ABSTRACT
The problem of poverty relief and the Elizabethan system The story of social policy is largely the story of the means by which each modern society tackled and overcame factors within it which were overtly upsetting its equilibrium. The most obvious disequilibrium in any group is, of course, poverty itself. Societies vary in the degree of poverty (and sometimes of riches) that they can tolerate and are thus interested in the distribution of incomes and in the distribution of the resources of the community itself, but they always regard absolute destitution as something serious and something which constitutes a disequilibrium. 'The poor ye will have always with you' is sometimes quoted as representative of Christian teaching, but the context in which the phrase was used must not be overlooked, and it does not necessarily embody the persistence of a state of affairs in which poverty is regarded as good. It was coupled with the duty of giving alms to the poor and it was a suggestion that this duty would always be with us. The giving of alms to the poor was always regarded as a Christian duty, and though poverty might be present, it was always the duty of Christian people to do all that they could to relieve its hardships. 10
This duty was accepted by the Christian church, and the church in medieval times was frequently the custodian of considerable properties and funds for distribution to the poor. Some of the monastic orders, moreover, were bound by the rules of their order to aid the poor. It would be hard, however, to argue, as some text books have tried to do, that the monastic orders constituted a system of relief for the poor which was eliminated by the dissolution of the monasteries. Without going as far as Richard Burn, who called this belief 'a vulgar error', it is not difficult to imagine that among the unreformed monasteries there would have been considerable variation in the degree of responsibility which they brought to the interpretation of their duty. Some would have taken the task seriously but others could have fallen into the group that Burn castigated in the following words :
They were great inns. They entertained those bountifully, who could be bountiful to them again. The poor received scraps at their gates, and other donations sometimes; this was not the chief provision for the poor even in those days.
