The great evils produced by the encouragement of mendicancy which has always accompanied the uncontrolled development of Catholicity, have naturally given rise to much discussion and legislation. The fierce denunciations of the mendicant orders by William of St. Amour in the thirteenth century were not on account of their encouragement of mischievous charity;(196) but one of the disciples of Wycliffe, named Nicholas of Hereford, was conspicuous for his opposition to indiscriminate gifts to beggars;(197) and a few measures of an extended order appear to have been taken even before the Reformation.(198) In England laws of the most savage cruelty were then passed, in hopes of eradicating mendicancy. A parliament of Henry VIII., before the suppression of the monasteries, issued a law providing a system of organised charity, and imposing on any one who gave anything to a beggar a fine of ten times the value of his gift. A sturdy beggar was to be punished with whipping for the first offence, with whipping and the loss of the tip of his ear for the second and with death for the third.(199) Under Edward VI., an atrocious law, which, however, was repealed in the same reign, enacted that every sturdy beggar who refused to work should be branded, and adjudged for two years as a slave to the person who gave information against him; and if he took flight during his period of servitude, he was condemned for the first offence to perpetual slavery, and for the second to death. The master was authorised to put a ring of iron round the neck of his slave, to chain him, and to scourge him. Any one might take the children of a sturdy beggar for apprentices, till the boys were twenty-four and the girls twenty.(200) Another law, made under Elizabeth, punished with death any strong man under the age of eighteen who was convicted for the third time of begging; but the penalty in this reign was afterwards reduced to a life-long service in the galleys, or to banishment, with a penalty of death to the returned convict.(201) Under the same queen the poor-law system was elaborated, and Malthus long afterwards showed that its effects in discouraging parsimony rendered it scarcely less pernicious than the monastic system that had preceded it. In many Catholic countries, severe, though less atrocious, measures were taken to grapple with the evil of mendicancy. That shrewd and sagacious pontiff, Sixtus V., who, though not the greatest man, was by far the greatest statesman who has ever sat on the papal throne, made praiseworthy efforts to check it at Rome, where ecclesiastical influence had always made it peculiarly prevalent.(202) Charles V., in 1531, issued a severe enactment against beggars in the Netherlands, but excepted from its operation mendicant friars and pilgrims.(203) Under Lewis XIV., equally severe measures were taken in France. But though the practical evil was fully felt, there was little philosophical investigation of its causes before the eighteenth century.