618 Constitutional History. [chap.
The poorer
classes.
Not over-
crowded ;
except in
walled
towns.
Villages
not over-
peopled.
Population
of the
country
varied very
slowly.
or to take up their freedom as citizens; and the cottagers who
had no chance of acquiring a rood of ground to till and leave
to their children : two classes alike keenly sensitive to all
changes in the seasons and in the prices of the necessaries of
life ; very indifferently clad and housed, in good times well fed,
but in bad times not fed at all. In some respects these classes
differed from that which in the present day furnishes the bulk
of the mass of pauperism. The evils which are commonly, how-
ever erroneously it may be, regarded as resulting from redun-
dant population, had not in the middle ages the shape which
they have taken in modern times. Except in the walled towns,
and then only in exceptional times, there could have been no
necessary overcrowding of houses. The very roughness and
uncleanliness of the country labourer’s life was to some extent
a safeguard ; if he lived, as foreigners reported, like a hog, he
did not fare or lodge worse than the beasts that he tended. In
the towns, the restraints on building, which were absolutely
necessary to keep the limited area of the streets open for traffic,
prevented any very great variation in the number of inhabited
houses ; for, although in some great towns, like Oxford, there
were considerable vacant spaces which were apt to become a
sort of gypsey camping-ground for the waifs and strays of a
mixed population, most of them were closely packed ; the rich
men would not dispense with their courts and gardens, and the
very poor had to lodge outside the walls. In the country
townships again, there was no such liberty as has in more
modern times been somewhat imprudently used, of building or
not building cottage dwellings without due consideration of
place or proportion to the demand for useful labour. Every
manor had its constitution and its recognised classes and number
of holdings on the demesne and the freehold, the village and
the waste ; the common arable and the common pasture were a
village property that warned off all interlopers and all super-
fluous competition. So strict were the barriers, that it seems
impossible to suppose that any great increase of population ever
presented itself as a fact to the medieval economist ; or, if he
thought of it at all, he must have regarded the recurrence of
XXI.]
Legislation for the Poor.
619
wars and pestilences as a providential arrangement for the re-
adjustment of the conditions of his problem. As a fact, what-
ever the cause may have been, the population of England
during the middle ages did not vary in anything like the pro-
portion in which it has increased since the beginning of the
last century ; and there is no reason to think that any vast
difference existed between the supply and demand of homes for
the poor. Still there were many poor ; if only the old, the cia≡s of
diseased, the widows, and the orphans, are to be counted in
the number. There were too, in England, as everywhere else,
besides the absolutely helpless, whole classes of labourers and
artisans, whose earnings never furnished more than the mere
requisites of life ; and, besides these, idle and worthless beggars,
who preferred the freedom of vagrancy to the restrictions of ill-
remunerated labour. All these classes were to be found in
town and country alike.
494. The care of the really helpless poor was regarded both Bei⅛⅛us
. ∙ л t∙ duty of pi fl-
ag a legal and as a religious duty from, the very first ages of vid⅛gfor
English Christianity. S. Gregory, in his instruction to Augus- p°°r'
tine, had reminded him of the duty of a bishop to set apart for
the poor a fourth part of the income of his church ; and some
vestiges of the usage, which does not seem ever to have been
generally adopted, are found in the ecclesiastical legislation of
the fourteenth century : in 1342 archbishop Stratford ordered
that in all cases of appropriation a portion of the tithe should
be set apart for the relief of the poor. The neglect of the poor Legislation
1 for the care
was alleged as one of the crying sɪns of the alien clergy . Ihe of the poor,
legislation of the Witenagemotes of Ethelred, although there
I eems to be no evidence that it was ever carried into effect, bore
the same mark ; a third portion of the tithe that belonged to the
church was to go to God’s poor and to the needy ones in thral-
dom ; it was enjoined on all God’s servants that they should
comfort and feed the poor. Even in the reign of Henry ɪ the
king was declared to be the kinsman and advocate of the poor.
On such a point it is needless to multiply proof ; almsdeeds were
always regarded as a religious duty, whether as an act of merit
Johnson, Canons, ɪi. 364 ; Rot, ParI. iv. 290.