The Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty, Poor Relief and Health Care in Early-Modern Portugal

Laurinda Abreu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781032179551
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317020882
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By the end of the fifteenth century most European counties had witnessed a profound reformation of their poor relief and health care policies. As this book demonstrates, Portugal was among them and actively participated in such reforms. Providing the first English language monograph on this this topic, Laurinda Abreu examines the Portuguese experience and places it within the broader European context. She shows that, in line with much that was happening throughout the rest of Europe, Portugal had not only set up a systematic reform of the hospitals but had also developed new formal arrangements for charitable and welfare provision that responded to the changing socioeconomic framework, the nature of poverty and the concerns of political powers. The defining element of the Portuguese experience was the dominant role played by a new lay confraternity, the confraternity of the Misericórdia, created under the auspices of King D. Manuel I in 1498. By the time of the king's death in 1521 there were more than 70 Misericórdias in Portugal and its empire, and by 1640, more than 300. All of them were run according to a unified set of rules and principles with identical social objectives. Based upon a wealth of primary source documentations, this book reveals how the sixteenth-century Portuguese crown succeeded in implementing a national poor relief and health care structure, with the support of the Papacy and local elites, and funded principally though pious donations. This process strengthened the authority of the royal government at a time which coincided with the emergence of the early modern state. In so doing, the book establishes poor relief and public health alongside military, diplomatic and administrative authorities, as the pillars of centralization of royal power.

PART I

Charity and Poor Relief in Portugal at the Dawn of the Early Modern Period: The Organisation and Consolidation of Crown Authority

Chapter 1

Social and Political Contexts

The profound changes in production structures that had begun to appear in Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages against a background of widespread economic downturn primarily penalised the most vulnerable groups, who flooded into the towns in search of work, relief or alms, thereby adding to the difficulties that were also being felt there.¹ Like wars, epidemics were an integral part of the cycle of recession that had taken hold in the mid-fourteenth century, and they had recurred at intervals ever since the Black Death, throwing life in the affected areas into disarray sometimes for long periods.² They added a further dimension to the economic and social problems, to the extent that the authorities were forced to seek ways to address them. In Italy, the towns that were the first to face the plague were also the swiftest at developing methods to combat it, and in doing so they ended up opening the doors to new social groups and giving them political opportunities. In most cases, it was the local authorities who stepped forward with innovative public health schemes developed around the health boards,³ which were supported by a bureaucracy that was already somewhat complex. These schemes were later adopted in England, France, Spain and Portugal. In these countries, however, the new public health policies were mostly issued by the crown, even though their implementation fell to the towns. The fear of epidemics at a time of intense migration,⁴ which was of particular concern when spurred on by poverty,⁵ legitimised the intervention of central government and gave it a good excuse to tighten its grip on the land and people and prevent communities from uprooting themselves, which would reduce tax revenue and military conscription,⁶ both of which were essential to the emerging state.

In Portugal, King Manuel I (1495–1525) unequivocally regarded epidemic control as a matter for central government. On the basis of the 1471 provisions,⁷ he set out to tackle the plague which ‘so often’ (‘tão amiúde’) assailed Lisbon⁸ by urging the city council to invest in developing a public health department⁹ and requiring it to introduce prevention measures; he did this against the wishes of the aldermen, who were more concerned about the financial impact of the restrictions than about medium-term planning. In 1510 Manuel I also sought to turn Lisbon’s temporary casas da saúde (‘healthcare homes’), which sprang up whenever there was an outbreak of plague only to close down when it was over,¹⁰ into permanent institutions,¹¹ with plans for a great hospital, which were sent to the council on 23 July 1520. Designed (‘as you will see from the painting of everything’ – ‘como vereis pela pintura de tudo’) to have 160 beds, as well as workshops and other ‘necessary offices’ (‘casas necessárias’), the new hospital was to be built beside the river in Alcântara, as it was some distance from the city and also because there was ‘plenty of water and space for burials’ (‘muita água e lugar para os enterramentos’) and building materials could easily be transported there. It was expected to cost five million réis; the king agreed to provide one million réis and required the city council to match that amount and collect the remainder from the people through an extraordinary tax. This tax was not to spare anybody – not even those who traditionally enjoyed tax exemption privileges – because of the public utility of the undertaking, ‘since this matter seems to us so necessary and beneficial for all the health of this city and also of all the kingdom’.¹²

The king’s death in December 1521 caused the plans for the plague hospital to be abandoned, reflecting the crown’s difficulty in maintaining the strategies that had been marked out, although it did not represent a volte-face. As Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares concluded in her analysis of medieval public health policies, ‘in contrast to other forms of welfare, in which private individuals were paramount, plague relief saw the direct involvement of the local authorities and the crown. Between them, they took responsibility for public health in a way that had nothing to do with charity, which until the end of the fifteenth century had been the primary basis for poor relief’.¹³ That was the situation at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but the town councils had lost their ability to act independently, and they remained thus constrained until at least 1804.¹⁴ Something very similar was happening with the regulation of professions associated with the ‘curative arts’,¹⁵ hospital reform, foundling care¹⁶ and the organisation of formal relief mechanisms for prisoners and the poor, which underlay the creation of the misericórdias, as the crown was taking control of all these areas.

My intention in the pages that follow is to revisit this process in the light of the political changes taking place at the time. First, however, another factor that accompanied these reforms and in some cases shaped them must be examined: the way in which access to health care and poor relief was regulated. While laws against begging and vagrancy were nothing new in late medieval Portugal, they gained a special place during the Black Death and the other plagues that followed and, as I shall try to show, they are one of the factors that best express the change in attitudes towards the poor and poverty in general.¹⁷

Defining the Deserving Poor

No matter how generous the religious institutions, the clergy, the nobility or anonymous individuals might be, and no matter how well the poor might be integrated into the economy of salvation, which granted them relief in exchange for spiritual favours, the resources available simply could not keep up with the growing number of paupers, which since the 1480s had been rising in line with the recovery from demographic recession.¹⁸ How to develop effective ways to expel impostors, prevent idleness and the evils associated with it, and select the most deserving out of the hordes of poor people became key concerns for the authorities.

The delimitation of the ‘deserving poor’ concept was a factor that helped shape social policy in early modern Europe, a process that can only be understood in conjunction with the measures that were introduced to tackle unauthorised travel and begging. In this as in many other respects, the Portuguese crown acted in line with its European counterparts and, like them, justified its repression of beggars and vagrants with what it interpreted as concerns felt by the settled and socially included population.¹⁹ Evidence of this may be found, for example, in the laws against foreign beggars²⁰ and the laws that reduced unauthorised mendicants to near slavery.²¹

There are many signs that tramps or wanderers (‘andantes’) were poorly tolerated by society, as the common people showed at the Cortes (assembly of the estates of the realm) held in Lisbon in 1371.²² In the early sixteenth century, the representatives of the town of Santarém at the Cortes made their aversion to those who ‘want neither to find a trade, nor to live with others’²³ quite clear, declaring that those who had no known livelihood could only ‘live by wrongdoing’ (‘viv[er] de mal fazer’).²⁴ In both cases communities explicitly refused to welcome those who did not accept the established rules and sought to live on the means of others;²⁵ with the exception of the mendicant religious orders,²⁶ people tended to see beggars as bringers of destabilisation and usurpers of their goods. The fact that lodging houses for pilgrims, which also put up beggars and vagrants, allowed them to stay for only short periods (no more than three days as a rule²⁷) reflects the mistrust in which they were held. Furthermore, the notion of work as a factor of social inclusion had long been current, giving charity a markedly moralistic tone.²⁸ That partly accounts for the generosity shown towards workers who settled in communities either seasonally or more permanently and showed that they had assimilated their rules. At a time when the majority of the population lived in poverty, the concern to prevent the poor from falling into destitution and indigence led to the creation of mutual support systems – either through informal help at family or neighbourhood level, or in institutions founded by individuals or corporations²⁹ – to provide support when there was no work, for a new family, when a family split up or at times of sickness or death. The confraternities played a vital role in supporting communities during this period.³⁰

Royal concerns about beggars and vagrants can already be found in the Livro das Posturas (Book of Ordinances) written by King Afonso II in 1211, but it was the Lei das Sesmarias (Law on Royal Land Grants) of 1375 that put forward the first systematic set of rules governing idleness and false poverty. Usually studied as an instrument promoting the development of farming in the wake of the Black Death, the Lei das Sesmarias also followed the model of the English Statute of Labourers of 1349 and the Castilian Ordenamiento de menestrales y posturas of 1351, and set out the main threads of government policy on begging:³¹ alms were no substitute for work, which was made compulsory for all, including the disabled; the false poor were to be punished by way of example (whipping in private on the first offence and in public on the second, followed by banishment); and licences to beg could only be granted to the very weak, the old, the sick and the ‘bashful’ or ‘shamefaced’ poor’.³² Although the law accepted mendicancy as a means of subsistence, it restricted it severely, specified the kind of poor person who deserved to be helped, and defined as ‘bashful’ poor those who were unable to work because of their social condition – in this respect it should be noted that the humiliation related to the work and not the begging, which in this case was seen as socially acceptable and not something to be hidden. The law also established a means of policing the people, based on a relatively elaborate system of local informers commanded by the ‘worthiest in the land’ (‘melhores das terras’).³³

The Lei das Sesmarias was to guide the Portuguese monarchy’s approach to these issues until the end of the early modern period in the country. It already included the main elements usually considered revolutionary in the ideas put forward much later, although in a rather more developed form, by Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540): the need to distinguish ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• PART I CHARITY AND POOR RELIEF IN PORTUGAL AT THE DAWN OF THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD: THE ORGANISATION AND CONSOLIDATION OF CROWN AUTHORITY
• PART II INSTITUTIONS AS SOCIAL ACTORS MEDIATING BETWEEN SOCIETY, THE AUTHORITIES AND INDIVIDUALS
• Conclusion
• Sources
• Bibliography
• Index