Poverty in Flanders and Brabant from the Fourteenth to the Mid-Sixteenth Century: Sources and Problems

Abstract

‘Poor’ and ‘poverty’ are such general words — and their use in the sources is no exception — that their application in a scholarly treatise requires a more precise definition. In our view, this can best be approached from the concepts of need or deprivation, which express a lack which may relate to various aspects of the human scale of values and of which the connotation varies according to the social environment. By defining the terms thus, we eliminate a category which contemporaries and also many historians have included in the notion of poverty, namely certain groups which of their own free will chose a sober way of life¹. For them, spiritual compensations in fact precluded need.

This is an abridged translation of ‘Armoede in de Nederlanden van de 14e tot het midden van de 16e eeuw: bronnen en problemen’, in Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, LXXXVIII (Groningen, 1975) 501–38. More material, notably in a number of Tables, graphs and a map, will be found in the original version. Conversely, this version embodies a number of additions and corrections.