Poverty was experienced at many social levels in the later middle ages, frequently for smallholders and wage-earners, and occasionally among the urban artisans and middle-ranking peasants. Most people were vulnerable to deprivation in old age and as parents of young children. They also felt the effects of long-term economic cycles and short-term slumps. Everyone was prone to fall victim to the ill-fortune which visited medieval people more often than ourselves, and from which recovery was more difficult - illness, accidents, premature death of breadwinners, fire, robbery, pillage in war, natural disasters and bad weather.

Poverty, defined as life-threatening deprivation, seems to have been a permanent condition for some and a periodic problem for many, and yet not all of its victims went to an early grave, or otherwise the population could not have grown in the thirteenth century, or maintained its numbers in the fifteenth. A possible answer to the question of ‘How did the poor survive?’ could lie in the abundance of charity, so initially we must devote some attention to alms-giving and poor relief, both as advocated by moralists and as it was practised.

Much is known of the theory of charity, because throughout Europe it provided a constant theme for writers of all kinds, theologians, canon lawyers, authors of sermons and devotional works, poets and chroniclers.