Early Charity Law Sources

Editorial matters

Author: The researcher, copier, compiler, editor and publisher of this collection of old documents in the website “Early Charity Law Sources” is Richard A Brunton of Ontario, Canada.

Copyright: Most of the documents in this collection are very old, most published sources they are copied from are also quite old and most of the original authors are long since deceased. So, it seems highly unlikely that copyright could still apply. But in case that is wrong and copyright applies in some circumstances, then I submit that showing these documents here is research, private study and education, and therefore “fair dealing” as allowed by Canadian copyright law. In any event, I will always show or cite the sources and academics I am quoting or relying on. Also, the whole point of this project is to provide the public (those who may be interested) with rare, out-of-print or hard-to-find sources which no one is selling today; therefore, it seems impossible that doing this could affect anyone’s market, sales or business.

My own notes, commentaries and translations either appear in their own webpages or are inserted into the documents as notes or footnotes in purple or using square brackets. I as author freely licence anyone who would like to copy or quote those, to do so if they cite my name or this website.

Orthography: The aim is to reproduce the exact spelling and sequence of words, and most of the punctuation, of the source—but not the source’s typeface. The original typeface, italics, boldface and handwriting are not binding on a report of the text. Readers will not see ancient “blackletter” or gothic here. In this website, italics are used for passages in another language than that of the document and for titles and proper names depending on the source; and boldface and red ink only for headings and rubric.

Nor is one bound to reproduce the great long tedious blocks of text that were the style of old printing. The texts are as accurately reproduced as I can muster, but readers will see them divided into paragraphs and subparagraphs—and sometimes numbered in the margin too, for ease of reference or comprehension.

The older the source is, the more there will be peculiar letter-forms; for example:

  • ʃ, the so-called “long” s, which was originally the s of Latin handwriting but became by early modern times a capriciously-used variant shown along with lower-case s
  • ꝭ which was short for “es” (or sometimes “is”)
  • ʒ which was short for “us”
  • ꝝ which was short for “rum”
  • þ called “thorn” which was the equivalent of “th” and was later mistaken for “y”
  • Also, older documents tended not to differentiate between u and v, which were originally the same letter in Latin. This letter will be shown as either u or v according to modern pronunciation.
  • Another typical practice was that writers or copyists simply omitted letters from a long or oft-repeated word and showed only an abbreviated version or contraction of it with a curved line above. For these the missing letters will be put back in using italic superscript.

French and Latin: Where a French or Latin version of a document is available, it is included with the English in parallel columns. If I cannot find an English version in the sources, I have attempted a translation. Readers please be patient: This rank amateur would appreciate whatever help they think is needed here.

Money: Many of the old documents in this collection refer to amounts in British pounds sterling—also “marks”, “guineas”, colonial pounds, dollars and so on. The figures are, of course, old and seem ridiculously small to modern eyes. The fact is, there has been a lot of inflation and the old, tiny figures we see are often indicators of very substantial, even enormous wealth. Indeed, wealth and what may or may not be done with it is the essence of charity law as it developed. In order to gauge the wealth our historical predecessors commanded, one wants a way to convert old money values into modern equivalents.

The consumer price index won’t work. It tracks changes in the price of a “basket” of typical consumer goods, but this basket changes with the times. More important, the consumer price index only goes back a limited time, certainly not into the periods of history with which this website is concerned.

The reality is, the historical prices of commodities such as gold, silver, wheat, corn, wool and so on, fluctuated. Their relative economic, labour or market values changed with laws, technology, productivity, customs and events. Translating old money into modern terms presents something of a conundrum.

This website attempts two solutions. Whenever a document refers to an old money amount, there will be a footnote that will show two estimated conversions to modern values,

  • one based on the modern Canadian price of the silver that the old money legally represented,
  • and the other based on the average income level of the era in question as compared to the average in modern Canada (2022).

The first or silver-based method relies on the fact that for most of the British pound’s history, it either consisted of coins of various types (shillings, mostly) that actually contained a certain amount of silver, or it took the form of bank notes, pieces of paper, that were convertible to a certain amount of silver—originally, in the so-called Dark Ages, literally a pound of silver. This was debased over subsequent centuries as follows (taken from a table in the Wikipedia article “Pound sterling” which is based on an 1896 resource The History of Currency by William Arthur Shaw):

  • It is, I gather, accepted that before c 800 AD, the pound was literally a troy pound, that is, twelve troy ounces of silver. From the website LoonieRates.ca, the average price of silver in Canada in 2022 was Can$28.33 per troy ounce. So, this original pound would be worth about 12 x 28.33 = Can$340 today.
  • c 800 to 1157: the pound was reduced to 11.25 troy ounces of silver, so Can$319 today;
  • 1158 to 1350: 10.41 troy ounces, Can$295;
  • 1351 to 1411: 8.32 troy ounces, Can$236;
  • 1412 to 1463: 6.94 troy ounces, Can$197;
  • 1464 to 1550: 5.55 troy ounces, Can$157;
  • 1551 to 1600: 3.70 troy ounces, Can$105;
  • 1601 to 1815: 3.58 troy ounces, Can$101;
  • From 1816 on, the British pound was actually or in legal theory convertible to gold, not silver, at 0.23542 troy ounces of gold each. From the same website, the average price of gold in Canada in 2022 was Can$2,343.71 per troy ounce. So, a British pound converted to gold this way would be worth 0.23542 x 2,343.71 = Can$552. This gold-based value is obviously incompatible with the silver value. The relative value of silver vs gold seems to be much different now from it was in the past. For the purpose of converting old amounts to modern in terms of a valuable metal, it would seem to be more useful to continue with the silver standard. Money amounts from 1816 on will be converted to their modern silver values by reference to the prevailing market price of silver at the time. Such can be found here: https://www.chards.co.uk/silver-price/silver-price-history.

As the above problem hints, using a precious metal or indeed any other commodity as a standard of value is problematic because of its changeable relative value. In the case of silver, there seems to be a lot more of it in the world today than there was centuries ago and, relative to other commodities such as gold, silver might therefore be much cheaper now than it was then. Using the silver standard seems to lead, therefore, to underestimating the wealth.

Wealth is the point, as I say. Who were they, these rich people who founded charities in the distant past? What can we today consider their wealth to have been? In this website, another more realistic attempt is made to gauge the wealth that a stated amount of money represented—by resorting to income relativity, that is, by converting the amount into a modern equivalent in terms of relative per capita Canadian income levels today.

It appears that there is a statistic, per capita GDP (gross domestic product), that can be used as an approximate measure of prevailing average (i.e. mean) level of income within the economy in a year. This measure avoids having to track the ever-changing commodities, goods and services bought and sold by that income at the prices that prevailed then. There are Canadian GDP and population estimates for 1841 on. For the UK, per capita GDP estimates go back centuries more; see the website measuringworth,com, as well as English Gross Domestic Product, 1300-1700: Some Preliminary Estimates by A. Apostolides et al. (2008, University of Warwick).

Take, for example, something that was valued at £1,000 in 1434. Per capita GDP that year in England has been estimated at about £2. The value £1,000 was thus about 500 times average GDP level. So, in the year 2022, in Canada, per capita GDP was about $70,000. We apply the same 500 times to that and get a whopper—about $35,000,000. The comparison being made, then, is “£1,000 in 1434 ≈ $35M in 2022”. It does not matter what precisely £1,000 would have bought in 1434 whether in silver or gold or any other commodities, goods or services, nor what precisely $35M would buy in 2022. It only matters that at either time whatever both amounts would buy was equivalent to 500 times prevailing average income level measured by per capita GDP in current money at current prices. In this example £1,000 was, in other words, tremendous wealth in 1434.

There may be quibbles from economists about this methodology. No, I am not an economist. I am just using my limited acumen to make a meaningful guess of the comparative modern economic value of the amounts our ancestors dealt with in their affairs and there simply seems to be no other way. Yes, common sense suggests that a calculation like this this cannot hope to be precise. For one thing, estimating the per capita GDP values of centuries past has to be a highly fraught process, though perhaps academics have statistical ways of accounting for historical data uncertainty. Moreover, the goods and services that could be bought in 1434 were utterly different from those that can be bought today in Canada. Also, the income and wealth distribution in 1434 was much more inegalitarian than today. The average or mean GDP of £2 a year in 1434 tells us little about what the incomes of the vast majority of the population—the common or lower classes—actually were. A comparison of that with the modern Canadian average of $70,000 can only be taken as a very approximate illustration. But a useful one, I hope, capable of shedding light on the origins of charity long ago—who was giving what, and why, and how much it was worth really.