And because many sturdy beggars, so long as they can live by begging for alms, refuse to labour, living in idleness and sin and sometimes by thefts and other crimes, no man, under the aforesaid penalty of imprisonment, shall presume under colour of pity or alms to give anything to such as shall be able profitably to labour, or to cherish them in their sloth, that so they may be compelled to labour for the necessaries of life.
Idleness in the able-bodied is wicked and leads to wickedness, and therefore to extend charity to the undeserving is itself an act worthy of punishment. Anyone confronted by a beggar who might be called able-bodied would exercise caution. Thus, at the small cost of denying alms to some who deserved them, the great public benefit would be gained of extracting labor from those fit to work. Sound morals and sound economics at a single stroke.
It is characteristic of Poor Law as a phenomenon to attempt to suppress the charitable impulse and, where benefit is transferred, to maximize its effectiveness as social coercion. The conditions imposed on the giving of charity make it no charity at all. That for which it is exchanged — submission, in a word — makes it instead an unusually good bargain, especially since more niggardly assistance is more effectively controlling. This fortunate conjunction of advantages will be sought with increasing rigor and system, but by the same methods, over centuries. Beatrice Webb herself will brood over the well-being of the working poor with a sublime concern that they should not be corrupted by any largesse, public or private, that succors them when their need is not exquisite. In fact, a most rigorous discrimination between worthy and unworthy poor, morally earnest in the extreme but sadly inclined to pinch and humiliate the worthy in order that no reprobate should escape unpinched and unhumiliated, will become the primary care of British philanthropy, enlisting the efforts of the finest spirits and the loftiest minds.
Certain features of this fourteenth-century ordinance should be noted. It deals with working people exclusively, depresses their wages and exacts their labor, and worries over their tendency to be taken for or treated as needy people, unable to work, whose right to charity is implicitly conceded. For a long time, well into the twentieth century, the words “poor” and “labourers” and “workers” will be used interchangeably. Like the Ordinance of Labourers, the Poor Laws will be directed at working people, whose normal condition is assumed to be poverty. Paupers, the destitute, those who fall short of subsistence, are simply workers in sickness or old age or widowhood or madness or despair, or whose trade has become obsolete or whose industry has gone into crisis, or whose wages have fallen so low that they work and are still indigent and dependent. “Pauper” is simply Latin for “poor,” logically enough. The word implies a distinction whose reality is doubtful at best, since the whole class of workers or poor were governed by laws supposedly designed to relieve and discourage pauperism.
The distinction between workers and the poor is not made, because workers are poor, and, as a class, are vulnerable to utter destitution. This fundamental relationship of labor to the purchasers of labor will attract rationalizations the way a magnet does pins. Frequently these rationalizations are at odds with one another, but this does not matter, because as justifications of an existing order, their very variety indicates profound consensus.
The Ordinance of Labourers, with its refusal to distinguish between free and servile, was clearly designed to shore up erosions in the feudal system. An act of the twelfth year of Richard II, in 1388, reinforced this effect. This law anticipated the later Acts of Settlement, which would continue in effect in association with the Poor Laws down to 1948. It forbade any laborer to leave the town or borough where he lived without a “letter patent containing the cause of his going and the time of his return.” Towns were to maintain stocks where any laborer traveling without a letter could be kept “until he have found surety to return to his service or to serve or labour in the town from which he comes.” Those who cannot work, “beggars unable to serve,” are immobilized in the same way and by the same means. Thirty years after the plague, labor was still scarce, still exacted: “As well artificers and craftsmen as servants and apprentices” are “to be forced to serve in harvest at cutting, gathering, and bringing in the corn.” The law specifically limits the wages of categories of workers, “because servants and labourers will not and for [a] long time have not been willing to serve and labour without outrageous and excessive hire and much greater than has been given to such servants and labourers in any time past.”
This law is often described as important because it makes a distinction between the idle and the truly needy. However, it does nothing of the kind. It restricts the movements of the impotent poor in order to restrict more effectively the movements of the able-bodied, who begged and wandered just as they did. It is designed to make unnecessary the distinction required by the ban on charity for sturdy beggars in the Ordinance of Labourers. Again, while the Poor Laws are always treated as if they were intended to alleviate poverty, these early statutes from which they derive are clearly designed to immobilize labor and bring down its cost. The features of the laws affecting the impotent are designed to ensure these results.
The interpretation of the laws as primarily charitable provision for the needy, rather than as attempts to control the cost and supply of labor, has given great currency to the view that they originated in the breaking up of the monasteries by Henry VIII. The eighteenth-century writer Frederick Eden, in his classic work, The State of the Poor (1797), traces the Poor Laws to these origins, as do Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Carlyle, Disraeli, Hilaire Belloc, and others. Marx mentions the fourteenth-century laws in his discussion of the Poor Laws in Capital, but he makes nothing of them. Occurring as they do long before the Reformation, they are anomalous, if one assumes that the intent of the laws was to create a secular equivalent of the disrupted institutions of Christian charity. The miseries of the mass of rural people driven from the land described in More’s Utopia, published in 1515, make very clear that the problems of poverty and beggary were fully present when the monasteries still flourished. That More should not have mentioned them in association with the suffering he describes hardly encourages one to believe that they figured significantly in alleviating need.
The institution threatening to collapse in the fourteenth century was not monasticism but feudalism. The Black Death had ravaged the society, transforming the situation of the workers by making them few. The great restlessness of the people during this period issued finally in the Peasants’ War. Jean Froissart, a contemporary of these events, a Frenchman with a courtly bias, reports in his Chronicles that in 1381 there occurred “great disasters and uprisings of the common people, on account of which the country was almost ruined beyond recovery.” Says Froissart: “It was because of the abundance and prosperity in which the common people then lived that this rebellion broke out.” Other historians find a cause in the Ordinance of Labourers. The high wages which workers seem to have been able to command where the law was skirted, together with the oppressiveness of its enforcement where it was not, might very well have produced a revolt like Wat Tyler’s. “These bad people,” wrote Froissart, “began to rebel because, they said, they were held too much in subjection, and when the world began there had been no serfs.” Serfdom was at that time, according to him, especially widespread in England.