ABSTRACT
It has been more than half a century since Brian Tierney delivered four lectures on medieval poor law to the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, which three years later became the basis of his landmark book, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its Application in England.1 In Medieval Poor Law Tierney established the care of the poor as an integral part of medieval canon law under the purview of the Church. He described the functioning of social welfare institutions beset by appropriations of their resources by laymen and monasteries.
