[530] _Orders of the Norfolk Quarter Sessions_, 1650.
[531] _Quarter Sessions from Queen Elizabeth to Queen Anne_, p. 91. A. H. A. Hamilton.
Richard Holworthy also in 1640 left £20 for the poor in the Bristol Newgate.
At Oxford, Wardell in 1625 and Myles Windsor both left the profits of a small sum for the poor in Bocardo. _Rep._ VI., p. 403, 404.
At Launceston by Connock's charity in 1611 a rent of 52_s._ a year was set apart for the poor felons in the county gaol. _Rep._ 32. 1, p. 406.
Bequests in London for this purpose were very frequent. _Rep._ VI. p. 302. Sir T. Bennett in 1616 left £24 a year for redeeming twelve or more poor debtors.
[Sidenote: 6. Provision of funds to provide work for the unemployed.]
But the provision for the unemployed workmen is by far the most characteristic part of the early seventeenth century administration. A man who was unemployed and had no resources had either to beg or to steal. If he begged, he was whipped; if he stole, he went to one of the terrible prisons of the time. The bands of armed vagrants, who made themselves terrible by their numbers and defied the law, were therefore only a natural consequence of the social conditions of the period. Repressive measures were tried but did not succeed because force could not restrain a man from begging if that was his only means of escaping starvation. The provision of work which had been made for the unemployed before 1597 was quite inadequate, and it remained for the earlier Stuarts to develope and extend the system.
We will examine first some of the methods of raising funds which now came to be utilised, and secondly a few of the various plans adopted in different places at different times with the object of employing the poor.
It is characteristic of the time that the money was frequently provided by private people. At Guildford Archbishop Abbot founded a workhouse, and we are told that the poor men of the town were employed to spin flax and hemp into cloth, and that this was found to be a "great comfort to many poore workefolke men, women and children[533]".
[533] _Dom. State Papers_, Chas. I., Vol. 191, 42.
At New Windsor several sums of money were left for this purpose. One of these was bequeathed by Andrew Windsor in a will dated 1621. He bequeathed £200, the annual interest from which amounted to fourteen pounds. With this the poor were to be set to work in the making of cloth. To some extent the donor's intentions were fulfilled up to the present century. During the eighteenth century and up to 1829 the money was expended in setting the poor to work to spin sheeting[534].