ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Welfare Provision in Castile and Madrid. In order to gain a clear understanding of pauperism and how it was dealt with in the 18th and 19th centuries in Castile, it seems essential to start from the social and institutional fundamentals and the mentalites on which these historical realities were based, which in the present case were medieval. Poverty was religiously extolled in medieval culture as a sign of the solemnization of the poor in the figure of 'Christ the Poor', as an expression of God and the holiness of poverty, as a virtue and soteriological instrument in Catholic theology and morals. The lax moral attitude in marriage amongst the privileged in the Ancien Régime explains why a discrete solution was found for illegitimate children, as well as a remedy to the practice of infanticide, which was not found as repulsive as it was in later middle-class times.
