The Poor in Plantagenet England

The Black Death of 1348-49 brought with it disease and population breakdown on a scale never before seen in English history.  No one was spared, from common farmers, laborers and beggars, to members of the royal family, including at least one of Edward III's children.  Depopulation of large estates, though, proved a potential benefit to some on the bottom of the social scale.  Ever since Saxon times, serfdom had been the lot of most of England's peasants.  They were bound to the land and sold or transferred with it.  Unlike slaves, they couldn't be sold individually, but their daily lot of work and hopelessness wasn't much better.  In the wake of the plague thousands of these downtrodden laborers simply walked away from estates where their ancestors had been born, lived and died.  Their destinations were the cities and towns, where work could be had for the lucky few.  Many, though, wandered about the countryside, trying to find land of their own to squat on, or an estate where conditions were better.  When that failed, vagrancy and crime were the next options.

To counteract this, the administrations of Edward III and later Richard II enacted laws mainly aimed at keeping laborers on the land, but, by extension, dealing with beggars and vagrants who simply showed up in towns and cities with no job skills or prospects and soon took to begging or worse.  In 1349 and 1350, King Edward's government issued Statutes of Laborers, commanding workers to stay put on their estates and landowners to keep them employed.  This forced some landowners to give their workers more freedom and higher wages.  But laborers were still walking away.  In 1351, the government issued a Statute of Laborers which required every able bodied person to work.  Vagrants were punished, usually by shaming in the stocks or beating, and sent back to the estates they came from.   In 1388 the Statute of Cambridge again forbad workers to leave their estates and placed harsher penalties for those who did, or for anyone caught idling or begging.

These early laws fixed official attitudes to the plight of the poor that lasted until the 20th century, resulting in the harsh poor laws of the Tudor Era and the Victorian workhouse system of the 19th century.  Being poor was seen as a character flaw, a lack of industry and effort.  If a person were willing to work hard enough, there was no reason they should be poor.  Being ill or unlucky was no excuse.  While parishes and religious institutes would care for those who were visibly ill, disabled or dying, everyone else had to work, no excuses.  Able-bodied poor caught idling or begging would be shamed and punished repeatedly until they either got on their feet, or moved on to another locality where the cycle repeated.