ABSTRACT
This chapter considers only cathedral and collegiate almsrooms in the gift of the crown. It examines the points of connection and disjunction between the founding intentions of charity, the charity administrators, and their beneficiaries. Henry ordained that the almsmen were to be poor men pressed down by want and afflicted with poverty, wounded and maimed in war, or worn down with age, or otherwise weakened and reduced to poverty and wretchedness. Being granted a patent of a place was by no means the end of the process for the would-be almsman. The rewards garnered by almsmen were not necessarily commensurate with the efforts required to secure them. In 1898 John Hammerton, formerly a colour sergeant in the Worcestershire regiment, was admitted as a bedesmen at Worcester. If deans and chapters disrupted Henrician expectations about the likely beneficiaries of cathedral charities, almsmen in their turn could contradict expectations about their behaviour once in post.
