Paul Vallely

Sources are credited in full on their first mention, with hyperlinks where available. Thereafter only an abbreviated source line is given.

Chapter  3

Chapter  4

Chapter 5

Chapter 3:

Medieval Charity

(pages 79–124)

1. Peterborough Chronicle, Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, AD1137, ed J. A. Giles, London, 1914, p. 202.
2. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Diana Greenway, Oxford, 2002, p. 108.
3. Peter Hopewell, St Cross, England’s Oldest Almshouse, Chichester, 1995, p.3.
4. Quotation from the lawyers of Bishop William of Wycombe during a protracted lawsuit between 1367 and 1374 over alleged financial mismanagement by the master of the hospital. Quoted in John Crook, The Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty, Winchester, 2011, p. 3.
5. Hopewell, St Cross, p. 4.
6. Hopewell, St Cross, p. 23.
7. Edward L. Cutts, Parish Priests and their People in the Middle Ages in England, London, 1898, p. 49.
8. ibid, p. 78.
9. ibid, p. 71.
10. A. E. Redgate, Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 800–1066, Abingdon, 2014, p. 106.
11. Anthony Smart, ‘Archbishop Wulfstan and the importance of paying God his dues’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 2016, Volume 16, Issue 1, pp. 24–41.
12. William A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity, University of California Press, 1970, p. 244.
13. Smart, ‘Archbishop Wulfstan’.
14. Redgate, Religion, Politics and Society’, p. 106.
15. Cutts, Parish Priests, 79.
16. ibid, p. 74.
17. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400 to 1700, Oxford, 1985, p. 144.
18. Cutts, Parish Priests, p. 92.
19. ibid, p. 94.
20. Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Application in England, Berkeley, CA, 1959, p. 71.
21. Cutts, Parish Priests, 93.
22. Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313–450), Oxford, 2006, pp. 91, 95, 99.
23. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 68.
24. Gratian, Distinctio, I: xlii.
25. Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge, Cambridge, 2002, p. 1.
26. Mario Conti, Kevin O’Gorman and David McAlpine, ‘Hospitality in necessitudine: hospices, hostels and hospitals’, Hospitality Review, 10 (2), 2008, pp. 28–35.
27. F. P. Retief and L. Cilliers, ‘The evolution of hospitals from antiquity to Renaissance’, Acta Theologica Supplementum 7, 2005 pp. 213–33; Roy Porter, Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine, London, 2003; Vivian Nutton, ‘Medicine in medieval Western Europe’, in Lawrence Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition 800 BC to AD 1800, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 139–98, quoted in Conti, O’Gorman and McAlpine, ‘Hospitality in necessitudine’.
28. Norman Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, London, 1990.
29. Brian Pullan, ‘New approaches to poverty and new forms of institutional charity in late medieval and Renaissance Italy’, Poverta e innovazioni istituzionali in Italia – dal medioevo ad oggi, ed. Vera Zamagni, Bologna, 2007. Note: lazzaretto is the Italian spelling; in English it is usually rendered lazaretto.
30. John Henderson and Katherine Park, ‘The first hospital among Christians: the Ospedale degli Santa Maria Nova in early 16th-century Florence’, Medical History, 35, 1991, pp. 164–88.
31. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, London, 1997, p. 198.
32. Kevin O’Gorman and Ewan MacPhee, ‘The legacy of monastic hospitality: 2 The lasting influence’, The Hospitality Review 8 (4) 2006, pp. 16–25; Guenter B. Risse, Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals, New York, 1999, pp. 293–308.
33. Conti, O’Gorma, McAlpine, ‘Hospitality in necessitudine’, pp. 28–35.
34. Amy Singer, Charity in Islamic Societies, Cambridge, 2008, p. 219.
35. The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa D. 1325–1354, vol. I, ed. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, trans. H. A. R. Gibb, London, 2002, p. 48.
36. Quoted in Singer, Charity, p. 68.
37. Amy Singer, ‘Giving practices in Islamic societies’, Social Research Quarterly, 80:2, Summer 2013, p. 352.
38. ibid, p. 351.
39. ibid, p. 343.
40. ibid, p. 354.
41. Singer, Charity, p. 91.
42. ibid, pp. 48–9.
43. Singer, ‘Giving practices’, p. 342.
44. Singer, Charity, pp. 57–62.
45. Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, Princeton, NJ, 2005, p. 8.
46. ibid, p. 33.
47. Cohen’s translation of an old rabbinic idiom, yarad mi-nekhasav; ibid, pp. 37–9.
48. Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. A. Kolakowska, Oxford, 1994, pp. 21, 52. Geremek spoke of the ‘marginals’– people who are described in contemporary documents as being ‘of no use to anyone’ or ‘of no fixed abode’, who are not totally excluded from society but lived by transgressing its established standards. Bronislaw Geremek The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, trans. Jean Birrell, Cambridge, 1987, p. ix.
49. All quotes from Maimonides are taken from Hilchot Matanot Aniyim (Laws about Giving to Poor People), Chapter 10:1–14, trans. Eliyahu Touger, www. chabad. org.
50. Genesis 18:19: ‘I have known him, because he commands his children . . . to perform charity’, and Isaiah 54:14: ‘I have known him, because he commands his children . . . to perform charity.’
51. Isaiah 1:27: ‘You shall be established through righteousness.’  Israel will be redeemed solely through charity, he asserts, again quoting Isaiah: ‘Zion will be redeemed through judgement and those who return to her through charity.’
52. Deuteronomy 13:18: ‘And He shall grant you mercy and shower mercy upon you and multiply you.’
53. Isaiah 32:17.
54. ibid.
55. An interesting contemporary reflection on these can be found in Julie Salamon, Rambam’s Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and why it is Necessary to Give, New York, 2003.
56. Hilchot Matanot Aniyim (Laws about Giving to Poor People), Chapter 10:4. Maimonides quotes Job 30:25 and 29:13 in support.
57. ibid, 10:5: ‘If a poor person asks one for a donation and he has nothing to give him, he should conciliate him with words. It is forbidden to scold a poor person or to raise one’s voice against him while shouting, because his heart is broken and crushed, and [Psalms 51:19] states: ‘God will not scorn a broken and crushed heart.’ Woe unto he who shames the poor, woe be he! Instead, one should be like a father to him, both in mercies and in words, as [Job 29:16] states: “I am a father to the destitute.”’
58. ibid, 10:13.
59. ibid, 10:12.
60. ibid, 10:11.
61. ibid, 10:10.
62. ibid, 10:9.
63. ibid, 10:8.
64. ibid.
65. ibid, 10:7.
66. Derek J. Penslar, ‘The origins of modern Jewish philanthropy’, Philanthropy in the World’s Traditions, ed. Warren Ilchman, Stanley Katz and Edward Queen, Bloomington, IN, 1998, p. 198.
67. Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, Cambridge, 2002.
68. Quoted in Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 6.
69. ibid, 64.
70. ibid and Brian Tierney, ‘The Decretists and the “Deserving Poor”’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 1, 1958–9, pp. 360–73.
71. Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 7.
72. Tierney, Decretists, p. 361.
73. Suzanne Roberts, ‘Context of charity in the Middle Ages – religious, social, and civic’, in Giving: Western Ideas of Philanthropy, ed J. B. Schneewind, Bloomington, IN, 1996, p. 30.
74. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, pp. 24–44.
75. Rubin, Charity and Community, p. 59.
76. Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 44.
77. Spencer E. Young, Scholarly Community at the Early University of Paris: Theologians, Education and Society, 1215–1248, Cambridge, 2014, p. 165.
78. Innocent III, Libellus de eleemosyna, PL 217, pp. 752–62, quoted in James Brodman, Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe, Washington DC, 2009, p. 23.
79. Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 44.
80. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 38.
81. Rubin, Charity and Community, p. 48.
82. The two Dominicans are mentioned in Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 44.
83. Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Francis Morgan, Oxford, 1994, p. 175, quoted in Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 45.
84. Quoted in ibid, p. 51.
85. Alexander Murray, Reason and Society, Oxford, 1978, pp. 317–41, Appendix 1, pp. 405–12; André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 157, 173–84, table 6, p. 184, and table 8, p. 186, quoted in Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 51.
86. Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, p. 125, quoted in Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 46.
87. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. 3, ch. 133, vol. 3, p. 140, quoted in Wood Medieval Economic Thought, p. 46.
88. Geremek, Poverty, p. 29.
89. Bernard, De consideratione, trans. George Lewis, Oxford, 1908, bk. 2, ch. 6, p. 47, quoted in Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 50.
90. Aquinas, Summa theologica, I-II q. 64, Second and Revised Edition, 1920, English Dominican Province, Online Edition.
91. Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, p. 153, quoted in Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 51.
92. Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, p. 173, quoted in Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 42.
93. Gratian, Decretum, D47, C8, quoted in Rubin, Charity and Community, p. 60.
94. Aquinas, Summa theologica, II-II 32,5; also 11-11 66,7, quoted in Stephen J. Pope, ‘Aquinas on almsgiving, justice and charity: an interpretation and reassessment’, The Heythrop Journal, XXXII, 1991, pp. 167–91. All following quotes from Aquinas are taken from the Summa theologica as quoted by Pope unless otherwise stated.
95. Aquinas II-II 32,5.
96. ibid, II-II 66,6 ad 1; II-II 66,7; I-II 105,2 ad l.
97. ibid, II-II 66,7, summarized in Pope, ‘Aquinas on almsgiving’.
98. ibid, II-II 87,4 ad 4.
99. ibid, II-II 2. 5c.
100. ibid, II-II 32. 6c.
101. ibid, II-II 117. 2c.
102. ibid, I-II 64,1 ad 3.
103. ibid, II-II 30,l; also I-II 117,5 ad 3.
104. ibid, II-II 3l,3 ad 1; II-II 71,1 ad 1.
105. ibid, I-II 58,2.
106. ibid, I-II 105.
107. Anne M. Scott, Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France, Abingdon, 2012, p. 6; Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 55, and Tierney, Decretists, p. 362.
108. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 53.
109. ibid, pp. 55–6, 68.
110. Geremek, Poverty, p. 26.
111. Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 7.
112. G. M. Trevelyan, History of England, London, 1973, p. 218; also Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, p. 58.
113. Bernadette Paton, Preaching Friars and the Civic Ethos: Siena, 1380 to 1480, London, 1992, p. 203.
114. Geremek, Poverty, 49.
115. Brodman, Charity and Religion, p. 29.
116. Tierney, Decretists, p. 364.
117. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, pp. 57, 150.
118. D. G. Shaw, The Creation of a Community: The City of Wells in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1993, p. 228.
119. Rubin, Charity and Community, p. 69.
120. Tierney, Decretists, pp. 363–4; Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, pp. 58–9.
121. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, 61.
122. ibid, 62.
123. Tierney, Decretists, p. 367.
124. Brodman, Charity and Religion, p. 29.
125. Tierney, Decretists, p. 366.
126. Aquinas also includes ‘buffoons and flatterers’. II-II 19,2 ad 21.
127. Tierney, Decretists, p. 369.
128. Quoted in Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 27.
129. Quoted in Gratian, Decretum, C12, qI, c2.
130. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 37, quoting the Decretum and its Glossa Ordinaria.
131. ibid.
132. Aquinas I 93,1, quoting Augustine QQ. 83, qu. 74, and Genesis 1:26.
133. Aquinas II-II 32,1.
134. ibid, II-II 23,1; 23,5; 25,1; 26,2; 184,3.
135. Frederic William Maitland, Roman Canon Law in the Church of England, London, 1898, p. 100.
136. Aquinas I-II 114,4 ad 3, quoting Paul, I Corinthians 13:4.
137. Aquinas II-II 183. 2.
138. In correspondence with the author, February 2019.
139. Aquinas II-II 25,6; II-II 78,1, paraphrased in Pope, ‘Aquinas on almsgiving’.
140. Aquinas I 92,1.
141. ibid, II-II 189,9.
142. ibid, II-II 64,2.
143. ibid, II-II 65,1 and 64,2.
144. ibid, I-II 94,5; II-II 27,3.
145. ibid, II-II ,66,2 and 3, quoting St Basil from his Homilies on Luke 12:18: ‘Why are you rich while another is poor unless it be that you may have the merit of good stewardship, and he the reward of patience?’
146. ibid, II-II: 7,2; 24,4–9.
147. ibid, II-II, 58,3.
148. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 51.
149. Pope, ‘Aquinas on almsgiving’, p. 169, citing Aquinas II-II, 32,3, and quoting Kenneth E. Kirk, The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Bonum Summum, New York, 1931, p. 157.
150. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 25.
151. ibid, p. 46.
152. Rubin, Charity and Community, p. 2.
153. Glossa Ordinaria as Sext. C Iq. w. C. II.
154. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, 62.
155. ibid, p. 133.
156. ibid, p. 62.
157. Pope, ‘Aquinas on almsgiving’, p. 169.
158. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 12.
159. Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, London, 1979.

The interview with Naser Haghamed was conducted 25 October 2019

Chapter 4:

How the Black Death Changed Everything

(pages 125–168)

1. Registrum Epistolarum Johannes Peckham Archepiscopi Cantuariensis, ed. C. T. Martin, Rolls Series, 1882 to 1886. Quoted in Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Application in England, Berkeley, CA, 1959, pp. 102–3.
2. ibid.
3. ibid, p. 72.
4. Walter Farquhar Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, London, 1865, 3, ch. 6, pp. 349–50.
5. ibid, p. 343
6. John Peckham, De Oculo Morali, quoted in Georg Herzfeld, An Old English Martyrology, London, 1900, p304.
7. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 78.
8. ibid, p. 102.
9. ibid, p. 103.
10. John Peckham, Registrum epistolarum fratris Johannis Peckham, Charles Trice Martin, Vol 3, 1885 – the oldest of the Canterbury Registers now preserved at Lambeth.
11. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 107.
12. Abbot Gasquet, England under the Old Religion, London, 1912 p. 233.
13. Abbot Gasquet Parish Life in Medieval England, London, 1906, 84.
14. Lyndwood’s Provinciale: The Text of the Canons Therein Contained, Reprinted from the Translation Made in 1534, ed. J. V. Bullard and H. Chalmer Bell, London, 1929.
15. Gasquet, 1906, p. 84.
16. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 90.
17. Raymond J. de Souza, ‘Interview with Eamon Duffy’, Commonweal, New York, 16 June 2004.
18. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 91.
19. Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. A. Kolakowska, Oxford, 1994, p. 36.
20. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law.
21. ibid, p. 99.
22. ibid.
23. Servus Gieben, ‘Robert Grosseteste at the papal curia, Lyons, 1250: edition of the documents’, Collectanea Franciscana, 41, Rome, 1971, pp. 358–9.
24. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 101.
25. ibid, p. 107.
26. ibid, p. 100.
27. ibid, p. 158.
28. ibid, p. 103.
29. ibid, p. 108, quoting W. J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, London, 1925, p. 310.
30. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 107.
31. A mark was two-thirds of a pound, i.e. 13 shillings and four pence.
32. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue, lines 855–9.
33. Ashley, An Introduction, quoted in Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 89.
34. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 48.
35. ibid, pp. 47–8.
36. ibid, p. 107.
37. ibid.
38. ibid, p. 106.
39. Just 1,000 pounds of its 33,000-pound income. Geremek, Poverty, p. 41.
40. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 81.
41. ibid, p. 82.
42. There were similar problems with the review of the account rolls of individual abbeys conducted by R. H. Snape in 1926. R. H. Snape, English Monastic Finances in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1926, pp. 110–18, claimed that only about 5 per cent of revenues were spent on alms and hospitality. But Snape’s survey covered only half a dozen monasteries.
43. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 81.
44. Geremek, Poverty, p. 40.
45. James William Brodman, Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe, Washington, DC, 2009, p. 283.
46. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 109.
47. Gregory the Great, Dialogues, bk. 4, ch. 39, Edmund G. Gardner, London, 1911.
48. Matthew 12:32.
49. 1 Corinthians 3:11–15.
50. Gregory, Dialogues, ch. 39.
51. ibid, ch. 40.
52. ibid.
53. bid, ch. 55.
54. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400 to 1700, Oxford, 1985, p. 30.
55. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago, IL, 1984, pp. 225–7.
56. ibid, p. 157.
57. Eamon Duffy, ‘Provision against purgatory’, Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity, London, 2018, p. 245.
58. Quoted in ibid, p. 253.
59. Spencer E. Young, Scholarly Community at the Early University of Paris: Theologians, Education and Society, 1215–1248, Cambridge, 2014, p. 165.
60. Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge, Cambridge, 2002, p. 64.
61. J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, Oxford, 1984, p. 58.
62. Bossy, Christianity, p. 55.
63. ibid, pp. 55–6.
64. Duffy, ‘Provision against purgatory’, p. 240.
65. Clive Burgess, ‘An institution for all seasons: the late medieval English college’, in Clive Burgess and Martin Heal, eds, 2008, The Late Medieval English College and its Context, York, 2008.
66. Bossy, Christianity, p. 144.
67. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations – Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors, Oxford, 1993, p. 37. From 24 per cent of testators to 44 per cent.
68. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, New Haven, CT, and London, 1992.
69. Duffy ‘Provision Against Purgatory’, pp. 246–7. Yet he notes that though such documents supported the view that the religion of the fourteenth and fifteenth century was a panic-stricken Christianity driven by fear, in fact the total number of wills with some hint of haste comes to 43 out of more than 2,300, just under 2 per cent of testators. By contrast some testators delayed the establishment of Chantry services or charitable activities until their widow had died.
70. Young, Scholarly Community, p. 157.
71. Luke 11:41.
72. Edward L. Cutts, Parish Priests and their People in the Middle Ages in England, London, 1898, p. 84.
73. Rubin, Charity and Community, 1987, p. 249.
74. Cutts, Parish Priests, p. 448.
75. Matthew 5:25–6.
76. Robert M. Durling, Purgatorio: The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Oxford, 2004, p. 5.
77. ibid, XXIII, pp. 83–4.
78. ibid, p. 6.
79. Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age (vers 1320–vers 1480), Collection de’École Française de Rome, 47, 1980, p. 306. Quoted in Mia Korpiola and Anu Lahtinen, ‘Cultures of death and dying in medieval and early modern Europe’, Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 18, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 1–31.
80. Joel T. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: The Social Function of Aristocratic Benevolence, 1307–1485, London, 1972.
81. Martin Luther, Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences – The Ninety-Five Theses, Thesis Twenty Seven.
82. Mathew 19:29.
83. Young, Scholarly Community, p. 156.
84. Rubin, Charity and Community, p. 64, n. 63.
85. Young, Scholarly Community, p. 156.
86. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, p. 5.
87. Duffy, ‘Provision against purgatory’, pp. 252–3.
88. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, p. 13.
89. Gabriele de Mussis of Piacenza, Historia de Morbo (c. 1348), quoted in The Black Death, a collection of contemporary sources edited and translated by Rosemary Horrox, Manchester, 1994, p. 17.
90. Mark Wheelis, Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa, Emerging Infectious Diseases: US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2002.
91. Medieval writers suggested that only one in 10 people survived. The best modern estimates are that just under half the population in England and the rest of Europe perished within the space of 18 months. Horrox, The Black Death, p. 3.
92. ‘Cronache senesi di Agnolo di Tura del Grasso’, ed. A. Lisini and F. Iacometti, in Rerum Italicum Scriptores. Racolta degli Storici Italiani, 15, VI, ed. L. A. Muratri et al., Bologna, 1931, p. 555.
93. Johannes Nohl, The Black Death: A Chronicle of the Plague Compiled from Contemporary Sources, London, 1961, p. 27.
94. G. M. Trevelyan, History of England, London, 1973, p. 280.
95. ibid.
96. Nohl, The Black Death, p. 134.
97. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 111.
98. Trevelyan, History of England, p. 280.
99. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640, London, 1985, p. xxi.
100. Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, Cambridge, 2002.
101. Trevelyan, History of England, p. 282.
102. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 111.
103. ibid, p. 112.
104. Geremek, Poverty, pp. 39–40.
105. Thomas Max Safley, The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief, Leiden, 2003, p. 4.
106. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 112.
107. Quoted in Horrox, The Black Death, p. 289.
108. Brian Pullan, Catholics and the Poor in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot, 1994, p. 29.
109. Geremek, Poverty, p. 38.
110. ibid, p. 46.
111. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 60.
112. Geremek, Poverty, p. 47; also J. F. Groner, ‘Geiler Von Kaysersberg’, New Catholic Encyclopedia, updated 2 January 2020.
113. Brodman, Charity and Religion, pp. 181–3.
114. Marvin P. Becker, ‘Aspects of lay piety in early Renaissance Florence’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. H. A. Oberman, Leiden, 1974, p. 177.
115. ibid, p. 179.
116. Matthew Thomas Schneider, ‘Charity and property: the wealth of opere pie in early modern Bologna’, Povertà e innovazioni istitutzionali in Italia dal medioevo ad oggi, Vera Zamagni, Bologna, 2000, p. 131.
117. Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de Medici, quoted by D, Kent, ‘The Buonomini di San Martino’, in Essays in Commemoration of the 600th Anniversary of Cosimo the Medici’s Birth, Oxford, 1992, pp. 49–67.
118. Paul Bonenfant, ‘Les origines et le caractère de la reforme de la bienfaisance publique aux Pay-Bas sou le règne de Charles-Quint’, quoted in Brian Pullan, ‘New approaches to poverty’, Povertà e innovazioni istitutzionali, Zamagni, p. 31.
119. Geremek, Poverty, p. 44.
120. ibid, p. 41.
121. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 128.
122. Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice, Oxford, 1971, p. 200, quoting F. R. Salter, Early Tracts on Poor Relief, London, 1926, pp. 50–1.
123. Cutts, Parish Priests, p. 474.
124. ibid, p. 476.
125. Brian Pullan, Catholics and the Poor in Early Modern Europe, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26, 1976, p. 19.
126. Brian Pullan, ‘New approaches to poverty’, in Zamagni, Povertà e innovazioni istitutzionali in Italia, p. 33.
127. Cutts, Parish Priests, p. 571.
128. Brian Pullan, ‘Aid to brothers and charity towards all Christians’, in Corpi, ‘fraternità’, mestieri nella storia della società europea, ed. D. Zardin, Rome, 1998, pp. 85–102.
129. Nicholas Terpstra, The Politics of Confraternal Charity, in Zamagni, Povertà e innovazioni istitutzionali in Italia, p. 153.
130. Brodman, Charity and Religion, pp. 178–244; Scarisbrick, The Reformation, p. 21, records that many of the larger fraternities like those in Abingdon, Aylesbury, Banbury, Chester, Chesterfield, Colchester, Derby, Henley in Arden, Hull, Maidstone, Taunton, Newcastle, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick and Worcester ran schools and almshouses for their own members and contributed to wider poor relief.
131. Geremek, Poverty, p. 39.
132. Luke 6:34–5.
133. Robert P. Maloney,  “Usury in Greek, Roman and Rabbinic thought,” Traditio, vol. 27, 1971, pp. 79–109. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27830917. And Deuteronomy 23:19.
134. Sixtus IV, Jewish Virtual Library.
135. Brian Pullan, ‘Charity and usury, Jewish and Christian lending in Renaissance and early modern Italy’, Proceedings of the British Academy 2003, 125, 19–40, 2004, p. 22.
136. Pullan, ‘New approaches to poverty’, in Zamagni, Povertà e innovazioni istitutzionali in Italia, p. 29.
137. Pullan, ‘Charity and usury’, p. 22.
138. Carol Bresnaham Menning, ‘Loans and favors, kin and clients: Cosimo de’ Medici and the Monte di Pietà’, The Journal of Modern History, 61, 3, September 1989, pp. 487–511.
139. Pullan, ‘Charity and usury’, p. 34.
140. Pullan, ‘New approaches to poverty’, in Zamagni, Povertà e innovazioni istitutzionali in Italia, 34.
141. ibid, 30.
142. Umberto Benigni, ‘Montes Pietàtis’, ‘The Catholic Encyclopedia, 10, New York, 23 September 1911.
143. Pullan, ‘New approaches to poverty’, in Zamagni, Povertà e innovazioni istitutzionali in Italia, 33.
144. ibid, 41.
145. Sienna, in ibid, 30.
146. Safley, The Reformation of Charity, p. 5.
147. Brodman produces clear evidence for this in Charity and Religion in Medieval Europe, pp. 178–244 and 267–86.
148. Nicholas Terpstra, ‘Caritas e Misericodia’, in Religioni e Filantropia nel Mediterraneo, ed. Giuliana Gemelli, Bologna, 2015, p. 370.
149. Suzanne Roberts, ‘Context of charity in the Middle Ages – religious, social, and civic’, in Giving: Western Ideas of Philanthropy edited by Jerome B. Schneewind, Bloomington IN, 1996, p. 44.
150. Geremek,
151. Safley, The Reformation of Charity, p. 4.
152. Bossy, Christianity in the West, pp. 115–20.

The interview with John Studzinski was conducted on 24 October 2019

Chapter 5:

The Great Myth of the Reformation

(pages 169–199)

1. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Poor relief, humanism, and heresy: The case of Lyon’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, V, 1968.
2. Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620, Oxford, 1971.
3. Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe 1350–1850, Hemel Hempstead, 1979; J. P. Gutton, La Société et les Pauvres en Europe, Paris, 1974; Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo, Cambridge, 1983; Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation, Oxford, 1989.
4. Brian Pullan, ‘Catholics, Protestants, and the poor in early modern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35:3, ‘Poverty and charity: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam’, Winter 2005, p. 441.
5. Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice, p. 198.
6. Brian Pullan, ‘Catholics and the poor in early modern Europe’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26, 1976, p. 16.
7. Brian Pullan, ‘Charity and usury, Jewish and Christian lending in Renaissance and early modern Italy’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 2004, 125, pp. 19–40.
8. See Chapter 5 above and Brian Pullan, ‘New approaches to poverty and new forms of institutional charity in late mediaeval and Renaissance Italy’, in Poverta e innovazioni istituzionali in Italia, ed. Vera Zamagni, Bologna, 2007, p. 20.
9. Natalie Zemon Davis is ‘supported by most of the leading scholars in this field such as Brian Pullan, Paul Slack, Hugo Soly and Robert Jütte’, according to Andrew Cunningham and ‎Ole Peter Grell, editors of Health Care and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe 1500–1700, London, 1997, pp. 42–3. C. Lis and H. Soly, eds, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-industrial Europe, London, 1979; Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England, London, 1988; R. Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 1994.
10. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400 to 1700, Oxford, 1985 p. 143.
11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. John Allen), Philadelphia, PA, 1936, p. 743.
12. The city council was divided roughly evenly between Protestant and Catholic councillors. Alexander Fisher, Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580–1630, Abingdon, 2004, pp. 1–11.
13. Beggars’ Bridge or Bettelbrücke. Augsburg During the Reformation Era: An Anthology of Sources, ed. B. Ann Tlusty, Indianapolis, IN, 2012, p. 91.
14. ibid, pp. 89–91.
15. Lee Palmer Wandel, Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 60–2.
16. James Fishman, The Political Use of Private Benevolence: The Statute of Charitable Uses, Pace Law Faculty Publications, Paper 487, 2008, pp. 46–7.
17. William Langland, Piers Plowman, trans. E. Talbot Donaldson, New York, 2006, p. 113.
18. Charities Act 2006 Explanatory Notes, Sections 1 – 3, §13-18.
19. Pullan, ‘Catholics, Protestants’, p. 450.
20. Pullan, ‘Catholics and the poor’, p. 22.
21. Ole Peter Grell, ‘The Protestant imperative of Christian care and neighbourly love’, in Healthcare and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe 1500 to 1700, ed. A. Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, London, 1997, p. 44.
22. Nicholas Terpstra, ‘The politics of confraternital charity’, in Zamagni, Poverta e innovazioni istituzionali in Italia, pp. 153–73.
23. Elsie Anne Mckee, John Calvin on the Diaconate and Liturgical Almsgiving, Geneva, 1984; and Pullan, ‘Catholics and the poor in early modern Europe’, pp. 19–20.
24. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, Ch 18, 6:

We must, therefore, do like those who begin to remove to any place where they mean to fix their abode. As they send forward their effects, and grudge not to want them for a season, because they think the more they have in their future residence, the happier they are; so, if we think that heaven is our country, we should send our wealth thither rather than retain it here, where on our sudden departure it will be lost to us. But how shall we transmit it? By contributing to the necessities of the poor, the Lord imputing to himself whatever is given to them. Hence that excellent promise, “He that has pity on the poor lendeth to the Lord,” (Prov. 19:17; Mt. 25:40); and again, “He which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully,” (2 Cor. 9:6). What we give to our brethren in the exercise of charity is a deposit with the Lord, who, as a faithful depositary, will ultimately restore it with abundant interest. Are our duties, then, of such value with God that they are as a kind of treasure placed in his hand? Who can hesitate to say so when Scripture so often and so plainly attests it?

25. Ian Archer, ‘The charity of early modern Londoners’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 12 (2002), p. 231.
26. Indeed, Scarisbrick argues that Protestant revolution increased rather than diminished the role of clerics. He suggests that the loss of the medieval lay fraternities left lay people with less of a role to play in their religion. The English Reformation, he says, led to ‘a marked shift in the balance of power in favour of the clergy . . . The new Protestant minister, if he was a zealous servant of the Gospel, was a disciplining, preaching authority-figure. He may not have had the sacramental powers of the old priest, but he expected rank-and-file lay people to be more passive . . .’ (J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, Oxford, 1984, pp. 39, 164–70).
27. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905, trans, Talcott Parsons, London, 2001. In fact, Weber’s characterization of Protestantism and understanding of Catholicism was faulty, as was his grasp of the basic difference between the two in terms of their economic values. The evidence rather suggests that late medieval Catholic society evolved elements favourable to the capitalist spirit. Indeed, it can even be argued that elements of the Reformation constituted a reaction against that.
28. Pullan, Catholics, Protestants, pp. 447–8.
29. Thomas Max Safley, ed., The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief, Boston, MA, 2003, pp. 8–9.
30. Pullan, ‘Catholics and the poor’, p. 18.
31. Review in The Spectator, 6 September 1873, p. 16, of Poor Relief in Different Parts of Europe, being a Selection of Essays, ed. A. Emminghaus, Rev. E. B. Eastwick, London, 1873.
32. Pullan, ‘Catholics and the poor’, p. 17, citing Paul Slack, ‘Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597–1666’, in Essays in Urban History, ed. P. Clark and P. Slack, London, 1972, pp. 165–9; Paul Slack, ‘Vagrants and vagrancy in England, 1598–1664’, Economic History Review, second series, xxvii (1974), pp. 360–79, and A. L. Beier, ‘Vagrants and the social order in Elizabethan England’, Past and Present, 64, August 1974, pp. 3–29.
33. ‘There were no substantial differences in the provision of poor relief and health care between Catholic and Protestant cities’, in Safley, The Reformation of Charity, pp. 7–9.
34. Derek Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe, Berkeley, CA, 2001, p. 94.
35. The Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535 (27 Hen 8 c 28).
36. According to the Benedictine historian Dom David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol. III, Cambridge, 1959, p. 157.
37. G. H. Cook, ed., Letters to Cromwell and Others on the Suppression of the Monasteries, London, 1965, p. 14; G. W. O. Woodward, The Dissolution of the Monasteries, Blandford, 1966, p. 49.
38. Kenneth Pickthorn, Early Tudor Government. Volume 2: Henry VIII (1934), Cambridge, 2015, p. 377.
39. Robert Aske, one of the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion, Aske’s Examination conducted by Thomas Cromwell, May 1537, EHR, V, 561–2, quoted in Christopher Haigh, The Last Days of the Lancashire Monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace, Manchester, 1989, p. 53.
40. ‘A supplication of the poore commons’, 1546, Four Supplications, Early English Text Society, p. 79, quoted in John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England, London, 1971, 2nd edn, 1986, p. 86.
41. ibid, p. 21.
42. Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, quoted in Beier, ‘Vagrants and the social order in Elizabethan England’, p. 19.
43. ibid, pp. 20–1.
44. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, p. 51.
45. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, New Haven, CT, and London, 1992, p. 7.
46. Kate Kelly, Medicine in the Middle Ages 500–1450, New York, 2015, p. 73.
47. Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition, Grand Rapids, MI, 1999, p. 48.
48. Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, quoted in Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England, p. 19.
49. Haigh, The Last Days of the Lancashire Monasteries, pp. 50, 53.
50. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, p. 73.
51. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, London, 1964, rev. 1989.
52. Patrick Collinson, Obituary of A. G. Dickens, The Independent, Thursday 9 August 2001.
53. See pages 184-9. In the wake of the work of Scarisbrick, Duffy and Haigh, a number of formerly conventional ideas about the English Reformation have come to seem simply untenable, says Peter Marshall in ‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, 48, July 2009, pp. 564–86. Also see: Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People; Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, Cambridge, 1987; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars; Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, New Haven, CT, and London, 2001; Peter Marshall, Reformation England, 1480–1642, London, 2003; Dairmaid MacCulloch, Mary Laven and Eamon Duffy, ‘The English Reformation after Revisionism’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59:3, September 2006, p. 724; Ethan Shagan in Popular Politics and the English Reformation, Cambridge, 2003, p. 5, suggests that in a simple contest between the interpretation of Dickens and that of Duffy and Haigh, the latter ‘win hands down’.
54. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, p. 1.
55. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, back
56. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors, Oxford, 1993.
57. Archer, ‘The charity of early modern Londoners’, 231.
58. Brinkelow, The lamentacion of a Christian against the citie of London, 1542, quoted in Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660, 161.
59. Thomas Becon, The Fortress of the faythfull, 1550, in The Catechism of Thomas Becon, Cambridge, 1884, p. 587.
60. Andrew Willet, Synopsis Papsimi (4th edn., 1614), quoted in Archer, ‘The charity of early modern Londoners’, p. 223.
61. Willett, Synopsis Papsimi (6th edn, 1634), p. 1,219, quoted in Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660, p. 235.
62. John Donne, Sermons, II, 234, quoted in Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660, p. 238.
63. The Fellows of Pembroke Hall celebrating their Draper benefactors in 1658, quoted in Ian Archer, ‘The arts and acts of memorialisation in early modem London’, in Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Strow to Strype, 1598– 1720, ed. J. F. Merritt (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 89–113; A. H. Johnson, The History of the Worshipful Company of Drapers of London, 5 vols (Oxford, 1914–22), 1:II, p. 248.
64. J. White, Two Sermons the Former Delivered at Pauls Crosse . . . the Latter at the Spittle on Monday in Easter Weeke 1613 (1615), p. 71, quoted in Archer, ‘The charity of early modern Londoners’, p. 225.
65. L. Chaderton, An Excellent and Godly Sermon . . . Preached at Paules Crosse the XXVI Daye of October An. 1578 (1580), sig. ciiiiv, quoted in Archer, ‘The charity of early modern Londoners’, p. 226.
66. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, pp. 78–9.
67. Frederick C. Dietz, English Government Finance, 1485–1558, Abingdon, 1964, p. 149.
68. Thomas Riis, ‘Poor relief and health care provision in 16th-century Denmark’, pp. 129–46, and Ole Peter Grell, ‘The Protestant imperative of Christian care and neighbourly love’, in Healthcare and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe 1500 to 1700, ed. A. Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, London, 1997.
69. Pullan, Catholics, Protestants, and the Poor, p. 449.
70. Archer, ‘The charity of early modern Londoners’, p. 225.
71. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660, p. 160.
72. A. Emminghaus, Das Armenwesen und die Armengesetzgebung in europäischen Staaten, Berlin, 1870, trans. in E. B. Eastwick’s Poor Relief in Different Parts of Europe, London, 1873.
73. ibid, p. 7.
74. Franz Ehrle, Beiträge zur Geshicte und Reform der Armenpflege, Freiburg, 1881.
75. Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Application in England, Berkeley, CA, 1959, 47.
76. See John A. Ryan, ‘Review of “Charity and social life. A short study of religious and social thought in relation to charitable methods and institutions by C. S. Loch’, American Journal of Sociology, 17:5, March 1912, pp. 701–8.
77. P. Lane, Poverty and Poor Relief in the German Church Orders of Johann Bugenhagen, 1485–1558, Ohio State University, Ph.D, 1973.
78. W.J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, vol. II, London, 1893.
79. ibid, p. 317.
80. ibid, p. 339.
81. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 74.
82. W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660: A Study of the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations, London, 1959; David Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960, Cambridge, MA, 1965.
83. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Poor Law History, vol. I, London, 1927.
84. ibid, pp. 4–5.
85. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon, London, 1931, pp. 133–6.
86. ibid, p. 253.
87. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660.
88. ibid, p. 16.
89. James J. Fishman, The Political Use of Private Benevolence: The Statute of Charitable Uses, Pace Law Faculty Publications, Paper 487, 2008, p. 59.
90. In per capita terms, according to D. C. Coleman, ‘Philanthropy deflated: a comment’, Economic History Review, second series, 31, 1978, pp. 118–23, quoted in Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge, Cambridge, 1987, p. 5. See also G. R. Elton: ‘If one corrects the figures to allow for a doubling of prices in the twenty years [after 1541] one finds that, so far from charity quickening, the rate of giving declined by comparison with the despised pre-Reformation decades’: G. R. Elton, The Historical Journal, 4:2, 1961, pp. 229–30, review of The Charities of London by W. K. Jordan, London, 1960.
91. James J. Fishman, The Political Use of Private Benevolence: The Statute of Charitable Uses.
92. G. R. Elton, The Historical Journal, 3:1, 1960, pp. 89–92, review of Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660 by W. K. Jordan.
93. G. R. Elton, The Historical Journal, 4:2, 1961, pp. 229–30, review of The Charities of London by W. K. Jordan, London, 1961.
94. Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960, p. 2.
95. Rhodri Davies, Public Good by Private Means: How Philanthropy Shapes Britain, London, 2015.
96. Russell Sage Foundation, Annual Report, 1958–9, 1960–1 and 1961–2. Report of the Princeton Conference, Russell Sage Foundation, 1956. Stanley N. Katz , ‘Policy issues: Philanthropy’, Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, ed. Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby, Amsterdam, 2006; David C. Hammack, ‘Waves of historical interest in philanthropy and civil society’, HistPhil.org, 24 June 2015.
97. See Chapter 9. Also see Peter Dobkin Hall, ‘The work of many hands: A response to Stanley N. Katz on the origins of the ‘serious’ study of philanthropy’, Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 28:4, December 1999, pp. 522–34.

The interview with Rowan Williams was conducted on 20 September 2019