Hanging with History

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Great context on English society and the Poor Law mechanism.

“According to the 16th century stereotype, the undeserving pauper was typically rootless, masterless and homeless.  A Vagrant.  His behavior was disorderly and criminal, that of a rogue.”

In the 16th century, the poor laws and other laws make the vagrant criminal.  But, like other laws, there is a massive amount of local discretion when it comes to enforcement.  There were basically so many people who you might call a vagrant, that local officials just did not punish all pauper wanderers.  And there were people who, if they were guilty of some other crime would be punished for that, as for example they were a thief, a magistrate might ignore that they were also a vagrant.

It was only a small minority of immigrants who were ever punished as vagrants.  Usually, if they got work or rented a place to live, the authorities would look the other way.  They didn’t have to, but they could.

We look at the dangerous poor, their punishments, movements and the attitudes of the respectable towards them.  They were really the greatest source of crime, and many lived highly dysfunctional lives.

There were definitely professional beggars as well.  “Counterfeit bedlams, and a counterfeit cripple in Herefordshire, one of Salisbury’s vagrants was a Dumberer pretending he hath no tongue.”

There is an abuse of power story told too.  The power of overseers to regulate the family life of the poor is not a well known story.

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Europe wide, there were Humanist driven policy responses to poverty in the 16th century, which we have covered in some detail.  These were essentially all failures.

There was one successful poverty program which, despite many flaws, solved the problem of famine among the poor.  Just one?  How could this possibly be?

 If we brutally summarize Proust we would say, first of all, most areas did not rationalize their agricultural production.  They had too many inefficient small holdings, and/or they established price controls which lowered production or distorted production.  Inefficient small holdings come from cultural preference, and is usually reinforced by legal and bureaucratic institutions, often based on little more than dumb preference.

Second, in the brutal summarization, price controls distorting production, is a simple corruption by elites, who tend to be terrible.  Terrible in the way I usually refer to as being against human flourishing.  There is even a weak version of this in England relating to the corn laws.

Third, is the use of high status people to use the money, in the context of a seriously hierarchical society where the high status people cannot be questioned or audited as they were in England in the Bording Administrative History episodes.  In other words, scummy elites who are corrupt.

A poorly structured economy, and terrible elites is just the human normal, which is everywhere all the time, and these things tend to work against the poverty programs run all over Europe.  Another problem was simple inefficiency, a wasting of resources used to fight poverty.  The flow of money they were able to raise to help the poor was inadequate, partially because the vast majority of the money was spent on administration.  Examples we had was that the monastery at St Deny only gave 3% of the revenue they raised directly to the poor in the form of food, clothing or money.

St Deny is not considered a great outlier, but institutions spending 90% on their own people and priorities, are common through history, right down to today.  Efforts start with prestige and high status people working on solving a problem, but generally devolve into corrupt people doing what they want.  That’s just how institutions work.

When so much is wasted, there is just not enough money.

And yet, there was a successful poverty program, that also was born with Humanist roots, but evolved and changed into a more 'empirical' and less 'critical' approach, that actually solved the problem of famine for the poor.

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During the 16th century, this whole social controversy over the treatment of the poor ranged across and intersected with the Reformation.  You also have the social changes happening where the power of the central court is growing and that of the knights is weakening.  The economy is becoming more dependent on cash and trade and division of labor.  Wealth is increasing, but at the same time there are more people and almost all the new people, meaning the marginal growth in numbers, are extremely poor.  

Intellectually, the Humanists are dominant.  They lead the policy reforms towards the poor, as a result, the initial policies of all involved are quite similar.

The European climate is cooling, There is a radical challenge to the single greatest institution or corporate body on the continent.  Not only is the church being splintered, and challenged at every ideological level, but the church engages in a great council and comes out of it quite changed.  Superficially the same, but more fixed in doctrine, less able to change doctrine as scientific advances happen.  The counter reformation places the church against science in a way that it was not before.

All this is happening in societies that are not particularly used to rapid change.  

We finish with Spain's national effort at treatment of the poor.

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We left last episode with the policy response of Venice, Ypres, Rouen and Grenoble to first the 1527-1531 famine and later structural response.  Today, we’ll look at Lyons, Valladolid and England.  

It’s not easy, it never is when demons are involved.          

Anyway, we will have looked at France, the low countries, England, Spain and Italy.  One of the points is that Humanist inspired regulation, adopting their core ideology was done by both Catholics and Protestants.  The Catholics suffered more from internal politics, as there was political pushback from the monasteries and other sections of the church when the policy response of the cities was always, eventually always, to secularize the aid to the poor.  Because the secular authorities, by the 16th century, were where all the repressive power was.  And repression of the poor gradually became a key plank in the solution set.  Remember Rouen and the gibbets standing right next to where food was distributed.

Lyon has been a favorite of historians studying 16th century poverty. It follows and unusual, but dramatic arc. 

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We are summarizing the problem circa 1525, before we get into the pan-European, well, Western European, solutions to the problem, driven by the Humanists.

We have a simultaneous admiration and horror towards poverty.  The warmth stems from the role of poverty in elite society.  They are objects of charity, and without charity how do we get into heaven?  Plus, we sense the people who renounce their power and wealth and choose to live like poor hermits are spiritually superior, they are blessed; they are holy.  So in those senses poverty is good actually.  And this confounds everything, because of course mainly poverty is horribly bad, in obvious ways.  

It’s horrible in the countryside, where there is still a lot of elite oppression, and food storage is not deep or high quality.  There are terribly insufficient wild resources for the numbers of people that live in more densely populated country.  You might say there is always enough fish in Norway, but the Tuscan countryside is overpopulated for wild resources to help for long.  

 It’s horrible in the cities where the poor go when they starve, hoping there is food there.  The granaries and warehouses help.  Places like London and Antwerp, Lisbon and Amsterdam are getting grain from surplus areas like the Baltic.  1525, we don’t really have much in Ukraine yet, the steppe nomads are still out there.  There is little in the way of ghost acreage in North America. Europe is on its own really.

And the poor, how to think of them, they are increasing in number, dramatically.  And changing attitudes towards the poor are a big part of the cultural change and ideological shift towards secularization that is part of our subject. 

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Last episode we had the emotional episode about the sufferings of paupers in 16th century Italy.  So we are now done.. with autophagy, cannibalism, dung eating, baker murdering, and all that.

We are now moving on to a European wide response to poverty at the policy level.  Bronislaw Geremek’s Poverty A History is a primary source.  Then when we move on to the specifically British response of the poor laws we will mainly be using Paul Slack’s Poverty and Policy in Tudor England.   And a long essay by Paul Fideler  called Poverty, Policy and Providence.

Some of the specific incidents come from Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams.

“Social Science has from its very inception, always recognized the importance of poverty, and its two most vital questions, what causes poverty and how is it to be eradicated.”

I’ll point out that the philosopher Hannah Arendt, named John Locke’s notion that wealth is the product of human creativity.   Therefore, it is theoretically unlimited, opening the possibility that poverty can be eliminated.  

I have to mention that, because the question of what causes poverty is sort of foolish, physics causes poverty.  Humans have to expend effort merely to live and creating wealth requires a high degree of coordination and cooperation.  The how is poverty to be eradicated question is more interesting, because it has happened and failed in many different ways.

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Quoting Dante:

“The disease of the starving, I mean hunger, is a pitiable affliction.  Of human calamities hunger is certainly supreme.  It brings about the cruelest end of all deaths. Hunger is a disease that torments with slowness, a pain that endures, a sickness that lasts, and is hidden in the bowels.  Since it consumes the natural humor the heat becomes cold, the bodily form is consumed and strength is weakened little by little.  The flesh becomes thin, the vermillion disappears from the blood.  The voice is weak and feeble, the eyes weakened and without their natural support in the cavities sunken in the sockets like dried nuts in their skins.  The torments of hunger force many to cross the limits of nature, that is to feed on the bodies of people related by blood or friendship and mothers who give birth to children only to put them back into the womb with horror.”

And this episode dives into famine poverty with emotions and icky feelings.  Expect analysis next episode.  The idea is that the miracle stopped and defeated famine and poverty.  This is what its enemies want to bring back.

The focus here is Italy in the 16th century, but goes as far afield as France in the 17th century.

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We are trying to take a look at the life of a knight.  A look at the life in full, stripped of idealizations and self righteous outrage on behalf of oppressed peasants.

 Last episode we were looking at medieval life.  There were knights and clerics as relatively free parts of society.  We know that west of the Hajnal line, the catastrophe of the Black Death will weaken serfdom a great deal, while they get screwed down even harder in eastern Europe.  

The life of a knight is something different than we might expect, if we have drunk too deeply of the Victorian era ideal of the courtly knight, who protects the weak, idealizes women, is always an honest and true member of society.   One who upholds the good and meets evil with violence.

We talked of the violence, the love of killing and enjoyment of torture, the fact that emotions like shame and embarrassment only occurred with those of the equal or higher status, you weren’t really embarrassed if peasants saw your private parts or that they know YOU DOUBLE DIPPED your chips in the salsa.

Tacitus, the ancient Germans, the Franks, Vikings, the Crusades all make their appearance in the development of the life of the knight.

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We are going to start with trivialities, then get into some serious differences between now and the medieval psyche.  Around gross stuff, aggression and killing and finally torture,  and torture’s enjoyment.  This is absolutely not an episode for children.    If you hate me by the end I will understand.  This is going to explain that western Europe was led in part by a really horrible elite class of chivalric knights.  There will be a small flavor of it.  And this is what almost the whole rest of the world lives under.  This is what Europe developed away from.

Still aggression has powerful effects.  Part of the discussion will include the impact on history of aggression turned to the theoretical maximum, the Cimbri and the Teutones and the development of the Roman Empire. 

At the end I try to soften the blow by having Camie appear, which will give you a normal person's reaction to this horror. 

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It was probably while the brutal siege in Vienna went on, and the little boys and girls of the region were being sold into slavery, after being raped a few times if more modern examples teach us anything.  That Erasmus wrote a book l  On Civility for Boys.  This was a publishing blockbuster, full of useful advice, like- try not to fart so Loudly!  Again, the contrast is part of the theme. If you can manage to avoid slavers, then don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve.  You can so easily see the advantages of civilized society, of being so powerful the savages cannot hurt you. Please don’t throw that away.

On Civility for Boys went through 30 editions in 5 years, was likely the number one best seller of the time, new editions keep coming out into the 20th century, something like 140 editions all told.  The book is seen as marking a transition from an aristocratic culture touchy about its honor to something more modern emphasizing civility and manners.

It was the first major western treatise that was about the moral and practical education of children in terms of everyday manners, rather than an advice manual of how to behave at court, which has a longer history and there are several surviving examples of.  So this work becomes a core piece of Norbert Elias’ history of manners, which we can use to take a look at cultural evolution, and kind of take a first glance at a big question.