The poor and disabled in early eighteenth-century Russian towns

Pre-industrial Europe recognized two basic categories of impoverishment. The first group - the disabled, those who endured serious chronic or acute disease, the insane, the aged, and the orphan - had always earned the pity and charity of those who were better off. Sometimes called the "structural" poor, these unfortunates were incapable of earning a living, and therefore wholly dependent upon begging and charity. The second group (the "conjunctural" poor) included the able-bodied who had fallen into penury through some crisis, whether meteorologic, epidemic, or economic. Members of this second group, whose numbers grew significantly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, did not owe their poverty to obvious causes; caught up in the changing economies of proto-industrialization, they simply could not find work.(1)

The apparent clarity of this taxonomy of poverty notwithstanding, the historian encounters considerable difficulty in determining who was poor. For one thing, until relatively recent times, the poor themselves left scant trace in the historical record, for as long as charity was predominantly personal and face-to-face - as it was until the bureaucratization of charity and government social aid - no parchment or paper preserved a record of the gift, let alone a description or enumeration of the recipients. The sixteenth-century Russian book of advice on household administration, Domostroi, urges generosity toward the poor, emphasizing personal contact: "Bring the poor into your home, offer them food and drink, warm them with clothing, giving with love and a pure conscience.... Invite the poor, the helpless, the impoverished, the suffering, the stranger to your house. According to your means, feed them and give them drink, warm them, and give them alms accrued through your own righteous labors."(2) The very intimacy and privacy of the act precluded it finding a place on paper, so that it is impossible to know how many received, let alone deserved, this charity.

Even those gifts that were recorded - such as testaments or pre-obit donations - provide no more than a glimpse into the life of the donor. A will might prescribe a dole for the poor who attended a funeral, or might endow a meal for the poor, thereby entering into the historical record the donor. But those who benefited from charity remained out of view and anonymous. Only with the creation of central institutions of charity and, later, with the state's growing interest in the resources of its population did more or less systematic records of the poor appear.

The registers with which city and state authorities in early modern Europe attempted to assess the taxability of their subjects bring into view the world of the have-nots in early modern Europe. Detailing both the occupants of each household and their financial and physical well-being, these sources present detailed pictures of the poor, and how their circumstances compared to those who enjoyed prosperity. But population and tax inventories are far from ideal means by which to discover the character and dimensions of poverty; as comparisons with other nominal lists of the poor show, tax and population lists regularly understated the dimensions of impoverishment in early modern Europe by omitting the homeless and migrant poor. Furthermore, cadasters from different locales, even if compiled at the same time under the same instructions, reveal substantial variance in the number of the poor - the result, no doubt, of the different criteria of poverty applied by different persons.

As the reform of charity carried out almost everywhere in Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrates, still other factors influenced public perceptions of who was poor. Margaret Pelling has pointed out that the primary emphasis of urban charity in sixteenth-century Norwich was to rescue the public purse. The reformers intended to get the able poor, who "myght well labour if they were hoole," off the dole and out to work; those enduring chronic illness, or who were too weak or too old to work enjoyed more sympathy, and were dealt with separately. How one made these distinctions, however, was far from obvious. Elsewhere, the appearance of epidemics and famines not only inflated the number of the poor, and therefore the claimants to charity, but also catalyzed local authorities to discriminate among different categories of the impoverished. John Walter found that throughout English towns in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries "harvest failure prompted a more restrictive definition of eligibility for relief," and therefore a corresponding downward pressure on the censuses of the poor.(3)

Paul Slack's study of Salisbury demonstrates just how elastic might be the definition of poverty, and how external vectors could influence the numbers of persons registered as deserving aid. Women, children, and the aged dominated the "impotent" poor in Salisbury who in 1625 accounted for about 4 percent of the town's population of 6,500. The number of "impudent" poor - vagabonds, beggars, and the able-bodied - increased geometrically, especially on the heels of plague and harvest disasters. Consequently, although those receiving alms in Salisbury in 1635 accounted for no more than about 5 percent of the population, the number of persons who, by a more generous definition, might be regarded as poor represented almost a third of the population.