3 - Almshouse Founders and Their Motivations

Summary

To classify men's charitable acts into neat categories according to the impulses assumed to have prompted them would be dangerous and absurd. Human behaviour rarely exhibits such helpful singleness of motive.

The motivation behind any philanthropic gesture is open to a number of interpretations, and altruism and self-interest may, as Clive Burgess observes, be ‘hopelessly entangled’. As a particular form of philanthropy with a long history, almshouses lent themselves to a wide range of motivations which went beyond the obvious meeting of social need. Founders, too, were a diverse group, ranging from town tradesmen, country gentry and local clergymen to city merchants, great magnates and church prelates. Many were involved in local or state government and administration, and their philanthropy was as much a public as a private gesture, influenced by a range of complex and overlapping agenda. While the Christian imperative to provide for the poor was accepted by Catholics and Protestants alike, and for many founders this was probably sufficient motivation, for others there is some suggestion that the founding and administration of almshouses might have played a part in forging particular religious and cultural identities. In the continuing debate on the correct response to the problem of the poor, moreover, members of the government and court publicly led by example in founding almshouses and in other charitable works. For the landowning classes, accepting responsibility for providing for aged tenants and other poor people in the neighbourhood was an obvious expression of their status, virtue and moral leadership, while their charitable foundations could themselves become sites of memorialisation. Among the urban oligarchies, involvement in the provision of almshouses was likewise an opportunity to demonstrate or acquire prestige and respect through the exercise of civic responsibility. Consequently, the beneficiaries of almshouses might be not only the poor inhabitants themselves, but also the donors, the administrators, and society more generally.

In these circumstances, identifying the specific impulses which motivated individual donors is a necessarily speculative exercise. The conservatism of many donors, whereby benefactors were influenced by the philanthropic acts of their contemporaries or local predecessors, also makes it difficult to judge how far individuals were subject to a precise set of motivations. Yet the enduring popularity throughout the early modern period of almshouses as a specific form of charitable provision requires at least some attempt at explanation.