Hanging with History

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We cover policy contributions from Thomas Starkey to Thomas Smith to Francis Bacon.   The main policy discussions are about the Poor Laws, the Recoinage and Labor policy.

Then we go into the ideological support for the poor laws.  There are three bible passages that had a great effect on Tudor ideas about the poor laws.  They are in conflict, at one level.  It was the resolution of the conflict that made the English Poor Laws so successful.   This discussion explains whey the parish elders, the vestrymen, behaved the way they did in the operation of the poor laws, which was left a bit mysterious in the prior episodes.  

The biggest policy change, allowing for loans at interest up to 10%, is reserved for episode 233.

One of the biggest issues in understanding policy is that the way the policies were carried out on the ground is very different from the letter of the legislation.  That's a lot of it.

There is discussion about the influence of Richard Perkins.

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We compare the Humanist vs Lutheran vs Elizabethan poverty policies in some depth.  

Part of that involves a deeper analysis of More's Utopia, as well as related work by Erasmus and Juan De Vives.  Erasmus and More's 1515 work was foundational to later Humanist poverty policy and also accounts for the similarity between the early Humanist policy and the early Lutheran policy as well as Cromwell's 1531 beginning.

Some time is spent comparing Wycliff and Lollardy with the Devotio Moderna, as these were origin ideologies for the Netherlands and England, which very quickly became the leaders of the world in per capita income terms.  England also had Piers Ploughman by Langland, around the same time as Wycliff, so they got a double dose of the message that elites needed to become less terrible, corrupt and doomed to hell. 

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The question seems crazy and yet there are entangled facts that we need to consider.  This is a 16th and 17th century issue.

1.  The obsession over employment for the poor.

2.  The actions of Common Law operating over many decades.

3. The near dictatorial power of JPs in certain kinds of land use disputes.

This ended with a set of property laws that allowed property owners unusually free use of their own land for business purposes, which was not the case before, is not the case now, and has seldom in the world ever been the case.  It used to be easy for other powerful people to veto an owner's use of land, then for a time it was not.  That had consequences. 

The episode also has a great deal of detail on the Poor Laws and their development from the 17th to the 18th century.  As with all complex arrangements, the unintended consequences tend to be the most powerful.

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Poverty policy was deeply entangled with other obsessions of the 16th and 17th century England.  Combine these obsessions with the local dictatorial power of the JPs and the concept of Common Law, and you get a surprising result.

There were many false starts in the European efforts to fight poverty in the early 16th century.  Traditionalists, Protestants and Humanists all took quite similar steps towards fighting poverty.

They all made similar mistakes, putting the agency and control over money, at the wrong level of poverty fighting machinery.  England took a different approach, from all of these.   

We have talked a lot about these differences, experiment, fail, try again.  Learn from the parish over there.  

But all that effort over the poor resulted in substantial taxation.  20% of all land taxes went towards helping the poor.  One obsession for the JPs (can we say as a consequence?) was the employment of the poor.  Combine that with common law, Joan Thirsk style economic projects, and businesses are allowed to go forward with projects that would create employment that before would have been vetoed by other interested parties.  

Things changed, culture changed, law changed.  

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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.