Abreu - Political and Social Dynamics of Poor Relief and Health Care in Early Modern Portugal

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THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF 
POVERTY, POOR RELIEF AND HEALTH CARE IN 
EARLY-MODERN PORTUGAL 
By the end of the ��eenth century most European countries 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 �rst English language monograph on 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. 
�e de�ning 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 uni�ed set of rules and 
principles with identical social objectives. Based upon a wealth of primary source 
documentation, 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 through pious 
donations. �is 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 centralisation of royal power.
Laurinda Abreu is Professor of History at the University of Évora, Portugal. 
She is director of the University of Évora’s Erasmus Mundus PhD, Phoenix 
JDP – Dynamics of Health and Welfare. She was the coordinator (2001–09) of 
the Phoenix TN – European �ematic Network on Health and Social Welfare 
Policy, and President (2011–13) of the European Association for the History of 
Medicine and Health. Her recent publications include a co-edited book with 
S. Sheard (eds), Hospital Life: �eory and Practice �om the Medieval to the 
Modern; and Pina Manique: um reformador no Portugal das Luzes.
Christopher J. Tribe is a freelance translator based in the UK. He has also 
translated  Pedro Páez’s History of Ethiopia, 1622 (ed. Boavida, Pennec & 
Ramos), and �e English in Brazil by Gilberto Freyre.
�e History of Medicine in Context
Series Editors: Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge
Department of History
Open University
Titles in the series include
Uroscopy in Early Modern Europe
Michael Stolberg
�e British Pharmacopoeia, 1864 to 2014
Medicines, International Standards and the State
Anthony C. Cartwright 
Anatomy and Anatomists in Early Modern Spain
Bjørn Okholm Skaarup
�e Fate of Anatomical Collections
Edited by Rina Knoe� and Robert Zwijnenberg
Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome
Maria Pia Donato
�e Political and Social Dynamics 
of Poverty, Poor Relief and Health 
Care in Early-Modern Portugal
LAURINDA ABREU
University of Évora, Portugal
Translated by Christopher J. Tribe
First published 2016 
by Routledge 
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and by Routledge 
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© Laurinda Abreu 2016
�e right of Laurinda Abreu to be identi�ed as author of this work has been asserted by her 
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
�e Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Abreu, Laurinda.
Title: �e political and social dynamics of poverty, poor relief and health 
 care in early-modern Portugal / by Laurinda Abreu.
Description: 2016. | Series: �e history 
 of medicine in context | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identi�ers: LCCN 2015026609 | ISBN 9781472477255 (hardcover : alkaline paper) 
 | ISBN 9781315554525 (ebook) |
Subjects: LCSH: Poor–Services for Portugal–History. | Poor–Medical 
 care–Portugal–History. | Poverty–Social aspects–Portugal–History. | 
 Poverty–Political aspects–Portugal–History. | 
 Charities–Portugal–History. | Public welfare–Portugal–History. | 
 Medical policy–Portugal–History. | Portugal–Social policy. | 
 Portugal–Politics and government. | Portugal–Social conditions.
Classi�cation: LCC HV4129.A3 A25 2016 | DDC 362.109469/09031–dc23 LC record 
available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015026609
ISBN: 9781472477255 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315554525 (ebk)
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015026609
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Introduction 1
PART I CHARITY AND POOR RELIEF IN PORTUGAL AT 
THE DAWN OF THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD: 
THE ORGANISATION AND CONSOLIDATION 
OF CROWN AUTHORITY
1 Social and Political Contexts 9
2 ‘For the Bene�t of the Body’: Hospital and Health Care Reform 25
3 Epidemic Control 45
4 �e Foundation of the Misericórdias 55
5 �e Organisation of the Welfare ‘System’ 89
6 �e Funding of Poor Relief 113
PART II INSTITUTIONS AS SOCIAL ACTORS 
MEDIATING BETWEEN SOCIETY, THE 
AUTHORITIES AND INDIVIDUALS
7 Poor Relief in an Institutional Context 137
8 �e Movement to Found Con�nement Institutions 147
9 �e Population of Female Recolhimentos: ‘wives, nuns and 
prostitutes’ 165
10 Hospitals and their Users 193
11 Prisons and Misericórdias 219
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Povertyvi
Conclusion 257
Sources 263
Bibliography 271
Index 297
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
5.1 Municipalities Required to Finance the Training of Doctors 
and Apothecaries 92
5.2 Municipalities Required to Finance the Training of Doctors and 
Apothecaries; Misericórdias 94
5.3 Municipalities that Financed Training and Hired Doctors, 
Apothecaries and Surgeons 95
10.1 Espírito Santo Hospital, Évora: Hospital Admissions 
1628–1753 211
10.2 Espírito Santo Hospital, Évora: Monthly Admission Figures 213
Tables
8.1 Poor Relief Institutions (c. 1540–1804) 148
10.1 Patterns of Hospitalisation in Espírito Santo Hospital, Évora 214
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Introduction
Poor relief in the early modern period is now a well-established �eld of study. 
It has attracted a large number of researchers, who have taken a variety of 
approaches and focused on many di�erent aspects. �is book examines how this 
�eld developed in early modern Portugal in tandem with the incipient forging of 
the state. It draws on the work of historians such as Paul Slack, who, particularly 
since the 1980s,1 have emphasised the political nature of the subject.2 More 
speci�cally, the intention here is to place poor relief and public health alongside 
war, the army, diplomacy and government on the list of topics that are usually 
identi�ed as pillars of centralised royal power.
�e people were essential to the political authorities, and not only in numerical 
terms. As a rule, the number of poor people receivingrelief was quite small, 
excluding, of course, the poor who received alms given spontaneously, either 
in an institutional context or privately, the social impact of which will always 
be impossible to evaluate. �is is because the eligibility criteria for receiving 
formal poor relief – charity given in an institutional context with some degree of 
bureaucratic control3 – served as a powerful �lter, which limited the number of 
potential users. Not all poor people could satisfy the moral canons, the physical 
and age requirements that prioritised the old, the very young, the disabled, the 
sick and their families and those who were temporarily or permanently unable to 
work, as well as certain circumstances associated with an individual’s life history4 
and the requirement of a �xed abode.5 Even if all these conditions were ful�lled, 
there was no guarantee that a poor person would be accepted for relief in a 
highly competitive world of scarce resources. In the mid-seventeenth century, 
only 6 per cent of the population of Antwerp received institutional aid either 
regularly or sporadically;6 the same percentage was found in towns in Catholic 
1 See Grell and Cunningham, 1997, pp. 1–17.
2 See Barry and Jones, 1994. �is does not mean that the role of the religious values 
and principles that dominated early modern society should be underestimated. Of the 
abundant literature on these issues, see in particular Parker, 1998.
3 Hindle, 2004, and Dinges, 2004, pp. 23–50.
4 Woolf, 1986.
5 Even if the variability of this socially constructed concept (poor) is taken into 
account. See Simmel, 1965, pp. 137–8.
6 Roughly 4,000 of the city’s 63,000 inhabitants. See Soly, 1997, p. 98.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty2
Germany7 and in Stockholm, among other European cities.8 In Portugal, Évora 
was not far o� this mark, perhaps with 7–8 per cent, if one includes the charity 
handed out in the hospital – which mainly looked a�er migrant workers – and 
the safe-conducts given to help poor people, mostly non-residents, to leave 
the city. In Lisbon only 1.5 per cent of the population was succoured by the 
misericórdia (House of Mercy) in the �nancial year 1715–16, which was 
probably about average for the number of poor people helped each year. �ese 
�gures are low9 in comparison with a number of estimates suggesting that 30–50 
per cent of Europe’s population in the late Middle Ages and early modern period 
was living below the poverty line.10 At this point, however, we need to broaden 
our �eld of view to include the various bodies involved in helping the poor. 
�is examination should not be con�ned to those organisations that had the 
means to operate as instruments of social normalisation and thereby serve the 
purposes of the authorities and dominant groups, but should embrace society in 
general. Poor relief was a factor for social cohesion and was seen as such by the 
authorities, which were o�en open to interactions and negotiations that were 
of undeniable socio-political signi�cance.11 Furthermore, for many people poor 
relief also provided an occupation and allowed access to bene�ts that would 
otherwise be denied to them. �e case of foster-mothers for foundling infants 
is already relatively well known. An occupation discussed below is that of alms 
collectors, a highly sought-a�er activity practised by a large number of men who, 
by appealing for donations for the poor, li�ed themselves out of manual labour 
and paying taxes.
�e operational concepts of collective action and actors with interests, as 
formulated by Dorothy Porter12 and Marco Van Leeuwen,13 are signi�cant 
in this context. One of their main advantages is that they are integrative, 
embracing all the actors involved in poor relief: those who provided the funds, 
those who organised their distribution (not necessarily the same groups), and 
the bene�ciaries.
 7 Between 6 and 10 per cent in some cases. See Roeck, 1999, pp. 283–4.
 8 Kouri, 1997, p. 182; Slack, 1988; Jütte, 1996a, pp. 53–4. A little later, between 1755 
and 1794, it was 7–13 per cent in several towns in the Netherlands. See Lis and Soly, 1985, 
pp. 194–5.
 9 João Brandão calculated roughly 1,000–2,000 poor people begging in Lisbon in 
1552. João Brandão, 1990, pp. 89–90.
10 �e complexity of this issue is discussed by John Henderson and Richard Wall, in 
their excellent introduction to Poor Women and Children in the European Past, 1994.
11 Munck, unpublished.
12 Dorothy Porter, 1999a, pp. 9–21, and 1999b. On the application of these tools to 
the Portuguese case, see Abreu, 2010b, pp. 347–71.
13 Van Leeuwen, 1994, pp. 589–613. 
Introduction 3
More recent works have shown that, once the poor had become part of 
the relief ‘system’, they were able to interact with it to varying degrees, not 
least because they then had an acknowledged social role, such as ensuring the 
reproduction of the existing social order, providing labour or – because of the 
residence requirement – preventing the spread of epidemics, a matter of great 
concern to the dominant elites. It may be argued that they were actors with 
limited abilities, not least because their actions were almost always motivated 
solely by the need to survive. �at may be true, but an analysis focusing on 
people rather than numbers shows that the poor were able to act consciously 
and, in some cases at least, with a certain moral sense of dissent as active subjects 
of their own history,14 although obviously within the bounds of their powers 
and social capital.15 �ey did so without resorting to violence or the force of 
any movement that was in the least organised, but just fought with the means 
that the system itself placed at their disposal, in a tacit game that required the 
collaboration of those that controlled it. �is assumption implies rescuing 
the socially integrated poor from being seen exclusively as victims of a society 
that oppressed them and subjected them to many di�erent kinds of discipline 
and social control16 applied in relatively subtle or pedagogically highly visible 
manners – such as the renfermement policies,17 which researchers drawing on 
Foucault’s early theories18 believed were dominant in early modern Europe. 
�at, of course, does not invalidate the pre-eminence of the authorities in all 
these processes. In Portugal, the policies that prevailed right from the start – in 
other words, from the �nal years of the ��eenth century onwards – were those 
of the crown, and it was within that framework that the various social groups 
were constrained to act. What areas of intervention were favoured by the crown 
in terms of poor relief and public health? What strategies did it develop for each 
area? How were the various actors recruited to implement its policies, and how 
were they made to participate �nancially?19 How were welfare responsibilities 
shared out among the various authorities? How did society put the crown’s 
14 �ompson, 1968.
15 A genealogy of this concept, coined by R. Putnam, with an account of its various 
applications is provided in Szreter, 2002, pp. 573–621.
16 For a discussion of these concepts and their application, see Spierenburg, 2004, 
pp. 1–22.
17 Some studies on these issues are discussed by Jones, 1996b, pp. 51–63.
18 See especially Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 1961; Surveiller et 
punir, 1975.
19 �e implementation of King Manuel I’s donation of 1 per cent of all Crown 
income to pious works in October 1516 has yet to be studied. See Systema, ou Collecção dos 
Regimentos Reaes: contém os Regimentos pertencentes á Administração da Fazenda Real, 1783, 
vol. I, pp. 122–3.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty4
policies into e�ect? How did the various actors interact to distribute resources? 
And what role was reserved for the poor?
�ese are some of the questions discussed in this book, which is organised 
into two distinct but complementary parts. �e �rst, Charity And Poor Relief 
in Portugal atthe Dawn of the Early Modern Period: the Organisation and 
Consolidation of Crown Authority, reveals how society and the authorities 
developed the concept of the ‘deserving poor’ to describe institutional resource 
users. �is notion leads into the crown’s exclusive area of intervention and the 
measures whereby it gradually came to control the mechanisms of social welfare. 
King Manuel I unhesitatingly followed the path marked out by his predecessors, 
transforming scattered, incomplete initiatives into a coherent, structured system. 
�e government’s interventions in hospitals, in the healthcare professions and 
in disease control are highlighted, while the misericórdias are seen not only as 
vehicles for the new charitable and welfare practices that the crown wished to 
establish throughout the country, but also as a means of reinforcing royal power, 
insofar as each one brought central government in�uence to the periphery. 
As the welfare �eld expanded both semantically and functionally, the crown 
reached areas in which it had never acted before, strengthening the connection 
between poor relief and health and adopting coordinated measures addressing 
both of these areas and the actors involved in them. �is part of the book also 
examines the political discourse that sought to regulate the professions and 
procedures associated with health care and poor relief. �e establishment of the 
medical ‘system’ and the grain store project are discussed as evidence that the 
crown took an integrated view of health and welfare issues. Also highlighted are 
the roles that the monarchs assigned to the local councils and the misericórdias, 
the methods they used to organise the funding of their social policies and the 
taxes that they imposed on the towns and requested from the church.
�e second part, Institutions as Social Actors Mediating between Society, the 
Authorities and Individuals, focuses on welfare institutions, in the broad sense 
of the term, and their users. Against the backdrop of a veritable obsession with 
institutionalisation as a way of resolving or preventing deviant behaviours 
associated mostly, but not only, with poverty, it provides an overview of 
recolhimentos (cloistered retreats for girls and women), hospices, mercearias 
(means of subsistence or endowed houses for poor people who pray for the 
donor’s soul) and orphanages, and discusses the crown’s interest in moral and 
religious education and in social regulation and discipline, which it shared with 
the church and also private individuals. In addition, there were the hospitals 
and prisons, which of all the institutions were the ones that most prompted the 
crown to intervene for the sake of more e�ective poor relief. In both cases, the 
actual relief provided and the government’s real aims are called into question, 
particularly a�er the misericórdias were granted such signi�cant and wide-
ranging powers to work in prisons. With regard to the users, and leaving aside 
Introduction 5
any gender concerns,20 the primary emphasis is on the actors, whether men or 
women. When discussing the various agents and negotiations, the book assesses 
the gap between what was stipulated in the normative discourses and what 
happened in reality, or at least that part of reality for which we have documentary 
evidence. Prisons deserve particular attention in this respect, given the speci�c 
pro�le of the poor inmates that the misericórdias helped and the kind of work 
that the confraternities carried out there.
In the initial plans for this book, which were o�en revised as the subject 
matter became ever more complex, and as additional answers were required as 
new questions arose, the second half of the eighteenth century seemed to form 
a natural cut-o� point. A�er that reforms (not many) were undertaken by the 
Marquis of Pombal in the areas in question, and some proposed reforms were 
put forward, especially in the intellectual milieu, that developed around the 
Portuguese Royal Academy of Sciences, created in 1779, as well as the educational 
and repressive policies of the Casa Pia, founded in 1780, an institution for 
beggars and deprived children. However, the dynamics that developed a�er 
1780 in both poor relief and public health, the variety of the sectors involved, 
the thoroughness of the measures introduced and the way in which practice 
accompanied political decision making, soon showed that the period in which 
Diogo Inácio de Pina Manique directed the Intendancy-General of Police 
(1780–1805) represented a di�erent world requiring its own speci�c approach. 
It was decided therefore to allow the Intendant to follow his own path, which 
has been investigated in Pina Manique. Um reformador no Portugal das Luzes 
(Pina Manique: A reformer in Enlightenment Portugal).21
It should also be pointed out that this book does not provide a synthesis of 
poor relief in Portugal in the early modern period, nor does it propose to revisit 
the extensive literature available on welfare practices.22 Instead, it attempts above 
all to examine the changes in the legal frameworks that organised the issues 
in question, not least because it was clear from the outset that the crown was 
gradually increasing its control of social, individual and collective behaviours 
over this period. �e primary aim is to take a longue durée approach to observe 
how people reacted and how individuals and groups resisted the general rules 
and adapted them to their own interests. �is aim may appear over-ambitious, 
particularly since the study dares to look at the country mostly through the 
lens of the central archives, even though they were amassed from di�erent 
social policy areas. �ese archives are held in the Ajuda Library, the National 
Library of Portugal, the Academy of Sciences and the Torre do Tombo National 
20 On these questions, see Henderson and Wall, 1994, p. 22.
21 Abreu, 2013a.
22 Especially that produced since 1990. See Abreu, 1990; Sá, 1997; Maria Marta Lobo 
de Araújo, 2000a, Maria Antónia Lopes, 2000.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty6
Archive, the last with a particular emphasis on the Chancelleries and the Board 
of Conscience and Orders (Mesa da Consciência e Ordens). Documentation from 
local archives is interspersed only here and there, the Portugaliae Monumenta 
Misericordiarum and local history monographs deserving special mention.
Lastly, the city of Évora is admittedly overrepresented in this book, because 
for several years it has been the subject of systematic research conducted 
within projects funded by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation 
(FCT),23 which has resulted in a relational database containing over 400,000 
individual name records from between 1535 and 1800, cross-referencing 
parish demographic records with the welfare institution archives that survive. 
Its immense potential, which has only been partially harnessed here, includes 
the possibility of reconstructing life histories and following families through 
the welfare system over several generations; this work has been started by Rute 
Pardal in her doctoral thesis.24
�e research embodied in this book began in 1984, under the supervision 
of Professor António de Oliveira; since then I have broadened its scope and 
developed additional approaches, which have resulted in a number of works, 
some of them reused here. �e European programmes in which I have taken part 
have provided particularly valuable learning opportunities. �rough them I have 
established fruitful contacts with colleagues with a variety of di�erent research 
experiences, who have been exceptionally generous in sharing their knowledge; 
Patrice Bourdelais, Sally Sheard and Jan Sundin deserve special thanks. I owe 
a debt of gratitude to all my friends and colleagues, old and new. Rute Pardal, 
Rute Ramos, Joana Troni, Luísa Gama, Ricardo Pinto, Alexandra Marques 
and Luís Gonçalves have taken part in the above-mentioned FCT projects at 
di�erent times and to di�erentdegrees, together with others who have made 
more occasional contributions. I thank them all for the professionalism and 
commitment they have devoted to the research. I must also thank Margarida 
Sobral Neto for her careful reading of the text and Maria de Fátima Lopes for 
the thorough �nal revision. My gratitude also goes, as ever, to my family, and to 
those who helped me design this book, watched me develop it and encouraged 
me to �nish it.
23 �ese projects are detailed in Abreu, 2014, footnote 25.
24 Pardal, forthcoming 2015.
PART I 
Charity and Poor Relief in Portugal at 
the Dawn of the Early Modern Period: 
�e Organisation and Consolidation 
of Crown Authority
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Chapter 1 
Social and Political Contexts
�e 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 
�ooded into the towns in search of work, relief or alms, thereby adding to the 
di�culties 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 a�ected areas into disarray sometimes for long periods.2 �ey 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 �rst to face the plague were also the swi�est 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. �ese 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. �e 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.
1 For a discussion of the urbanisation of rural people that resulted from this process, 
see Geremek, 1982, p. 188.
2 Bourdelais, 2003, p. 27.
3 According to the review of the subject given by Cavallo, 1995, pp. 44–57. See also 
Cavallo, 1989, pp. 93–122; Pullan, 1994a, pp. 101–23; and Palmer, 1999, pp. 87–101. 
Hospitalisation is a controversial issue and was felt to be so at the time, according to Biraben, 
1975, p. 173.
4 Teresa Ferreira Rodrigues (ed.), 2009, pp. 159–96.
5 Gutton, 1974, pp. 262–86. 
6 Geremek, 1991 is still essential reading for an overview of the way this problem has 
been dealt with in the literature.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty10
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 o�en’ (‘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 �nancial 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 o�ces’ (‘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 �ve 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. �is 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 bene�cial for all the health of this city and also of all the kingdom’.12
�e king’s death in December 1521 caused the plans for the plague hospital 
to be abandoned, re�ecting the crown’s di�culty 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 ��eenth 
century had been the primary basis for poor relief ’.13 �at was the situation 
 7 �e earliest references to the segregation of plague victims are found in a royal letter 
of 26 January 1480. See Gusmão, 1958, part I, p. 98. 
 8 Eduardo Freire de Oliveira, 1885–1911, vol. I, p. 452, note 1.
 9 Ibid., p. 453.
10 Ibid., p. 468.
11 See Teresa Ferreira Rodrigues, 1997, pp. 134–5. A�er several attempts by Manuel I’s 
predecessor João II in Évora, his successor João III came up against the same resistance from 
the council. ADE, ACME, Livro III dos Originais, No 73, f. 141, document of 2 March 1531. 
12 ‘… por esta coisa nos parecer tão necessária e proveitosa para toda a saúde dessa cidade 
e ainda de todo o reino’. Eduardo Freire de Oliveira, 1885–1911, vol. I, pp. 452–512.
13 Tavares, 1987, p. 32 (translation by Christopher J. Tribe).
Social and Political Contexts 11
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 withthe 
growing number of paupers, which since the 1480s had been rising in line with 
the recovery from demographic recession.18 How to develop e�ective 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.
�e 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, justi�ed its repression of 
beggars and vagrants with what it interpreted as concerns felt by the settled 
14 Abreu, 2013a, pp. 308–17.
15 �e public health statute that João II gave to the City of Lisbon in 1492 is extremely 
important in this respect. ADE, ACME, Livro III dos Originais, No 73, f. 182. 
16 Tavares, 1987, pp. 17–32. �e earliest municipal ordinances known in Portugal are 
from Évora in the last quarter of the fourteenth century.
17 Geremek, 1987, pp. 30–36.
18 Costa, Lains and Miranda, 2011, pp. 74 et seq.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty12
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
�ere 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 �nd 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. �e 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) re�ects 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 �at partly accounts for the generosity 
shown towards workers who settled in communities either seasonally or more 
19 �e de�nition of bashful poor closely follows that given in Abreu, 2007c, 
pp. 95–119, and 2007b, pp. 41–66.
20 Armindo de Sousa, 1990, vol. II, p. 280.
21 Unauthorised begging could sometimes trigger violent reactions from local people, 
even against legally protected groups such as ‘wandering lepers’ (‘gafos andantes’). See PMM, 
vol. 2, p. 141 and also doc. 90, pp. 208–9.
22 In this case, the people not only expressed their apprehension towards wanderers 
who had no roots and no social obligations, but also demonstrated the importance attached 
even then to deportation as a means of protecting communities. PMM, vol. 2, doc. 62, p. 125.
23 ‘… nem querem procurar mester, nem viver com outrem’. Ordenações Afonsinas (OA), 
book IV, pp. 141–2.
24 Cortes de Lisboa de 1410, PMM, vol. 2, doc. 64, p. 126.
25 �ey asked the power to decide who should be granted a begging licence to be 
restored to the municipal; a similar measure was decided by the King of Castile a�er the 
Madrid Cortes in 1435. A request was made for beggars to be expelled from Portugal at the 
Cortes of Santarém in 1410.
26 Moreno, 1990, p. 57.
27 For France, see Mollat, 1974.
28 �e royal letter of 8 December 1401, addressed to the magistrate of Lisbon, stated 
that ‘our land is not tilled or improved, nor are cattle raised on it through lack of servants, 
and there cannot be any since many men and women who are still able to serve lie down to 
beg’. (‘a nossa terra não é lavrada, nem aperfeiçoada, nem se criam em ela gados por míngua 
de servidores, que não podem haver porquanto muitos homens e mulheres que ainda são para 
servir se deitam a pedir’.) See Eduardo Freire de Oliveira, 1885–1911, vol. I, p. 307.
Social and Political Contexts 13
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. �e 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 �rst 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 �rst o�ence 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, speci�ed 
the kind of poor person who deserved to be helped, and de�ned 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. �e 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
�e 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 poor people who were capable of 
working from those who could be authorised to beg; regular inspections of the 
29 Mollat, 1973, vol. I, pp. 13–15.
30 �e literature on this subject is extensive. See in particular Coelho, 1993, pp. 61–100. 
�e important role played by the monastic orders in this �eld should not be overlooked. See 
Mattoso, 1973, vol. II, pp. 637–70.
31 Mollat, 1966, pp. 5–23.
32 OA, book IV, title XXXI, Das Sesmarias, 1375, pp. 281–304.
33 OA, book IV, pp. 289–92. 
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty14
latter group; and protection for the bashful poor. Vives did develop a novel 
formulation of the bashful poor concept34 based on religious texts and the work 
of certain lay authorities, who the author of De pauperum subventione (‘On the 
Relief of the Poor’) believed should alone be responsible for the organisation 
and delivery of poor relief.
�e lists of cities that stood out in passing laws against beggars in sixteenth 
century Europe – Nuremberg, 1522;Strasbourg and Leisnig, 1523–24; Zurich, 
Mons and Ypres, 1525; Venice, 1527–28; Lyon, Rouen and Genoa, 1531–35; 
Paris, Madrid, Toledo and London, 1540; Brandenburg, 154035 – may vary in 
length according to the historians who compiled them, but they all systematically 
omit Portugal. Yet Portugal surpassed all the examples mentioned in the scale 
of enforcement. Since the end of the ��eenth century the Portuguese rulers’ 
charitable and social policies had featured the three elements that Paul Slack, 
summarising Margo Todd,36 identi�es as underlying humanist thinking and 
attitudes towards the countryside in the �rst half of the following century:37 
Christian charity, moral reform and leadership by the public authorities. 
�e �rst of these, based on the principle that the better-o� had obligations 
towards the poor, and not just to save their own souls or for their own moral 
and social bene�t, was fully re�ected in the 1498 Compromisso (constitution) 
of the Lisbon Misericórdia confraternity. Moral reform, which was so dear to 
the heart of humanists, and with it the advocacy of work as a value that shapes 
society, arrived in sixteenth-century Portugal through the Lei das Sesmarias, 
as mentioned above. Public authority intervention in social issues, the last of 
Todd’s three elements, was conspicuous in Portugal, as will be demonstrated 
later.38 �e nation-wide scope of the measures restricting begging was perhaps 
the most notable sign of this.
Going beyond King Manuel I’s legislation,39 the order (alvará) of 4 
November 154440 was the most important piece of legislation since the Lei das 
34 Vives, 1525. See also Martz, 1983, pp. 7–15
35 Slack, 1988, pp. 8–9. For a more complete list, see note 16 on p. 15.
36 Todd, 1987.
37 Slack, 1995, pp. 6–7.
38 Portugal deserves the same status that Paul Slack attributed to England when 
he compared the English situation with that of France and Germany. See Slack, 1988, 
particularly pp. 23, 116 and 119–21.
39 PMM, vol. 3, doc. 88, p. 242. �e Ordenações Manuelinas (OM) speci�ed 20 days 
as being the longest anyone without work could stay in a particular place. A�er that they 
were liable to be imprisoned, �ogged or transported. See OM, book V, title LXXII, 1984, 
pp. 224–5.
40 �is was preceded by the law of 1538, which reiterated the conditions that could 
lead a false beggar into slavery (which were much more onerous than in the similar English 
Social and Political Contexts 15
Sesmarias. Named by King Sebastião the Lei dos Vadios (Law of Idlers),41 and 
regarded by some late eighteenth-century social reformers as a model of good 
practice,42 it �rst applied only to the ‘place where His Highness was with his 
court’ (‘lugar em que Sua Alteza estivesse com sua corte’), but it was amended in 
1558 and extended to the whole country. Grounded in the association between 
begging and idleness in a period that did not yet question the e�ects of a lack 
of work,43 the order lists repressive measures arranged clearly and simply in a 
progressive hierarchy: on the �rst o�ence transgressors should be jailed, publicly 
�ogged and expelled from the locality where they had committed the crime of 
unauthorised begging; if they were caught again, they would not only be jailed 
and �ogged, but would also lose their property, if they had any, and would be 
banished from the city for life; on the third o�ence they would be transported 
to Brazil for 10 years, which in practice could mean that they would never set 
foot in Portugal again.
�e procedures for granting begging permits continued the late-medieval 
model, with its emphasis on the need for the poor to be self-su�cient, even if 
they were disabled. To that end, a number of possible occupations was presented, 
which were to be applied according to the extent of the person’s physical 
limitations. For example, the ‘in�rm of the feet’ (‘doentes dos pés’) should learn 
the trade of tailors, shoemakers or similar, those with deformed hands (‘defeitos 
nas mãos’) should be sent to work with the religious, while the blind should help 
blacksmiths or locksmiths ‘to work the bellows for them’ (‘para lhes tangerem os 
foles’). �e whole process was marked by a high level of bureaucracy and had to 
be recorded in writing. To be granted the status of licensed beggar a person had 
to provide proof of confession; renewal of the licence at the end of the year was 
contingent upon knowing the Pater noster, Ave Maria, Credo and Salve Regina. 
Under no circumstances could foreigners be authorised to beg, even if they were 
obviously in need or there was an ‘acceptable’ justi�cation; Córdoba and other 
Castilian towns had been enforcing this rule since the 1520s.44 �e crown relied 
on the poor themselves and their social networks to spread the news of where 
and when potential beggars would be examined.
�e 1544 order established a number of links with the welfare measures that 
were being developed at the time. �e most obvious was the care given to sick 
law of 1547). See Lião, [1569], 1987, part IV, title XIII, law 1, pp. 154v–155. �e law proved 
ine�ective in England, and probably in Portugal as well. See Slack, 1995, p. 10.
41 Lião, 1987, pp. 155–7. �e law of 1544 appeared four years a�er Cardinal Tavera 
had passed a similar law in Castile, restoring the restrictive legislation introduced by King 
João I in 1387. For the Castilian process, see Martz, 1983, pp. 19–21.
42 Abreu, 2013a, pp. 101–2.
43 �is was the prevailing attitude throughout late medieval and early modern Europe, 
according to Riis, 1997, pp. 129–46.
44 Martz, 1983, pp. 14–15.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty16
beggars, who were compulsorily taken into hospitals, but the real innovation 
was child protection. While support for foundlings had been institutionalised 
by Manuel I in his Ordenações (code of laws) of 1512, the new order increased 
the care to be given to children exploited by beggars, who used them as their 
assistants, extending to them the same protection that the law gave to foundlings 
in terms of upbringing, providing apprenticeships at the age of seven or placing 
them on the labour market. A third provision, and perhaps the most important 
for the purposes of this analysis, made the Confraternity of the Court – founded 
in 1527, while the royal family was staying in Almeirim, to help the poor who 
accompanied the court on its travels, especially knights and widows of soldiers 
who had served the crown in Africa – responsible for providing well-lit and 
heated premises where licensed beggars could spend the night.45 In other words, 
the monarch was transposing the praxis of hospices and some hospitals into law 
on the assumption that these beggars’ itinerant lifestyle excluded them from the 
formal mechanisms of regular support.
�e orders of 1544 and 1558 were accompanied by increased policing 
activities by the king’s o�cers,46 supposedly at the people’s request,47 who were 
given greater powers48 in order to keep vagrants and beggars under more e�ective 
control.49 Judges, baili�s and alcaides were ordered to inspect inns, hospitals 
and lodging houses every fortnight and to arrest and try suspects summarily,50 
but it was the local councils that were to examine beggars and grant licences to 
those who wished to beg outside their home areas. A network of o�cers and 
informants, also set up in 1544, was to police the districts of Lisbon,51 keeping 
watch over every beggar and every possible lodging place.52 Life was made 
increasingly di�cult for foreigners,53 particularly those who had no trade.54 
45 �e fact that these kinds of laws were introduced at almost the same time in both 
Portugal and Spain is assessed by Flynn, 1989, especially pp. 75–114.
46 BA, 46–XI–7, �. 161–72. See also BA, 51–VIII–7, No 76 and BA, 51–VIII–18, 
No 317.
47 Freire de Oliveira, 1885–1911, vol. I, p. 546, note 1.
48 Ibid., I, pp. 545–6, 30 March 1546.
49 Lião, 1987, part I, title X, law III, p. 32, order of 1 February 1545.50 Ibid., part IV, title XIII, law IV, �. 157–158v, 6 November 1558.
51 Ibid., part I, title X, law III, p. 32, order of 1 February 1545.
52 Freire de Oliveira, 1885–1911, vol. III, pp. 69–70.
53 Lião, [1569], 1987, part IV, title XIII, law II, p. 155, law 24 of the Cortes, 1538. �e 
letter of 6 November 1558 gave foreigners 20 days to leave the place where they were caught 
and 30 days to leave the kingdom. Ibid., part IV, title XIII, law IV, �. 157–158v.
54 �e order of 14 August 1563 de�ned as foreigners those who ‘in dress, language 
and manner seem to be Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Persians or other nations not subject to 
the Turk’ (‘nos trajos, língua e modo pareçam ser arménios, gregos, árabes, persas ou outras 
nações que são sujeitas ao turco’). See Lião, [1569], 1987, part IV, title XIII, law V, p. 158v.
Social and Political Contexts 17
In an attempt to make the laws more e�ective, a statute passed in 1604 entitled 
On the poor who beg (Sobre os pobres que hão de pedir)55 adopted a new strategy and 
punished local magistrates (corregedores), provincial administrators (provedores) 
and circuit judges (ouvidores) who were not su�ciently diligent in pursuing 
beggars.56 Again, English and Portuguese laws on the subject are remarkably 
similar in content: in this case the English law of 159857 and the Portuguese of 
1604. Neither religion nor distance caused much di�erence in these countries’ 
policies on begging and vagrancy.
Since the Lei das Sesmarias, the authorities had tended to categorise the poor 
into three groups, which were apparently neither stable nor mutually exclusive: 
the false poor, who should be punished and expelled from their communities; 
the poor, whether resident or not, who were authorised to beg for a limited 
time; and the poor who could aspire to the largest share of the funds set aside by 
relief institutions, provided they did not beg. Unlicensed beggars and vagrants 
in the �rst group did not meet the conditions that de�ned the deserving poor. 
If contemporary accounts are to be believed, they formed a very large contingent 
that was a priori excluded from formal poor relief, except that provided by 
hospitals, where they could only go if genuinely ill – the letter that Manuel I sent 
to Évora City Council in 1502, forbidding it to admit into the Espírito Santo 
Hospital those who wanted to treat it as a hospice (‘healthy poor people who 
are quite able to work’),58 is revelatory in this respect – and prisons or possibly 
in the form of safe conducts. �e deserving poor, which included the sick, the 
young and the ‘defenceless’ elderly, fell into the second and third groups. �e 
second was allowed to beg as well as to receive a certain amount of aid from 
some institution or other, almost always on an occasional basis, while the third 
was subject to stricter eligibility criteria which varied according to a variety of 
locally determined circumstances. None of these groups included gypsies; in 
fact they are only mentioned in the context of relief in prison, and even then in 
very low numbers.
�e gypsy question is complex and has been examined in detail elsewhere.59 
It need only be said here that they probably arrived in Portugal at the same time 
as in Castile, at the end of the ��eenth century, at a time when the authorities 
in many parts of Europe were engaged in a ruthless battle against nomadism, 
which o�cial sources equated with vagabondage and vagrancy. As they lived 
like vagrants, gypsies were punished as such, because the stigma attached to their 
lifestyle had already been developed and internalised by society. �eir treatment 
55 BPE, Cod. CXIX/1–13, �. 64–65v.
56 Collecção Chronologica, 1819, vol. I, pp. 87–100.
57 Slack, 1995, pp. 52–3.
58 ADE, ACME, Livro I dos Originais, No 71, f. 251.
59 Abreu, 2007b, pp. 41–66.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty18
under the law was therefore the result of applying existing categories and not 
a new, ethnically discriminatory rule. From the start, the gypsy question in 
Portugal was not distinguished from the problem of false beggars and vagrants in 
general. �e �rst known order referring to them, dated 13 March 1526, forbade 
them from entering the kingdom and ordered those who were already living 
there to leave, arguing that it was for the sake of protecting public order, but 
the only point that di�ered from the complaints the king received about other 
‘wanderers’ concerned the ‘many spells they feign to know, causing the people 
much loss and trouble’.60 �e next law, in 1538, speci�ed that it applied not only 
to false beggars but also to ‘other persons of any nation who travel or live like 
gypsies’.61 �is recognition that a wandering lifestyle was characteristic of this 
ethnic group was new, and henceforth all laws condemning vagrancy likewise 
singled out ‘those who live like gypsies’. On 8 August 1639 the chief justice of 
the Court of Petitions (Casa da Suplicação) further clari�ed the term, stating 
that ‘being a gypsy does not consist of one’s nature [birth] but of living as such’.62 
�e crown itself did not have a well-de�ned policy for this group, although 
the tendency was to increase the severity of punishments.63 Consequently, 
while it dealt with gypsies in accordance with its own interests64 and current 
circumstances,65 it is also true that on several occasions it decided in their favour, 
going against the municipalities that refused to have them on their lands,66 and 
seeking to integrate them67 on conditions identical to those required of any 
minority:68 they had to settle in a particular place, work and relinquish traits 
60 ‘… muitas feitiçarias que �ngem saber, em que o povo recebe muita perda e fadiga’. 
Rui de Abreu Torres, ‘Ciganos’, undated, pp. 68–9.
61 ‘outras pessoas de qualquer nação que andassem ou vivessem como ciganos’. Lião, 
[1569], 1987, part IV, title XIII, law II, p. 155, law 24 of the Cortes, 1538.
62 ‘o ser cigano não consiste na natureza [naturalidade] mas em viver como tal’. See 
J.J.A. Silva, 1855–59, 1603–1612, p. 139.
63 See Alvará sobre os ciganos, para que se cumpra a ley declarada na Ordenação do livro 
V, título 69, Lisbon, unnumbered, 1606.
64 As it did ‘to the more than 250 gypsies’ (‘aos mais de duzentos e cinquenta ciganos’) 
posted to the border with Spain to defend Portuguese independence a�er 1640. See Collecção 
Chronologica, 1819, vol. I, pp. 524–6.
65 J.J.A. Silva, 1855–59, 1603–1612, p. 151.
66 For example, when by a letter of 23 July 1699 it forced Évora to accept several 
families from Lisbon, who were leaving the capital because the cost of living there was very 
high. ADE, ACME, Livro XIII dos Originais, No 83, �. 252–3.
67 According to the royal letter of 28 March 1618, which enlarged on decisions of 
1594. See J.J.A. Silva, 1855–59, 1613–1619, p. 273.
68 Intolerance of the Moors grew during the Counter Reformation. In Spain, the law 
of 1 January 1567 (reiterating earlier laws) banned them from using Arabic and keeping up 
their social and religious customs; instead they had to adopt Castilian customs and dress. See 
Elliott, 1991, pp. 172–94.
Social and Political Contexts 19
that would identify their ethnic origin. �ese demands were always rejected. 
�e 1649 Law on Gypsies and Vagrants (Lei sobre ciganos e vagabundos)69 is of 
interest in this respect, since it laid down that gypsy children should be handed 
over to the misericórdia confraternities, recolhimentos and orphanages when they 
reached the age of nine so they could be educated for the world of work and 
learn basic Christian values – in other words the same objectives that governed 
the policies on foundlings and orphans. For the �rst time, the law used education 
as a means of repressing the gypsies but, as with previous attempts, it was to 
no avail, since their social memory was �rmly enough established to resist the 
values that the crown wished to instil in them, namely work as a prerequisite for 
economic development, social stability70and access to formal relief measures.
None of these policies against unlicensed beggars, vagrants, idlers and cheats, 
whether they were gypsies or not, questioned the religious principles that lay 
behind charitable activities at that time. �e Bible and patristics continued 
to give substance to o�cial documents and literary texts, as clearly shown in 
the poetry of Gil Vicente,71 while church ideology, which was also praxis, was 
re�ected in books such as the Leal Conselheiro by King Duarte (1433–1438) 
and the Livro da Virtuosa Benfeitoria by Prince Pedro. Authors generally 
combined two fundamental themes without ambivalence: evangelical poverty, 
grounded in doctrine,72 and a condemnation of idleness in favour of honesty 
and work. �e point to be made here is that the measures to control begging 
can also stand among the royal actions that de�ned the model of the good king.73 
�e dual feelings that Ângela Barreto Xavier termed ‘A�ection and disa�ection 
for the poor’ re�ect the contradictions of a time that contained the seeds of 
change, where traditional models of charity, such as the acts performed by the 
confraternities,74 existed alongside new demands on the faithful, who were urged 
to renew the spirituality of bene�cence, while at the same time mechanisms of 
greater social control were being developed. Although the literature of treatises 
and the Catholic morality of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exalted 
poverty and proclaimed the virtues of almsgiving to the point of advocating 
that it should be obligatory,75 it appears they neither opposed nor rejected the 
repressive anti-begging measures and the incentive to work, which in fact was 
based on the scholastic tradition that the government was promulgating.
69 A very similar situation was occurring in France at that time.
70 J.J.A. Silva, 1855–59, 1648–1656, pp. 26–7.
71 See Tavares, 1987, pp. 17 et seq.
72 Xavier, 1999, p. 63.
73 Ibid., p. 81.
74 Gomes, 1995, pp. 89–150.
75 Lopes, 2000, vol. I, pp. 42 et seq.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty20
�ose who made charity conditional on age, physical health and moral 
conduct were remarkably assertive;76 the Archbishop of Évora, D. Teotónio 
de Bragança (1578–1602) was typical in this respect. In contrast to Ypres 
and Castile in the 1530s (and Castile again a�er 1565), Portugal saw no legal 
reversals or major opposition in this area, even from the church. Among the 
principles that guided charitable work and institutional relief in the country 
were ideas advocated by Juan Luís Vives (with whom King João III exchanged 
correspondence), Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers who were 
severely criticised by the Catholic Church.
�e main criticism of the legal measures against beggars and vagrants and, 
therefore, of the provisions de�ning the deserving poor, was that the crown 
was incapable of enforcing them, most notably because it lacked the o�cers to 
proclaim and carry out its orders. Some laws acknowledged this,77 although they 
were attempting to extend their scope to other areas traditionally associated 
with vagrancy, such as prostitution.78 As Robert Castel has rightly pointed 
out, however,79 such reasoning is based on the false premise that the aim of the 
legislation on begging was to suppress it. Since public bodies were well aware 
that punishment was ine�ective, the reiteration of laws acted as a deterrent, 
which was in fact more in line with the conditions of the early modern period 
and attitudes to the law at that time.
Welfare institutions incorporated the idea of the deserving poor into 
their everyday activities with no apparent di�culty, although they reshaped 
it according to their own interests and aims. �e misericórdia confraternities 
almost certainly rejected the crown’s intentions that lay behind the order of 
8 July 1500, which gave them the task of distinguishing the true poor from 
the false, the �rst time that this kind of responsibility had been entrusted to a 
charitable institution. On such a sensitive issue, it is not hard to see what King 
Manuel I intended: his aim was to centralise charity and repression – the former 
legitimising the latter – in a single body, without undermining private piety or 
questioning the right to alms, which was upheld by the church. Meanwhile, 
the task of controlling beggars and vagrants remained with the municipalities, 
which struggled to �nd the money and manpower to carry out these duties. In 
Évora, for example, the city council even tried to put pressure on the crown, in 
1586, by threatening not to honour its obligations, since it had been prevented 
from creating a post of baili� to punish the ‘idle men who frequent this city, 
not having been born here, and those that make out that they are sick when 
76 Ibid., vol. I, pp. 74–78.
77 BNP, Cod. 801, �. 121v–124, Alvará de 02 de Junho de 1570, ordena aos juízes do 
crime que façam o recenseamento de todos os ociosos e vadios, homens e mulheres, nos seus bairros.
78 BNP, Cod. 801, �. 130–135, Alvará de 2 de Junho de 1570, sobre os bairros de Lisboa, 
em que hão de viver as mulheres solteiras.
79 Castel, 1995, pp. 169–71.
Social and Political Contexts 21
they are not and take alms from the poor, and the many the�s that occur for 
this reason in this city’.80 Such reactions were transitory, however, as most local 
councils were aware that the aim of royal edicts was to protect the people, even 
though they might be di�cult to enforce, as Tomar Council acknowledged in 
the late sixteenth century.81
�e fact is that, in general, the lists of poor people supported by the 
misericórdias hardly included any beggars or vagrants; the same was also true 
of the cathedral chapters, and very few beggars were admitted to the hospitals. 
Could beggars, vagrants and gypsies trick the authorities by adopting false 
identities – pretending to be workers, for instance – and thus receive alms from 
the misericórdias and other institutions, or be admitted to a hospital without 
being ill? Undoubtedly they could and did. �e social uses of the system and the 
ease with which hospitals accepted those who worked, or claimed to work, are 
well known; however, the very fact that people needed to get round the rules 
shows how important they were. �ere were also times, although admittedly not 
o�en, when the institutions themselves decided to �out the rules that governed 
them, as happened during the social emergency that occurred in Lisbon during 
the economic crisis of the late sixteenth century, when the capital was �ooded 
with ‘companies of men, women and children who, through surviving on herbs 
and other provisions of such weak substance and poor quality, fell sick in large 
numbers’.82 Defying the crown’s orders83 to con�ne the beggars in a blockaded 
street until ships could arrive to take them to Brazil, leaving Lisbon ‘relieved of 
this burden’ (‘aliviada desta carga’),84 the city council chose instead to come to 
their aid. A similar situation occurred in Évora in 1659, when the misericórdia 
decided that ‘just one vintém should be paid to each person and if it appeared 
that some was being given to people who went from door to door begging it 
should be taken from them so that this money could be used to help the hospital 
due to the great necessity it has since there is a large number of sick people in 
it and its income is �nished’.85 As studies on the users of this hospital show, the 
80 ‘… homens ociosos que andam nessa cidade, não sendo naturais dela, e dos que se 
fazem doentes não o sendo e tiram esmolas aos pobres e dos muitos furtos que por esta causa 
se fazem nessa cidade’. ADE, ACME, Livro VI dos Originais, No 76, f. 116.
81 Anais do Município de Tomar, vol. IV, 1581–1700, 1968, p. 73.
82 ‘… companhias de homens, mulheres e meninos que, por virem mantidos de ervas 
e outros mantimentos de tão fraca substância e má qualidade, adoeciam tantos’. Freire de 
Oliveira, 1885–1911, vol. II, pp. 100–104, Carta da câmara de 18de Abril de 1598.
83 Freire de Oliveira, 1885–1911, vol. II, pp. 106–7.
84 Ibid., pp. 120–21.
85 ‘… se pagasse somente um vintém a cada uma pessoa das providas e se parecesse que 
davam algumas a pessoas que andassem pelas portas pedindo se lhas tirassem para […] com este 
dinheiro se acudir ao hospital pela grande necessidade que tem por haver grande numero de 
doentes nele e estarem suas rendas acabadas’. ADE, AME, Livro de Lembranças, No 19, f. 119v.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty22
confraternity was prioritising poor people from outside the city, even beggars, 
which could be seen as a way in which these people were turning the system that 
excluded them to their own bene�t.86
As a rule, however, and leaving aside those poor people who were temporarily 
admitted to hospital or helped in prison, those who were given safe conducts to 
leave their communities and perhaps a few ‘poor at the gate’,87 the precondition 
for receiving alms with (some) regularity or, in other words, for joining the 
highest of the three groups of poor people mentioned above, was to be included 
on the list of those provided for and visited (rol dos providos e visitados). As 
the name suggests, entitlement to institutional relief was based on a residence 
criterion, whereby the recipient was subject to inspection by the donor. By being 
‘visited’, the poor could receive one or more types of relief, such as food, money or 
medical care. Between the poor at the bottom of the hierarchy, that is to say the 
ones who received alms only sporadically, and those at the top, who were given 
relief constantly or regularly, there were several subgroups from the entire social 
spectrum, o�en unconnected to one another. Somewhat unexpectedly, the local 
elites were to be found among them and sometimes they received the major part 
of the money distributed. In the wake of the 1544 act, the Compromisso of the 
Lisbon Misericórdia of 1577 formalised what previous compromissos had only 
hinted at: the poor in the ‘visited’ category were not allowed to ‘go begging from 
house to house or around the city’, a principle that Duke João II of Bragança, the 
future King João IV, would reiterate to the Vila Viçosa Misericórdia in 1636.88 
As o�en happened in early modern Portugal, however, rules were not absolute. 
Formal alms were in no way su�cient to provide the poorest with the basic means 
of survival,89 leading some of them to break the rules and turn to begging, while 
the misericórdias that were supporting them turned a blind eye. In practice that 
blurred the distinction between the two groups of deserving poor de�ned above. 
At least, that is implicit in the decision made by the misericórdia board in Évora 
on 17 July 1596 that in future the brothers would only visit the bashful poor 
who were unable to work or beg.90 �e level of permissiveness shown towards 
begging depended more on the resources available than on any rule: in 1658, 
when the board members allotted two loaves per month to an abandoned child 
who still lived with his foster mother, they explained that the donation would be 
given for so long as the child was ‘unable to beg for his own alms’.91
86 Some French examples, albeit from a slightly later period, may be found in Hu�on, 
1972, pp. 97–123.
87 Even this category of poor people had to be registered and identi�ed in Évora.
88 Maria Marta Lobo de Araújo, 2004, pp. 187–8.
89 A more detailed examination of the role of the family in these contexts may be found 
in Lynch, 2003, pp. 68–102.
90 ADE, AME, Livro de Lembranças, No 8, f. 5v.
91 ADE, AME, Livro de Lembranças, No 19, f. 111.
Social and Political Contexts 23
Why did the authorities accept that local community members could beg 
whereas they tended to ban outsiders from doing so? �ere were various reasons. 
�e economic and social regulation of communities, as well as people’s mutual 
acquaintance and the notion of social cohesion, relied on a safety net set up 
�rst and foremost for local people: their own beggars were recognised as truly 
poor people, part of the social structure, who might perhaps do odd jobs and for 
one reason or another had fallen into mendicancy. �is situation assumed that 
poverty was caused by circumstances, and mendicancy was socially integrated, 
provided it was not adopted as a way of life by the �t and well. Additionally, local 
beggars were not automatically associated with criminal activities, as beggars 
from outside o�en were.
�is leads us back to the thorny question of the bashful poor. �e early 
compromissos of the Lisbon Misericórdia, including the 1498 manuscript and the 
printed works of 1516 and 1577, but not the 1618 version, described the ‘visited 
poor’ as ‘bashful and retiring persons’ whose eligibility should be con�rmed in 
their own homes. �is was a di�erent de�nition from that given in the Lei das 
Sesmarias: the shame now lay in the act of begging in public and not in having a 
social condition that prevented manual work.
A digression is called for here to clear up some confusion regarding these 
poor people and how they are classi�ed. In applying the term envergonhado 
(ashamed, shamefaced, bashful) to the Portuguese case with the meaning as used 
by G. Ricci and J.-P. Gutton,92 but without taking account of temporal changes, 
some historians have tended to confuse ‘retirement’ (recolhimento, a prohibition 
on working or begging) with secrecy, suggesting that the bashful poor were 
given alms in secret, a concept very rarely mentioned in the compromissos of 
the misericórdias. �e authorisation given in the royal charter for the Santarém 
Misericórdia dated 24 April 1542 for board members to bear arms at night 
during their visits to the bashful poor, ‘since it is thus more concealed’ (‘por 
assim ser mais escondido’), is far from common.93 In any case, it would have 
been di�cult to maintain secrecy when the regulations required the visitors to 
enquire of the ‘church priests and confessors and around the neighbourhood 
where said persons live’ (‘curas das igrejas e confessores e assim pela vizinhança 
onde as tais pessoas viverem’) about how the would-be ‘visited’ behaved; any 
con�dentiality concerned the information collected and the informants’ privacy, 
in procedures identical to those organised for women applying for a marriage 
dowry. Nevertheless, situations like that of Manuel Álvares, a major in the militia, 
are not uncommon: in his request to the Évora cathedral chapter for alms he 
mentioned his ‘many necessities due to great poverty, as this entire city knows, 
since they do not contribute to me from their pay […], so that I am no longer 
92 On the concept of bashful poverty, see Ricci and Revel, 1983, pp. 158–77.
93 PMM, vol. 3, doc. 215, p. 328. Also Sá, 2003, pp. 16–17.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty24
able to leave the house because of my lack of apparel’.94 In this and other similar 
cases, the claimant hoped to gain more by admitting to his ‘necessities’ in public 
than by maintaining the discretion required by his social status. Moreover, in a 
society of privileges, having enough income to maintain one’s social status could 
be considered a right, and the authorities should enable people to maintain their 
status for fear that the social hierarchy might disintegrate. Was the attitude of 
poor people very di�erent when they turned to the hospitals for want of any 
other means of social support?
94 ‘… muitas necessidades pela muita pobreza, como sabe toda esta cidade, por lhe não 
contribuírem com seus ordenados [ … ], que já não estou capaz de poder sair fora de casa 
por falta do vestido’. ACE, Esmolas dadas pelo Cabido, folder No 48, bundle II, eighteenth- 
century alms.
Chapter 2 
‘For the Bene�t of the Body’: 
Hospital and Health Care Reform
Linked to the spread of Christianity, hospitals in the Middle Ages had been 
the most important institutional examples of popular religious feeling and 
demonstrated social responsibility in theface of the adversities that a�ected 
people, especially the most fragile, and above all in urban contexts.1
Hospitals had been founded by the church, notably by bishops and religious 
orders, and by royal patronage, but mostly by ordinary people. �ey were also 
the charitable institutions that attracted most pious bequests, exemptions and 
tax privileges.2 Several thousand must have existed in medieval Europe – 1,103 
have been counted in England and Scotland alone3 – but the actual number 
will never be known because they were so readily re-founded, converted or even 
merged into other hospitals. Shaped by Christian values, they imbued their work 
with strong religious overtones that could even be seen in their architecture, 
which in the larger buildings was in�uenced by monastic in�rmaries. Some of 
them contained chapels or even churches, but the vast majority were diminutive, 
consisting of just two or three rooms in an ordinary house. Common to all 
these institutions, large and small, were the religious obligations imposed on 
their users, who were expected to pray for the souls of the founders and worthy 
personages. Masses were also celebrated periodically, as required by the founders, 
at a time when an important aspect of charity was its contractual, simoniacal 
and utilitarian nature.4
�e word ‘hospital’ covered a wide variety of institutions, which, with the 
exception of leprosy hospitals, catered for an eclectic range of inmates, including 
pilgrims, travellers, the poor, the elderly, orphans, the sick and prostitutes; 
a very few also took in pregnant women or those about to give birth. �ere 
they received the bare essentials to continue on their way – food, clothing, a 
few nights’ shelter and basic personal care – but seldom medical support. 
1 Pullan, 1971, p. 42.
2 �e way they evolved depended more on the nature of the political authorities 
and the attitudes of the local elite than on speci�c models developed along any particular 
religious line.
3 Carlin, 1989, p. 21.
4 �e introduction to this chapter is reworked from part of the Introduction to Abreu 
and Sheard, 2013, pp. 1–20.
�e Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty26
Information on attendance by healthcare professionals and the use of medicines 
is more common in the case of larger hospitals that developed medical care and 
invested in new treatment methods. Examples are Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital 
in London, founded in 1123, and the most famous of the French hospitals, the 
Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, as well as the Ospedale Santo Spirito in Rome, founded 
in 1198 by Pope Innocent III.5 �e Ospedale Santa Maria Nuova, in Florence, 
was one of the best known for investing in medical treatment and professional 
training, and it was supported from 1321 onwards by a Studium Generale, which 
included a medical school.
In the 12th–13th centuries leprosy began to be seen as a social problem, 
and this was a decisive factor in the gradual development of specialised hospital 
services. �e segregation of lepers and the compulsory siting of leprosaria far 
from inhabited areas appear to have originated with the Lateran Council of 1179 
and were probably the �rst organised public-health measures. At the same time, 
access to hospitals was restricted for people with what were considered incurable 
or contagious diseases. Not all hospitals would have been as strict in this regard as 
the English hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Bridgwater, which detailed these 
situations in its ordinance in 1219,6 but such strict admission criteria tended to 
spread around Europe, particularly a�er the Black Death, in connection with 
the prophylaxis of epidemics. While it is controversial to apply the concept of 
medicalisation, in the sense of medical therapy, to periods so far in the past, it is 
less problematic to state that many hospitals were already centralising health and 
welfare resources, which obviously included spiritual support.7
Because of the work they did, their legal standing (o�en subject to both civil 
and canonical law) and the capital assets involved, which were almost always 
amortised and therefore limited economic transactions, with an adverse impact on 
the central powers’ co�ers, hospitals soon became a major issue for the government. 
�is was particularly true when social matters began to be seen as public-health 
issues, an example of which was the new moral attitude towards beggars and 
vagrants, which developed during the economic crisis of the fourteenth century.
Whether created from scratch or formed by the merger of other institutions 
and pious bequests, new hospitals such as the Hôtel-Dieu in Beaune, which was 
operational in 1452, were now organised along fresh lines, as forerunners of 
early modern hospitals: their religious leanings remained very strong, but their 
aims were unashamedly secular. Philip II stated it very clearly in the instructions 
5 Renzi, 1999, pp. 104–5.
6 Hospital of St John the Baptist Bridgwater Ordinance – From Bishop Bekynton’s 
Register Somerset Record Society vol. 59 entry 1062, Bishop Jocelyn August 1219, Ordinance 
and foundation of the hospital of St John Bruggewater.
7 See the review of the subject in Dinges, 1999, p. 240.
‘For the Bene�t of the Body’: Hospital and Health Care Reform 27
he sent to his troops in the following century, when he urged them to destroy 
French hospitals because ‘hospitals are not churches’.
In 1311 the Council of Vienna recognised the di�culties in carrying out 
urgent reforms to the hospitals – and it should be noted that there were various 
legal reasons for it to interfere, even though the church ran fewer institutions 
than the number long attributed to it – and suggested that, except for those 
belonging to the hospitaller orders, they should be run by secular bodies 
rather than the church.8 In doing so, it exposed its �ank to an incursion by the 
civil authorities, which had o�en been under popular pressure to act. �eir 
shrewdness in backing the church by upholding the religious values enshrined 
in the hospitals made it easier for them to take over; the attempt by the Council 
of Trent (1545–63) to strengthen the bishops’ authority over the hospitals was 
vigorously opposed by the monarchs, as it would mean a reversal of the process 
initiated two centuries earlier.
It was in defence of the souls of the founders, who o�en did not receive the 
masses that were required by the donations they had made to the hospitals, and 
the bodies of the poor, who were prevented from bene�ting from the income 
deriving from those donations, that with papal support the monarchs expelled 
bad administrators and incorporated poorly managed hospitals into the crown 
estate. �is had begun to take place in France in the thirteenth century, when 
hospitals that could not prove their origin were turned into royal foundations 
and placed under the control of government agents.9 �e same situation 
occurred in England in 1414, once the House of Commons had accepted that 
the hospitals were decadent. In southern Europe, reform began in 1401, in 
Aragon, led by the government; it happened in 1456 in Milan under Francesco 
Sforza, and somewhat earlier in Florence.10 During his travels around Europe, 
Prince Pedro, brother of the king of Portugal, advised King Duarte to undertake 
the same kind of reforms. Royal intervention in welfare institutions in Portugal 
did in fact begin with the hospitals.
�e Portuguese crown �rst contacted the pope to start the process of hospital 
reform in 1432 and 1434. It was con�ned to the Lisbon diocese at �rst, but a�er 
two years Duarte proposed large-scale reorganisation, closing hospitals that were 
unable to survive and transferring their assets to those that were more viable. To 
pre-empt possible con�icts of jurisdiction, the crown requested that the hospitals 
created from such mergers ‘could be administered by an authority of their own 
and without interference from the local ordinaries or prelates, [or]