Het functioneren van de stedelijke armeninstellingen in de Graafse samenleving in de periode 1537-1543

Samenvatting

The Function of Civic Institutions for the Poor in the Town of Grave 1537-1543

This study focuses on the running of two major institutions for the poor in the late medieval period in the urban society of the town of Grave in the duchy of Brabant in the Low Countries,namely St Catherine’s Hospital, founded in 1291, and the Table of the Holy Ghost, established about a decade later. The research data, consisting of the accounts of the combined institutions from 1537-1543, show that their relations with society were manifold. This is partly due to the funds that were raised to generate annual proceeds, but even more so to the large degree of diversity in providing relief to the poor and to the regular maintenance performed on the institutions’ landed properties.

The study ascertained that 80-85% of the inhabitants of Grave received some form of poverty relief for shorter or longer periods between 1537 and 1543. This demonstrates that these two institutions for the poor were part and parcel of the very fibre of urban society, supported by a considerable group of sympathisers and served by a host of suppliers and craftsmen. The surrounding rural communities also benefitted from the institutions in Grave.

This study also investigated how the running of the two institutions was influenced by the centralised approach to poverty relief ensuing from the edict of Charles V in 1531. With regard to Charles V’s edict, we may conclude that the more efficient approach it propagated and the idea of the ‘joint fund’ did indeed manifest themselves in Grave. The Hospital and the Table were merged and placed under single management. The newly appointed steward continued to enter the receipts for each institution separately, due to the legal proceedings involved in obtaining property rights, but the expenditures were entered on a joint basis. The guilds and citizen’s militia, which before 1531 had provided for the needy amongst their own membership, now contributed to the Hospital as a central facility (Gemene Beurs) for the poor, as the receipts and expenditures relating to guilds and citizen’s militias show. This public organisation, therefore, actually intermediated between all local institutional benefactors and the needy.

This situation probably persisted until 1540, when this central facility was terminated by an edict that remains as yet unknown to us. The same had already happened in ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1532. As a consequence of the new edict, we see a brief transition period from centralisation to decentralisation in the accounts. In 1540, the guilds and citizen’s militias once more took care of their own poor and after 1542/1543 the accounts again reflect the running of two separate entities.

This study also investigated whether the running of the two institutions reflected any acts of war attendant upon the annexation of Guelders into the Habsburg Empire in 1543. With regard to these acts of war, we might see a connection with the dwindling actual revenues from the meadows and landed properties, but these may also have been caused by floodings of the river Meuse, which affected Grave and its environs in the 1537-1539 period. Our data, therefore, do not allow us to answer this question conclusively.