Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Chariot" to "Chatelaine"
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Title: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Chariot" to "Chatelaine"
Author: Various
Release date: August 14, 2010 [eBook #33427]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
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Transcriber's notes:
(1) Numbers following letters (without space) like C2 were originally
printed in subscript. Letter subscripts are preceded by an
underscore, like C_n.
(2) Characters following a carat (^) were printed in superscript.
(3) Side-notes were relocated to function as titles of their respective
paragraphs.
(4) Macrons and breves above letters and dots below letters were not
inserted.
(5) The following typographical error has been corrected:
ARTICLE CHARLES ALBERT: "... made a savage demonstration against
him at the Palazzo Greppi, whence he escaped in the night with
difficulty and returned to Piedmont with his defeated army." 'army
amended from armp'.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE
AND GENERAL INFORMATION
ELEVENTH EDITION
VOLUME V, SLICE VIII
Chariot to Chatelaine
ARTICLES IN THIS SLICE:
CHARIOT CHARLES MARTEL
CHARISIUS, FLAVIUS SOSIPATER CHARLESTON (Illinois, U.S.A)
CHARITON CHARLESTON (South Carolina, U.S.A.)
CHARITY AND CHARITIES CHARLESTON (West Virginia, U.S.A.)
CHARIVARI CHARLESTOWN
CHARKHARI CHARLET, NICOLAS TOUSSAINT
CHARLATAN CHARLEVILLE
CHARLEMAGNE CHARLEVOIX, PIERRE FRANCOIS XAVIER DE
CHARLEMAGNE, JEAN ARMAND CHARLEVOIX
CHARLEMONT, JAMES CAULFEILD CHARLOTTE
CHARLEROI (town in Belgium) CHARLOTTENBURG
CHARLEROI (Pennsylvania, U.S.A.) CHARLOTTESVILLE
CHARLES CHARLOTTETOWN
CHARLES II. (Roman emperor) CHARM
CHARLES III. (Roman emperor) CHARNAY, (CLAUDE JOSEPH) DESIRE
CHARLES IV. (Roman emperor) CHARNEL HOUSE
CHARLES V. (Roman emperor) CHARNOCK, JOB
CHARLES VI. (Roman emperor) CHARNOCK, ROBERT
CHARLES VII. (Roman emperor) CHARNOCKITE
CHARLES I. (king of Great Britain) CHARNWOOD FOREST
CHARLES II. (king of G. Britain) CHAROLLES
CHARLES I. and II. (of France) CHARON
CHARLES III. (king of France) CHARONDAS
CHARLES IV. (king of France) CHARPENTIER, FRANCOIS
CHARLES V. (king of France) CHARRIERE, AGNES ISABELLE EMILIE DE
CHARLES VI. (king of France) CHARRON, PIERRE
CHARLES VII. (king of France) CHARRUA
CHARLES VIII. (king of France) CHART
CHARLES IX. (king of France) CHARTER
CHARLES X. (king of France) CHARTERED COMPANIES
CHARLES I. (king of Hungary) CHARTERHOUSE
CHARLES I. (king of Naples) CHARTER-PARTY
CHARLES II. (king of Naples) CHARTERS TOWERS
CHARLES II. (king of Navarre) CHARTIER, ALAIN
CHARLES III. (king of Navarre) CHARTISM
CHARLES (king of Rumania) CHARTRES
CHARLES II. (king of Spain) CHARTREUSE
CHARLES III. (king of Spain) CHARTREUSE, LA GRANDE
CHARLES IV. (king of Spain) CHARWOMAN
CHARLES IX. (king of Sweden) CHASE, SALMON PORTLAND
CHARLES X. (king of Sweden) CHASE, SAMUEL
CHARLES XI. (king of Sweden) CHASE, WILLIAM MERRITT
CHARLES XII. (king of Sweden) CHASE
CHARLES XIII. (king of Sweden) CHASING
CHARLES XIV. (king of Sweden) CHASLES, VICTOR EUPHEMIEN PHILARETE
CHARLES XV. (king of Sweden) CHASSE
CHARLES (duke of Brittany) CHASSE
CHARLES (duke of Burgundy) CHASSELOUP-LAUBAT, FRANCOIS
CHARLES (count of Flanders) CHASSEPOT
CHARLES I. (duke of Lorraine) CHASSESRIAU, THEODORE
CHARLES II. (duke of Lorraine) CHASSIS
CHARLES III. or II. (duke of Lrn.) CHASTELARD, PIERRE DE BOCSOZEL DE
CHARLES IV. or III. (duke of Lrn.) CHASTELLAIN, GEORGES
CHARLES V. or IV. (duke of Lor.) CHASUBLE
CHARLES II. (duke of Parma) CHATEAU
CHARLES (archduke of Austria) CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANCOIS RENE
CHARLES (cardinal of Lorraine) CHATEAUBRIANT
CHARLES (prince of Lorraine) CHATEAUDUN
CHARLES (count of Valois) CHATEAU-GONTIER
CHARLES (prince of Viana) CHATEAUNEUF, LA BELLE
CHARLES, ELIZABETH CHATEAU-RENAULT, DE ROUSSELET
CHARLES, JACQUES ALEXANDRE CESAR CHATEAUROUX, MARIE ANNE
CHARLES, THOMAS CHATEAUROUX
CHARLES ALBERT CHATEAU-THIERRY
CHARLES AUGUSTUS CHATELAIN
CHARLES EDWARD CHATELAINE
CHARLES EMMANUEL I.
CHARIOT (derived from an O. Fr. word, formed from _char_, a car), in
antiquity, a conveyance (Gr. [Greek: arma], Lat. _currus_) used in
battle, for the chase, in public processions and in games. The Greek
chariot had two wheels, and was made to be drawn by two horses; if a
third or, more commonly, two reserve horses were added, they were
attached on each side of the main pair by a single trace fastened to the
front of the chariot, as may be seen on two prize vases in the British
Museum from the Panathenaic games at Athens. On the monuments there is
no other sign of traces, from the want of which wheeling round must have
been difficult. Immediately on the axle ([Greek: axon], _axis_), without
springs of any kind, rested the basket or body ([Greek: diphros]) of the
chariot, which consisted of a floor to stand on, and a semicircular
guard round the front about half the height of the driver. It was
entirely open at the back, so that the combatant might readily leap to
the ground and up again as was necessary. There was no seat, and
generally only room for the combatant and his charioteer to stand in.
The pole ([Greek: rumos], _temo_) was probably attached to the middle of
the axle, though it appears to spring from the front of the basket; at
the end of the pole was the yoke ([Greek: zygon], _jugum_), which
consisted of two small saddles fitting the necks of the horses, and
fastened by broad bands round the chest. Besides this the harness of
each horse consisted of a bridle and a pair of reins, mostly the same as
in use now, made of leather and ornamented with studs of ivory or metal.
The reins were passed through rings attached to the collar bands or
yoke, and were long enough to be tied round the waist of the charioteer
in case of his having to defend himself. The wheels and body of the
chariot were usually of wood, strengthened in places with bronze or
iron; the wheels had from four to eight spokes and tires of bronze or
iron. This description applies generally to the chariots of all the
nations of antiquity; the differences consisted chiefly in the
mountings. The chariots of the Egyptians and Assyrians, with whom the
bow was the principal arm of attack, were richly mounted with quivers
full of arrows, while those of the Greeks, whose characteristic weapon
was the spear, were plain except as regards mere decoration. Among the
Persians, again, and more remarkably among the ancient Britons, there
was a class of chariot having the wheels mounted with sharp,
sickle-shaped blades, which cut to pieces whatever came in their way.
This was probably an invention of the Persians; Cyrus the younger
employed these chariots in large numbers. Among the Greeks and Romans,
on the other hand, the chariot had passed out of use in war before
historical times, and was retained only for races in the public games,
or for processions, without undergoing any alteration apparently, its
form continuing to correspond with the description of Homer, though it
was lighter in build, having to carry only the charioteer. On two
Panathenaic prize vases in the British Museum are figures of racing
_bigae_, in which, contrary to the description given above, the driver
is seated with his feet resting on a board hanging down in front close
to the legs of his horses. The _biga_ itself consists of a seat resting
on the axle, with a rail at each side to protect the driver from the
wheels. The chariot was unsuited to the uneven soil of Greece and Italy,
and it is not improbable that these nations had brought it with them as
part of their original habits from their former seats in the East. In
the remains of Egyptian and Assyrian art there are numerous
representations of chariots, from which it may be seen with what
richness they were sometimes ornamented. The "iron" chariots in use
among the Jews appear to have been chariots strengthened or plated with
metal, and no doubt were of the form above described, which prevailed
generally among the other ancient nations. (See also CARRIAGE.)
The chief authorities are J.C. Ginzrot, _Die Wagen and Fahrwerke der
Griechen und Romer_ (1817); C.F. Grashof, _Uber das Fuhrwerk bei Homer
und Hesiod_ (1846); W. Leaf in _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, v.; E.
Buchholz, _Die homerischen Realien_ (1871-1885); W. Helbig, _Das
homerische Epos aus den Denkmalern erlautert_ (1884), and the article
"Currus" in Daremberg and Saglio, _Dictionnaire des Antiquites_.
CHARISIUS, FLAVIUS SOSIPATER, Latin grammarian, flourished about the
middle of the 4th century A.D. He was probably an African by birth,
summoned to Constantinople to take the place of Euanthius, a learned
commentator on Terence. The _Ars Grammatica_ of Charisius, in five
books, addressed to his son (not a Roman, as the preface shows), has
come down to us in a mutilated condition, the beginning of the first,
part of the fourth, and the greater part of the fifth book having been
lost. The work, which is merely a compilation, is valuable as containing
excerpts from the earlier writers on grammar, who are in many cases
mentioned by name--Q. Remmius Palaemon, C. Julius Romanus, Cominianus.
The best edition is by H. Keil, _Grammatici Latini_, i. (1857); see
also article by G. Gotz in Pauly-Wissowa's _Realencyclopadie_, iii. 2
(1899); Teuffel-Schwabe, _Hist. of Roman Literature_ (Eng. trans.), S
419, I. 2; Frohde, in _Jahr. f. Philol._, 18 Suppl. (1892), 567-672.
CHARITON, of Aphrodisias in Caria, the author of a Greek romance
entitled _The Loves of Chaereas and Callirrhoe_, probably flourished in
the 4th century A.D. The action of the story, which is to a certain
extent historical, takes place during the time of the Peloponnesian War.
Opinions differ as to the merits of the romance, which is an imitation
of Xenophon of Ephesus and Heliodorus.
Editions by J.P. D'Orville (1783), G.A. Hirschig (1856) and R. Hercher
(1859); there is an (anonymous) English translation (1764); see also
E. Rohde, _Der griechische Roman_ (1900).
CHARITY AND CHARITIES. The word "charity," or love, represents the
principle of the good life. It stands for a mood or habit of mind and an
endeavour. From it, as a habit of mind, springs the social and personal
endeavour which in the widest sense we may call charity. The two
correspond. Where the habit of mind has not been gained, the endeavour
fluctuates and is relatively purposeless. In so far as it has been
gained, the endeavour is founded on an intelligent scrutiny of social
conditions and guided by a definite purpose. In the one case it is
realized that some social theory must be found by us, if our action is
to be right and consistent; in the other case no need of such a theory
is felt. This article is based on the assumption that there are
principles in charity or charitable work, and that these can be
ascertained by a study of the development of social conditions, and
their relation to prevalent social aims and religious or philosophic
conceptions. It is assumed also that the charity of the religious life,
if rightly understood, cannot be inconsistent with that of the social
life.
Perhaps some closer definition of charity is necessary. The words that
signify goodwill towards the community and its members are primarily
words expressive of the affections of family life in the relations
existing between parents, and between parent and child. As will be
seen, the analogies underlying such phrases as "God the Father,"
"children of God," "brethren," have played a great part in the
development of charitable thought in pre-Christian as well as in
Christian days. The germ, if we may say so, of the words [Greek:
philia, agape], _amor_, love; _amicitia_, friendship, is the sexual or
the parental relation. With the realization of the larger life in man
the meaning of the word expands. _Caritas_, or charity, strikes
another note--high price, and thus dearness. It is charity, indeed,
expressed in mercantile metaphor; and it would seem that it was
associated in thought with the word [Greek: charis], which has also a
commercial meaning, but signifies as well favour, gratitude, grace,
kindness. Partly thus, perhaps, it assumed and suggested a nobler
conception; and sometimes, as, for instance, in English ecclesiastical
documents, it was spelt _charitas_. [Greek: Agape], which in the
Authorized Version of the Bible is translated charity, was used by St
Paul as a translation of the Hebrew word _hesed_, which in the Old
Testament is in the same version translated "mercy"--as in Hosea vi.
6, "I desired mercy, and not sacrifice." This word represents the
charity of kindness and goodness, as distinguished from almsgiving.
Almsgiving, _sedaqah_, is translated by the word [Greek: eleemosune]
in the Septuagint, and in the Authorized Version by the word
"righteousness." It represents the deed or the gift which is due--done
or made, not spontaneously, but under a sense of religious obligation.
In the earlier Christian period the word almsgiving has this meaning,
and was in that sense applied to a wide range of actions and
contracts, from a gift to a beggar at a church door to a grant and a
tenure of land. It also, in the word almoner, represented the
fulfilment of the religious obligation with the aid of an agent or
delegate. The words charity or love (_caritas_ or [Greek: agape]), on
the other hand, without losing the tone with which the thought of
parental or family love inspires them, assume a higher meaning. In
religious thought they imply an ideal life, as represented by such
expressions as "love (_agape_) of God." This on the one side; and on
the other an ideal social relation, in such words as "love of man."
Thus in the word "charity" religious and social associations meet; and
thus regarded the word means a disciplined and habitual mood in which
the mind is considerate of the welfare of others individually and
generally, and devises what is for their real good, and in which the
intelligence and the will strive to fulfil the mind's purpose. Charity
thus has no necessary relation to relief or alms. To give a lecture,
or to nurse a sick man who is not in want or "poor," may be equally a
deed of charity; though in fact charity concerns itself largely with
the classes usually called "the poor," and with problems of distress
and relief. Relief, however, is not an essential part of charity or
charitable work. It is one of many means at its disposal. If the world
were so poor that no one could make a gift, or so wealthy that no one
needed it, charity--the charity of life and of deeds--would remain.
The history of charity is a history of many social and religious
theories, influences and endeavours, that have left their mark alike
upon the popular and the cultivated thought of the present day. The
inconsistencies of charitable effort and argument may thus in part be
accounted for. To understand the problem of charity we have therefore
(1) to consider the stages of charitable thought--the primitive, pagan,
Greek and Roman, Jewish and Christian elements, that make up the modern
consciousness in regard to charity, and also the growth of the habit of
"charity" as representing a gradually educated social instinct. (2) We
have also to consider in their relation to charity the results of recent
investigations of the conditions of social life. (3) At each stage we
have to note the corresponding stage of practical administration in
public relief and private effort--for the division between public or
"poor-law" relief and charity which prevails in England is,
comparatively speaking, a novelty, and, generally speaking, the work of
charity can hardly be appreciated or understood if it be considered
without reference to public relief. (4) As to the present day, we have
to consider practical suggestions in regard to such subjects as charity
and economic thought, charity organization, friendly visiting and
almonership, co-operation with the poor-law, charity and thrift,
parochial management, hospitals and medical relief, exceptional distress
and the "unemployed," the utilization of endowments and their
supervision, and their adaptation to new needs and emergencies. (5) We
have also throughout to consider charitable help in relation to classes
of dependants, who appear early in the history of the question--widows
and orphans, the sick and the aged, vagrants and wayfarers.
First in the series come the charities of the family and of hospitality;
then the wider charities of religion, the charities of the community,
and of individual donors and of mutual help. These gradually assumed
importance in communities which consisted originally of self-supporting
classes, within which widows and orphans, for instance, would be rather
provided for, in accordance with recognized class obligations, than
relieved. Then come habitual almsgiving, the charitable endowment, and
the modern charitable institution and association. But throughout the
test of progress or decadence appears to be the condition of the family.
The family is the source, the home and the hearthstone of charity. It
has been created but slowly, and there is naturally a constant tendency
to break away from its obligations and to ignore and depreciate its
utility. Yet the family, as we now have it, is itself the outcome of
infinite thought working through social instinct, and has at each stage
of its development indicated a general advance. To it, therefore,
constant reference must be made.
PART I.--PRIMITIVE CHARITY
The study of early communities has brought to light the history of the
development of the family. "Marriage in its lowest phases is by no means
a matter of affection or companionship"; and only very slowly has the
position of both parents been recognized as implying different but
correlative responsibilities towards their child. Only very slowly,
also, has the morality necessary to the making of the family been won.
Charity at earlier stages is hardly recognized as a virtue, nor
infanticide as an evil. Hospitality--the beginning of a larger social
life--is non-existent. The self-support of the community is secured by
marriage, and when relations fail marriage becomes a provision against
poverty. Then by the tribal system is created another safeguard against
want. But apart also from these methods of maintenance, at a very early
stage there is charitable relief. The festivals of the solstices and
equinoxes, and of the seasons, are the occasions for sacrifice and
relief; and, as Christmas customs prove, the instinct to give help or
alms at such festival periods still remains. Charity is concerned
primarily with certain elemental forces of social life: the relation
between these primitive instincts and impulses that still influence
charity should not, therefore, be overlooked. The basis of social life
is also the basis of charitable thought and action.
The savage is the civilized man in the rough. "The lowest races have,"
Lord Avebury writes, "no institution of marriage." Many have no word
for "dear" or "beloved." The child belongs to the tribe rather than to
the parent. In these circumstances a problem of charity such as the
following may arise:--"Am I to starve, while my sister has children
whom she can sell?" a question asked of Burton by a negro. From the
point of view of the tribe, an able-bodied man would be more valuable
than dependent children, and the relationship of the larger family of
brothers and sisters would be a truer claim to help than that of
mother and child. Subsequently the child is recognized as related, not
to the father, but to the mother, and there is "a kind of bond which
lasts for life between mother and child, although the father is a
stranger to it." Slowly only is the relative position of both parents,
with different but correlative responsibilities, recognized. The first
two steps of charity have then been made: the social value of the bond
between the mother, and then between the father, and the child has
been recognized. Until this point is reached the morality necessary to
the making of the family is wanting, and for a long time afterwards it
is hardly won. The virtue of chastity--the condition precedent to the
higher family life--is unrecognized. Indeed, the set of such religious
thought as there may be is against it. Abstract conceptions, even in
the nobler races, are lacking. The religion of life is vaguely
struggling with its animality, and that which it at last learns to
rule it at first worships. In these circumstances there is little
charity for the child and little for the stranger. "There is," Dr
Schweinfurth wrote in his _Heart of Africa_, "an utter want of
wholesome intercourse between race and race. For any member of a tribe
that speaks one dialect to cross the borders of a tribe that speaks
another is to make a venture at the hazard of his life." The religious
obligations that fostered and sanctified family life among the Greeks
and Romans and Jews are unknown. Much later in development comes
charity for the child, with the abhorrence of infanticide--against
which the Jewish-Christian charity of 2000 years ago uttered its most
vigorous protests. If the child belonged primarily to the tribe or
state, its maintenance or destruction was a common concern. This
motive influenced the Greeks, who are historically nearer the earlier
forms of social life than ourselves. For the common good they exposed
the deformed child; but also "where there were too many, for in our
state population has a limit," as Aristotle says, "the babe or unborn
child was destroyed." And so, to lighten their own responsibilities,
parents were wont to do in the slow years of the degradation of the
Roman empire, though the interest of the state then required a
contrary policy. The transition to our present feeling of
responsibility for child-life has been very gradual and uncertain,
through the middle ages and even till the 18th century. Strictly it
may be said that all penitentiaries and other similar institutions are
concrete protests on behalf of a better family life. The movement for
the care of children in the 18th century naturally and instinctively
allied itself with the penitentiary movement. The want of regard for
child-life, when the rearing of children becomes a source of economic
pressure, suggests why in earlier stages of civilization all that
charitable apparatus which we now think necessary for the assistance
of children is wanting, even if the need, so far as it does arise, is
not adequately met by the recognized obligations of the clan-family or
brotherhood.
In the case of barbarous races charity and self-support may be
considered from some other points of view. Self-support is secured in
two ways--by marriage and by slavery. "For a man or woman to be
unmarried after the age of thirty is unheard of" (T.H. Lewin, _Wild
Races of South-East India_). On the other hand, if any one is without
a father, mother or other relative, and destitute of the necessaries
of life, he may sell himself and become a slave. Thus slavery becomes
a provision for poverty when relations fail. The clan-family may serve
the same purpose. David Livingstone describes the formation of the
clan-family among the Bakuena. "Each man, by virtue of paternity, is
chief of his own children. They build huts round his.... Near the
centre of each circle of huts is a spot called a 'kotla,' with a
fireplace; here they work, eat, &c. A poor man attaches himself to the
'kotla' of a rich one, and is considered a child of the latter." Thus
the clan-family is also a poor-relief association.
Studies in folklore bring to light many relations between the charity
of the old world and that of our own day.
The early community.
In regard to the charity of the early community, we may take the 8th
century B.C. as the point of departure. The _Odyssey_ (about 800 B.C.)
and Hesiod (about 700 B.C.) are roughly parallel with Amos (816-775),
and represent two streams of thought that meet in the early Christian
period. The period covered by the _Odyssey_ seems to merge into that of
Hesiod. We take the former first, dealing with the clan-family and the
phratry, which are together the self-maintaining unit of society, with
the general relief of the poor, with hospitality, and with vagrancy. In
Hesiod we find the customary law of charity in the earlier community
definitely stated, and also indications of the normal methods of
neighbourly help which were in force in country districts. First of the
family and brotherhood, or phratry. The family (_Od_. viii. 582)
included alike the wife's father and the daughter's husband. It was thus
a clanlike family. Out of this was developed the phratry or brotherhood,
in which were included alike noble families, peasants and craftsmen,
united by a common worship and responsibilities and a common customary
law (_themis_). Zeus, the god of social life, was worshipped by the
phratry. He was the father of the law (_themis_). He was god of host and
guest. Society was thus based on law, the brotherhood and the family.
The irresponsible man, the man worthy of no respect or consideration,
was one who belonged to no brotherhood, was subject to no customary law,
and had no hearth or family. The phratry was, and became afterwards
still more, "a natural gild." Outside the self-sustaining phratry was
the stranger, including the wayfarer and the vagrant; and partly merged
in these classes was the beggar, the recognized recipient of the alms of
the community. To change one's abode and to travel was assumed to be a
cause of reproach (_Il_. ix. 648). The "land-louper" was naturally
suspected. On the other hand, a stranger's first thought in a new
country was whether the inhabitants were wild or social ([Greek:
dikaioi]), hospitable and God-fearing (_Od_. xiii. 201). Hospitality
thus became the first public charity; Zeus sent all strangers and
beggars, and it was against all law ([Greek: themis]) to slight them.
Out of this feeling--a kind of glorified almsgiving--grew up the system
of hospitality in Greek states and also in the Roman world. The host
greeted the stranger (or the suppliant). An oath of friendship was taken
by the stranger, who was then received with the greeting, Welcome
([Greek: chaire]), and water was provided for ablution, and food and
shelter. In the larger house there was a guests' table. In the hut he
shared the peasant's meal. The custom bound alike the rich and the poor.
On parting presents were given, usually food for the onward journey,
sometimes costly gifts. The obligation was mutual, that the host should
give hospitality, and that the guest should not abuse it. From early
times tallies were exchanged between them as evidence of this formal
relationship, which each could claim again of the other by the
production of the token. And further, the relationship on either side
became hereditary. Thus individuals and families and tribes remained
linked in friendship and in the interchange of hospitalities.
Under the same patronage of Zeus and the same laws of hospitality were
vagrants and beggars. The vagrant and loafer are sketched in the
_Odyssey_--the vagrant who lies glibly that he may get entertainment,
and the loafer who prefers begging to work on a farm. These and the
winter idlers, whom Hesiod pictures--a group known to modern
life--prefer at that season to spend their time in the warmth of the
village smithy, or at a house of common resort ([Greek: lesche])--a
common lodging-house, we might say--where they would pass the night.
Apparently, as in modern times, the vagrants had organized their own
system of entertainment, and, supported by the public, were a class for
whom it was worth while to cater. The local or public beggars formed a
still more definite class. Their begging was a recognized means of
maintenance; it was a part of the method of poor relief. Thus of
Penelope it was said that, if Odysseus' tale were true, she would give
him better clothes, and then he might beg his bread throughout the
country-side. Feasts, too, and almsgiving were nearly allied, and feasts
have always been one resource for the relief of the poor. Thus naturally
the beggars frequented feasts, and were apparently a recognized and yet
inevitable nuisance. They wore, as part of their dress, scrips or
wallets in which they carried away the food they received, as later
Roman clients carried away portions of food in baskets (_sportula_) from
their patron's dinner. Odysseus, when he dresses up as a beggar, puts on
a wallet as part of his costume. Thus we find a system of voluntary
relief in force based on a recognition of the duty of almsgiving as
complete and peremptory as that which we shall notice later among the
Jews and the early Christians. We are concerned with country districts,
and not with towns, and, as social conditions that are similar produce
similar methods of administration, so we find here a general plan of
relief similar to that which was in vogue in Scotland till the Scottish
Poor Law Act of 1845.
In Hesiod the fundamental conceptions of charity are more clearly
expressed. He has, if not his ten, at least his four commandments, for
disobedience to which Zeus will punish the offender. They are: Thou
shalt do no evil to suppliant or guest; thou shalt not dishonour any
woman of the family; thou shalt not sin against the orphan; thou shalt
not be unkind to aged parents.
The laws of social life are thus duty to one's guest and duty to one's
family; and chastity has its true place in that relation, as the later
Greeks, who so often quote Hesiod (cf. the so-called _Economics_ of
Aristotle), fully realized. Also the family charities due to the
orphan, whose lot is deplored in the _Iliad_ (xxii. 490), and to the
aged are now clearly enunciated. But there is also in Hesiod the duty
to one's neighbour, not according to the "perfection" of "Cristes
lore," but according to a law of honourable reciprocity in act and
intent. "Love him who loves thee, and cleave to him who cleaveth to
thee: to him who would have given, give; to him who would not have
given, give not." The groundwork of Hesiod's charity outside the
family is neighbourly help (such as formed no small part of old
Scottish charity in the country districts); and he put his argument
thus: Competition, which is a kind of strife, "lies in the roots of
the world and in men." It is good, and rouses the idle "handless" man
to work. On one side are social duty ([Greek: dike]) and work, done
briskly at the right season of the year, which brings a full barn. On
the other side are unthrift and hunger, and relief with the disgrace
of begging; and the relief, when the family can do no more, must come
from neighbours, to whose house the beggar has to go with his wife and
children to ask for victual. Once they may be helped, or twice, and
then they will be refused. It is better, Hesiod tells his brother, to
work and so pay off his debts and avoid hunger (see _Erga_, 391, &c.,
and elsewhere). Here indeed is a problem of to-day as it appeared to
an early Greek. The alternatives before the idler--so far as his own
community is concerned--are labour with neighbourly help to a limited
extent, or hunger.
Hesiod was a farmer in Boeotia. Some 530 years afterwards a pupil of
Aristotle thus describes the district and its community of farmers.
"They are," he says, "well to do, but simple in their way of life.
They practise justice, good faith, and hospitality. To needy townsmen
and vagabonds they give freely of their substance; for meanness and
covetousness are unknown to them." The charitable method of Homeric
and Hesiodic days still continued.
PART II.--CHARITY AMONG THE GREEKS
The Greek state.
Society in a Greek state was divided into two parts, citizens and
slaves. The citizens required leisure for education, war and government.
The slaves were their ministers and servants to enable them to secure
this leisure. We have therefore to consider, on the one hand, the
position of the family and the clan-family, and the maintenance of the
citizen from public funds and by public and private charities; and on
the other hand the condition of the slaves, and the relation between
slavery and charity.
The slaves formed the larger part of the population. The census of
Attica, made between 317 and 307 B.C., gives their numbers at 400,000
out of a population of about 500,000; and even if this be considered
excessive, the proportion of slaves to citizens would certainly be very
large. The citizens with their wives and children formed some 12% of the
community. Thus, apart from the resident aliens, returned in the census
at 10,000, and their wives and children, we have two divisions of
society: the citizens, with their own organization of relief and
charities; and the slaves, permanently maintained by reason of their
dependence on individual members of the civic class. Thus, there is no
poverty but that of the poor citizens. Poverty is limited to them. The
slaves--that is to say, the bulk of the labouring population--are
provided for.
From times relatively near to Hesiod's we may trace the growth and
influence of the clan-family as the centre of customary charity within
the community, the gradual increase of a class of poor either outside
the clan-family or eventually independent of it, and the development of
a new organization of relief introduced by the state to meet newer
demands. We picture the early state as a group of families, each of
which tends to form in time a separate group or clan. At each expansion
from the family to the clan the members of the clan retain rights and
have to fulfil duties which are the same as, or similar to, those which
prevailed in the family. Thus, in Attica the clan-families (_genos_) and
the brotherhoods (_phratria_) were "the only basis of legal rights and
obligations over and above the natural family." The clan-family was "a
natural guild," consisting of rich and poor members--the well-born or
noble and the craftsman alike. Originally it would seem that the land
was divided among the families of the clan by lot and was inalienable.
Thus with the family was combined the means of supporting the family. On
the other hand, every youth was registered in his phratry, and the
phratry remained till the reforms of Cleisthenes (509 B.C.) a political,
and even after that time a social, organization of importance.
First, as to the family--the mother and wife, and the father. Already
before the age of Plato and Xenophon (450-350 B.C.) we find that the
family has suffered a slow decline. The wife, according to later Greek
usage, was married as a child, hardly educated, and confined to the
house, except at some festival or funeral. But with the decline came
criticism and a nobler conception of family life. "First, then, come
laws regarding the wife," writes the author of the so-called _Economics_
of Aristotle, and the law, "thou shalt do no wrong; for, if we do no
wrong, we shall not be wronged." This is the "common law," as the
Pythagoreans say, "and it implies that we must not wrong the wife in the
least, but treat her with the reverence due to a suppliant, or one taken
from the altar." The sanctity of marriage is thus placed among the
"commandments" of Hesiod, beside the duty towards the stranger and the
orphan. These and other references to the Pythagoreans suggest that
they, possibly in common with other mystics, preached the higher
religion of marriage and social life, and thus inspired a deeper social
feeling, which eventually allied itself with the Christian movement.
Next, as to parents and children: the son was under an obligation to
support his father, subject, after Solon's time, to the condition that
he had taught him a trade; and after Solon's time the father had no
claim for support from an illegitimate son. "The possession of
children," it was said (Arist. _Econ._), "is not by nature for the
public good only, but also for private advantage. For what the strong
may gain by their toil for the weak, the weak in their old age receive
from the strong... Thus is the nature of each, the man and the woman,
prearranged by the Divine Being for a life in common." Honour to parents
is "the first and greatest and oldest of all debts" (Plato, _Laws_,
717). The child has to care for the parent in his old age. "Nemesis, the
minister of justice ([Greek: dike]), is appointed to watch over all
these things." And "if a man fail to adorn the sepulchre of his dead
parents, the magistrates take note of it and inquire" (Xen. _Mem._ ii.
14). The heightened conception of marriage implies a fuller
interpretation of the mutual relations of parent and child as well; both
become sacred.
Then as to orphans. Before Solon's time (594 B.C.) the property of any
member of the clan-family who died without children went to the clan;
and after his time, when citizens were permitted to leave their property
by will, the property of an intestate fell to the clan. This arrangement
carried with it corresponding duties. Through the clan-family provision
was made for orphans. Any member of the clan had the legal right to
claim an orphan member in marriage; and, if the nearest agnate did not
marry her, he had to give her a dowry proportionate to the amount of his
own property. Later, there is evidence of a growing sense of
responsibility in regard to orphans. Hippodamus (about 443 B.C.), in his
scheme of the perfected state (Arist. _Pol._ 1268), suggested that there
should be public magistrates to deal with the affairs of orphans (and
strangers); and Plato, his contemporary, writes of the duty of the state
and of the guardian towards them very fully. Orphans, he proposes
(_Laws_, 927), should be placed under the care of public guardians. "Men
should have a fear of the loneliness of orphans ... and of the souls of
the departed, who by nature take a special care of their own
children.... A man should love the unfortunate orphan (boy or girl) of
whom he is guardian as if he were his own child; he should be as careful
and diligent in the management of the orphan's property as of his
own--or even more careful still."
To relieve the poverty of citizens and to preserve the citizen-hood were
objects of public policy and of charity. In Crete and Sparta the
citizens were wholly supported out of the public resources. In Attica
the system was different. The citizens were aided in various ways, in
which, as often happens, legal or official and voluntary or private
methods worked on parallel lines. The means were (1) legal enactment for
release of debts; (2) emigration; (3) the supply of corn; (4) poor
relief for the infirm, and relief for the children of those fallen in
war; (5) emoluments; (6) voluntary public service, separate gifts and
liberality; (7) loan societies.
(1) In 594 B.C. the labouring class in Attica were overwhelmed with
debts and mortgages, and their persons pledged as security. Only by a
sharp reform was it possible to preserve them from slavery. This Solon
effected. He annulled their obligations, abolished the pledge of the
person, and gave the labourers the franchise (but see under SOLON).
Besides the laws above mentioned, he gave power to the Areopagus to
inquire from what sources each man obtained the necessaries of life,
and to punish those who did not work. His action and that of his
successor, Peisistratus (560 B.C.), suggest that the class of poor
([Greek: aporoi]) was increasing, and that by the efforts of these two
men the social decline of the people was avoided or at least
postponed. Peisistratus lent the poor money that they might maintain
themselves in husbandry. He wished, it is said (Arist. _Ath. Pol._
xvi.), to enable them to earn a moderate living, that they might be
occupied with their own affairs, instead of spending their time in the
city or neglecting their work in order to visit it. As rent for their
land they paid a tenth of the produce.
(2) Akin to this policy was that of emigration. Athenians, selected in
some instances from the two lowest political classes, emigrated,
though still retaining their rights of citizenship. In 570-565 B.C.
Salamis was annexed and divided into lots and settled, and later
Pericles settled more than 2750 citizens in the Chersonese and
elsewhere--practically a considerable section of the whole body of
citizens. "By this means," says Plutarch, "he relieved the state of
numerous idle agitators and assisted the necessitous." In other states
this expedient was frequently adopted.
(3) A third method was the supply of corn at reduced rates--a method
similar to that adopted, as we shall see, at Rome, Constantinople and
elsewhere. The maintenance of the mass of the people depended on the
corn fleets. There were public granaries, where large stores were laid
up at the public expense. A portion of all cargoes of corn was
retained at Athens and in other ways importation was promoted.
Exportation was forbidden. Public donations and distributions of corn
were frequent, and in times of scarcity rich citizens made large
contributions with that object. The distributions were made to adult
citizens of eighteen years of age and upwards whose names were on the
registers.
(4) In addition to this there was a system of public relief for those
who were unable to earn a livelihood on account of bodily defects and
infirmities. The qualification was a property test. The property of
the applicant had to be shown to be of a value of not more than three
minae (say L12). Socrates, it may be noted, adopts the same method of
estimating his comparative poverty (Xen. _Econ._ 2. 6), saying that
his goods would realize about five minae (or about twenty guineas).
The senate examined the case, and the ecclesia awarded the bounty,
which amounted to 1 or 2 obols a day, rather more than 1-1/2d. or
3d.--out-door relief, as we might say, amounting at most to about 1s.
9d. a week. There was also a fund for the maintenance of the children
of those who had fallen in war, up to the age of eighteen.
(5) But the main source of support was the receipt of emoluments for
various public services. This was not relief, though it produced in
the course of time the effect of relief. It was rather the Athenian
method of supporting a governing class of citizens.
The inner political history of Athens is the history of the extension
of the franchise to the lower classes of citizens, with the privileges
of holding office and receiving emoluments. In early times, either by
Solon (q.v.) or previously, the citizens were classified on the basis
of property. The rich retained the franchise and the right of holding
office; the middle classes obtained the franchise; the fourth or
lowest class gained neither. By the reforms of Cleisthenes (509 B.C.)
the clan-family and the phratry were set aside for the _deme_ or
parish, a geographical division superseding the social. Finally, about
478 B.C., when all had acquired the franchise, the right to hold
office also was obtained by the third class. These changes coincided
with a period of economic progress. The rate of interest was high,
usually 12%; and in trading and bottomry the returns were much higher.
A small capital at this interest soon produced comparative wealth; and
simultaneously prices were falling. Then came the reaction. "After the
Peloponnesian war" (432-404 B.C.), writes Professor Jebb, "the wealth
of the country ceased to grow, as population had ceased to grow about
50 years sooner. The rich went on accumulating: the poor, having no
means of enriching themselves by enterprise, were for the most part
occupied in watching for some chance of snatching a larger share of
the stationary total." Thus the poorer classes in a time of prosperity
had won the power which they were able to turn to their own account
afterwards. A period of economic pressure followed, coupled with a
decline in the population; no return to the land was feasible, nor was
emigration; the people had become town-folk inadaptable to new uses;
decreasing vitality and energy were marked by a new temper, the
"pauper" temper, unsettled, idle and grasping, and political power was
utilized to obtain relief. The relief was forthcoming, but it was of
no avail to stop the general decline. The state, it might almost be
said, in giving scope to the assertion of the spirit of dependence,
had ruined the self-regarding energy on which both family and state
alike depended. The emoluments were diverse. The number of citizens
was not large; the functions in which citizens could take part were
numerous; and when payment was forthcoming the poorer citizens pressed
in to exercise their rights (cf. Arist. _Pol._ 1293 a). All Athenian
citizens could attend the public assembly or _ecclesia_. Probably the
attendance at it varied from a few hundred to 5000 persons. In 395
B.C. the payment for attendance was fixed at 3 obols, or little more
than 4-1/2d. a day--for the system of payment had probably been
introduced a few years before (but see ECCLESIA and refs.). A juror or
_dicast_ would receive the same sum for attendance, and the courts or
juries often consisted of 500 persons. If the estimate (Bockh, _Public
Economy of Athens_, Eng. trans. pp. 109, 117) holds good that in the
age of Demosthenes (384-323 B.C.) the member of a poor family of four
free persons could live (including rent) on about 3.3d. or between 2
and 3 obols a day, the pay of the citizen attending the assembly or
the court would at least cover the expenses of subsistence. On the
other hand, it would be less than the pay of a day labourer, which was
probably about 4 obols or 6d. a day. In any case many citizens--they
numbered in all about 20,000--in return for their participation in
political duties would receive considerable pecuniary assistance.
Attending a great public festival also, the citizen would receive 2
obols or 3d. a day during the festival days; and there were besides
frequent public sacrifices, with the meal or feast which accompanied
them. But besides this there were confiscations of private property,
which produced a surplus revenue divisible among the poorer citizens.
(Some hold that there were confiscations in other Greek states, but
not in Athens.) In these circumstances it is not to be wondered that
men like Isocrates should regret that the influence of the Areopagus,
the old court of morals and justice in Athens, had disappeared, for it
"maintained a sort of censorial police over the lives and habits of
the citizens; and it professed to enforce a tutelary and paternal
discipline, beyond that which the strict letter of the law could mark
out, over the indolent, the prodigal, the undutiful, and the deserters
of old rite and custom."
(6) In addition to public emoluments and relief there was much private
liberality and charity. Many expensive public services were undertaken
honorarily by the citizens under a kind of civic compulsion. Thus in a
trial about 425 B.C. (Lysias, _Or._ 19. 57) a citizen submitted
evidence that his father expended more than L2000 during his life in
paying the expenses of choruses at festivals, fitting out seven
triremes for the navy, and meeting levies of income tax to meet
emergencies. Besides this he had helped poor citizens by portioning
their daughters and sisters, had ransomed some, and paid the funeral
expenses of others (cf. for other instances Plutarch's _Cimon_,
Theophrastus, _Eth._, and Xen. _Econ._).
(7) There were also mutual help societies ([Greek: eranoi]). Those for
relief would appear to have been loan societies (cf. Theoph. _Eth._),
one of whose members would beat up contributions to help a friend, who
would afterwards repay the advance.
The criticisms of Aristotle (384-321 B.C.) suggest the direction to
which he looked for reform. He (_Pol._ 1320 a) passes a very
unfavourable judgment on the distribution of public money to the
poorer citizens. The demagogues (he does not speak of Athens
particularly) distributed the surplus revenues to the poor, who
received them all at the same time; and then they were in want again.
It was only, he argued, like pouring water through a sieve. It were
better to see to it that the greater number were not so entirely
destitute, for the depravity of a democratic government was due to
this. The problem was to contrive how plenty ([Greek: euporia], not
poverty, [Greek: aporia]) should become permanent. His proposals are
adequate aid and voluntary charity. Public relief should, he urges, be
given in large amounts so as to help people to acquire small farms or
start in business, and the well-to-do ([Greek: euporoi]) should in the
meantime subscribe to pay the poor for their attendance at the public
assemblies. (This proves, indeed, how the payments had become poor
relief.) He mentions also how the Carthaginian notables divided the
destitute amongst them and gave them the means of setting to work, and
the Tarentines ([Greek: koina poiountes]) shared their property with
the poor. (The Rhodians also may be mentioned (Strabo xiv. c. 652),
amongst whom the well-to-do undertook the relief of the poor
voluntarily.) The later word for charitable distribution was a sharing
([Greek: koinonia], Ep. Rom. xv. 26), which would seem to indicate
that after Aristotle's time popular thought had turned in that
direction. But the chief service rendered by Aristotle--a service
which covered indeed the whole ground of social progress--was to show
that unless the purpose of civil and social life was carefully
considered and clearly realized by those who desired to improve its
conditions, no change for the better could result from individual or
associated action.
Two forms of charity have still to be mentioned: charity to the stranger
and to the sick. It will be convenient to consider both in relation to
the whole classical period.
With the growth of towns the administration of hospitality was
elaborated.
The stranger.
(1) There was hospitality between members of families bound by the
rites of host and guest. The guest received as a right only shelter
and fire. Usually he dined with the host the first day, and if
afterwards he was fed provisions were supplied to him. There were
large guest-chambers ([Greek: xenon]) or small guest-houses,
completely isolated on the right or left of the principal house; and
here the guest was lodged. (2) There were also, e.g. at Hierapolis
(Sir W.M. Ramsay's _Phrygia_, ii. 97), brotherhoods of hospitality
([Greek: xenoi tekmereioi], bearers of the sign), which made
hospitality a duty, and had a common chest and Apollo as their
tutelary god. (3) There were inns or resting-places ([Greek:
katagogia]) for strangers at temples (Thuc. iii. 68; Plato, _Laws_,
953 A) and places of resort ([Greek: lesche]) at or near the temples
for the entertainment of strangers--for instance, at a temple of
Asclepius at Epidaurus (Pausanias ii. 174); and Pausanias argues that
they were common throughout the country. Probably also at the temples
hospitable provision was made for strangers. The evidence at present
is not perhaps sufficiently complete, but, so far as it goes, it tends
to the conclusion that in pre-Christian times hospitality was provided
to passers-by and strangers in the temple buildings, as later it was
furnished in the monasteries and churches. (4) There were also in
towns houses for strangers ([Greek: xenon]) provided at the public
cost. This was so at Megara; and in Crete strangers had a place at the
public meals and a dormitory. Xenophon suggested that it would be
profitable for the Athenian state to establish inns for traders
([Greek: katagogia demusia]) at Athens. Thus, apart from the official
hospitality of the proxenus or "consul," who had charge of the affairs
of foreigners, and the hospitality which was shown to persons of
distinction by states or private individuals, there was in Greece a
large provision for strangers, wayfarers and vagrants based on the
charitable sentiment of hospitality. Among the Romans similar customs
of private and public hospitality prevailed; and throughout the empire
the older system was altered, probably very slowly. In Christian times
(cf. Ramsay above) Pagan temples were (about A.D. 408) utilized for
other purposes, including that of hospitality to strangers.
The sick.
Round the temples, at first probably village temples, the organization
of medical relief grew up. Primitive medicine is connected with dreams,
worship, and liturgical "pollution," punishment and penitence, and an
experimental practice. Finally, systematic observation and science (with
no knowledge of chemistry and little of physiology) assert themselves,
and a secular administration is created by the side of the older
religious organization.
Sickness among primitive races is conceived to be a material substance
to be extracted, or an evil spirit to be driven away by incantation.
Religion and medicine are thus at the beginning almost one and the
same thing. In Anatolia, in the groups of villages (cf. Ramsay as
above, i. 101) under the theocratic government of a central [Greek:
ieron] or temple, the god Men Karou was the physician and saviour
([Greek: soter] and [Greek: sozon]) of his people. Priests, prophets
and physicians were his ministers. He punished wrong-doing by diseases
which he taught the penitent to cure. So elsewhere pollution, physical
or moral, was chastened by disease and loss of property or children,
and further ills were avoided by sacrifice and expiation and public
warning. In the temple and out of this phase of thought grew up
schools of medicine, in whose practice dreams and religious ritual
retained a place. The newer gods, Asclepius and Apollo, succeeded the
older local divinities; and the "sons" of Asclepius became a
profession, and the temple with its adjacent buildings a kind of
hospital. There were many temples of Asclepius in Greece and
elsewhere, placed generally in high and salubrious positions. After
ablution the patient offered sacrifices, repeating himself the words
of the hymn that was chanted. Then, when night came on, he slept in
the temple. In the early dawn he was to dream "the heavenly dream"
which would suggest his cure; but if he did not dream, relations and
others--officials at the temple--might dream for him. At dawn the
priests or sons of Asclepius came into the temple and visited the
sick, so that, in a kind of drama, where reality and appearance seemed
to meet, the patients believed that they saw the god himself. The next
morning the prescription and treatment were settled. At hand in the
inn or guest-chambers of the temple the patient could remain, sleeping
again in the temple, if necessary, and carrying out the required
regimen. In the temple were votive tablets of cases, popular and
awe-inspiring, and records and prescriptions, which later found their
way into the medical works of Galen and others. At the temple of
Asclepius at Epidaurus was an inn ([Greek: katagogion]) with four
courts and colonnades, and in all 160 rooms. (Cf. Pausanias ii. 171;
and _Report, Archaeol. in Greece_, R.C. Bosanquet, 1899, 1900.)
At three centres more particularly, Rhodes, Cnidos and Cos, were the
medical schools of the Asclepiads. If one may judge from an inscription
at Athens, priests of Asclepius attended the poor gratuitously. And
years afterwards, in the 11th century, when there was a revival of
medicine, we find (Daremberg, _La Medecine: histoire et doctrines_) at
Salerno the Christian priest as doctor, a simple and less palatable
pharmacy for the poor than for the rich, and gratuitous medical relief.
Besides the temple schools and hospitals there was a secular
organization of medical aid and relief. States appointed trained medical
men as physicians, and provided for them medical establishments ([Greek:
iatreia], "large houses with large doors full of light") for the
reception of the sick, and for operations there were provided beds,
instruments, medicines, &c. At these places also pupils were taught. A
lower degree of medical establishment was to be found at the barbers'
shops. Out-patients were seen at the _iatreia_. They were also visited
at home. There were doctors' assistants and slave doctors. The latter,
apparently, attended only slaves (Plato, _Laws_, 720); they do "a great
service to the master of the house, who in this manner is relieved of
the care of his slaves." It was a precept of Hippocrates that if a
physician came to a town where there were sick poor, he should make it
his first duty to attend to them; and the state physician attended
gratuitously any one who applied to him. There were also travelling
physicians going rounds to heal children and the poor. These methods
continued, probably all of them, to Christian times.
It has been argued that medical practice was introduced into Italy by
the Greeks. But the evidence seems to show that there was a quite
independent Latin tradition and school of medicine (Rene Brian,
"Medecine dans le Latium et a Rome," _Rev. Archeol._, 1885). In Rome
there were consulting-rooms and dispensaries, and houses in which the
sick were received. Hospitals are mentioned by Roman writers in the 1st
century A.D. There were infirmaries--detached buildings--for sick
slaves; and in Rome, as at Athens, there were slaves skilled in
medicine. In Rome also for each _regio_ there was a chief physician who
attended to the poorer people.
Slavery.
Slavery was so large a factor in pre-Christian and early Christian
society that a word should be said on its relation to charity.
Indirectly it was a cause of poverty and social degradation. Thus in the
case of Athens, with the achievement of maritime supremacy the number of
slaves increased greatly. Manual arts were despised as unbecoming to a
citizen, and the slaves carried on the larger part of the agricultural
and industrial work of the community; and for a time--until after the
Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.)--slavery was an economic success. But by
degrees the slave, it would seem, dispossessed the citizen and rendered
him unfit for competition. The position of the free artisan thus became
akin to that of the slave (Arist. _Pol._ 1260 a, &c.), and slavery
became the industrial method of the country. Though Greeks, Romans, Jews
and Christians spent money in ransoming individual slaves and also
enfranchised many, no general abolition of slavery was possible. At
last through economic changes the new status of _coloni_, who paid as
rent part of the produce of the land they tilled, superseded the status
of slavery (cf. above; the system turned to account by Peisistratus).
But this result was only achieved much later, when a new society was
being created, when the slaves from the slave prisons (_ergastula_) of
Italy joined its invaders, and the slave-owner or master, as one may
suppose, unable any longer to work the gangs, let them become _coloni_.
In Greece the feeling towards the slave became constantly more humane.
Real slavery, Aristotle said, was a cast of mind, not a condition of
life. The slave was not to be ordered about, but to be commanded and
persuaded like a child. The master was under the strongest obligation to
promote his welfare. In Rome, on the other hand, slavery continued to
the end a massive, brutal, industrial force--a standing danger to the
state. But alike in Greece and Rome the influence of slavery on the
family was pernicious. The pompous array of domestic slaves, the
transfer of motherly duties to slave nurses, the loss of that homely
education which for most people comes only from the practical details of
life--all this in later Greece and Italy, and far into Christian times,
prevented that permanent invigoration and reform of family life which
Jewish and Christian influences might otherwise have produced.
PART III.--CHARITY IN ROMAN TIMES
The words that suggest most clearly the Roman attitude towards what we
call charity are _liberalitas_, _beneficentia_ and _pietas_. The two
former are almost synonymous (Cicero, _De Offic._ i. 7, 14). Liberality
lays stress on the mood--that of the _liber_, the freeborn, and so in a
sense the independent and superior; beneficence on the deed and its
purpose (Seneca, _De Benef._ vi. 10). The conditions laid down by
Cicero, following Panaetius the Stoic (185-112 B.C.) are three: not to
do harm to him whom one would benefit, not to exceed one's means, and to
have regard to merit. The character of the person whom we would benefit
should be considered, his feelings towards us, the interest of the
community, our social relations in life, and services rendered in the
past. The utility of the deed or gift graded according to social
relationship and estimated largely from the point of view of ultimate
advantage to the doer or donor seems to predominate in the general
thought of the book, though (cf. Aristotle, _Eth._ viii. 3) the idea
culminates in the completeness of friendship where "all things are in
common." _Pietas_ has the religious note which the other words lack,
loving dutifulness to gods and home and country. Not "piety" only but
"pity" derive from it: thus it comes near to our "charity." Both books,
the _De Officiis_ and the _De Beneficiis_, represent a Roman and Stoical
revision of the problem of charity and, as in Stoicism generally, there
seems to be a half-conscious attempt to feel the way to a new social
standpoint from this side.
Roman times.
As from the point of view of charity the well-being of the community
depends upon the vigour of the deep-laid elemental life within it, so in
passing to Roman times we consider the family first. The Roman family
was unique in its completeness, and by some of its conditions the world
has long been bound. The father alone had independent authority (_sui
juris_), and so long as he lived all who were under his power--his wife,
his sons, and their wives and children, and his unmarried
daughters--could not acquire any property of their own. Failing father
or husband, the unmarried daughters were placed under the guardianship
of the nearest male members of the family. Thus the family, in the
narrower sense in which we commonly use the word, as meaning descendants
of a common father or grandfather, was, as it were, a single point of
growth in a larger organism, the _gens_, which consisted of all those
who shared a common ancestry.
The wife, though in law the property of her husband, held a position
of honour and influence higher than that of the Greek wife, at least
in historic times. She seems to come nearer to the ideal of Xenophon:
"the good wife should be the mistress of everything within the house."
"A house of his own and the blessing of children appeared to the Roman
citizen as the end and essence of life" (Mommsen, _Hist. Rome_). The
obligation of the father to the sons was strongly felt. The family,
past, present and future, was conceived as one and indivisible. Each
succeeding generation had a right to the care of its predecessor in
mind, body and estate. The training of the sons was distinctly a home
and not a school training. Brought up by the father and constantly at
his side, they learnt spontaneously the habits and traditions of the
family. The home was their school. By their father they were
introduced into public life, and though still remaining under his
power during his lifetime, they became citizens, and their relation to
the state was direct. The nation was a nation of yeomen. Only
agriculture and warfare were considered honourable employments. The
father and sons worked outdoors on the farm, employing little or no
slave labour; the wife and daughters indoors at spinning and weaving.
The drudgery of the household was done by domestic slaves. The father
was the working head of a toiling household. Their chief gods were the
same as those of early Greece--Zeus-Diovis and Hestia-Vesta, the
goddess of the hearth and home. Out of this solid, compact family
Roman society was built, and so long as the family was strong
attachment to the service of the state was intense. The _res publica_,
the common weal, the phrase and the thought, meet one at every turn;
and never were citizens more patient and tenacious combatants on their
country's behalf. The men were soldiers in an unpaid militia and were
constantly engaged in wars with the rivals of Rome, leaving home and
family for their campaigns and returning to them in the winter. With a
hardness and closeness inconsistent with--indeed, opposed to--the
charitable spirit, they combined the strength of character and sense
of justice without which charity becomes sentimental and unsocial. In
the development of the family, and thus, indirectly, in the
development of charity, they stand for settled obligation and
unrelenting duty.
Under the protection of the head of the family "in dependent freedom"
lived the clients. They were in a middle position between the freemen
and the slaves. The relation between patron and client lasted for
several generations; and there were many clients. Their number increased
as state after state was conquered, and they formed the _plebs_, in Rome
the _plebs urbana_, the lower orders of the city.
In relation to our subject the important factors are the family, the
_plebs_ and slavery.
Two processes were at work from an early date, before the first agrarian
law (486 B.C.): the impoverishment of the _plebs_ and the increase of
slavery. The former led to the _annona civica_, or the free supply of
corn to the citizens, and to the _sportula_ or the organized food-supply
for poor clients, and ultimately to the _alimentarii pueri_, the
maintenance of children of citizens by voluntary and imperial bounty.
The latter (slavery) was the standing witness that, as self-support was
undermined, the task of relief became hopeless, and the impoverished
citizen, as the generations passed, became in turn dependant, beggar,
pauper and slave.
The great patrician families--"an oligarchy of warriors and
slaveholders"--did not themselves engage in trade, but, entering on
large speculations, employed as their agents their clients, _libertini_
or freedmen, and, later, their slaves. The constant wars, for which the
soldiers of a local militia were eventually retained in permanent
service, broke up the yeomanry and very greatly reduced their number.
Whole families of citizens became impoverished, and their lands were in
consequence sold to the large patrician families, members of which had
acquired lucrative posts, or prospered in their speculations, and
assumed possession of the larger part of the land, the _ager publicus_,
acquired by the state through conquest. The city had always been the
centre of the patrician families, the patron of the trading _libertini_
and other dependants. To it now flocked as well the _metoeci_, the
resident aliens from the conquered states, and the poorer citizens,
landless and unable for social reasons to turn to trade. There was thus
in Rome a growing multitude of aliens, dispossessed yeomen and dependent
clients. Simultaneously slavery increased very largely after the second
Punic War (202 B.C.). Every conquest brought slaves into the market, for
whom ready purchasers were found. The slaves took the place of the
freemen upon the old family estates, and the free country people became
extinct. Husbandry gave place to shepherding. The estates were thrown
into large domains (_latifundia_), managed by bailiffs and worked by
slaves, often fettered or bound by chains, lodged in cells in houses of
labour (_ergastula_), and sometimes cared for when ill in infirmaries
(_valetudinaria_). In Crete and Sparta the slaves toiled that the mass
of citizens might have means and leisure. In Rome the slave class was
organized for private and not for common ends. In Athens the citizens
were paid for their services; at Rome no offices were paid. Thus the
citizen at Rome was, one might almost say, forced into a dependence on
the public corn, for as the large properties swallowed up the smaller,
and the slave dispossessed the citizen, a population grew up unfit for
rural toil, disinclined to live by methods that pride considered sordid,
unstable and pleasure-loving, and yet a serious political factor, as
dependent on the rich for their enjoyments as they were on their patrons
or the prefect of the corn in the city for their food.
It is estimated, from extremely difficult and uncertain data, that the
population of Rome in the time of Augustus was about 1,200,000 or
1,500,000. At that time the_ plebs urbana_ numbered 320,000. If this
be multiplied by three, to give a low average of dependants, wives and
children, this section of the population would number 960,000. The
remainder of the 1,500,000, 540,000, would consist of (a) slaves, and
(b) those, the comparatively few, who would be members of the great
clan-families (_gentes_). Proportionately to Attica this seems to
allow too small a population of slaves. But however this be, we may
picture the population of Rome as consisting chiefly of a few
patrician families ministered to by a very large number of slaves, and
a populace of needy citizens, in whose ranks it was profitable for an
outsider to find a place in order that he might participate in the
advantages of state maintenance.
The annona civica.
In Rome the clan-family became the dominant political factor. As in
England and elsewhere in the middle ages, and even in later times, the
family, in these circumstances, assumes an influence which is out of
harmony with the common good. The social advantage of the family lies in
its self-maintenance, its home charities, and its moral and educational
force, but if its separate interests are made supreme, it becomes
uncharitable and unsocial. In Rome this was the line of development. The
stronger clan-families crushed the weaker, and became the "oligarchy of
warriors and slaveholders." In the same spirit they possessed themselves
of the _ager publicus_. The land obtained by the Romans by right of
conquest was public. It belonged to the state, and to a yeoman state it
was the most valuable acquisition. At first part of it was sold and part
was distributed to citizens without property and destitute (cf.
Plutarch, _Tib. Gracchus_). At a very early date, however, the patrician
families acquired possession of much of it and held it at a low rental,
and thus the natural outlet for a conquering farmer race was monopolized
by one class, the richer clan-families. This injustice was in part
remedied by the establishment of colonies, in which the emigrant
citizens received sufficient portions of land. But these colonies were
comparatively few, and after each conquest the rich families made large
purchases, while the smaller proprietors, whose services as soldiers
were constantly required, were unable to attend to their lands or to
retain possession of them. To prevent this (367 B.C.) the Licinian law
was passed, by which ownership in land was limited to 500 _jugera_,
about 312 acres. This law was ignored, however, and more than two
centuries later the evil, the double evil of the dispossession of the
citizen farmer and of slavery, reached a crisis. The slave war broke out
(134 B.C.) and (133 B.C.) Tiberius Gracchus made his attempt to re-endow
the Roman citizens with the lands which they had acquired by conquest.
He undertook what was essentially a charitable or philanthropic
movement, which was set on foot too late. He had passed through Tuscany,
and seen with resentment and pity the deserted country where the foreign
slaves and barbarians were now the only shepherds and cultivators. He
had been brought up under the influence of Greek Stoical thought, with
which, almost in spite of itself, there was always associated an element
of pity. The problem which he desired to solve, though larger in scale,
was essentially the same as that with which Solon and Peisistratus had
dealt successfully. At bottom the issue lay between private property,
considered as the basis of family life for the great bulk of the
community, with personal independence, and pauperism, with the _annona_
or slavery. In 133 B.C. Tiberius Gracchus became tribune. To expand
society on the lines of private property, he proposed the enforcement of
"the Licinian Rogations"; the rich were to give up all beyond their
rightful 312 acres, and the remainder was to be distributed amongst the
poor. The measure was carried by the use of arbitrary powers, and
followed by the death of Tiberius at the hands of the patricians, the
dominant clan-families. In 132 B.C. Caius Gracchus took up his brother's
quarrel, and adopting, it would seem, a large scheme of political and
social reform, proposed measures for emigration and for relief. The
former failed; the latter apparently were acceptable to all parties, and
continued in force long after C. Gracchus had been slain (121 B.C.).
Already, at times, there had been sales of corn at cheap prices. Now, by
the _lex frumentaria_ he gave the citizens--those who had the Roman
franchise--the right to purchase corn every month from the public stores
at rather more than half-price, 6-1/3 _asses_ or about 3.3d. the peck.
This, the fatal alternative, was accepted, and henceforth there was no
possibility of a reversion to better social conditions.
The provisioning of Rome was, like that of Athens, a public service.
There were public granaries (267 B.C.), and there was a quaestor to
supervise the transit of the corn from Sicily and, later, from Spain and
Africa, and an elaborate administration for collecting and conveying it.
The _lex frumentaria_ of Caius was followed by the _lex Octavia_,
restricting the monthly sale to citizens settled in Rome, and to 5
_modii_ (1-1/4 bushels). According to Polybius, the amount required for
the maintenance of a slave was 5 _modii_ a month, and of a soldier 4.
Hence the allowance, if continued at this rate, was practically a
maintenance. The _lex Clodia_ (58 B.C.) made the corn gratuitous to the
_plebs urbana_.
Julius Caesar (5 B.C.) found the number of recipients to be 320,000,
and reduced them to 150,000. In Augustus's time they rose to 200,000.
There seems, however, to be some confusion as to the numbers. From the
_Ancyranum Monumentum_ it appears that the _plebs urbana_ who received
Augustus's dole of 60 _denarii_ (37s. 6d.) in his eighth consulship
numbered 320,000. And (Suet. _Caes._ 41) it seems likely that in
Caesar's time the lists of the recipients were settled by lot;
further, probably only those whose property was worth less than
400,000 _sesterces_ (L3541) were placed on the lists. It is probable,
therefore, that 320,000 represents a maximum, reduced for purposes of
administration to a smaller number (a) by a property test, and (b) by
some kind of scrutiny. The names of those certified to receive the
corn were exposed on bronze tablets. They were then called _aerarii_.
They had tickets (_tesserae_) for purposes of identification, and they
received the corn or bread in the time of the republic at the temple
of Ceres, and afterwards at steps in the several (14) regions or wards
of Rome. Hence the bread was called _panis gradilis_. In the middle of
the 2nd century there were state bakeries, and wheaten loaves were
baked for the people perhaps two or three times a week. In Aurelian's
time (A.D. 270) the flour was of the best, and the weight of the loaf
(one _uncia_) was doubled. To the gifts of bread were added pork, oil
and possibly wine; clothes also--white tunics with long sleeves--were
distributed. In the period after Constantine (cf. _Theod. Code_, xiv.
15) three classes received the bread--the palace people (_palatini_),
soldiers (_militares_), and the populace (_populares_). No
distribution was permitted except at the steps. Each class had its own
steps in the several wards. The bread at one step could not be
transferred to another step. Each class had its own supply. There were
arrangements for the exchange of stale loaves. Against
misappropriation there were (law of Valentinian and Valens) severe
penalties. If a public prosecutor (_actor_), a collector of the
revenue (_procurator_), or the slave of a senator obtained bread with
the cognizance of the clerk, or by bribery, the slave, if his master
was not a party to the offence, had to serve in the state bakehouse in
chains. If the master were involved, his house was confiscated. If
others who had not the right obtained the bread, they and their
property were placed at the service of the bakery (_pistrini exercitio
subjugari_). If they were poor (_pauperes_) they were enslaved, and
the delinquent client was to be put to death.
The right to relief was dependent on the right of citizenship. Hence it
became hereditary and passed from father to son. It was thus in the
nature of a continuous endowed charity, like the well-known family
charity of Smith, for instance, in which a large property was left to
the testator's descendants, of whom it was said that as a result no
Smith of that family could fail to be poor. But the _annona civica_ was
an endowed charity, affecting not a single family, but the whole
population. Later, when Constantinople was founded, the right to relief
was attached to new houses as a premium on building operations. Thus it
belonged not to persons only, but also to houses, and became a species
of "immovable" property, passing to the purchaser of the house or
property, as would the adscript slaves. The bread followed the house
(_aedes sequantur annonae_). If, on the transfer of a house, bread
claims were lost owing to the absence of claimants, they were
transferred to the treasury (_fisci viribus vindicentur_). But the
savage law of Valentinian, referred to above, shows to what lengths such
a system was pushed. Early in its history the _annona civica_ attracted
many to Rome in the hope of living there without working. For the 400
years since the _lex Clodia_ was enacted constant injury had been done
by it, and now (A.D. 364) people had to be kept off the civic bounty as
if they were birds of prey, and the very poor man (_pauperrimus_), who
had no civic title to the food, if he obtained it by fraud, was
enslaved. Thus, in spite of the abundant state relief, there had grown
up a class of the very poor, the Gentiles of the state, who were outside
the sphere of its ministrations. The _annona civica_ was introduced not
only into Constantinople, but also into Alexandria, with baleful
results, and into Antioch. When Constantinople was founded the
corn-ships of Africa sailed there instead of to Rome. On charitable
relief, as we shall see, the _annona_ has had a long-continued and fatal
influence.
1. If the government considers itself responsible for provisioning the
people it must fix the price of necessaries, and to meet distress or
popular clamour it will lower the price. It becomes thus a large
relief society for the supply of corn. In a time of distress, when the
corn laws were a matter of moment in England, a similar system was
adopted in the well-known Speenhamland scale (1795), by which a larger
or lesser allowance was given to a family according to its size and
the prevailing price of corn. A maintenance was thus provided for the
able-bodied and their families, at least in part, without any
equivalent in labour; though in England labour was demanded of the
applicant, and work was done more or less perfunctorily. In amount the
Roman dole seems to have been equivalent to the allowance provided for
a slave, but the citizen received it without having to do any labour
task. He received it as a statutory right. There could hardly be a
more effective method for degrading his manhood and denaturalizing his
family. He was also a voter, and the alms appealed to his weakness and
indolence; and the fear of displeasing him and losing his vote kept
him, socially, master of the situation, to his own ruin. If in England
now relief were given to able-bodied persons who retained their votes,
this evil would also attach to it.
2. The system obliged the hard-working to maintain the idlers, while
it continually increased their number. The needy teacher in Juvenal,
instead of a fee, is put off with a _tessera_, to which, not being a
citizen, he has no right. "The foreign reapers," it was said, "filled
Rome's belly and left Rome free for the stage and the circus." The
freeman had become a slave--"stupid and drowsy, to whom days of ease
had become habitual, the games, the circus, the theatre, dice,
eating-houses and brothels." Here are all the marks of a degraded
pauperism.
3. The system led the way to an ever more extensive slavery. The man
who could not live on his dole and other scrapings had the alternative
of becoming a slave. "Better have a good master than live so
distressfully"; and "If I were free I should live at my own risk; now
I live at yours," are the expressions suggestive of the natural
temptations of slavery in these conditions. The escaped slaves
returned to "their manger." The _annona_ did not prevent destitution.
It was a half-way house to slavery.
4. The effect on agriculture, and proportionally on commerce
generally, was ruinous. The largest corn-market, Rome, was withdrawn
from the trade--the market to which all the necessaries of life would
naturally have gravitated; and the supply of corn was placed in the
hands of producers at a few centres where it could be grown most
cheaply--Sicily, Spain and Africa. The Italian farmer had to turn his
attention to other produce--the cultivation of the olive and the vine,
and cattle and pig rearing. The greater the extension of the system
the more impossible was the regeneration of Rome. The Roman citizen
might well say that he was out of work, for, so far as the land was
concerned, the means of obtaining a living were placed out of his
reach. While not yet unfitted for the country by life in the town, he
at least could not "return to the land."
5. The method was the outcome of distress and political hopelessness.
Yet the rich also adopted it in distributing their private largess.
Cicero (_De Off._ ii. 16) writes as though he recognized its evil; but
though he expresses his disapprobation of the popular shows upon which
the _aediles_ spent large sums, he argues that something must be done
"if the people demand it, and if good men, though they do not wish it,
assent to it." Thus in a guarded manner he approves a distribution of
food--a free breakfast in the streets of Rome. One bad result of the
_annona_ was that it encouraged a special and ruinous form of
charitable munificence.
The sportula.
The _sportula_ was a form of charity corresponding to the _annona
civica_. Charity and poor relief run on parallel lines, and when the one
is administered without discrimination, little discrimination will
usually be exercised in the other. It was the charity of the patron of
the chiefs of the clan-families to their clients. Between them it was
natural that a relation, partly hospitable, partly charitable, should
grow up. The clients who attended the patron at his house were invited
to dine at his table. The patron, as Juvenal describes him, dined
luxuriously and in solitary grandeur, while the guests put up with what
they could get; or, as was usual under the empire, instead of the dinner
(_coena recta_) a present of food was given at the outer vestibule of
the house to clients who brought with them baskets (_sportula_) to carry
off their food, or even charcoal stoves to keep it warm. There was
endless trickery. The patron (or almoner who acted for him) tried to
identify the applicant, fearing lest he might get the dole under a false
name; and at each mansion was kept a list of persons, male and female,
entitled to receive the allowance. "The pilferer grabs the dole"
(_sportulam furunculus captat_) was a proverb. The _sportula_ was a
charity sufficiently important for state regulation. Nero (A.D. 54)
reduced it to a payment in money (100 _quadrantes_, about 1s.). Domitian
(A.D. 81) restored the custom of giving food. Subsequently both
practices--gifts in money and in food--appear to have been continued.
In these conditions the Roman family steadily decayed. Its "old
discipline" was neglected; and Tacitus (A.D. 75), in his dialogue on
Oratory, wrote (c. xxviii.) what might be called its epitaph. Of the
general decline the laws of Caesar and Augustus to encourage marriage
and to reward the parents of large families are sufficient evidence.
The destruction of the working-class family must have been finally
achieved by the imperial control of the _collegia_.
The collegia.
In old Rome there were corporations of craftsmen for common worship,
and for the maintenance of the traditions of the craft. These
corporations were ruined by slave labour, and becoming secret
societies, in the time of Augustus were suppressed. Subsequently they
were reorganized, and gave scope for much friendliness. They often
existed in connexion with some great house, whose chief was their
patron and whose household gods they worshipped. The gilds of the
poor, or rather of the lower orders (_collegia tenuiorum_), consisted
of artisans and others, and slaves also, who paid monthly
contributions to a common fund to meet the expenses of worship, common
meals, and funerals. They were not in Italy, it would seem (J.P.
Waltzing, _Etudes histor. sur les corporations professionnelles chez
les Romains_, i. 145, 300), though they may have been in Asia Minor
and elsewhere, societies for mutual help generally. They were chiefly
funeral benefit societies. Under Severus (A.D. 192) the _collegia_
were extended and more closely organized as industrial bodies. They
were protected and controlled, as in England in the 15th century the
municipalities affected the cause of the craft gilds and ended by
controlling them. Industrial disorder was thus prevented; the
government were able to provide the supplies required in Rome and the
large cities with less risk and uncertainty; and the workmen employed
in trade, especially the carrying trade, became almost slaves. In the
2nd century, and until the invasions, there were three groups of
_collegia_: (1) those engaged in various state manufactures; (2) those
engaged in the provision trade; and (3) the free trades, which
gradually lapsed into a kind of slavery. If the members of these gilds
fled they were brought back by force. Parents had to keep to the trade
to which they belonged; their children had to succeed them in it. A
slave caste indeed had been formed of the once free workmen.
Pueri alimentarii.
As a charitable protest against the destruction of children, in the
midst of a broken family life, and increasing dependence and poverty, a
special institution was founded (to use the Scottish word) for the
"alimentation" of the children of citizens, at first by voluntary
charity and afterwards by imperial bounty.
Nerva and Trajan adopted the plan. Pliny (_Ep._ vii. 18) refers to it.
There was a desire to give more lasting and certain help than an
allotment of food to parents. A list of children, whose names were on
the relief tables at Rome, was accordingly drawn up, and a special
service for their maintenance established. Two instances are recorded
in inscriptions--one at Veleia, one at Beneventum. The emperor lent
money for the purpose at a low percentage--2-1/2 or 5% as against the
usual 10 or 12. At Veleia his loan amounted to 1,044,000
_sesterces_--about L8156, and 51 of the local landed proprietors
mortgaged land, valued at 13 or 14 million _sesterces_, as security
for the debt. The interest on the emperor's money at 5% was paid into
the municipal treasury, and out of it the children were relieved. The
figures seem small; at Veleia 300 children were assisted, of whom 36
were girls. The annual interest at 5% amounted to nearly L408, which
divided among 300 gives about 27s. a head. The figures suggest that
the money served as a charitable supplementation of the citizens'
relief in direct aid of the children. Apparently the scheme was widely
adopted. Curators of high position were the patrons; procurators acted
as inspectors over large areas; and _quaestores alimentarii_ undertook
the local management. Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138), and Marcus Aurelius
(A.D. 160), and subsequently Severus (A.D. 192) established these
bursaries for children in the names of their wives. In the 3rd century
the system fell into disorder. There were large arrears of payments,
and in the military anarchy that ensued it came to an end. It is of
special interest, as indicating a new feeling of responsibility
towards children akin to the humane Stoicism of the Antonines, and an
attempt to found, apart from temples or _collegia_, what was in the
nature of a public endowed charity.
PART IV.--JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN CHARITY
With Christianity two elements came into fusion, the Jewish and the
Greco-Roman. To trace this fusion and its results it is necessary to
describe the Jewish system of charity, and to compare it with that of
the early Christian church, to note the theory of love or friendship in
Aristotle as representing Greek thought, and of charity in St Paul as
representing Christian thought, and to mark the Roman influences which
moulded the administration of Ambrose and Gregory and Western
Christianity generally.
Hebrew charity.
In the early history of the Hebrews we find the family, clan-family and
tribe. With the Exodus (probably about 1390 B.C.) comes the law of Moses
(cf. Kittel, _Hist. of the Hebrews_, Eng. trans. i. 244), the central
and permanent element of Jewish thought. We may compare it to the
"commandments" of Hesiod. There is the recognition of the family and its
obligations: "Honour thy father and mother"; and honour included help
and support. There is also the law essential to family unity: "Thou
shalt not commit adultery"; and as to property there is imposed the
regulation of desire: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house."
Maimonides (A.D. 1135), true to the old conception of the family (x.
16), calls the support of adult children, "after one is exempt from
supporting them," and the support of a father or mother by a child,
"great acts of charity; since kindred are entitled to the first
consideration." To relief of the stranger the Decalogue makes no
reference, but in the Hebraic laws it is constantly pressed; and the
Levitical law (xix. 18) goes further. It first applies a new standard to
social life: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." This thought is
the outcome of a deep ethical fervour--the element which the Jews
brought into the work of charity. In Judges and Joshua, the "Homeric"
books of the Old Testament, the Hebrews appear as a passionately fierce
and cruel people. Subsequently against their oppression of the poor the
prophets protested with a vehemence as great as the evil was intense;
and their denunciations remained part of the national literature, a
standing argument that life without charity is nothing worth. Thus
schooled and afterwards tutored into discipline by the tribulation of
the exile (587 B.C.), they turned their fierceness into a zeal, which,
as their literature shows, was as fervent in ethics as it was in
religion and ceremonial. In the services at the synagogues, which
supplemented and afterwards took the place of the Temple, the
Commandments were constantly repeated and the Law and the Prophets read;
and as the Jews of the Dispersion increased in number, and especially
after the destruction of Jerusalem, the synagogues became centres of
social and charitable co-operation. Thus rightly would a Jewish rabbi
say, "On three things the world is stayed: on the Thorah (or the law),
and on worship, and on the bestowal of kindness." Also there was on the
charitable side an indefinite power of expansion. Rigid in its
ceremonial, there it was free. Within the nation, as the Prophets, and
after the exile, as the Psalms show, there was the hope of a universal
religion, and with it of a universally recognized charity. St Paul
accentuated the prohibitive side of the law and protested against it;
but, even while he was so doing, stimulated by the Jewish discipline, he
was moving unfettered towards new conceptions of charity and
life--charity as the central word of the Christian life, and life as a
participation in a higher existence--the "body of Christ."
To mark the line of development, we could compare--1. The family among
the Jews and in the early Christian church; 2. The sources of relief and
the tithe, the treatment of the poor and their aid, and the assistance
of special classes of poor; 3. The care of strangers; and, lastly, we
would consider the theory of almsgiving, friendship or love, and
charity.
1. As elsewhere, property is the basis of the family. Wife and children
are the property of the father. But the wife is held in high respect. In
the post-exilian period the virtuous wife is represented as laborious as
a Roman matron, a "lady bountiful" to the poor, and to her husband wife
and friend alike. Monogamy without concubinage is now the rule--is taken
for granted as right. There is no "exposure of children." The slaves are
kindly treated, as servants rather than slaves--though in Roman times
and afterwards the Jews were great slave-traders. The household is not
allowed to eat the bread of idleness. "Six days," it was said, "_must_
[not _mayest_] thou work." "Labour, if poor; but find work, if rich."
"Whoever does not teach his son business or work, teaches him robbery."
In Job xxxi., a chapter which has been called "an inventory of late Old
Testament morality," we find the family life developed side by side with
the life of charity. In turn are mentioned the relief of the widow, the
fatherless and the stranger--the classification of dependents in the
Christian church; and the whole chapter is a justification of the homely
charities of a good family. "The Jewish religion, more especially in the
old and orthodox form, is essentially a family religion" (C.G.
Montefiore, _Religion of Ancient Hebrews_).
In the early documents of the Church the fifth commandment is made the
basis of family life (cf. Eph. vi. 1; _Apost. Const._ ii. 32, iv. 11--if
we take the first six books of the _Apost. Const._ as a composite
production before A.D. 300, representing Judaeo-Christian or Eastern
church thought). But two points are prominent. Duties are insisted on as
reciprocal (cf. especially St Paul's Epistles), as, e.g. between husband
and wife, parent and child, master and servant. Charity is mutual; the
family is a circle of reciprocal duties and charities. This implies a
principle of the greatest importance in relation to the social utility
of charity. Further reference will be made to it later. Next the "thou
shalt love thy neighbour" is translated from its position as one among
many sayings to the chief place as a rule of life. In the _Didache_ or
_Teaching of the Twelve Apostles_ (Jewish-Christian, c. 90-120 A.D.) the
first commandment in "the way of life" is adapted from St Matthew's
Gospel thus: "First, thou shalt love God who made thee; secondly, thy
neighbour as thyself; and all things whatsoever thou wouldst not have
done to thee, neither do thou to another." A principle is thus applied
which touches all social relations in which the "self" can be made the
standard of judgment. Of this also later. To touch on other points of
comparison: the earlier documents seem to ring with a reiterated cry for
a purer family life (cf. the second, the negative, group of commandments
in the _Didache_, and the judgment of the apocalyptic writings, such as
the Revelations of Peter, &c.); and, sharing the Jewish feeling, the
riper conscience of the Christian community formulates and accepts the
injunction to preserve infant life at every stage. It advocates, indeed,
the Jewish purity of family life with a missionary fervour, and it makes
of it a condition of church membership. The Jewish rule of labour is
enforced (_Ap. Const._ ii. 63). If a stranger settle (_Didache_, xii. 3)
among the brotherhood, "let him work and eat." And the father
(_Constit._ iv. 11) is to teach the children "such trades as are
agreeable and suitable to their need." And the charities to the widow,
the fatherless, are organized on Jewish lines.
2. The sources of relief among the Jews were the three gifts of corn:
(1) the corners of the field (cf. Lev. xix. &c.), amounting to a
sixtieth part of it; (2) the gleanings, a definite minimum dropped in
the process of reaping (Maimonides, _Laws of the Hebrews relating to the
Poor_, iv. 1); (3) corn overlooked and left behind. So it was with the
grapes and with all crops that were harvested, as opposed, e.g. to
figs, that were gathered from time to time. These gifts were divisible
three times in the day, so as to suit the convenience of the poor (Maim.
ii. 17), and the poor had a right to them. They are indeed a poor-rate
paid in kind such as in early times would naturally spring up among an
agricultural people. Another gift "out of the seed of the earth," is the
tithe. In the post-exilian period the septenniad was in force. Each year
a fiftieth part of the produce (Maim. vi. 2, and Deut. xviii. 4) was
given to the priest (the class which in the Jewish state was supported
by the community). Of the remainder one-tenth went to the Levite, and
one-tenth in three years of the septennium was retained for pilgrimage
to Jerusalem, in two given to the poor. In the seventh year "all things
were in common." Supplementing these gifts were alms to all who asked;
"and he who gave less than a tenth of his means was a man of evil eye"
(Maim. vii. 5). All were to give alms, even the poor themselves who were
in receipt of relief. Refusal might be punished with stripes at the hand
of the Sanhedrim. At the Temple alms for distribution to the worthy poor
were placed by worshippers in the cell of silence; and it is said that
in Palestine at meal times the table was open to all comers. As the
synagogues extended, and possibly after the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 70),
the collections of alms was further systematized. There were two
collections. In each city alms of the box or chest (_kupha_) were
collected for the poor of the city on each Sabbath eve (later, monthly
or thrice a year), and distributed in money or food for seven days. Two
collected, three distributed. Three others gathered and distributed
daily alms of the basket (_tamchui_). These were for strangers and
wayfarers--casual relief "for the poor of the whole world." In the
Jewish synagogue community from early times the president (_parnass_)
and treasurer were elected annually with seven heads of the congregation
(see Abraham's _Jewish Life in the Middle Ages_, p. 54), and sometimes
special officers for the care of the poor. A staff of almoners was thus
forthcoming. In addition to these collections were the _pruta_ given to
the poor before prayers (Maim. x. 15), and moneys gathered to help
particular cases (cf. _Jewish Life_, p. 322) by circular letter. There
were also gifts at marriages and funerals; and fines imposed for breach
of the communal ordinances were reserved for the poor. The distinctive
feature of the Jewish charity was the belief that "the poor would not
cease out of the land," and that therefore on charitable grounds a
permanent provision should be made for them--a poor-rate, in fact,
subject to stripes and distraint, if necessary (Maim. vii. 10; and
generally cf. articles on "Alms" and "Charity" in the _Jewish
Encyclopaedia_).
If we compare this with the early church we find the following sources
of relief: (1) The Eucharistic offerings, some consumed at the time,
some carried home, some reserved for the absent (see Hatch, _Early
Church_, p. 40). The ministration, like the Eucharist, was connected
with the love feast, and was at first daily (Acts ii. 42, vi. 1, and
the _Didache_). (2) Freewill offerings and first-fruits and voluntary
tithes (_Ap. Con._ ii. 25) brought to the bishop and used for the
poor--orphans, widows, the afflicted and strangers in distress, and
for the clergy, deaconesses, &c. (3) Collections in churches on
Sundays and week-days, alms-boxes and gifts to the poor by worshippers
as they entered church; also collections for special purposes (cf. for
Christians at Jerusalem). Apart from "the corners," &c., the sources
of relief in the Christian and Jewish churches are the same. The
separate Jewish tithe for the poor, which (Maim. vi. II, 13) might be
used in part by the donor as personal charity, disappears. A voluntary
tithe remains, in part used for the poor. We do not hear of stripes
and distraint, but in both bodies there is a penitential system and
excommunication (cf. _Jewish Life_, p. 52), and in both a settlement
of disputes within the body (Clem. _Hov_. iii. 67). In both, too,
there is the abundant alms provided in the belief of the permanence of
poverty and the duty of giving to all who ask. As to administration in
the early church (Acts vi. 3), we find seven deacons, the number of
the local Jewish council; and later there were in Rome seven
ecclesiastical relief districts, each in charge of a deacon. The
deacon acted as the minister of the bishop (_Ep._ Clem, to Jam. xii.),
reporting to him and giving as he dictated (_Ap. Con._ ii. 30, 31). He
at first combined disciplinary powers with charitable. The presbyters
also (Polycarp, _Ad Phil._ 6, A.D. 69-155), forming (Hatch, p. 69) a
kind of bishop's council, visited the sick, &c. The bishop was
president and treasurer. The bishop was thus the trustee of the poor.
By reason of the churches' care of orphans, responsibilities of
trusteeship also devolved on him. The temples were in pagan times
depositories of money. Probably the churches were also.
3. Great stress is laid by the Jews on the duty of gentleness to the
poor (Maim. x. 5). The woman was to have first attention (Maim. vi. 13).
If the applicant was hungry he was to be fed, and then examined to learn
whether he was a deceiver (Maim. vii. 6). Assistance was to be given
according to the want--clothes, household things, a wife or a
husband--and according to the poor man's station in life. For widows and
orphans the "gleanings" were left. Both are the recognized objects of
charity (Maim. x. 16,17). "The poor and the orphan were to be employed
in domestic affairs in preference to servants." The dower was a constant
form of help. The ransoming of slaves took precedence of relief to the
poor. The highest degree of alms-deed (Maim. x. 7) was "to yield support
to him who is cast down, either by means of gifts, or by loan, or by
commerce, or by procuring for him traffic with others. Thus his hand
becometh strengthened, exempt from the necessity of soliciting succour
from any created being."
If we compare the Christian methods we find but slight difference. The
absoluteness of "Give to him that asketh" is in the _Didache_ checked by
the "Woe to him that receives: for if any receives having need, he shall
be guiltless, but he that has no need shall give account, ... and coming
into distress ... he shall not come out thence till he hath paid the
last farthing." It is the duty of the bishop to know who is most worthy
of assistance (_Ap. Con._ ii. 3, 4); and "if any one is in want by
gluttony, drunkenness, or idleness, he does not deserve assistance, or
to be esteemed a member of the church." The widow assumes the position
not only of a recipient of alms, but a church worker. Some were a
private charge, some were maintained by the church. The recognized
"widow" was maintained: she was to be sixty years of age (cf. 1 Tim, v.
9 and _Ap. Con._ iii. 1), and was sometimes tempted to become a
bedes-woman and gossipy pauper, if one may judge from the texts.
Remarriage was not approved. Orphans were provided for by members of the
churches. The virgins formed another class, as, contrary to the earlier
feeling, marriage came to be held a state of lesser sanctity. They too
seem to have been also, in part at least, church workers. Thus round the
churches grew up new groups of recognized dependents; but the older
theory of charity was broad and practical--akin to that of Maimonides.
"Love all your brethren, performing to orphans the part of parents, to
widows that of husbands, affording them sustenance with all kindliness,
arranging marriages for those who are in their prime, and for those who
are without a profession the means of necessary support through
employment: giving work to the artificer and alms to the incapable"
(_Ep._ Clem, to James viii.).
4. The Jews in pre-Christian and Talmudic times supported the stranger
or wayfarer by the distribution of food (_tamchui_); the strangers were
lodged in private houses, and there were inns provided at which no money
was taken (cf. _Jewish Life_, p. 314). Subsequently, besides these
methods, special societies were formed "for the entertainment of the
resident poor and of strangers." There were commendatory letters also.
These conditions prevailed in the Christian church also. The
_Xenodocheion_, coming by direct succession alike from Jewish and Greek
precedents, was the first form of Christian hospital both for strangers
and for members of the Christian churches. In the Christian community
the endowment charity comes into existence in the 4th century, among the
Jews not till the 13th. The charities of the synagogue without separate
societies sufficed.
Greek, Jewish and Christian thought.
We may now compare the conceptions of Jews and Christians on charity
with those of the Greeks. There are two chief exponents of the diverse
views--Aristotle and St Paul; for to simplify the issues we refer to
them only. Thoughts such as Aristotle's, recast by the Stoic Panaetius
(185-112 B.C.), and used by Cicero in his _De Officiis_, became in the
hands of St Ambrose arguments for the direction of the clergy in the
founding of the medieval church; and in the 13th century Aristotle
reasserts his influence through such leaders of medieval thought as St
Thomas Aquinas. St Paul's chapters on charity, not fully appreciated
and understood, one is inclined to think, have perhaps more than any
other words prevented an absolute lapse into the materialism of
almsgiving. After him we think of St Francis, the greatest of a group of
men who, seeking reality in life, revived charity; but to the theory of
charity it might almost be said that since Aristotle and St Paul nothing
has been added until we come to the economic and moral issues which Dr
Chalmers explained and illustrated.
The problem turns on the conception (1) of purpose, (2) of the self, and
(3) of charity, love or friendship as an active force in social life. To
the Greek, or at least to Greek philosophic thought, purpose was the
measure of goodness. To have no purpose was, so far as the particular
act was concerned, to be simply irrational; and the less definite the
purpose the more irrational the act. This conception of purpose was the
touchstone of family and social life, and of the civic life also. In no
sphere could goodness be irrational. To say that it was without purpose
was to say that it was without reality. So far as the actor was
concerned, the main purpose of right action was the good of the soul
([Greek: psyche]); and by the soul was meant the better self, "the
ruling part" acting in harmony with every faculty and function of the
man. With faculties constantly trained and developed, a higher life was
gradually developed in the soul. We are thus, it might be said, what we
become. The gates of the higher life are within us. The issue is whether
we will open them and pass in.
Consistent with this is the social purpose. Love or friendship is not
conceived by Aristotle except in relation to social life. Society is
based on an interchange of services. This interchange in one series of
acts we call justice; in another friendship or love. A man cannot be
just unless he has acquired a certain character or habit of mind; and
hence no just man will act without knowledge, previous deliberation and
definite purpose. So also will a friend fulfil these conditions in his
acts of love or friendship. In the love existing between good men there
is continuance and equality of service; but in the case of benefactor
and benefited, in deeds of charity, in fact, there is no such equality.
The satisfaction is on one side but often not on the other. (The dilemma
is one that is pressed, though not satisfactorily, in Cicero and
Seneca.) The reason for this will be found, Aristotle suggests, in the
feeling of satisfaction which men experience in action. We realize
ourselves in our deeds--throw ourselves into them, as people say; and
this is happiness. What we make we like: it is part of us. On the other
hand, in the person benefited there may be no corresponding action, and
in so far as there is not, there is no exchange of service or the
contentment that arises from it. The "self" of the recipient is not
drawn out. On the contrary, he may be made worse, and feel the
uneasiness and discontent that result from this. In truth, to complete
Aristotle's argument, the good deed on one side, as it represents the
best self of the benefactor, should on the other side draw out the best
self of the person benefited. And where there is not ultimately this
result, there is not effective friendship or charity, and consequently
there is no personal or social satisfaction. The point may be pushed
somewhat further. In recent developments of charitable work the term
"friendly visitor" is applied to persons who endeavour to help families
in distress on the lines of associated charity. It represents the work
of charity in one definite light. So far as the relation is mutual, it
cannot at the outset be said to exist. The charitable friend wishes to
befriend another; but at first there may be no reciprocal feeling of
friendship on the other's part--indeed, such a feeling may never be
created. The effort to reciprocate kindness by becoming what the friend
desires may be too painful to make. Or the two may be on different
planes, one not really befriending, but giving without intelligence, the
other not really endeavouring to change his nature, but receiving help
solely with a view to immediate advantage. The would-be befriender may
begin "despairing of no man," expecting nothing in return; but if, in
fact, there is never any kind of return, the friendship actually fails
of its purpose, and the "friend's" satisfaction is lost, except in that
he may "have loved much." In any case, according to this theory
friendship, love and charity represent the mood from which spring social
acts, the value of which will depend on the knowledge, deliberation and
purpose with which they are done, and accordingly as they acquire value
on this account will they give lasting satisfaction to both parties.
St Paul's position is different. He seems at first sight to ignore the
state and social life. He lays stress on motive force rather than on
purpose. He speaks as an outsider to the state, though technically a
citizen. His mind assumes towards it the external Judaic position, as
though he belonged to a society of settlers ([Greek: paroikoi]). Also,
as he expects the millennium, social life and its needs are not
uppermost in his thoughts. He considers charity in relation to a
community of fellow-believers--drawn together in congregations. His
theory springs from this social base, though it over-arches life itself.
He is intent on creating a spiritual association. He conceives of the
spirit ([Greek: pneuma]) as "an immaterial personality." It transcends
the soul ([Greek: psyche]), and is the Christ life, the ideal and
spiritual life. Christians participate in it, and they thus become part
of "the body of Christ," which exists by virtue of love--love akin to
the ideal life, [Greek: agape]. The word represents the love that is
instinct with reverence, and not love [Greek: philia] which may have in
it some quality of passion. This love is the life of "the body of
Christ." Therefore no act done without it is a living act--but, on the
contrary, must be dead--an act in which no part of the ideal life is
blended. On the individual act or the purpose no stress is laid. It is
assumed that love, because it is of this intense and exalted type, will
find the true purpose in the particular act. And, when the expectation
of the millennium passed away, the theory of this ideal charity remained
as a motive force available for whatever new conditions, spiritual or
social, might arise. Nevertheless, no sooner does this charity touch
social conditions, than the necessity asserts itself of submitting to
the limitations which knowledge, deliberation and purpose impose. This
view had been depreciated or ignored by Christians, who have been
content to rely upon the strength of their motives, or perhaps have not
realized what the Greeks understood, that society was a natural organism
(Arist. _Pol._ 1253A), which develops, fails or prospers in accordance
with definite laws. Hence endless failure in spite of some success. For
love, whether we idealize it as [Greek: agape] or consider it a social
instinct as [Greek: philia], cannot be love at all unless it quickens
the intelligence as much as it animates the will. It cannot, except by
some confusion of thought, be held to justify the indulgence of emotion
irrespective of moral and social results. Yet, though this fatal error
may have dominated thought for a long time, it is hardly possible to
attribute it to St Paul's theory of charity when the very practical
nature of Judaism and early Christianity is considered. In his view the
misunderstanding could not arise. And to create a world or "body" of men
and women linked together by love, even though it be outside the normal
life of the community, was to create a new form of religious
organization, and to achieve for it (so far as it was achieved) what,
_mutatis mutandis_, Aristotle held to be the indispensable condition of
social life, friendship ([Greek: philia]), "the greatest good of
states," for "Socrates and all the world declare," he wrote, that "the
unity of the state" is "created by friendship" (Arist. _Pol._ ii. 1262
b).
It should, however, be considered to what extent charity in the
Christian church was devoid of social purpose, (1) The Jewish
conceptions of charity passed, one might almost say, in their
completeness into the Christian church. Prayer, the petition and the
purging of the mind, fasting, the humiliation of the body, and alms,
as part of the same discipline, the submissive renunciation of
possessions--all these formed part of the discipline that was to
create the religious mood. Alms henceforth become a definite part of
the religious discipline and service. Humility and poverty hereafter
appear as yoked virtues, and many problems of charity are raised in
regard to them. The non-Christian no less than the Christian world
appreciated more and more the need of self-discipline ([Greek:
askesis]); and it seems as though in the first two centuries A.D.
those who may have thought of reinvigorating society searched for the
remedy rather in the preaching and practice of temperance than in the
application of ideas that were the outcome of the observation of
social or economic conditions. Having no object of this kind as its
mark, almsgiving took the place of charity, and, as Christianity
triumphed, the family life, instead of reviving, continued to decay,
while the virtues of the discipline of the body, considered apart from
social life, became an end in themselves, and it was desired rather to
annihilate instinct than to control it. Possibly this was a necessary
phase in a movement of progress, but however that be, charity, as St
Paul understood it, had in it no part. (2) But the evil went farther.
Jewish religious philosophy is not elaborated as a consistent whole by
any one writer. It is rather a miscellany of maxims; and again and
again, as in much religious thought, side issues assume the principal
place. The direct effect of the charitable act, or almsgiving, is
ignored. Many thoughts and motives are blended. The Jews spoke of the
poor as the means of the rich man's salvation. St Chrysostom
emphasizes this: "If there were no poor, the greater part of your sins
would not be removed: they are the healers of your wounds" (_Hom._
xiv., Timothy, &c., St Cyprian on works and alms). Alms are the
medicine of sin. And the same thought is worked into the penitential
system. Augustine speaks of "penance such as fasting, almsgiving and
prayer for breaches of the Decalogue" (Reichel, _Manual of Canon Law_,
p. 23); and many other references might be cited. "Pecuniary penances
(Ib. 154), in so far as they were relaxations of, or substitutes for,
bodily penances, were permitted because of the greater good thereby
accruing to others" (and in this case they were--A.D. 1284--legally
enforceable under English statute law). The penitential system takes
for granted that the almsgiving is good for others and puts a premium
on it, even though in fact it were done, not with any definite object,
but really for the good of the penitent. Thus almsgiving becomes
detached from charity on the one side and from social good on the
other. Still further is it vulgarized by another confusion of thought.
It is considered that the alms are paid to the credit of the giver,
and are realized as such by him in the after-world; or even that by
alms present prosperity may be obtained, or at least evil accident
avoided. Thus motives were blended, as indeed they now are, with the
result that the gift assumed a greater importance than the charity, by
which alone the gift should have been sanctified, and its actual
effect was habitually overlooked or treated as only partially
relevant.
(3) The Christian maxim of "loving ([Greek: agape]) one's neighbour as
one's self" sets a standard of charity. Its relations are idealized
according as the "self" is understood; and thus the good self becomes
the measure of charity. In this sense, the nobler the self the
completer the charity; and the charity of the best men, men who love
and understand their neighbours best, having regard to their chief
good, is the best, the most effectual charity. Further, if in what we
consider "best" we give but a lesser place to social purpose or even
allow it no place at all, our "self" will have no sufficient social
aim and our charity little or no social result. For this "self,"
however, religion has substituted not St Paul's conception of the
spirit ([Greek: pneuma]), but a soul, conceived as endowed with a
substantial nature, able to enjoy and suffer quasi-material rewards
and punishments in the after-life; and in so far as the safeguard of
this soul by good deeds or almsgiving has become a paramount object,
the purpose of charitable action has been translated from the actual
world to another sphere. Thus, as we have seen, the aid of the poor
has been considered not an object in itself, but as a means by which
the almsgiver effects his own ulterior purpose and "makes God his
debtor." The problem thus handled raises the question of reward and
also of punishment. Properly, from the point of view of charity, both
are excluded. We may indeed act from a complexity of motives and
expect a complexity of rewards, and undoubtedly a good act does
refresh the "self," and may as a result, though not as a reward, win
approval. But in reality reward, if the word be used at all, is
according to purpose; and the only reward of a deed lies in the
fulfilment of its purpose. In the theory of almsgiving which we are
discussing, however, act and reward are on different planes. The
reward is on that of a future life; the act related to a distressed
person here and now. The interest in the act on the doer's part lies
in its post-mortal consequences to himself, and not either wholly or
chiefly in the act itself. Nor, as the interest ends with the act--the
giving--can the intelligence be quickened by it. The questions "How?
by whom? with what object? on what plan? with what result?" receive no
detailed consideration at all. Two general results follow. In so far
as it is thus practised, almsgiving is out of sympathy with social
progress. It is indeed alien to it. Next also the self-contained,
self-sustained poverty that will have no relief and does without it,
is outside the range of its thought and understanding. On the other
hand, this almsgiving is equally incapable of influencing the weak and
the vicious; and those who are suffering from illness or trouble it
has not the width of vision to understand nor the moral energy to
support so that they shall not fall out of the ranks of the
self-supporting. It believes that "the poor" will not cease out of the
land. And indeed, however great might be the economic progress of the
people, it is not likely that the poor will cease, if the alms given
in this spirit be large enough in amount to affect social conditions
seriously one way or the other. When we measure the effects of
charity, this inheritance of divided thought and inconsistent counsels
must be given its full weight.
The organization of the parish and endowed charities.
The sub-apostolic church was a congregation, like a synagogue, the
centre of a system of voluntary and personal relief, connected with the
congregational meals (or [Greek: agapai]) and the Eucharist, and under
the supervision of no single officer or bishop. Out of this was
developed a system of relief controlled by a bishop, who was assisted
chiefly by deacons or presbyters, while the [Greek: agapai], consisting
of offerings laid before the altar, still remained. Subsequently the
meal was separated from the sacrament, and became a dole of food, or
poor people's meal--e.g. in St Augustine's time in western Africa--and
it was not allowed to be served in churches (A.D. 391). As religious
asceticism became dominant, the sacrament was taken fasting; it appeared
unseemly that men and women should meet together for such purposes, and
the [Greek: agapai] fell out of repute. Simultaneously it would seem
that the parish [Greek: paroikia] became from a congregational
settlement a geographical area.
The organization of relief at Rome illustrates both a type of
administration and a transition. St Gregory's reforms (A.D. 590) largely
developed it. The first factor in the transition was the church fund of
the second period of Christianity, about A.D. 150 to after 208
(Tertullian, _Apol_. 39). It served as a friendly fund, was supported by
voluntary gifts, and was used to succour and to bury the poor, to help
destitute and orphaned children, old household slaves and those who
suffered for the faith. This fund is quite different from the _collegia
tenuiorum_ or _funeratica_ of the Romans, which were societies to which
the members paid stipulated sums at stated periods, for funeral benefits
or for common meals (J.P. Waltzing, _Corporations professionnelles chez
les Romains_, i. 313). It represents the charitable centre round which
the parochial system developed. That system was adopted probably about
the middle of the 3rd century, but in Rome the diaconate probably
remained centralized. At the end of the 4th century Pope Anastasius had
founded deaconries in Rome, and endowed them largely "to meet the
frequent demands of the diaconate." Gregory two hundred years later
reorganized the system. He divided the fourteen old "regions" into seven
ecclesiastical districts and thirty "titles" (or parishes). The parishes
were under the charge of sixty-six priests; the districts were
eleemosynary divisions. Each was placed under the charge of a deacon,
not (Greg. _Ep_. xi. and xxviii.) under the priests (_presbyteri
titularii_). Over the deacons was an archdeacon. It was the duty of the
deacons to care for the poor, widows, orphans, wards, and old people of
their several districts. They inquired in regard to those who were
relieved, and drew up under the guidance of the bishop the register of
poor (_matricula_). Only these received regular relief. In each district
was an hospital or office for alms, of which the deacon had charge,
assisted by a steward (or _oeconomus_). Here food was given and meals
were taken, the sick and poor were maintained, and orphan or foundling
children lodged. The churches of Rome and of other large towns possessed
considerable estates, "the patrimony of the patron saints," and to Rome
belonged estates in Sicily which had not been ravaged by the invaders,
and they continued to pay to it their tenth of corn, as they had done
since Sicily was conquered. Four times a year (Milman, _Lat. Christ_,
ii. 117) the shares of the (1) clergy and papal officers, (2) churches
and monasteries, and (3) "hospitals, deaconries and ecclesiastical wards
for the poor," were calculated in money and distributed; and the first
day in every month St Gregory distributed to the poor in kind corn,
wine, cheese, vegetables, bacon, meal, fish and oil. The sick and infirm
were superintended by persons appointed to inspect every street. Before
the pope sat down to his own meal a portion was separated and sent out
to the hungry at his door. The Roman _plebs_ had thus become the poor of
Christ (_pauperes Christi_), and under that title were being fed by
_civica annona_ and _sportula_ as their ancestors had been; and the
deaconries had superseded the "regions" and the "steps" from which the
corn had been distributed. The _hospitium_ was now part of a common
organization of relief, and the sick were visited according to Jewish
and early Christian precedent. How far kindly Romans visited the sick of
their day we do not know. Alms and the _annona_ were now, it would seem,
administered concurrently; and there was a system of poor relief
independent of the churches and their alms (unless these, organized, as
in Scottish towns, on the ancient ecclesiastical lines, were paid wholly
or in part to a central diaconate fund). Much had changed, but in much
Roman thought still prevailed.
On lines similar to these the organization of poor relief in the middle
ages was developed. In the provinces in the later empire the senate or
_ordo decurionum_ were responsible for the public provisioning of the
towns (Fustel de Coulanges, _La Gaule romaine_, p. 251), and no doubt
the care of the poor would thus in some measure devolve on them in times
of scarcity or distress. On the religious side, on the other hand, the
churches would probably be constant centres of almsgiving and relief;
and then, further, when the Roman municipal system had decayed, each
citizen (as in Charlemagne's time, 742-814) was required to support his
own dependants--a step suggestive of much after-history.
The change in sentiment and method could hardly be more strongly
marked than by a comparison of "the _Teaching_" with St Ambrose's
(334-397) "Duties of the Clergy" (_De Officiis Ministrorum_). For the
old instinctive obedience to a command there is now an endeavour to
find a reasoned basis for charitable action. Pauperism is recognized.
"Never was the greed of beggars greater than it is now.... They want
to empty the purses of the poor, to deprive them of the means of
support. Not content with a little, they ask for more.... With lies
about their lives they ask for further sums of money." "A method in
giving is necessary." But in the suggestions made there is little
consistency. Liberality is urged as a means of gaining the love of the
people; a new and a false issue is thus raised. The relief is neither
to be "too freely given to those who are unsuitable, nor too sparingly
bestowed upon the needy." Everywhere there is a doctrine of the mean
reflected through Cicero's _De Officiis_, the doctrine insufficiently
stated, as though it were a mean of quantity, and not that rightly
tempered mean which is the harmony of opposing moods. The poor are not
to be sent away empty. Those rejected by the church are not to be left
to the "outer darkness" of an earlier Christianity. They must be
supplied if they are in want. The methodic giver is "hard towards
none, but is free towards all." Consequently none are refused, and no
account is taken of the regeneration that may spring up in a man from
the effort towards self-help which refusal may originate. Thus after
all it appears that method means no more than this--to give sometimes
more, sometimes less, to all needy people. In the small congregational
church of early Christianity, each member of which was admitted on the
conditions of strictest discipline, the common alms of the faithful
could hardly have done much harm within the body, even though outside
they created and kept alive a horde of vagrant alms-seekers and
pretenders. Now in this department at least the church had become the
state, and discipline and a close knowledge of one's fellow-Christians
no longer safeguarded the alms. From Cicero is borrowed the thought of
"active help," which "is often grander and more noble," but the
thought is not worked out. From the social side the problem is not
understood or even stated, and hence no principle of charity or of
charitable administration is brought to light in the investigation.
Still there are rudiments of the economics of charity in the praise of
Joseph, who made the people _buy_ the corn, for otherwise "they would
have given up cultivating the soil; for he who has the use of what is
another's often neglects his own." Perhaps, as St Augustine inspired
the theology of the middle ages, we may say that St Ambrose, in the
mingled motives, indefiniteness, and kindliness of this book, stands
for the charity of the middle ages, except in so far as the movement
which culminated in the brotherhood of St Francis awakened the
intelligence of the world to wider issues.
In Constantinople the pauperism seems to have been extreme. The corn
supplies of Africa were diverted there in great part when it became the
capital of the empire. This must have left to Rome a larger scope for
the development of the civic-religious administration of relief. St
Chrysostom's sermons give no impression of the rise of any new
administrative force, alike sagacious and dominant. The appeal to give
alms is constant, but the positive counsel on charitable work is _nil_.
The people had the _annona civica_, and imperial gifts, corn, allowances
(_salaria_) from the treasury granted for the poor and needy, and an
annual gift of 50 gold pounds (rather more than L1400) for funerals.
Besides these there were many institutions, and the begging and the
almsgiving at the church doors. "The land could not support the lazy and
valiant beggars." There were public works provided for them; if they
refused to work on them they were to be driven away. The sick might
visit the capital, but must be registered and sent back (A.D. 382); the
sturdy beggar was condemned to slavery. So little did alms effect. And
in the East monasticism seems to have produced no firmness of purpose
such as led to the organization of the church and of charitable relief
under St Gregory.
Another movement of the Byzantine period was the establishment of the
endowed charity. The Jewish synagogue long served as a place for the
reception of strangers--a religious [Greek: xenodocheion]. Probably the
strangers referred to in "the _Teaching_" were so entertained. The table
of the bishop and a room in his house served as the guest-chamber, for
which afterwards a separate building was instituted. In the East the
Jewish charitable inn first appears, and there took place the earliest
extension of institutions. There was probably a demand for an
elaboration of institutions as social changes made themselves felt in
the churches. We have seen this in the case of the [Greek: agape].
Similar changes would affect other branches of charitable work. The
hospital (_hospitalium_, [Greek: xenodocheion]) is defined as a "house
of God in which strangers who lack hospitality are received" (Suicerus,
_Thesaur._), a home separated from the church; and round the church, out
of the primitive [Greek: xenodocheion] of early Christian times and the
entertainment of strangers at the houses of members of the community,
would grow up other similar charities. In A.D. 321 licence was given by
Constantine to leave property to the Church. The churches were thus
placed in the same position as pagan temples, and though subsequently
Valentinian (A.D. 379) withdrew the permission on account of the
shameless legacy-hunting of the clergy, in that period much must have
been done to endow church and charitable institutions. In the same
period grew to its height the passion for monasticism. This affected the
parish and the endowed charity alike. Under its influence the deacon as
an almoner tends to disappear, except where, as in Rome, there is an
elaborate system of relief. Nor does it seem that deaconesses, widows,
and virgins continued to occupy their old position as church workers and
alms-receivers. Naturally when marriage was considered "in itself an
evil, perhaps to be tolerated, but still degrading to human nature," and
(A.D. 385) the marriage of the clergy was prohibited, men, except those
in charge of parishes, and women would join regular monastic bodies; the
deacon, as almoner, would disappear, and the "widows" and virgins would
become nuns. Thus there would grow up a large body of men and women
living segregated in institutions, and forming a leisured class able to
superintend institutional charities. And now two new officers appear,
the _eleemosynarius_ or almoner and the _oeconomus_ or steward (already
an assistant treasurer to the bishop), who superintend and distribute
the alms and manage the property of the institution. (In the first six
books of the _Apost. Constit._, A.D. 300, these officers are not
mentioned.) In these circumstances the _hospitium_ or hospital ([Greek:
xenon], [Greek: katagogion]) assumes a new character. It becomes in St
Basil's hands (A.D. 330-379) a resort not only for those who "visit it
from time to time as they pass by, but also for those who need some
treatment in illness." And round St Basil at Caesarea there springs up a
colony of institutions. Four kinds principally are mentioned in the
Theodosian code: (i) the guest-houses ([Greek: xenodocheia]); (2) the
poor-houses ([Greek: ptocheia]), where the poor (_mendici_) were housed
and maintained (the [Greek: ptocheion] was a general term also applied
to all houses for the poor, the aged, orphans and sick); (3) there were
orphanages ([Greek: orphanotropheia]) for orphans and wards; and (4)
there were houses for infant children ([Greek: brephotropheia]). Thus a
large number of endowed charities had grown up. This new movement it is
necessary to consider in connexion with the law relating to religious
property and bequests, in its bearing on the rule of the monasteries,
and in its effect on the family.
The sacred property (_res sacra_) of Roman law consisted of things
dedicated to the gods by the pontiff with the approval of the civil
authority, in turn, the people, the senate and the emperor. Things so
consecrated were inalienable. Apart from this in the empire, the
municipalities as they grew up were considered "juristic persons" who
were entitled to receive and hold property. In a similar position were
authorized _collegia_, amongst which were the mutual aid societies
referred to above. Christians associated in these societies would
leave legacies to them. Thus (W.M. Ramsay, _Cities and Bishoprics of
Phrygia_, I. i. 119) an inscription mentions a bequest (possibly by a
Christian) to the council ([Greek: synhedrion]) of the presidents of
the dyers in purple for a ceremonial, on the condition that, if the
ceremony be neglected, the legacy shall become the property of the
gild for the care of nurslings; and in the same way a bequest is left
in Rome (Orelli 4420) for a memorial sacrifice, on the condition that,
if it be not performed, double the cost be paid to the treasury of the
corn-supply (_fisco stationis annonae_). No unauthorized _collegia_
could receive a legacy. "The law recognized no freedom of
association." Nor could any private individual create a foundation
with separate property of its own. Property could only be left to an
authorized juristic person, being a municipality or a _collegium_. But
as the problem of poverty was considered from a broader standpoint,
there was a desire to deal with it in a more permanent manner than by
the _annona civica_. The _pueri alimentarii_ (see above) were
considered to hold their property as part of the _fiscus_ or property
of the state. Pliny (_Ep._ vii. 18), seeking a method of endowment,
transferred property in land to the steward of public property, and
then took it back again subject to a permanent charge for the aid of
children of freemen. By the law of Constantine and subsequent laws no
such devices were necessary. Widows or deaconesses, or virgins
dedicated to God, or nuns (A.D. 455), could leave bequests to a church
or memorial church (_martyrum_), or to a priest or a monk, or to the
poor in any shape or form, in writing or without it. Later (A.D. 475)
donations of every kind, "to the person of any martyr, or apostle, or
prophet, or the holy angels," for building an oratory were made valid,
even if the building were promised only and not begun; and the same
rule applied to infirmaries ([Greek: nosokomoeia]) and poor-houses
([Greek: ptocheia])--the bishop or steward being competent to appear
as plaintiff in such cases. Later, again (A.D. 528), contributions of
50 solidi (say about L19, 10s.) to a church, hostel ([Greek:
xenodocheion]), &c., were made legal, though not registered; while
larger sums, if registered, were also legalized. So (A.D. 529)
property might be given for "churches, hostels, poor-houses, infant
and orphan homes, and homes for the aged, or any such community"
(_consortium_), even though not registered, and such property was free
from taxation. The next year (530) it was enacted that prescription
even for 100 years did not alienate church and charitable property.
The broadest interpretation was allowed. If by will a share of an
estate was left "to Christ our Lord," the church of the city or other
locality might receive it as heir; "let these, the law says, belong to
the holy churches, so that they may become the alimony of the poor."
It was sufficient to leave property to the poor (_Corpus Juris
Civilis_, ed. Krueger, 1877, ii. 25). The bequest was legal. It went
to the legal representative of the poor--the church. Charitable
property was thus church property. The word "alms" covered both. It
was given to pious uses, and as a kind of public institution "shared
that corporate capacity which belonged to all ecclesiastical
institutions by virtue of a general rule of law." On a _pia causa_ it
was not necessary to confer a juristic personality. Other laws
preserved or regulated alienation (A.D. 477, A.D. 530), and checked
negligence or fraud in management. The clergy had thus become the
owners of large properties, with the _coloni_ and slaves upon the
estates and the allowances of civic corn (_annona civica_); and (A.D.
357) it was stipulated that whatever they acquired by thrift or
trading should be used for the service of the poor and needy, though
what they acquired from the labour of their slaves in the labour
houses (_ergastula_) or inns (_tabernae_) might be considered a profit
of religion (_religionis lucrum_).
Thus grew up the system of endowed charities, which with certain
modifications continued throughout the middle ages, and, though it
assumed different forms in connexion with gilds and municipalities, in
England it still retains, partially at least, its relation to the
church. It remained the system of institutional relief parallel to the
more personal almsgiving of the parish.
Monasticism, in acting on men of strong character, endowed them with a
double strength of will, and to men like St Gregory it seemed to give
back with administrative power the relentless firmness of the Roman. In
the East it produced the turbulent soldiery of the church, in the West
its missionaries; and each mission-monastery was a centre of relief. But
whatever the services monasticism rendered, it can hardly be said to
have furthered true charity from the social standpoint, though out of
regard to some of its institutional work we may to a certain degree
qualify this judgment. The movement was almost of necessity in large
measure anti-parochial, and thus out of sympathy with the charities of
the parish, where personal relations with the poor at their homes count
for most.
The good and evil of it may be weighed. Monasticism working through St
Augustine helped the world to realize the mood of love as the real or
eternal life. Of the natural life of the world and its
responsibilities, through which that mood would have borne its
completest fruit, it took but little heed, except in so far as, by
creating a class possessed of leisure, it created able scholars,
lawyers and administrators, and disciplined the will of strong men.
It had no power to stay the social evils of the day. Unlike the
friars, at their best the monks were a class apart, not a class mixed
up with the people. So were their charities. The belief in poverty as
a fixed condition--irretrievable and ever to be alleviated without any
regard to science or observation, subjected charity to a perpetual
stagnation. Charity requires belief in growth, in the sharing of life,
in the utility and nobility of what is done here and now for the
hereafter of this present world. Monasticism had no thought of this.
It was based on a belief in the evil of matter; and from that root
could spring no social charity. Economic difficulties also fostered
monasticism. Gold was appreciated in value, and necessaries were
expensive, and the cost of maintaining a family was great. It was an
economy to force a son or a brother into the church. The population
was decreasing; and in spite of church feeling Marjorian (A.D. 461)
had to forbid women from taking the veil before forty, and to require
the remarriage of widows, subject to a large forfeit of property
(Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, ii. 420). Monasticism was
inconsistent with the social good. As to the family--like the moderns
who depreciate thrift and are careless of the life of the family, the
monks, believing that marriage was a lower form of morality, if not
indeed, as would at times appear, hardly moral at all, could feel but
little enthusiasm for what is socially a chief source of health to the
community and a well-spring of spontaneous charitable feeling. By the
sacerdotal-monastic movement the moralizing force of Christianity was
denaturalized. Among the secular clergy the falsity of the position as
between men and women revealed itself in relations which being
unhallowed and unrecognized became also degrading. But worse than all,
it pushed charity from its pivot. For this no monasteries or
institutions, no domination of religious belief, could atone. The
church that with so fine an intensity of purpose had fostered chastity
and marriage was betraying its trust. It was out of touch with the
primal unit of social life, the child-school of dawning habits and the
loving economy of the home. It produced no treatise on economy in the
older Greek sense of the word. The home and its associations no longer
retained their pre-eminence. In the extreme advocacy of the celibate
state, the honourable development of the married life and its duties
were depreciated and sometimes, one would think, quite forgotten.
We may ask, then, What were the results of charity at the close of the
period which ends with St Gregory and the founding of the medieval
church?--for if the charity is reflected in the social good the results
should be manifest. Economic and social conditions were adverse. With
lessened trade the middle class was decaying (Dill, _Roman Society in
the Last Century of the Western Empire_, p. 204) and a selfish
aristocracy rising up. Municipal responsibility had been taxed to
extinction. The public service was corrupt. The rich evaded taxation,
the poor were oppressed by it. There were laws upon laws, endeavours to
underpin the framework of a decaying society. Society was bankrupt of
skill--and the skill of a generation has a close bearing on its
charitable administration. While hospitals increased, medicine was
unprogressive. There were miserable years of famine and pestilence, and
constant wars. The care of the poorer classes, and ultimately of the
people, was the charge of the church. The church strengthened the
feeling of kindness for those in want, widows, orphans and the sick. It
lessened the degradation of the "actresses," and, co-operating with
Stoic opinion, abolished the slaughter of the gladiatorial shows. It
created a popular "dogmatic system and moral discipline," which paganism
failed to do; but it produced no prophet of charity, such as enlarged
the moral imagination of the Jews. It ransomed slaves, as did paganism
also, but it did not abolish slavery. Large economic causes produced
that great reform. The serf attached to the soil took the place of the
slave. The almsgiving of the church by degrees took the place of
_annona_ and _sportula_, and it may have created pauperism. But
dependence on almsgiving was at least an advance on dependence founded
on a civic and hereditary right to relief. As the _colonus_ stood higher
than the slave, so did the pauper, socially at any rate, free to support
himself, exceed the _colonus_. Bad economic conditions and traditions,
and a bad system of almsgiving, might enthral him. But the way, at
least, was open; and thus it became possible that charity, working in
alliance with good economic traditions, should in the end accomplish the
self-support of society, the independence of the whole people.
PART V.--MEDIEVAL CHARITY AND ITS DEVELOPMENT
It remains to trace the history of thought and administration in
relation to (1) the development of charitable responsibility in the
parish, and the use of tithe and church property for poor relief; and
(2) the revision of the theory of charity, with which are associated the
names of St Augustine (354-430), St Benedict (480-542), St Bernard
(1091-1153), St Francis (1182-1226), and St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).
(3) There follows, in reference chiefly to England, a sketch of the
dependence of the poor under feudalism, the charities of the parish, the
monastery and the hospital--the medieval system of endowed charity; the
rise of gild and municipal charities; the decadence at the close of the
15th century, and the statutory endeavours to cope with economic
difficulties which, in the 16th century, led to the establishment of
statutory serfdom and the poor-laws. New elements affect the problem of
charity in the 17th and 18th centuries; but it is not too much to say
that almost all these headings represent phases of thought or
institutions which in later forms are interwoven with the charitable
thought and endeavours of the present day.
The parish and charitable relief.
Naturally, two methods of relief have usually been prominent: relief
administered locally, chiefly to residents in their own homes, and
relief administered in an institution. At the time of Charlemagne
(742-814) the system of relief was parochial, consisting principally of
assistance at the home. After that time, except probably in England, the
institutional method appears to have predominated, and the monastery or
hospital in one form or another gradually encroached on the parish.
The system of parochial charity was the outcome, apparently, of three
conditions: the position and influence of the bishop, the eleemosynary
nature of the church funds, and the need of some responsible
organization of relief. It resulted in what might almost be called an
ecclesiastical poor-law. The affairs of a local church or congregation
were superintended by a bishop. To deal with the outlying districts he
detached priests for religious work and, as in Rome and (774)
Strassburg, deacons also for the administration of relief. Originally
all the income of the church or congregation was paid into one fund
only, of which the bishop had charge, and this fund was available
primarily for charitable purposes. Church property was the patrimony
of the poor. In the 4th century (IV. Council of Carthage, 398) the
names of the clergy were entered on a list (_matricula_ or _canon_),
as were also the names of the poor, and both received from the church
their daily portion (cf. Ratzinger, _Geschichte der kirchlichen
Armenpflege_, p. 117). There were no expenses for building. Before the
reign of Constantine (306) very few churches were built (Ratzinger, p.
120). Thus the early church as has been said, was chiefly a charitable
society. By degrees the property of the church was very largely
increased by gifts and bequests, and in the West before St Gregory's
time the division of it for four separate purposes--the support of the
bishop, of the clergy, and of the poor, and for church
buildings--still further promoted decentralization. Apart from any
special gifts, there was thus created a separate fund for almsgiving,
supervised by the bishop, consisting of a fourth of the church
property, the oblations (mostly used for the poor), and the tithe,
which at first was used for the poor solely. The organization of the
church was gradually extended. The church once established in the
chief city of a district would become in turn the mother church of
other neighbourhoods, and the bishop or priest of the mother church
would come to exercise supervision over them and their parishes.
In France, which may serve as a good illustration, in the 4th century
(Ratzinger, p. 181) the civic organization was utilized for a further
change. The Roman provinces were divided into large areas,
_civitales_, and these were adopted by the church as bishop's parishes
or, as we should call them, dioceses; and the chief city became the
cathedral city. The bishop thus became responsible in Charlemagne's
time both for his own parish--that of the mother church--and for the
supervision of the parishes in the _civitas_, and so for the sick and
needy of the diocese generally. He had to take charge of the poor in
his own parish personally, keep the list of the poor, and houses for
the homeless. The other parishes were at first, or in some measure,
supported from his funds, but they acquired by degrees tithe and
property of their own and were endowed by Charlemagne, who gave one or
more manses or lots of land (cf. Fustel de Coulanges, _Hist, des
institutions politiques de l'ancienne France_, p. 360) for the support
of each parish priest. The priests were required to relieve their own
poor so that they should not stray into other cities (II. Counc.
Tours, 567), and to provide food and lodging for strangers. The method
was indeed elaborated and became, like the Jewish, that contradiction
in terms--a compulsory system of charitable relief. The payment of
tithe was enforced by Charlemagne, and it became a legal due (Counc.
Frankfort, 794; Arelat. 794). At the same time two other conditions
were enforced. Each person (_unusquisque fidelium nostrorum_ or _omnes
cives_) was to keep his own family, i.e. all dependent on him--all,
that is, upon his freehold estate (_allodium_), and no one was to
presume to give relief to able-bodied beggars unless they were set to
work (Charlem. _Capit_. v. 10). Thus we find here the germ of a
poor-law system. As in the times of the _annona civica_, slavery,
feudalism, or statutory serfdom, the burthen of the maintenance of the
poor fell only in part on charity. Only those who could not be
maintained as members of some "family" were properly entitled to
relief, and in these circumstances the officially recognized clients
of the church consisted of the gradually decreasing number of free
poor and those who were tenants of church lands.
Since 817 there has been no universally binding decision of the church
respecting the care of the poor (Ratzinger, p. 236). So long ago did
laicization begin in charity. In the wars and confusion of the 9th and
10th centuries the poorer freemen lapsed still further into slavery,
or became _coloni_ or bond servants; and later they passed under the
feudal rule. Thus the church's duty to relieve them became the
masters' obligation to maintain them. Simultaneously the activity of
the clergy, regular and secular alike, dwindled. They were exhorted to
increase their alms. The revenues and property of "the poor" were
largely turned to private or partly ecclesiastical purposes, or
secularized. Legacies went wholly to the clergy, but only the tithe of
the produce of their own lands was used for relief; and of the general
tithe, only a third or fourth part was so applied. Eventually to a
large extent, but more elsewhere than in England (Ratzinger, pp. 246,
269), the tithe itself was appropriated by nobles or even by the
monasteries; and thus during and after the 10th century a new
organization of charity was created on non-parochial methods of
relief. Alms, with prayer and fasting, had always been connected with
penance. But the character of the penitential system had altered. By
the 7th century private penance had superseded the public and
congregational penance of the earlier church (_Dict. Christian
Antiquities_, art. "Penitence"). To the penalties of exclusion from
the sacraments or from the services of the church or from its
communion was coupled, with other penitential discipline, an elaborate
penitential system, in which about the 7th century the redemption of
sin by the "sacrifice" of property, payments of money fines, &c., was
introduced. (Cf. for instance Conc. Elberti:--Labbeus i. 969 (A.D.
305), with Conc. Berghamstedense, Wilkins, Conc. p. 60 (A.D. 696), and
the Penitential (p. 115) and Canons (A.D. 960), p. 236.) The same sin
committed by an overseer (_praepositus paganus_) was compensated by a
fine of 100 _solidi_; in the case of a _colonus_ by a fine of 50. So
amongst the ways of penitence were entered in the above-mentioned
Canons, to erect a church, and if means allowed, add to it land ... to
repair the public roads ... "to distribute," to help poor widows,
orphans and strangers, redeem slaves, fast, &c.--a combination of
"good deeds" which suggests a line of thought such as ultimately found
expression in the definition of charities in the Charitable Uses Act
of Queen Elizabeth. The confessor, too, was "_spiritualis medicus_,"
and much that from the point of view of counsel would now be the work
of charity would in his hands be dealt with in that capacity. For
lesser sins (cf. Bede (673-735), _Hom._ 34, quoted by Ratzinger) the
penalty was prayer, fasting and alms; for the greater sins--murder,
adultery and idolatry--to give up all. Thus while half-converted
barbarians were kept in moral subjection by material penances, the
church was enriched by their gifts; and these tended to support the
monastic and institutional methods which were in favour, and to which,
on the revival of religious earnestness in the 11th century, the world
looked for the reform of social life.
Medieval revision of the theory of charity.
To understand medieval charity it is necessary to return to St
Augustine. According to him, the motive of man in his legitimate effort
to assert himself in life was love or desire (_amor_ or _cupido_). "All
impulses were only evolutions of this typical characteristic" (Harnack,
_History of Dogma_ (trans.), v. iii.); and this was so alike in the
spiritual and the sensuous life. Happiness thus depended on desire; and
desire in turn depended on the regulation of the will; but the will was
regulated only by grace. God was the _spiritualis substantia_; and
freedom was the identity of the will with the omnipotent unchanging
nature. This highest Being was "holiness working on the will in the form
of omnipotent love." This love was grace--"grace imparting itself in
love." Love (_caritas_--charity) is identified with justice; and the
will, the goodwill, is love. The identity of the will with the will of
God was attained by communion with Him. The after-life consummated by
sight this communion, which was here reached only by faith. Such a
method of thought was entirely introspective, and it turned the mind
"wholly to hope, asceticism and the contemplation of God in worship."
"Where St Augustine indulges in the exposition of practical piety he has
no theory at all of Christ's work." To charity on that side he added
nothing. In the 11th century there was a revival of piety, which had
amongst its objects the restoration of discipline in the monasteries and
a monastic training for the secular clergy. To this Augustinian thought
led the way. "Christianity was asceticism and the city of God" (Harnack
vi. 6). A new religious feeling took possession of the general mind, a
regard and adoration of the actual, the historic Christ. Of this St
Bernard was the expositor. "Beside the sacramental Christ the image of
the historical took its place,--majesty in humility, innocence in penal
suffering, life in death." The spiritual and the sensuous were
intermingled. Dogmatic formulae fell into the background. The picture of
the historic Christ led to the realization of the Christ according to
the spirit ([Greek: kata pneuma]). Thus St Bernard carried forward
Augustinian thought; and the historic Christ became the "sinless man,
approved by suffering, to whom the divine grace, by which He lives, has
lent such power that His image takes shape in other men and incites them
to corresponding humility and love."
Humility and poverty represented the conditions under which alone this
spirit could be realized; and the poverty must be spiritual, and
therefore self-imposed ("wilful," as it was afterwards called). This led
to practical results. Poverty was not a social state, but a spiritual;
and consequently the poor generally were not the _pauperes Christi_, but
those who, like the monks, had taken vows of poverty. From these
premisses followed later the doctrine that gifts to the church were not
gifts to the poor, as once they had been, but to the religious bodies.
The church was not the church of the poor, but of the poor in spirit.
But the immediate effect was the belief for a time, apparently almost
universal, that the salvation of society would come from the monastic
orders. By their aid, backed by the general opinion, the secular clergy
were brought back to celibacy and the monasteries newly disciplined. But
charity could not thus regain its touch of life and become the means of
raising the standard of social duty.
Next, one amongst many who were stirred by a kindred inspiration, St
Francis turned back to actual life and gave a new reality to religious
idealism. For him the poor were once again the _pauperes Christi_. To
follow Christ was to adopt the life of "evangelical poverty," and this
was to live among the poor the life of a poor man. The follower was to
work with his hands (as the poor clergy of the early church had done and
the clergy of the early English church were exhorted to do); he was to
receive no money; he was to earn the actual necessaries of life, though
what he could not earn he might beg. To ask for this was a right, so
long as he was bringing a better life into the world. All in excess of
this he gave to the poor. He would possess no property, buildings or
endowments, nor was his order to do so. The fulness of his life was in
the complete realization of it now, without the cares of property and
without any fear of the future. Having a definite aim and mission, he
was ready to accept the want that might come upon him, and his life was
a discipline to enable him to suffer it if it came. To him humility was
the soul making itself fit to love; and poverty was humility expanded
from a mood to a life, a life not guarded by seclusion, but spent
amongst those who were actually poor. The object of life was to console
the poor--those outside all monasteries and institutions--the poor as
they lived and worked. The movement was practically a lay movement, and
its force consisted in its simplicity and directness. Book learning was
disparaged: life was to be the teacher. The brothers thus became
observant and practical, and afterwards indeed learned, and their
learning had the same characteristics. Their power lay in their
practical sagacity, in their treatment of life, outside the cloister and
the hospital, at first hand. They knew the people because they settled
amongst them, living just as they did. This was their method of charity.
The inspiration that drew St Francis to this method was the
contemplation of the life of Christ. But it was more than this. The
Christ was to him, as to St Bernard, an ideal, whose nature passed into
that of the contemplating and adoring beholder, so that, as he said,
"having lost its individuality, of itself the creature could no longer
act." He had no impulse but the Christ impulse. He was changed. His
identity was merged in that of Christ. And with this came the conception
of a gracious and finely ordered charity, moving like the natural world
in a constant harmonious development towards a definite end. The
mysticism was intense, but it was practical because it was intense. In
that lay the strength of the movement of the true Franciscans, and in
those orders that, whether called heretical or not, followed
them--Lollards and others. Religion thus became a personal and original
possession. It became individual. It was inspired by a social endeavour,
and for the world at large it made of charity a new thing.
St Thomas Aquinas took up St Bernard's position. Renunciation of
property, voluntary poverty, was in his view also a necessary means of
reaching the perfect life; and the feeling that was akin to this
renunciation and prompted it was charity. "All perfection of the
Christian life was to be attained according to charity," and charity
united us to God.
In the system elaborated by St Thomas Aquinas two lines of thought are
wrought into a kind of harmony. The one stands for Aristotle and
nature, the other for Christian tradition and theology. We have thus a
duplicate theory of thought and action throughout, both rational and
theologic virtues, and a duplicate beatitude or state of happiness
correspondent to each. On the one hand it is argued that the good act
is an act which, in relation to its object, wholly serves its purpose;
and thus the measure of goodness (_Prima Secundae Summae Theolog. Q._
xviii. 2) is the proportion between action and effect. On the other
hand, the act has to satisfy the twofold law, human reason and eternal
reason. From the point of view of the former the cardinal factor is
desire, which, made proportionate to an end, is love (_amor_); and,
seeking the good of others, it loses its quality of concupiscence and
becomes friendly love (_amor amicitiae_). But this rational love
(_amor_) and charity (_caritas_), the theologic virtue, may meet. All
virtue or goodness is a degree of love (_amor_), if by virtue we mean
the cardinal virtues and refer to the rule of reason only. But there
are also theologic virtues, which are on one side "essential," on the
other side participative. As wood ignited participates in the natural
fire, so does the individual in these virtues (II. II.^ae lxii. l).
Charity is a kind of friendship towards God. It is received _per
infusionem spiritus sancti_, and is the chief and root of the
theologic virtues of faith and hope, and on it the rational virtues
depend. They are not degrees of charity as they are of (_amor_) love,
but charity gives purpose, order and quality to them all. In this
sense the word is applied to the rational virtues--as, for instance,
beneficence. The counterpart of charity in social life is pity
(_misericordia_), the compassion that moves us to supply another's
want (_summa religionis Christianae in misericordia consistit quantum
ad exteriora opera_). It is, however, an emotion, not a virtue, and
must be regulated like any other emotion (... _passio est et non
virtus. Hic autem motus potest esse secundum rationem regulatus_, II.
II.^ae xxx. 3). Thus we pass to alms, which are the instrument of
pity--an act of charity done through the intervention of pity. The act
is not done in order to purchase spiritual good by a corporal means,
but to merit a spiritual good (_per effectum caritatis_) through being
in a state of charity; and from that point of view its effect is
tested by the recipient being moved to pray for his benefactor. The
claim of others on our beneficence is relative, according to
consanguinity and other bonds (II. II.^ae xxxi. 3), subject to the
condition that the common good of many is a holier obligation
(_divinius_) than that of one. Obedience and obligation to parents may
be crossed by other obligations, as, for instance, duty to the church.
To give alms is a command. Alms should consist of the
superfluous--that is, of all that the individual possesses after he
has reserved what is necessary. What is necessary the donor should fix
in due relation to the claims of his family and dependants, his
position in life (_dignitas_), and the sustenance of his body. On the
other hand, his gift should meet the actual necessities of the
recipient and no more. More than this will lead to excess on the
recipient's part (_ut inde luxurietur_) or to want of spirit and
apathy (_ut aliis remissio et refrigerium sit_), though allowance must
be made for different requirements in different conditions of life. It
were better to distribute alms to many persons than to give more than
is necessary to one. In individual cases there remains the further
question of correction--the removing of some evil or sin from another;
and this, too, is an act of charity.
It will be seen that though St Thomas bases his argument on a
duplicate theory of thought, action and happiness, part natural, part
theologic, and states fully the conditions of good action, he does not
bring the two into unison. Logically the argument should follow that
alms that fail in social benefit (produce _remissionem et
refrigerium_, for instance) fail also in spiritual good, for the two
cannot be inconsistent. But in regard to the former he does not press
the importance of purpose, and, in spite of his Aristotle, he misses
the point on which Aristotle, as a close observer of social
conditions, insists, that gifts without purpose and reciprocity foster
the dependence they are designed to meet. The proverb of the "pierced
cask" is as applicable to ecclesiastical as to political almsgiving,
as has often been proved by the event. The distribution of all
"superfluous" income in the form of alms would have the effect of a
huge endowment, and would stereotype "the poor" as a permanent and
unprogressive class. The proposal suggests that St Thomas contemplated
the adoption of a method of relief which would be like a voluntary
poor-law; and it is noteworthy that his phrase "necessary relief"
forms the defining words of the Elizabethan poor-law, while he also
lays stress on the importance of "correction," which, on the decline
and disappearance of the penitential system, assumed at the
Reformation a prominent position in administration in relation not
only to "sin," but also to offences against society, such as idleness,
&c.
On this foundation was built up the classification of acts of charity,
which in one shape or another has a long social tradition, and which St
Thomas quotes in an elaborated form--the seven spiritual acts
(_consule_, _carpe_, _doce_, _solare_, _remitte_, _fer_, _ora_),
counsel, sustain, teach, console, save, pardon, pray; and the seven
corporal (_vestio_, _poto_, _cibo_, _redimo_, _tego_, _colligo_,
_condo_) I clothe, I give drink to, I feed, I free from prison, I
shelter, I assist in sickness, I bury (II. II.^ae xxxii. 2). These in
subsequent thought became "good works," and availed for the after-life,
bringing with them definite boons. Thus charity was linked to the system
of indulgences. The bias of the act of charity is made to favour the
actor. Primarily the benefit reverts to him. He becomes conscious of an
ultimate reward accruing to himself. The simplicity of the deed, the
spontaneity from which, as in a well-practised art, its freshness
springs and its good effects result, is falsified at the outset. The
thought that should be wholly concerned in the fulfilment of a definite
purpose is diverted from it. The deed itself, apart from the outcome of
the deed, is highly considered. An extreme inducement is placed on
giving, counselling, and the like, but none on the personal or social
utility of the gift or counsel. Yet the value of these lies in their
end. No policy or science of charity can grow out of such a system. It
can produce innumerable isolated acts, which may or may not be
beneficent, but it cannot enkindle the "ordered charity." This charity
is, strictly speaking, by its very nature alike intellectual and
emotional. Otherwise it would inevitably fail of its purpose, for though
emotion might stimulate it, intelligence would not guide it.
There are, then, these three lines of thought. That of St Bernard, who
invigorated the monastic movement, and helped to make the monastery or
hospital the centre of charitable relief. That of St Francis, who,
passing by regular and secular clergy alike, revived and reinvigorated
the conception of charity and gave it once more the reality of a social
force, knowing that it would find a freer scope and larger usefulness in
the life of the people than in the religious aristocracy of monasteries.
And that of St Thomas Aquinas, who, analysing the problem of charity and
almsgiving, and associating it with definite groups of works, led to its
taking, in the common thought, certain stereotyped forms, so that its
social aim and purpose were ignored and its power for good was
neutralized.
Charity and social conditions in England.
We have now to turn to the conditions of social life in which these
thoughts fermented and took practical shape. The population of England
from the Conquest to the 14th century is estimated at between 1-1/2 and
2-1/2 millions. London, it is believed, had a population of about
40,000. Other towns were small. Two or three of the larger had 4000 or
5000 inhabitants. The only substantial building in a village, apart
perhaps from the manor-house, was the church, used for many secular as
well as religious purposes. In the towns the mud or wood-paved huts
sheltered a people who, accepting a common poverty, traded in little
more than the necessaries of life (Green, _Town Life in the 15th
Century_, i. 13). The population was stationary. Famine and pestilence
were of frequent occurrence (Creighton, _Epidemics in Britain_, p. 19),
and for the careless there was waste at harvest-time and want in winter.
Hunger was the drill-sergeant of society. Owing to the hardship and
penury of life infant mortality was probably very great (Blashill,
_Sutton in Holdernesse_, p. 123). The 15th century was, however, "the
golden age of the labourer." Our problem is to ascertain what was the
service of charity to this people till the end of that century. In order
to estimate this we have to apply tests similar to those we applied
before to Greece and Rome and the pre-medieval church.
_The Family._--Largely Germanic in its origin, we may perhaps set down
as elemental in the English race what Tacitus said of the Germans.
They had the home virtues. They had a high regard for chastity, and
respected and enforced the family tie. The wife was honoured. The men
were poor, but when the actual pressure of their work--fighting--was
removed, idle. They were born gamblers. Much toil fell upon the wife;
but slavery was rather a form of tenure than a Roman bondage. As
elsewhere, there was in England "the joint family or household"
(Pollock and Maitland, _English Law before Edward I._ i. 31). Each
member of the community was, or should be, under some lord; for the
lordless man was, like the wanderer in Homer, who belonged to no
phratry, suspected and dangerous, and his kinsfolk might be required
to find a lord for him. There was personal servitude, but it was not
of one complexion; there were grades amongst the unfree, and the
general advance to freedom was continuous. By the 9th century the
larger amount of the slavery was bondage by tenure. In the reign of
Edward I., though "the larger half of the rural population was
unfree," yet the serf, notwithstanding the fact that he was his lord's
chattel, was free against all save his lord. A century later (1381)
villenage--that is payment for tenancy by service, instead of by
quit-rent--was practically extinguished. So steady was the progress
towards the freedom and self-maintenance of the individual and his
family.
_The Manor._--In social importance, next to the family, comes the
manor, the organization of which affected charity greatly on one side.
It was "an economic unit," the estate of a lord on which there were
associated the lord with his demesne, tenants free of service, and
villeins and others, tenants by service. All had the use of land, even
the serf. The estate was regulated by a manor court, consisting of the
lord of the manor or his representative, and the free tenants, and
entrusted with wide quasi-domestic jurisdiction. The value of the
estate depended on the labour available for its cultivation, and the
cultivators were the unfree tenants. Hence the lord, through the
manor-court, required an indemnity or fine if a child, for instance,
left the manor; and similarly, if a villein died, his widow might have
to remarry or pay a fine. Thus the lord reacquired a servant and the
widow and her family were maintained. The courts, too, fixed prices,
and thus in local and limited conditions of supply and demand were
able to equalize them in a measure and neutralize some of the effects
of scarcity. In this way, till the reign of Edward I., and, where the
manor courts remained active, till much later, a self-supporting
social organization made any systematic public or charitable relief
unnecessary.
_The Parish and the Tithe._--The conversion of England in the 7th
century was effected by bishops, accompanied by itinerant priests, who
made use of conventual houses as the centres of their work. The
parochial system was not firmly established till the 10th century
(970). Then, by a law of Edgar, a man who had a church on his own land
was allowed to pay a third of his tithe to his own church, instead of
giving the whole of it to the minister or conventual church. Theodore,
archbishop of Canterbury (667), had introduced the Carolingian system
into England; and, accordingly, the parish priest was required to
provide for strangers and to keep a room in his house for them. Of the
tithe, a third and not a fourth was to go to the poor with any
surplus; and in order to have larger means of helping them, the
priests were urged to work themselves, according to the ancient canons
of the church (cf. Labbeus, IV. Conc. Carthag. A.D. 398). The
importance of the tithe to the poor is shown by acts of Richard II.
and Henry IV., by which it was enacted that, if parochial tithes were
appropriated to a monastery, a portion of them should be assigned to
the poor of the parish. At a very early date (1287) quasi-compulsory
charges in the nature of a rate were imposed on parishioners for
various church purposes (Pollock and Maitland, i. 604), though in the
14th and 15th centuries a compulsory church rate was seldom made.
Collections were made by paid collectors, especially for Hock-tide
(q.v.) money--gathered for church purposes (Brand's _Antiquities_,
p. 112). But there must have been many varieties in practice. In
Somersetshire the churchwardens' accounts (1349 to 1560) show that the
parish contributed nothing to the relief of the poor, and it seems
probable that the personal charities of the parishioners, and the
charities of the gild fellowships and of the parsonage house sufficed
(Bishop Hobhouse, _Churchwardens' Accounts, 1349-1560_, Somerset
Record Society). Many parishes possessed land, houses and cattle, and
received gifts and legacies of all kinds. The proceeds of this
property, if given for the use of the parish generally, might, if
necessary, be available for the relief of the poor, but, if given
definitely for their use, would provide doles, or stock cattle or
"poor's" lands, &c. (Cf. Augustus Jessopp, _Before the Great Pillage_,
p. 40; and many instances in the reports of the Charity Commissioners,
1818-1835.) Of the endowments for parish doles very many may have
disappeared in the break-up of the 16th century. There were also
"Parish Ales," the proceeds of which would be used for parish purposes
or for relief. Further, all the greater festivals were days of
feasting and the distribution of food; at funerals also there were
often large distributions, and also at marriages. The faithful
generally, subject to penance, were required to relieve the poor and
the stranger. In the larger part of England the parish and the vill
were usually coterminous. In the north a parish contained several
vills. There were thus side by side the charitable relief system of
the parish, which at an early date became a rating area, and the
self-supporting system of the manor.
_The Monasteries._--As Christianity spread monasteries spread, and
each monastery was a centre of relief. Sometimes they were
established, like St Albans (796), for a hundred Benedictine monks and
for the entertainment of strangers; or sometimes without any such
special purpose, like the abbey of Croyland (reorganized 946), which,
becoming exceeding rich from its _diversorium pauperum_, or almonry,
"relieved the whole country round so that prodigious numbers resorted
to it." At Glastonbury, for instance (1537), L140 16s. 8d. was given
away in doles. But documents seem to prove (Denton, _England in
Fifteenth Century_, p. 245) that the relief generally given by
monasteries was much less than is usually supposed.
The general system may be described (cf. Rule, _St Dunst. Cant.
Archp._ p. 42, Dugdale; J.B. Clark, _The Observances_, Augustinian
Priory, Barnwell; Abbot Gasquet, _English Monastic Life_). The almonry
was usually near the church of the monastery. An almoner was in
charge. He was to be prudent and discreet in the distribution of his
doles (_portiones_) and to relieve travellers, palmers, chaplains and
mendicants (_mendicantes_, apparently the beggars recognized as living
by begging, such as we have noted under other social conditions), and
the leprous more liberally than others. The old and infirm, lame and
blind who were confined to their beds he was to visit and relieve
suitably (_in competenti annona_). The importunity of the poor he was
to put up with, and to meet their need as far as he could. In the
almonry there were usually rooms for the sick. The sick outside the
precincts were relieved at the almoner's discretion. Continuous relief
might be given after consultation with the superior. All the remnants
of meals and the old clothes of the monks were given to the almoner
for distribution, and at Christmas he had a store of stockings and
other articles to give away as presents to widows, orphans and poor
clerks. He also provided the Maundy gifts and selected the poor for
the washing of feet. He was thus a local visitor and alms distributor,
not merely at the gate of the monastery but in the neighbourhood, and
had also at his disposal "indoor" relief for the sick. Separate from
the rest the house there was also a dormitory and rooms and the
kitchen for strangers. A _hospitularius_ attended to their needs and
novices waited on them. Guests who were laymen might stay on, working
in return for board and lodging (Smith's _Dict. Christian Antiq._,
"Benedictine").
The monasteries often established hospitals; they served also as
schools for the gentry and for the poor; and they were pioneers of
agriculture. In the 12th century, in which many monastic orders were
constituted, there were many lavish endowments. In the 14th century
their usefulness had begun to wane. At the end of that century the
larger estates were generally held in entail, with the result that
younger sons were put into religious houses. This worldliness had its
natural consequences. In the 15th century, owing to mismanagement,
waste, and subsequently to the decline of rural prosperity, their
resources were greatly crippled. In their relation to charity one or
two points may be noted: (1) Of the small population of England the
professed monks and nuns with the parish priests (Rogers, _Hist.
Agric. and Prices_, i. 58) numbered at least 30,000 or 40,000. This
number of celibates was a standing protest against the moral
sufficiency of the family life. On the other hand, amongst them were
the brothers and sisters who visited the poor and nursed the sick in
hospitals; and many who now succumb physically or mentally to the
pressure of life, and are cared for in institutions, may then have
found maintenance and a retreat in the monasteries. (2) Bound together
by no common controlling organization, the monasteries were but so
many miscellaneous centres of relief, chiefly casual relief. They were
mostly "magnificent hostelries." (3) They stood outside the parish,
and they weakened its organization and hampered its development.
_The Hospitals._--The revival of piety in the 11th century led to a
large increase in the number of hospitals and hospital orders. To show
how far they covered the field in England two instances may be quoted.
At Canterbury (Creighton, _Epidemics_, p. 87) there were four for
different purposes, two endowed by Lanfranc (1084), one for poor,
infirm, lame and blind men and women, and one outside the town for
lepers. These hospitals were put under the charge of a priory, and
endowed out of tithes payable to the secular clergy. Later (Henry
II.), a hospital for leprous sisters was established, and afterwards a
hospital for leprous monks and poor relations of the monks of St
Augustine's. In a less populous parish, Luton (Cobbe, _Luton Church_),
there were a hospital for the poor, an almshouse, and two hospitals,
one for the sick and one for the leprous. The word "leper," it is
evident, was used very loosely, and was applied to many diseases other
than leprosy. There were hospitals for the infirm and the leprous; the
disease was not considered contagious. The hospital in its modern
sense was but slowly created. Thus St Bartholomew's in London was
founded (1123) for a master, brethren and sisters, and for the
entertainment of poor diseased persons till they got well; of
distressed women big with child till they were able to go abroad; and
for the maintenance, until the age of seven, of all such children
whose mothers died in the house. St Thomas's (rebuilt 1228) had a
master and brethren and three lay sisters, and 40 beds for poor,
infirm and impotent people, who had also victual and firing. There
were hospitals for many special purposes--as for the blind, for
instance. There were also many hospital orders in England and on the
continent. They sprang up beside the monastic orders, and for a time
were very popular: brothers and sisters of the Holy Ghost (1198),
sisters of St Elizabeth (1207-1231), Beguines and Beghards (see
BEGUINES), knights of St John and others.
_The Mendicant Orders._--The Franciscans tended the sick and poor in
the slums of the towns with great devotion--indeed, the whole movement
tells of a splendid self-abandonment and an intensity of effort in the
early spring of its enthusiasm, and with the aid of reform councils
and reformations it lengthened out its usefulness for two centuries.
Medieval endowed charities.
As in the pre-medieval church, the system of relief is that of
charitable endowments--a marked contrast to the modern method of
voluntary associations or rate-supported institutions.
(1) _The Church as Legatee._--The church building among the Teutonic
races was not held by the bishop as part of what was originally the
charitable property of the church. It was assigned to the patron saint
of the church by the donor, who retained the right of administration,
of which his own patronage or right of presentation is a relic.
Subsequently, with the study of Roman law, the conception of the
church as a _persona ficta_ prevailed; and till the larger growth of
the gilds and corporations it was the only general legatee for
charitable gifts. As these arise a large number of charitable trusts
are created and held by lay corporations; and "alms" include gifts for
social as well as religious or eleemosynary purposes. (2) _Freedom
from Taxation and Service._--Gifts to the church for charitable or
other purposes were made in free, pure and perpetual alms ("_ad
tenendum in puram et perpetuam eleemosynam sine omni temporali
servicio et consuetudine_"). Land held under this _frankalmoigne_ was
given "in perpetual alms," therefore the donor could not retract it;
in free alms, therefore he could exact no services in regard to it;
and in pure alms as being free from secular jurisdiction (cf. Pollock
and Maitland). (3) _Alienation and Mortmain._--To prevent alienation
of property to religious houses, with the consequent loss of service
to the superior or chief lords, a licence from the chief lord was
required to legalize the alienation (Magna Carta, and Edw. I., _De
viris religiosis_). Other statutes (Edw. I. and Rich. II.) enacted
that this licence should be issued out of chancery after
investigation; and the principle was applied to civil corporations.
The necessity of this licence was one lay check on injurious
alienation. (4) _Irresponsible Administration._--Until after the 13th
century, when the lay courts had asserted their right to settle
disputes as to lands held in alms, the administration of charity was
from the lay point of view entirely irresponsible. It was outside the
secular jurisdiction; and civilly the professed clergy, who were the
administrators, were "dead." They could not sue or be sued except
through their sovereign--their chief, the abbot. They formed a large
body of non-civic inhabitants free from the pressure and the
responsibilities of civil life. (5) _Control_.--Apart from the control
of the abbot, prior, master or other head, the bishop was visitor, or,
as we should say, inspector; and abuses might be remedied by the visit
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 founder.
The founder and his family retained a right of intervention. Sometimes
thus an institution was reorganized, or even dissolved, the property
reverting to the founder (Dugdale, _Monasticon Anglicanum_, vi. 2.
715). (6) _Cy-pres._--Charities were, especially after Henry V.'s
reign, appropriated to other uses, either because their original
purpose failed or because some new object had become important. Thus,
for instance, a college or hospital for lepers (1363) is
re-established by the founder's family with a master and priest, _quod
nulli leprosi reperiebantur_; and a similar hospital founded in Henry
I.'s time near Oxford has decayed, and is given by Edward III. to
Oriel College, Oxford, to maintain a chaplain and poor brethren. Thus,
apart from alienation pure and simple, the principle of adaptation to
new uses was put in force at an early date, and supplied many
precedents to Wolsey, Edward VI. and the post-Reformation bishops. The
system of endowments was indeed far more adaptable than it would at
first sight seem to have been. (7) _The Sources of Income._--The
hospitals were chiefly supported by rents or the produce of land; or,
if attached to monasteries, out of the tithe of their monastic lands
or other sources of revenue, or out of the appropriated tithes of the
secular clergy; or they might be in part maintained by collections
made, for instance, by a commissioner duly authorized by a formal
attested document, in which were recounted the indulgences by popes,
archbishops and bishops to those who became its benefactors (Cobbe, p.
75); or, in the case of leper hospitals, by a leper with a "clapdish,"
who begged in the markets; or by a proctor, in the case of more
important institutions in towns, who "came with his box one day in
every month to the churches and other religious houses, at times of
service, and there received the voluntary gifts of the congregation";
or they might receive inmates on payment, and thus apparently a
frequent abuse, decayed servants of the court and others, were "farmed
out." (8) _Mode of Admission._--The admission was usually, no doubt,
regulated by the prior or master. At York, at the hospital of St
Nicholas for the leprous, the conditions of admission were: promise or
vow of continence, participation in prayer, the abandonment of all
business, the inmate's property at death to go to the house. This may
serve as an example. The master was usually one of the regular clergy.
(9) _Decline of the Hospitals._--It is said that, in addition to 645
monasteries and 90 "colleges" and many chantries, Henry VIII.
suppressed 110 hospitals (Speed's _Chronicle_, p. 778). The numbers
seem small. In the economic decline at the end of the 15th and
beginning of the 16th centuries many hospitals may have lapsed.
Gild and municipal charities.
In the 15th century the towns grew in importance. First the wool trade
and then the cloth trade flourished, and the English developed a large
shipping trade. The towns grew up like "little principalities"; and for
the advancement of trade, gilds, consisting alike of masters and
workmen, were formed, which endeavoured to regulate and then to
monopolize the market. By degrees the corporations of the towns were
worked in their interests, and the whole commercial system became
restrictive and inadaptable. Meanwhile the towns attracted newcomers;
freedom from feudal obligations was gained with comparative ease; and a
new _plebs_ was congregating, a population of inhabitants not qualified
as burghers or gild members, women, sons living with their fathers,
menial servants and apprentices. There was thus an increasing
restriction imposed on trade, coupled with a growing _plebs_. Naturally,
then, lay charities sprang up for members of gilds, and for burghers and
for the commonalty. Men left estates to their gilds to maintain decayed
members in hospitals, almshouses or otherwise, to educate their
children, portion their daughters, and to assist their widows. The
middle-class trader was thus in great measure insured against the risks
of life. The gilds were one sign of the new temper and wants of burghers
freed from feudalism. Another sign was a new standard of manners. Rules
and saws, Hesiodic in their tone, became popular--in regard, for
instance, to such a question as "how to enable a man to live on his
means, and to keep himself and those belonging to him." The boroughs
established other charities also, hospitals and almshouses for the
people, a movement which, like that of the gilds, began very early--in
Italy as early as the 9th century. They sometimes gave outdoor relief
also to registered poor (Green i. 41), and they had in large towns
courts of orphans presided over by the mayor and aldermen, thus taking
over a duty that previously had been one of conspicuous importance in
the church. As early as 1257 in Westphalian towns there was a
rough-and-ready system of Easter relief of the poor; and in Frankfort in
1437 there was a town council of almoners with a systematic programme of
relief (Ratzinger, p. 352). Thus at the close of the middle ages the
towns were gradually assuming what had been charitable functions of the
church.
Statutory wage control.
While a new freedom was being attained by the labourer in the country
and the burgher in the town, the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient
supply of labour for agriculture must have been constant, especially at
every visitation of plague and famine. In accordance with a general
policy of state regulation which was to control and supervise industry,
agriculture and poor relief and to repress vagrancy by gaols and houses
of correction, the state stepped in as arbiter and organizer. By
Statutes of Labourers beginning in 1351 (25 Edw. III. 135), it aimed at
enforcing a settled wage and restraining migration. From 1351 it
endeavoured to suppress mendicity, and in part to systematize it in the
interest of infirm and aged mendicants. Each series of enactments is the
natural complement of the other. In the main their signification, from
the point of view of charity, lies in the fact that they represent a
persistent endeavour to prevent social unsettlement and in part the
distress which unsettlement causes, and which vagrancy in some measure
indicates, by keeping the people within the ranks of recognized
dependence, the settled industry of the crafts and of agriculture, or
forcing them back into it by fear of the gaol or the stocks. The extreme
point of this policy was reached when by the laws of Edward VI. and
Elizabeth the "rogue, vagabond or sturdy beggar" was branded with an R
on the shoulder and handed over as a bondman for a period to any one who
would take him. On the other hand, it was desired that relief should be
a means of preventing migration. In any time of general pressure there
is a desire to organize mendicity, to prevent the wandering of beggars,
to create a kind of settled poor, distinguished from the rest as infirm
and not able-bodied, and to keep these at least at home sufficiently
supported by local and parochial relief; and this, in its simpler form
all the world over, has in the past been by response to public begging.
The argument may be summed up thus: We cannot have begging, which
implies that the beggar is cared for by no one, belongs to no one, and
therefore throws himself on the world at large. Therefore, if he is
able-bodied he must be punished as unsocial, for it is his 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, and therefore of no service to any one--if no
one will keep him--we must organize his mendicity, for such mendicity is
justified. If he cannot dig for the man to whom he does or should
belong, he must beg. Then out of the failure to organize mendicity--for
relief of itself is no remedy, least of all casual relief--a poor-law
springs up, which, afterwards associated with the provision of
employment, will, it is hoped, make relief in some measure remedial by
increasing its quantity by means of compulsory levies. This argument,
which combined statutory wage control and statutory poor relief, seems
to have been firmly bedded in the English legislative mind for more than
two centuries, from 1351 till after 1600; and until 1834 these two
series of laws effectually reduced the English labourer to a new
industrial dependence. To people imbued with ideas of feudalism the way
of escape from villenage seemed to be not independence, but a new
reversion to it.
The decadence.
Many elements produced the social and economic catastrophe of the 16th
century, for the condition into which the country fell can hardly be
considered less than a catastrophe. With the growing independence of the
people there was created after the 13th century an unsettled
"masterless" class, a residue of failure resulting from social changes,
whic
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