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Poverty policy was deeply entangled with other obsessions of the 16th and 17th century England. Combine these obsessions with the local dictatorial power of the JPs and the concept of Common Law, and you get a surprising result.

There were many false starts in the European efforts to fight poverty in the early 16th century. Traditionalists, Protestants and Humanists all took quite similar steps towards fighting poverty.

They all made similar mistakes, putting the agency and control over money, at the wrong level of poverty fighting machinery. England took a different approach, from all of these.

We have talked a lot about these differences, experiment, fail, try again. Learn from the parish over there.

But all that effort over the poor resulted in substantial taxation. 20% of all land taxes went towards helping the poor. One obsession for the JPs (can we say as a consequence?) was the employment of the poor. Combine that with common law, Joan Thirsk style economic projects, and businesses are allowed to go forward with projects that would create employment that before would have been vetoed by other interested parties.

Things changed, culture changed, law changed.

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Great context on English society and the Poor Law mechanism.

“According to the 16th century stereotype, the undeserving pauper was typically rootless, masterless and homeless. A Vagrant. His behavior was disorderly and criminal, that of a rogue.”

In the 16th century, the poor laws and other laws make the vagrant criminal. But, like other laws, there is a massive amount of local discretion when it comes to enforcement. There were basically so many people who you might call a vagrant, that local officials just did not punish all pauper wanderers. And there were people who, if they were guilty of some other crime would be punished for that, as for example they were a thief, a magistrate might ignore that they were also a vagrant.

It was only a small minority of immigrants who were ever punished as vagrants. Usually, if they got work or rented a place to live, the authorities would look the other way. They didn’t have to, but they could.

We look at the dangerous poor, their punishments, movements and the attitudes of the respectable towards them. They were really the greatest source of crime, and many lived highly dysfunctional lives.

There were definitely professional beggars as well. “Counterfeit bedlams, and a counterfeit cripple in Herefordshire, one of Salisbury’s vagrants was a Dumberer pretending he hath no tongue.”

There is an abuse of power story told too. The power of overseers to regulate the family life of the poor is not a well known story.

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Europe wide, there were Humanist driven policy responses to poverty in the 16th century, which we have covered in some detail. These were essentially all failures.

There was one successful poverty program which, despite many flaws, solved the problem of famine among the poor. Just one? How could this possibly be?

If we brutally summarize Proust we would say, first of all, most areas did not rationalize their agricultural production. They had too many inefficient small holdings, and/or they established price controls which lowered production or distorted production. Inefficient small holdings come from cultural preference, and is usually reinforced by legal and bureaucratic institutions, often based on little more than dumb preference.

Second, in the brutal summarization, price controls distorting production, is a simple corruption by elites, who tend to be terrible. Terrible in the way I usually refer to as being against human flourishing. There is even a weak version of this in England relating to the corn laws.

Third, is the use of high status people to use the money, in the context of a seriously hierarchical society where the high status people cannot be questioned or audited as they were in England in the Bording Administrative History episodes. In other words, scummy elites who are corrupt.

A poorly structured economy, and terrible elites is just the human normal, which is everywhere all the time, and these things tend to work against the poverty programs run all over Europe. Another problem was simple inefficiency, a wasting of resources used to fight poverty. The flow of money they were able to raise to help the poor was inadequate, partially because the vast majority of the money was spent on administration. Examples we had was that the monastery at St Deny only gave 3% of the revenue they raised directly to the poor in the form of food, clothing or money.

St Deny is not considered a great outlier, but institutions spending 90% on their own people and priorities, are common through history, right down to today. Efforts start with prestige and high status people working on solving a problem, but generally devolve into corrupt people doing what they want. That’s just how institutions work.

When so much is wasted, there is just not enough money.

And yet, there was a successful poverty program, that also was born with Humanist roots, but evolved and changed into a more 'empirical' and less 'critical' approach, that actually solved the problem of famine for the poor.