Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/86

70 JO HARVARD LAW REVIEW. " For relief of aged, impotent and poor people, for maintenance of sick and maimed soldiers and mariners, schools of learning, free schools and scholars in universities ; for repair of bridges, ports, havens, causeways, churches, sea-banks and highways ; for education and preferment of or- phans ; for or towards relief stock or maintenance for house of correction ; for marriage of poor maids ; for supportation aid and help of young trades- men, handicraftsmen and persons decayed ; for relief or redemption of prisoners or captives, and for aid or ease of any poor inhabitants con- cerning payment of fifteens, setting out soldiers, and other taxes." This statute was passed in 1601, following an earlier act of 1597;^ but it may be new to many to find in the famous early English poem of the " Vision of Piers Plowman " an enumeration of charitable objects so full and so closely similar to that of the act, that it seems as if the Protestant Parliament of Elizabeth had bor- rowed the great church-reforming poet's verses for the staple of their enactment. The poet enjoins men to — " Save their wynnyng And amende meson-dieux [hospitals] theremyd; And wikkede [weak] weyes wightly amende; And mys-eise folke helpe ; And do boote to brugges [bridges] that to-broke were ; Marien maydenes, or maken hem nonnes ; Povere peple and prisons fynden hem hir foode ; And set scolers to scole, or to some othere craftes ; Releve religion, and renten hem bettere." ^ This was written in 1377, and an earlier version (in substance iden- tical) in 1362,^ nearly two hundred and forty years before the act of Elizabeth, but at a period when, if Protestantism were not yet born, the dry bones of the Church were being stirred by the mighty wind of reform, and by popular resistance to clerical abuses ; when John Langland's poetry was as potent as Wiclif's Scriptures ; and the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire ensured to England a safe foothold for resistance to Papal aggressions. The differ- ences between the statute and the poem are as significant as their similarities ; for while the " meson-dieux " and " helpe of mys-eise folke " in the poem answer more or less exactly to the " relief of sick and maimed soldiers, aged, impotent and poor people " in the statute ; " do boote to brugges that to-broke were," " and wikkede weyes wightly amende," to the "repair of bridges, causeways, and 1 39 Eliz. 2 vv. 4515-4528, Wright ed. « Passus VIII. vv. 27-39, Skeat ed.