ABSTRACT
Poverty was an omnipresent social phenomenon in the medieval period; however, the poor have not left many traces in the sources. They were not a unifi ed group; on the contrary, they were heterogeneous and belonged to all social groups. Since the idea of poverty was to an extent a matter of perception, it is a relative concept. Urbanites, peasants, nobles and clerics are all mentioned as being poor in medieval sources. The poor were most visible in medieval urban society, which was far from static due to the large masses of people coming to cities and towns, carried by waves of colonisation and urbanisation.
