Domingo de Soto, Deliberacion en la causa de los pobres (1545)

A Salamanca theologian's brief to the heir to the throne against the poor laws the Castilian towns began to enforce in 1544, which licensed and confined begging. Soto concedes the whole case against able-bodied idlers, reciting the lash and banishment the kingdom's own laws impose on them, and then defends the freedom of the genuinely poor to travel and to ask: no more reason is to be demanded of a poor man than of a rich one for being outside his own land. Printed with its own reply.