Poor Relief in Sixteenth Century England

The amount of charitable provision administered by the monasteries of the later Middle Ages has long received the attention of historians exploring pre-industrial social-welfare systems. Most nineteenth-century commentators remained skeptical about the value of monastic poor relief: The charity distributed by the monks . . . was to a great extent unorganized and indiscriminate and did nearly as much to increase beggars as to relieve them. No systematic study of monastic charity was carried out, however, until Savine’s analysis in 1909. Using the national Church tax assessment of 1535, known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus (hereinafter Valor), Savine calculated that the average proportion of monastic national gross income spent on poor relief was c. 2.5 percent -- a figure that remained influential on historiography until as recently as 1998. Among those who revised this interpretation, Harvey outlined the provision of the sixteenth-century Westminster Abbey where the monks distributed the large sum of £400 per annum -- about 10 percent of the Abbey’s gross income -- in various forms of relief to the poorer inhabitants of Westminster and London.