2 - Chronology and Distribution of Almshouse Foundations

Summary

Surely this is an annal of a magnificent and a noble achievement.

The remarkable surge in the founding of almshouses in the early modern period has been widely noted, and is usually viewed as a direct response to increasing problems of poverty and homelessness at the time. Elizabeth Prescott, for instance, asserts that ‘in the mid sixteenth century there was a desperate need for accommodation of this kind’, exacerbated by the loss of monasteries and hospitals through the Dissolution.More recently, Marjorie McIntosh has calculated that 291 hospitals and almshouses, out of a total of 601 pre-Reformation institutions, were closed in the period between 1530 and 1559. The many ancient foundations which had been monastic in origin were swept away; such was the fate, for instance, of St Giles’ Hospital for the poor at Kepier, Durham, founded in 1112 and dissolved in 1545.Out of that county's eighteen medieval hospitals, only five survived the Reformation, and these could hardly have been sufficient for the population of the county.

The impact of these losses is, nonetheless, hard to quantify, and may have been exaggerated by contemporary commentators. Both Clay and Prescott use a single quotation about the impotent poor from the 1546 polemic, A Supplication of the Poor Commons: ‘The[n] had they hospitals, and almshouses to be lodged in, but nowe they lye and storve in the stretes. Then was their number great, but nowe much greater’. This may well be a nostalgic reference to an imagined golden age when the poor were properly looked after, rather than an accurate portrayal of the past; and, given the forty-three pages of vivid anticlerical complaints within which it is embedded, this single quotation has possibly been ascribed too much significance. More recent scholarship, however, has revised upwards the proportion of monastic income estimated to have been spent on the poor, although this was unlikely to have been evenly distributed throughout the country.At a time of rapidly rising population, moreover, any loss of provision for the poor was likely to have been felt more keenly.

There is no doubt, however, that many medieval hospitals had decayed to the point of uselessness well before their dissolution. In a town such as Warwick, which was not well endowed with functioning medieval hospitals, the Dissolution itself probably had little impact.