Juan Luis Vives, De subventione pauperum (1526), read in the Valencia translation of 1781
The Valencian humanist's scheme for public poor relief, written for the magistrates of Bruges in 1526 and read here in the Castilian version printed at Valencia in 1781. It puts every charitable endowment in the town under the inspection of the magistrates, pays for schoolmasters for poor children, and strips the hospital servants who have grown rich on the poor. It also compels the able-bodied to work and sends healthy outsiders home, with a travel allowance so they need not rob.
Why this wins its question: Vives is the standard English-language starting point for early modern poor relief, and he is almost always summarised at one remove: either as the humane humanist who invented public welfare or as the author of the first workhouse. Both readings survive because the treatise itself is rarely quoted at any length in English. This object quotes it, from a printing opened page by page, and puts the halves side by side: the magistrates' power to inspect any endowment whatever, the schoolmasters bought at any price for poor children, the hospital servants stripped of what they took from the poor - and, from the same chapters, the ban on idleness, the physicians who exist to catch malingerers, and the removal of outsiders, printed in one sentence with the fare home that is given them so that sending them away is not the same as ordering a robbery. It also states what it cannot show, which is that the 1781 translator's Castilian is Vives's Latin.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The text used here is not Vives's Latin. It is "Tratado del socorro de los pobres compuesto en latin por el Doctor Juan Luis Vives, traducido en castellano por el Dr. Juan de Gonzalo, Nieto, Ivarra", printed at Valencia by Benito Monfort, printer to the archbishop, in 1781. Every quotation below is that translator's Castilian of 1781, standing at two hundred and fifty-five years' distance from the Latin of 1526, and the confidences on the claims are set with that distance in mind.
The second book is addressed to the magistrates and is organised as an administrative programme, not as an exhortation. Its index lists the chapters in order: what it belongs to the governors of the commonwealth to do for the poor, the gathering of the poor and the taking of their names, how food is to be found for all of them, the care of the children, the censors, the money that suffices for these costs, and those afflicted by some sudden or hidden need.
The load-bearing doctrine is the magistrates' power of inspection over charity. No endowment may plead the statutes of its founder to escape it, because in such statutes one attends not to the words but to the equity, as in contracts of good faith - the founder's will having plainly been that the revenues be spent on the best uses. The text then generalises: "nada hay tan libre en la Republica que no este sugeto al conocimiento de los que la goviernan", and the printed marginal rubric states it flatly, "Todas las cosas de la Ciudad estan sujetas a los Magistrados".
That power is claimed because the endowments were being eaten. The treatise says that some who were officers or servants of the hospitals "se han hecho ya senores", and that women admitted at first only to serve now live delicately with splendid ornaments and despise or ill-treat the poor; all of it is to be taken from them so that it not be verified that they "engordan y lucen con la sustancia de los mismos debiles y enflaquecidos pobres".
The scheme's other half is compulsion, and the treatise states it without softening. Nobody sound in age and health is to be allowed to be idle; Paul to the Thessalonians is quoted for the rule that he who will not work shall not eat; and the conclusion is that "no debe permitirse que viva alguno ocioso en la Ciudad, en donde como en una casa bien governada conviene que cada qual tenga su oficio". The marginal rubrics beside the passage are "Se ha de evitar el ocio" and "Cada uno ha de comer su pan no el ageno".
Claimed infirmity is to be tested rather than believed. Age and broken health are to be taken into account, but with the precaution that we not be deceived by the fiction or pretext of an ailment, "lo que acontece no pocas veces"; the judgment of physicians is to be called in, and whoever is found to have deceived is to be punished. A medical board sits between the poor and their relief, and its purpose is to detect fraud.
Healthy beggars from elsewhere are to be sent back to their own towns, which the treatise notes is also commanded in the civil law - but not empty-handed. They are to be given a viaticum, "porque seria cosa inhumana despachar al necesitado sin remedio para el camino", and the text asks what a man who did otherwise would be doing except ordering them to rob. The expulsion and the fare home are printed in the same sentence, and neither can honestly be quoted without the other.
The chapter on children is where the treatise spends public money most freely. The magistrates are told to spare no expense to obtain schoolmasters - "no perdonen a gasto alguno los Magistrados para adquirir estos Maestros" - because if they get them they will do the city they govern much good at little cost. The children are to be brought up temperately and cleanly, and are not to learn only reading and writing: "No aprendan solamente a leer y escrivir, sino en primer lugar la piedad christiana, y a formar juicio recto de las cosas".
Two things this object does not establish. It does not show that the 1526 Latin says what the 1781 Castilian says, because the Latin was not opened; and it does not trace the treatise's influence on any later institution, in Spain or in the Indies, because no source read for this object makes that connection. The relations to the hospitals and poorhouses of the Spanish world are graph edges of subject, not claims of descent.