ABSTRACT
This chapter decribes throughout the early modern Europe migrant workers were essential to the craft economy. In southern Germany, young men and women from rural areas provided crucial temporary and seasonal labour in the markets, households and workshops of nearby cities and towns. During the mid-sixteenth century, southern Germany began to experience repeated waves of famine and epidemic disease, along with frightening economic depression, mass impoverishment and rural landlessness. Ulm, a free imperial city in the region, had grown rich on long-distance trade in textiles during the late Middle Ages, but fell into a decline in sixteenth century as the regional economy faltered. Ulm's first comprehensive poor law dates from before the Reformation, but as the city moved towards adopting Protestant worship, its regulations gradually came to resemble the Lutheran ordinance from Wittenberg. By the time the city formally joined the Protestant camp, its treatment of the poor adhered closely to the Lutheran model adopted by other south German city-states.
