The distinction between paupers and non-paupers therefore was much less clear than it is to-day, and it is also true that the distinction between voluntary contributions and compulsory poor rates was much less rigidly defined. The supply of the poor with corn is nearly always stated to have been a voluntary measure, but it was carried out under very considerable pressure from the justices. Sometimes the pressure amounted to compulsion. Thus in the Sarum division of Wiltshire some gave "franklie and freely good quantities of their store" to the poor but others were "wilfull." The justices "terrified them a little w^{th} conventing them before the Lords of the Counsell and then they seemed very willing and tractable"[491]. It is difficult to say therefore how far the corn charities of the time were voluntary and how much they were compulsory. There was also a close connection between private and public charity in other forms of relief. [491] _D. S. P._, Chas. I., Vol. 182, No. 2. I. Probably in every town there were numbers of endowed charities controlled by the municipal officers or by overseers or by some public or semi-public authorities, which were practically a part of the same system as that enforced by law. Such were the four royal hospitals of London and the hospitals of Gloucester and Norwich. Such also were the many almshouses under the management of corporations, as were the almshouses founded respectively by Leche and by Kendrick at Reading, and the many charities for apprenticing poor children and lending money to poor tradesmen, which we shall afterwards consider in detail. Sometimes the connection was closer still, and the workhouse like the Free Library of to-day might be partly provided by private generosity and partly by public rates. Such was the case with the Barnstaple workhouse and the Jersey school of Newark[492]. [492] Barnstaple Records, _North Devon Herald_, Feb. 24th, 1881. Mr John Penrose gave £200 to employ the poor in Bridewell. Shelton's _Hist. of Newark_, pp. 38, 387. The relief of the poor in times of emergency thus brings into prominence two of the main features of the poor relief of the time. First, that the public compulsory system was developed from a voluntary system and that in the seventeenth century voluntary and public poor relief were closely connected. Secondly, that the poor relief of the time was intimately connected with the general system of government under which all classes were compelled by Government to do their duties and any class might be relieved that for the time failed to obtain its usual degree of prosperity. CHAPTER XI. METHODS OF RELIEF, 1597-1644 (_continued_). B. _Ordinary Relief._