INTRODUCTION

Western Europe saw a widespread move in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to replace the basis of charity and support of the poor, hitherto carried by religious bodies and charitable individuals, with a wider and better-organised system of support and control, whether by a city or by a state. In Protestant countries this was an evident need, since the secularisation of monastic property had removed an important if erratic source of alms, and the doctrinal devaluation of good works discouraged private almsgiving. Attempts to provide civic or national structures of relief involved a clearer definition of the poor: the word ‘poor’ had always meant the less favoured part of society, and continued to, but it also came to mean more specifically people whose need of help was recognised and categorised, whom a later age would label ‘objects of charity’ and a still later one ‘paupers’. In England by the mid sixteenth century a distinction was used between those recognised as suitable for charity and ‘sturdy beggars’, but those who begged were not clearly marked off in most people's minds from poor householders. In the 1570s, unemployment was recognised as a reason for destitution, and by the time of the dearth of the 1590s it was clearly seen in England that there was a class of poor householders who needed help in times of scarcity.

THE ORIGINS OF THE OLD SCOTTISH POOR LAW

In Scotland there had, from the twelfth century, been statutes which encouraged the gift of alms and the provision of justice to the poor.