ABSTRACT
In Portugal, an overview of the state of poor relief institutions under the tutelage of the Board of Conscience and Orders in the early nineteenth century may be gleaned from the official letter that this tribunal sent to the government secretary Alexandre Jos Ferreira Castelo, in response to a request he had made on 23 November 1811. The Board of Conscience and Orders was revealing vestiges of a world that it characterised as decayed and moribund. The chapter deals with the challenges that track the institutionalisation of poor relief in early modern Portugal. In Portugal, the link between prisons and charity led to a highly regulated environment with well-defined prescriptive principles, which sometimes complemented the existing penal and legal system and sometimes clashed with it. The involvement of the misericrdias in prisons has left a wealth of information on that world that has not yet been afforded its true importance.
