We can also learn, to take up a second of our themes, that being an outparish pauper was a fragile existence.
In other words, as the report of the survey suggests, the best way to prevent poverty was to allow paupers to form families.
They see, in these miserable paupers in search of a refuge, their future inner enemies, the sign of a siege to come.
A penance which hypothecated payments for the upkeep of paupers or priests was imaginative and peculiarly appropriate in the fight against heresy.
Moreover, its very existence gave paupers a part to play in negotiating and establishing entitlement.
Certainly some sixty-one per cent of all pauper letters written to these communities come from urban locations.
More work is clearly needed on this aspect of pauper letters.
I mention the pauper funeral here because its specter motivated members of the working class to avoid its ignominy at whatever cost.
