[525] Reports of the four Royal Hospitals, 1632, 1641. King's _Pamphlets_, 669 f. 4.
[526] Probate of John Carr's will was granted in 1586. An Act of Parliament confirming the foundation was passed 39 Eliz. The school was established on the site of Gaunt's Hospital, and the citizens of Bristol provided some of the necessary money. _Char. Com. Rep._ VI. p. 463 seq.
Children were thus very well provided for, and their training was considered a matter of national concern. Parents, whether they were very poor or not, were compelled to send their children to work or school and either to apprentice them or to find situations for them. We are apt to consider popular education an exclusively modern movement, but in this, as in many other matters, the aims of the seventeenth century anticipate those of the nineteenth. They had ideas which were very different from those of to-day as to the kind of training which was necessary, but they attached an equal importance to the necessity of training. The Town Council of Norwich and the justices of Hertfordshire and Norfolk took energetic action in the matter.
[Sidenote: 5. Relief given to prisoners.]
We will now see how the administration of the time affected the able-bodied poor. The help given to the unemployed is by far the most important part of this relief, but some aid was also given to prisoners.
The prisoners of the sixteenth century must have suffered great hardships. No adequate means seem to have existed for their maintenance. Their friends supported them, and under certain regulations they were allowed to beg. Several statutes made in the reign of Elizabeth provided partially for their support as part of the relief of the poor[528]. By the statute of 1601 prisoners were to be relieved by a county rate. The County Treasurer, who was responsible for the relief of soldiers and hospitals, also disbursed a part of the funds to them, and every county was bound to pay at least twenty shillings a year to the prisoners of the King's Bench and Marshalsea[529]. Still the help given was very small; up to 1650 the allowance granted to the poor in the Norfolk prison was only a penny a day[530], and this sum could barely have sufficed to keep them alive. In Devonshire their allowance was increased in 1608 because "divers of them of late have perished through want"[531]. We must remember that incarceration in these prisons was the fate of debtors. Charitable people tried to help these people, and bequests were often made for the purpose of granting them some assistance. Thus in the reign of Charles I. George White of Bristol left a gift of five pounds a year to be used for the purpose of freeing or relieving some of the prisoners in the Bristol Newgate, and there are many other bequests of the same kind[532]. Still the amount of these legacies was wholly insufficient for the need. Certainly neither the legislators nor the administrators of the reigns of the earlier Stuarts made the criminal poor more comfortable than the unfortunate poor. If we realise the condition of the prisoners of this time we can understand why Houses of Correction were regarded as charitable foundations. We can also see how it was that whipping and stocking were so frequently inflicted and that they were comparatively merciful punishments.