{
  "id": "medina-de-la-orden-de-la-limosna-1545",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Juan de Medina, De la orden que en algunos pueblos de Espana se ha puesto en la limosna (1545)",
  "summary": "The printed defence of the Castilian towns that had replaced street begging with a municipal alms fund. Its author advised the reform at Zamora, was ordered to set down his grounds, and answers the theologians who attacked it: nobody should need to beg, and freedoms held by natural right may be withdrawn for the public good. He also reports asking the city's poor, on two Saturdays in February, whether they preferred the ration to begging - and records what happened to the two who said no.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "spain",
    "castile",
    "poor-relief",
    "welfare",
    "law",
    "municipal-government",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "printed-sources"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "soto-deliberacion-causa-de-los-pobres-1545"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "school-of-salamanca"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "real-hospicio-de-pobres-de-mexico"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "monte-de-piedad-de-animas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hospitals-of-the-indies"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was the Castilian alms reform of 1540 and who defended it?",
    "Who was Juan de Medina and what did he argue about begging?",
    "Did any sixteenth-century town survey its poor about welfare?",
    "What was the case against the right to beg in early modern Spain?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The work is bound after Soto's Deliberacion in the same 1545 volume and opens with its own title page under the royal arms - \"De la orden que en algunos pueblos de Espana se ha puesto en la limosna: para remedio de los verdaderos pobres\" - which names no author. The dedication that follows, to Prince Philip, is the leaf that does: it is subscribed by Fray Juan de Medina, abbot of the monastery of San Vicente of Salamanca, of the order of Saint Benedict.",
      "sources": [
        "medina-orden-de-la-limosna-1545"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The same dedication says why it was written. In November last past, at Valladolid, the Cardinal of Toledo charged him to put in writing the grounds on which he had counselled that this order be taken, because it was by his counsel and preaching that it had been begun in the city of Zamora, from where it was carried to Salamanca and from there taken up in Valladolid; and he was told to send his motives so that, the one being compared with the other, the better might be chosen.",
      "sources": [
        "medina-orden-de-la-limosna-1545"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "His legal ground is a royal order of the year forty, which he says charged every town of these kingdoms to give among themselves some good order such that no poor person should ask at doors or in the streets; the towns then made chapters or ordinances in fulfilment of what the king had charged them.",
      "sources": [
        "medina-orden-de-la-limosna-1545"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "His theological ground is that to provide the needs of the poor so that they have no need to beg is divine law and apostolic observance, and that it is better and more conformable to the will of God that nobody should have need to beg than that anyone should have it - so that what remained open to dispute, he argues, was never whether the poor may be relieved without begging, but only whether the particular order adopted was fit and profitable.",
      "sources": [
        "medina-orden-de-la-limosna-1545"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The cost of his position is stated by him and not by his opponents. Freedoms that men hold by natural right, he writes, are taken away in times of war and of pestilence and other such events, not for fault but for legitimate and sufficient cause; the most legitimate cause there is for taking away such freedoms is the public good; and as each member of a body has its office and ceases from it, or is lost altogether if need be, so that the whole body take no harm, so those who live within a city may lose their freedoms and their lives if the good of the city requires it.",
      "sources": [
        "medina-orden-de-la-limosna-1545"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "He answers the charge that the poor were being coerced with a report of a public consultation. On the seventh and the fourteenth of February, two Saturdays on which by custom the week's alms was given to the poor who used to beg in the city, all of them were asked publicly whether they were content with what was given for their maintenance, and told that if they were not they would be given licence to return to begging as before; all answered together that they were very content, because it spared them the labours and affronts of asking. Testimonies of it, he says, were sent to the court.",
      "sources": [
        "medina-orden-de-la-limosna-1545"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The same page records the exception and the mechanism that closed it. Two poor women began to say that they would rather beg; when they were told that if they were to beg they would not be given the ration of the public alms, they said that they did not want to beg and preferred what was given them. The consultation was therefore offered under a condition that made refusal costly, and the man reporting it is the man who designed the reform.",
      "sources": [
        "medina-orden-de-la-limosna-1545"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The other side of the case is printed in the same volume and should be read with this one: Soto's Deliberacion argues that the genuinely poor may go where charity is greater, that no more reason is to be demanded of a poor man than of a rich man for travelling outside his own land, and that the ordinances confuse what is lawful with what is expedient.",
      "sources": [
        "soto-deliberacion-causa-de-los-pobres-1545"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "What is asserted here comes from the printed sheets. How many towns adopted the order, how long the funds lasted, what the ration actually was, and whether the crown decided between the two briefs are not documented in the pages read and are not asserted.",
      "sources": [
        "medina-orden-de-la-limosna-1545"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "The 1545 controversy is usually met, when it is met at all, as one famous tract by Soto, with the other side described at second hand or attributed to the wrong man. This object goes to the reply itself, names the author from the leaf that carries his subscription rather than from the title page that carries none, and quotes what makes it interesting and what makes it uncomfortable from the same source - a documented public consultation of welfare recipients in February 1545, and the answer, in the reformer's own words, that the public good may take away freedoms held by natural right.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-14",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/medina-de-la-orden-de-la-limosna-1545",
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  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Juan de Medina, De la orden que en algunos pueblos de Espana se ha puesto en la limosna (1545)",
    "description": "The printed defence of the Castilian towns that had replaced street begging with a municipal alms fund. Its author advised the reform at Zamora, was ordered to set down his grounds, and answers the theologians who attacked it: nobody should need to beg, and freedoms held by natural right may be withdrawn for the public good. He also reports asking the city's poor, on two Saturdays in February, whether they preferred the ration to begging - and records what happened to the two who said no.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/medina-de-la-orden-de-la-limosna-1545",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-14",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Deliberacion en la causa de los pobres, del maestro Fray Domingo de Soto catedratico de teologia en Salamanca, y prior de Santisteuan de la orden de los predicadores. Al muy alto y muy poderoso senor el Principe de Espana don Philippe",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=S3hMAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP7"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "De la orden que en algunos pueblos de Espana se ha puesto en la limosna: para remedio de los verdaderos pobres",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=S3hMAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP101"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Juan de Medina, De la orden que en algunos pueblos de Espana se ha puesto en la limosna (1545)"
  }
}