ABSTRACT
A story about Oscar Wilde at Oxford, told in variant versions all doubtless equally apocryphal, has him being orally examined in Divinity by the famous W. H. Spooner. Of course, from the 1530s onwards the parish had figured largely in many of the various projects, experiments, and enactments of the royal Council, of Parliament, and of major civic authorities for the support of the deserving poor and the deterrence of able-bodied scroungers. In 1598 the government was not responding to long-term trends in parish history or the economic conjoncture but to recent rebellions and impending famines and epidemics. The early modern history of parochial poor relief thus needs modification in several ways that are significant for the medievalist. For the sixteenth century, calculation of the relative proportions of the different ‘sectors’ is hard enough, even though at a certain point Slack can see the poor rate surpassing testamentary benefactions in volume.
