or chief lords, a license have been unnecessary. They were one sign of the new temper from the chief lord was required to legalize the alienation (Magna and wants of burghers freed from feudalism. Another sign was Carta, and Edwr. L, De viris religiosis). Other statutes (Edw. I. new standard of manners. Rules and saws, Hesiodic in their and Rich. II.) enacted that this license should be issued out of atone, Chancery after investigation ; and the principle was applied to as became popular,—in regard, for instance, to such a question how to enable a man totolive on hisThe means, and toestablished keep him■civil corporations. The necessity of this license was one lay check se . f and those belonging him.” boroughs on injurious alienation. (4) Irresponsible Administration.—Until other chanties also, hospitals and almshouses for the a after the 13th century, when the lay courts had asserted their movement which, like the guilds, began very early—inpeople, as right to settle disputes as to lands held in alms, the adminis- early as the 9th century. They sometimes gave outdoorItaly relief tration of charity was from the lay point of view entirely irre- also to registered poor (Green, i. 41), and they had in large towns sponsible. It was outside the secular jurisdiction ; and civilly courts of orphans presided over by the mayor and aldermen, thus the professed clergy, who were the administrators, were “dead.” taking over a duty that previously had been one of conspicuous They could not sue or be sued except through their sovereign— in the Church. As early as 1267 in Westphalian their chief, the abbot. They formed a large body of non-civic importance there was a rough-and-ready system of Easter relief of the inhabitants Iree from the pressure and the responsibilities of towns poor; and in Frankfort in 1437 there was a town council of civil life. (5) Control.—A.pa,Tt from the control of the abbot, almoners with a systematic programme of relief (Ratzinger, p. 352). friar, master, or other head, the bishop was visitor, or, as we I hus at the close of the Middle Ages the towns were gradually should say, inspector ; and abuses might be remedied by the visit assuming what had been charitable functions of the Church. of the bishop or his ordinary. The bishop’s ordinary (2 Henry V. i. 1) was the recognized visitor of all hospitals apart from the While a new freedom was being attained by the labourer founder. The founder and his family retained a right of intervention. Sometimes thus an institution was reorganized, or even in the country and the burgher in the town, the difficulty dissolved, the property reverting to the founder (Dugdale of obtaining a sufficient supply of labour for Monasticon Anglicanum, vi. 2. 715). (6) Cty-pres. — Charities were, especially after Henry Y.’s reign, appropriated to other agriculture must have been constant, especially m uses, either because their original purpose failed or because some at every visitation of plague and famine. The ** ° ' new object had become important. Thus, for instance, a college state accordingly stepped in as arbiter and organizer. By ■or hospital for lepers (1363) is re-established by the founders Statutes of Labourers beginning in 1351 it aimed at family with a master and priest, quod nulli leprosi reperiebantur; and a similar hospital founded in Henry I.’s time near enforcing a settled wage and restraining migration. From Oxford has decayed, and is given by Edward III. to Oriel 1388 it endeavoured to suppress mendicity, and in part to College, Oxford, to maintain a chaplain and poor brethren. Thus, systematize it in the interest of infirm and aged mendicants. apart from alienation pure and simple, the principle of adaptation Each series of enactments is the natural complement of the to new uses was put in force at an early date, and supplied other. In the main their signification, from the point of many precedents to Wolsey, Edward VI., and the post-Reformation bishops. The system of endowments was indeed far more adapt- view of charity, lies in the fact that they represent a able than it would at first sight seem to have been. (7) The Sources persistent endeavour to prevent social unsettlement, and of Income.—The hospitals were chiefly supported by rents or the part the distress which unsettlement causes, and pr iduce of land ; or, if attached to monasteries, out of the tithe of which vagrancy in some measure indicates, by keeping their monastic lands or other sources of revenue, or out of the appropriated tithes of the secular clergy ; or they might be in part the people within the ranks of recognized dependence, maintained by collections made, for instance, by a commissioner or forcing them back into it by fear of the gaol or duly authorized by a formal attested document, in which were the stocks. The extreme point of this policy was recounted the indulgences by popes, archbishops, and bishops to reached when by the laws of Edward VI. and Elizabeth, those who become its benefactors (Cobbe, p. 75) ; or, in the case of leper hospitals, by a leper with a “clapdish,” who begged in the possibly founded on Byzantine edicts, the despairing legismarkets ; or by a proctor, in the case of more important institu- lator offered to give the mendicant as a slave or bondman tions in towns, who “came with his box one day in every month for a period to any one who would take him. On the to the churches and other religious houses, at times of service, and there received the voluntary gifts of the congregation”; or they other hand, it was desired that relief should be a means of might receive inmates on payment, and thus apparently a preventing migration. In any time of general pressure there frequent abuse, decayed servants of the court and others, were is a desire to organize mendicity, to prevent the wandering farmed out. (8) Mode of Admission. — The admission was of beggars, to create a kind of settled poor, distinguished from usually, no doubt, regulated by the prior or master. At York, the rest as infirm and not able-bodied, and to keep these at at the hospital of St Nicholas for the lepx-ous, the conditions of admission were: promise or vow of continence, participation in least at home sufficiently supported by local and parochial prayer, the abandonment of all business, the inmate’s property relief; and this, in its simpler form all the world over, at death to go to the house. This may serve as an example. has in the past been by response to public begging. The The master was usually one of the regular clergy. (9) Decline may be summed up thus: We cannot have of the Hospitals.—It is said that, in addition to 645 monasteries argument and 90 colleges and many chantries, Henry VIII. suppressed 110 begging, which implies that the beggar is cared for hospitals (Speed s Chronicle, p. 778). The numbers seem small. by no one, belongs to no one, and therefore throws In the economic decline at the end of the 15th and beginning of himself on the world at large. Therefore, if he is the 16th centuries many hospitals may have lapsed. able-bodied he must be punished as unsocial, for it is his In the 15th century the towns grew in importance. First the wool trade and then the cloth trade flourished, and the English fault that he belongs to no one, or we must make him some one’s dependant, and so keep him; or if he is infirm, Tbe guild ?.rel°P.ed a ^rge shipping trade. The towns grew up and therefore of no service to any one—if no one will keep charities. of,etrade, little principalities ”
and for the advancement guilds, consisting alike of masters and work- him—we must organize his mendicity, for such mendicity men, were formed, which endeavoured to regulate and then to is justified. If he cannot dig for the man to whom he does monopolize the market. By degrees the corporations of the towns were worked, in their interests, and the whole commercial system or should belong, he must beg. Then out of the failure to became restrictive and inadaptable. Meanwhile the towns attracted organize mendicity—for relief of itself is no remedy, least newcomers; freedom from feudal obligations was gained with corn- of all casual relief—a poor-law springs up, which, after-
