ABSTRACT
Today on my way to work I was accosted by a beggar, then another and another. This is the year 2003, in a wealthy town in a wealthy country with low unemployment. When I was growing up I never saw a beggar, just the occasional traveller or 'man of the road', and if they begged from people then they did so unobtrusively and non-aggressively. It appears in fact as though, over the last thousand years or more, western Europe has been free of beggars only for a few decades, from about 1950 to about 1980, maybe an even shorter period. Now they are everywhere again, in the towns and cities of rich countries as well as poor, though not in such great numbers as our predecessors knew. Our personal and social responses to beggars today are replaying some of the arguments and discussions of people in every early modern Christian society where beggary was a universal fact of life, though today we discuss the issues largely without the Christian dimension any longer.
