Part 65

"It has been often said and often denied that the monasteries supplied the want which the poor law, two generations after the dissolution of these bodies, enforced. That the monasteries were renowned for their almsgiving is certain. The duty of aiding the needy was universal. Themselves the creatures of charity, they could not deny to others that on which they subsisted. … {2563} It is possible that these institutions created the mendicancy which they relieved, but it cannot be doubted that they assisted much which needed their help. The guilds which existed in the towns were also found in the country villages. … They were convenient instruments for charity before the establishment of a poor law, and they employed no inconsiderable part of their revenues, collected from subscriptions and from lands and tenements, in relieving the indigent and treating poor strangers hospitably. … Before the dissolution of the monasteries, but when this issue was fairly in view, in 1536, an attempt was made to secure some legal provision for destitution. The Act of this year provides that the authorities in the cities and boroughs should collect alms on Sundays and holy days, that the ministers should on all occasions, public and private, stir up the people to contribute to a common fund, that the custom of giving doles by private persons should be forbidden under penalty, and that the church-wardens should distribute the alms when collected. The Act, however, is strictly limited to free gifts, and the obligations of monasteries, almshouses, hospitals, and brotherhoods are expressly maintained. … There was a considerable party in England which was willing enough to see the monasteries destroyed, root and branch, and one of the most obvious means by which this result could be attained would be to allege that all which could be needed for the relief of destitution would be derived from the voluntary offerings of those who contributed so handsomely to the maintenance of indolent and dissolute friars. The public was reconciled to the Dissolution by the promise made that the monastic estates should not be converted to the king's private use, but be devoted towards the maintenance of a military force, and that therefore no more demands should be made on the nation for subsidies and aids. Similarly when the guild lands and chantry lands were confiscated at the beginning of Edward's reign, a promise was made that the estates of these foundations should be devoted to good and proper uses, for erecting grammar schools, for the further augmentation of the universities, and the better provision for the poor and needy. They were swept into the hands of Seymour and Somerset, of the Dudleys and Cecils, and the rest of the crew who surrounded the throne of Edward. It cannot, therefore, I think, be doubted that this violent change of ownership, apart from any considerations of previous practice in these several institutions, must have aggravated whatever evils already existed. … The guardians of Edward attempted, in a savage statute passed in the first year of his reign, to restrain pauperism and vagabondage by reducing the landless and destitute poor to slavery, by branding them, and making them work in chains. The Act, however, only endured for two years. In the last year of Edward's reign two collectors were to be appointed in every parish, who were to wait on every person of substance and inquire what sums he will give weekly to the relief of the poor. The promises are to be entered in a book, and the collectors were authorized to employ the poor in such work as they could perform, paying them from the fund. Those who refused to aid were to be first exhorted by the ministers and church wardens, and if they continued obstinate were to be denounced to the bishop, who is to remonstrate with such uncharitable folk. … In the beginning of Elizabeth's reign (5, cap. 3) the unwilling giver, after being exhorted by the bishop, is to be bound to appear before the justices, in quarter sessions, where, if he be still obdurate to exhortation, the justices are empowered to tax him in a weekly sum, and commit him to prison till he pays. … There was only a step from the process under which a reluctant subscriber to the poor law was assessed by the justices and imprisoned on refusal, to the assessment of all property under the celebrated Act of 43 Elizabeth [1601], cap. 3. The law had provided for the regular appointment of assessors for the levy of rates, for supplying work to the able-bodied, for giving relief to the infirm and old, and for binding apprentices. It now consolidates the experience of the whole reign, defines the kind of property on which the rate is to be levied, prescribes the manner in which the assessors shall be appointed, and inflicts penalties on parties who infringe its provisions. It is singular that the Act was only temporary. It was, by the last clause, only to continue to the end of the next session of parliament. It was, however, renewed, and finally made perpetual by 16 Car. I., cap. 4. The economical history of labour in England is henceforward intimately associated with this remarkable Act. … The Act was to be tentative, indeed, but in its general principles it lasted till 1835. … The effect of poor law relief on the wages of labour was to keep them hopelessly low, to hinder a rise even under the most urgent circumstances."

_J. E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, chapter 15 (volume 2)._

"In February 1834 was published perhaps the most remarkable and startling document to be found in the whole range of English, perhaps, indeed, of all, social history. It was the Report upon the administration and practical operation of the Poor Laws by the Commissioners who had been appointed to investigate the subject. … It was their rare good fortune not only to lay bare the existence of abuses and trace them to their roots, but also to propound and enforce the remedies by which they might be cured."

_T. W. Fowle, The Poor Law, chapter 4._

"The poor-rate had become public spoil. The ignorant believed it an inexhaustible fund which belonged to them. To obtain their share, the brutal bullied the administrators, the profligate exhibited their bastards which must be fed, the idle folded their arms and waited till they got it; ignorant boys and girls married upon it; poachers, thieves, and prostitutes extorted it by intimidation; country justices lavished it for popularity, and guardians for convenience. This was the way the fund went. As for whence it arose—it came, more and more every year, out of the capital of the shopkeeper and the farmer, and the diminishing resources of the country gentleman. … Instead of the proper number of labourers to till his lands—labourers paid by himself—the farmer was compelled to take double the number, whose wages were paid partly out of the rates; and these men, being employed by compulsion on him, were beyond his control—worked or not as they chose —let down the quality of his land, and disabled him from employing the better men who would have toiled hard for independence. These better men sank down among the worse; the rate-paying cottager, after a vain struggle, went to the pay-table to seek relief; the modest girl might starve, while her bolder neighbour received 1s. 6d. per week for every illegitimate child. {2564} Industry, probity, purity, prudence– all heart and spirit—the whole soul of goodness —were melting down into depravity and social ruin, like snow under the foul internal fires which precede the earthquake. There were clergymen in the commission, as well as politicians and economists; and they took these things to heart, and laboured diligently to frame suggestions for a measure which should heal and recreate the moral spirit as well as the economical condition of society in England. To thoughtful observers it is clear that the … grave aristocratic error … of confounding in one all ranks below a certain level of wealth was at the bottom of much poor-law abuse, as it has been of the opposition to its amendment. … Except the distinction between sovereign and subject, there is no social difference in England so wide as that between the independent labourer and the pauper; and it is equally ignorant, immoral, and impolitic to confound the two. This truth was so apparent to the commissioners, and they conveyed it so fully to the framers of the new poor-law, that it forms the very foundation of the measure. … Enlightened by a prodigious accumulation of evidence, the commissioners offered their suggestions to government; and a bill to amend the poor-law was prepared and proposed to the consideration of parliament early in 1834. … If one main object of the reform was to encourage industry, it was clearly desirable to remove the impediments to the circulation of labour. Settlement by hiring and service was to exist no longer; labour could freely enter any parish where it was wanted, and leave it for another parish which might, in its turn, want hands. In observance of the great principle that the independent labourer was not to be sacrificed to the pauper, all administration of relief to the able-bodied at their own homes was to be discontinued as soon as possible; and the allowance system was put an end to entirely. … Henceforth, the indigent must come into the workhouse for relief, if he must have it. … The able-bodied should work—should do a certain amount of work for every meal. They might go out after the expiration of twenty-four hours; but while in the house they must work. The men, women, and children must be separated; and the able-bodied and infirm. … In order to a complete and economical classification in the workhouses, and for other obvious reasons, the new act provided for unions of parishes. … To afford the necessary control over such a system … a central board was indispensable, by whose orders, and through whose assistant-commissioners, everything was to be arranged, and to whom all appeals were to be directed. … Of the changes proposed by the new law, none was more important to morals than that which threw the charge of the maintenance of illegitimate children upon the mother. … The decrease of illegitimate births was what many called wonderful, but only what the framers of the law had anticipated from the removal of direct pecuniary inducement to profligacy, and from the awakening of proper care in parents of daughters, and of reflection in the women themselves. … On the 14th of August 1834, the royal assent was given to the Poor–law Amendment Act, amidst prognostications of utter failure from the timid, and some misgivings among those who were most confident of the absolute necessity of the measure. … Before two years were out, wages were rising and rates were falling in the whole series of country parishes; farmers were employing more labourers; surplus labour was absorbed; bullying paupers were transformed into steady working-men; the decrease of illegitimate births, chargeable to the parish, throughout England, was nearly 10,000, or nearly 13 per cent.; … and, finally, the rates, which had risen nearly a million in their annual amount during the five years before the poor-law commission was issued, sank down, in the course of the five years after it, from being upwards of seven millions to very little above four."

_H. Martineau, A History of the Thirty Years Peace, book 4, chapter 7 (volume 2)._

In 1838 the Act was extended to Ireland, and in 1845 to Scotland.

_T. W. Fowle, The Poor Law, chapter 4._

"The new Poor Law was passed by Parliament in 1834; and the oversight of its administration was placed in the hands of a special board of commissioners, then known as the Central Poor Law Board. This board, which was not represented in Parliament, was continued until 1847. In that year it was reconstructed and placed under the presidency of a minister with a seat in the House of Commons—a reconstruction putting it on a political level with the Home Office and the other important Government Departments at Whitehall. The Department was henceforward known as the Poor Law Board, and continued to be so named until 1871, when there was another reconstruction. This time the Poor Law Board took over from the Home Office various duties in respect of municipal government and public health, and from the Privy Council the oversight of the administration of the vaccination laws and other powers, and its title was changed to that of the Local Government Board. Since then hardly a session of Parliament has passed in which its duties and responsibilities have not been added to, until at the present time the Local Government Board is more directly in touch with the people of England and Wales than any other Government Department. There is not a village in the land which its inspectors do not visit or to which the official communications of the Board are not addressed."

_E. Porritt, The Englishman at Home, chapter 2._

ALSO IN: _Sir G. Nicholls, History of the English Poor-Law._

_F. Peek, Social Wreckage._

POOR MEN OF LYONS. POOR MEN OF LOMBARDY.

See WALDENSES.

POOR PRIESTS OF LOLLARDY, The.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1360-1414.

POPE, General John. Capture of New Madrid and Island Number Ten.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1862 (MARCH-APRIL: ON THE .MISSISSIPPI).

Command of the Army of the Mississippi.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1862 (APRIL-MAY: TENNESSEE-MISSISSIPPI).

Virginia campaign.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1862 (JULY-AUGUST: VIRGINIA); (AUGUST: VIRGINIA); and (AUGUST-SEPTEMBER: VIRGINIA).

POPE, The.

See PAPACY.

POPHAM COLONY, The.

See MAINE: A. D. 1607-1608.

POPISH PLOT, The.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1678-1679.

POPOL VUH, The.

See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: QUICHES.

{2565}

POPOLOCAS, The.

See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: CHONTALS.

POPULARES.

See OPTIMATES.

PORNOCRACY AT ROME.

See ROME: A. D. 903-964.

PORT GIBSON, Battle of.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1863 (APRIL-JULY: ON THE MISSISSIPPI).

PORT HUDSON, Siege and capture of.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1863 (MAY-JULY: ON THE MISSISSIPPI).

PORT JACKSON: A. D. 1770-1788. The discovery. The naming. The first settlement.

See AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1601-1800.

PORT MAHON.

See MINORCA.

PORT PHILLIP DISTRICT.

See AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1800-1840, and 1839-1855.

PORT REPUBLIC, Battle of.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1862 MAY-JUNE: VIRGINIA).

PORT ROYAL: Start--------

PORT ROYAL, The Jansenists: A. D. 1602-1660. The monastery under Mère Angelique and the hermits of the Port Royal Valley. Their acceptance of the doctrines of Jansenius. Their conflict with the Jesuits.

"The monastery of Port Royal … was founded in the beginning of the 13th century, in the reign of Philip Augustus; and a later tradition claimed this magnificent monarch as the author of its foundation and of its name. … But this is the story of a time when, as it has been said, 'royal founders were in fashion.' More truly, the name is considered to be derived from the general designation of the fief or district in which the valley lies, Porrois—which, again, is supposed to be a corruption of Porra or Borra, meaning a marshy and woody hollow. The valley of Port Royal presents to this day the same natural features which attracted the eye of the devout solitary in the seventeenth century. … It lies about eighteen miles west of Paris, and seven or eight from Versailles, on the road to Chevreuse. … The monastery was founded, not by Philip Augustus, but by Matthieu, first Lord of Marli, a younger son of the noble house of Montmorency. Having formed the design of accompanying the crusade proclaimed by Innocent III. to the Holy Land, he left at the disposal of his wife, Mathilde de Garlande, and his kinsman, the Bishop of Paris, a sum of money to devote to some pious work in his absence. They agreed to apply it to the erection of a monastery for nuns in this secluded valley, that had already acquired a reputation for sanctity in connection with the old chapel dedicated to St. Lawrence, which attracted large numbers of worshippers. The foundations of the church and monastery were laid in 1204. They were designed by the same architect who built the Cathedral of Amiens, and ere long the graceful and beautiful structures were seen rising in the wilderness. The nuns belonged to the Cistercian order. Their dress was white woollen, with a black veil; but afterwards they adopted as their distinctive badge a large scarlet cross on their white scapulary, as the symbol of the 'Institute of the Holy Sacrament.' The abbey underwent the usual history of such institutions. Distinguished at first by the strictness of its discipline and the piety of its inmates, it became gradually corrupted with increasing wealth, till, in the end of the sixteenth century, it had grown notorious for gross and scandalous abuses. … But at length its revival arose out of one of the most obvious abuses connected with it. The patronage of the institution, like that of others, had been distributed without any regard to the fitness of the occupants, even to girls of immature age. In this manner the abbey of Port Royal accidentally fell to the lot of one who was destined by her ardent piety to breathe a new life into it, and by her indomitable and lofty genius to give it an undying reputation. Jacqueline Marie Arnauld—better known by her official name, La Mère Angélique—was appointed abbess of Port Royal when she was only eight years of age. She was descended from a distinguished family belonging originally to the old noblesse of Provence, but which had migrated to Auvergne and settled there. Of vigorous healthiness, both mental and physical, the Arnaulds had already acquired a merited position and name in the annals of France. In the beginning of the sixteenth century it found its way to Paris in the person of Antoine Arnauld, Seigneur de la Mothe, the grandfather of the heroine of Port Royal. … Antoine Arnauld married the youthful daughter of M. Marion, the Avocat-general. … The couple had twenty children, and felt, as may be imagined, the pressure of providing for so many. Out of this pressure came the remarkable lot of two of the daughters. The benefices of the Church were a fruitful field of provision, and the avocat-general, the maternal grandfather of the children, had large ecclesiastical influence. The result was the appointment not only of one daughter to the abbey of Port Royal, but also of a younger sister, Agnes, only six years of age, to the abbey of St Cyr, about six miles distant from Port Royal. … At the age of eleven, in the year 1602, Angélique was installed Abbess of Port Royal. Her sister took the veil at the age of seven. … The remarkable story of Angélique's conversion by the preaching of a Capucin friar in 1608, her strange contest with her parents which followed, the strengthening impulses in different directions which her religious life received, first from the famous St Francis de Sales, and finally, and especially, from the no less remarkable Abbé de St Cyran, all belong to the history of Port Royal."

_J. Tulloch, Pascal, chapter 4._