lay charities sprang up for members of gilds, and for burghers and
for the commonalty. Men left estates to their gilds to maintain decayed
members in hospitals, almshouses or otherwise, to educate their
children, portion their daughters, and to assist their widows. The
middle-class trader was thus in great measure insured against the risks
of life. The gilds were one sign of the new temper and wants of burghers
freed from feudalism. Another sign was a new standard of manners. Rules
and saws, Hesiodic in their tone, became popular--in regard, for
instance, to such a question as "how to enable a man to live on his
means, and to keep himself and those belonging to him." The boroughs
established other charities also, hospitals and almshouses for the
people, a movement which, like that of the gilds, began very early--in
Italy as early as the 9th century. They sometimes gave outdoor relief
also to registered poor (Green i. 41), and they had in large towns
courts of orphans presided over by the mayor and aldermen, thus taking
over a duty that previously had been one of conspicuous importance in
the church. As early as 1257 in Westphalian towns there was a
rough-and-ready system of Easter relief of the poor; and in Frankfort in
1437 there was a town council of almoners with a systematic programme of
relief (Ratzinger, p. 352). Thus at the close of the middle ages the
towns were gradually assuming what had been charitable functions of the
church.

Statutory wage control.

While a new freedom was being attained by the labourer in the country
and the burgher in the town, the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient
supply of labour for agriculture must have been constant, especially at
every visitation of plague and famine. In accordance with a general
policy of state regulation which was to control and supervise industry,
agriculture and poor relief and to repress vagrancy by gaols and houses
of correction, the state stepped in as arbiter and organizer. By
Statutes of Labourers beginning in 1351 (25 Edw. III. 135), it aimed at
enforcing a settled wage and restraining migration. From 1351 it
endeavoured to suppress mendicity, and in part to systematize it in the
interest of infirm and aged mendicants. Each series of enactments is the
natural complement of the other. In the main their signification, from
the point of view of charity, lies in the fact that they represent a
persistent endeavour to prevent social unsettlement and in