[Sca-cooks] Re: poor widow

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 07:20 AM 4/21/2005, you wrote:
>On a slightly different tangent, I was surprised to find that
>there was a system set up in the guilds to take care of widows.
>One of the streets I saw, I think in Hamburg, was a series of
>houses that were used for the widows of a certain type of guild. I
>kept meaning to go back and get more information on it because I
>think that was the pre-cursor for social security ~grin~. Has
>anyone else heard of this? I always thought that widows were left
>to fend for themselves until this tour.

Short answer- yes! There were a number of different guild and fraternity 
organizations that provided reliefs to the widows and children of deceased 
members. It was largely an urban thing though.

Long answer- will have to wait until later, likely tonight. I pulled the 
pertinent books and I'll give you a better recap then- I'm kinda buried in 
a sewing project and need to keep going while I have the steam up...

In the meantime, a quick poke through my bookmarks shows these:

http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc1/lectures/24guilds.html

http://web.archive.org/web/19990221141432/www.millersv.edu/~english/homepage/duncan/medfem/guilds.html

Good places to start.

'Lainie
___________________________________________________________________________
O it is excellent to have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it 
like a giant--Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II