The charitable endowments of the Continent were as inefficient as those of England, and both in England and abroad we find that attempts were made to organise a public system of poor relief in order that the honest poor might be relieved, and the bands of vagrants justly punished and repressed. Prof. Ashley has sketched the early history of poor relief on the Continent. He shows that, as early as 1522, the German towns of Augsburg and Nuremburg endeavoured to regulate the administration of charity in order to repress beggars, and that in 1525 the townsmen of Ypres reorganised their charitable institutions on a general plan and subjected the whole to public management with the approval of the ecclesiastical authorities. This organisation of Ypres was submitted to the judgment of the Sorbonne and, with some limitations, the principles involved were approved[42]. It is thus clear that the necessity of reforming the administration of charity was felt even in districts which were hostile to the Reformation, and in countries where the Reformers were in power the old charitable endowments were often seized by the public authorities, who by so doing placed themselves under greater obligations to provide for the poor. [42] Ashley, _Economic Hist._, vol. II. pp. 346, 347. In England we find that the course of events is similar. The citizens of London, before 1518, began to draw up orders with the object of repressing vagrants and controlling charity, but after the dissolution of the monasteries they found it necessary to refound and reorganise the greater part of the existing system of relief. From that time until the reign of Charles I. constant efforts were made to create and to administer an efficient system of poor relief under public management. In the reign of Charles I., and not until then, were the efforts successful, and the English organisation is then seen to be almost[43] the only successful survivor of the many schemes of the same kind which had been tried in Western Europe. [43] There was a successful system of poor relief in Holland. [Sidenote: 5. (a) Three factors in the making of English poor relief.] There were in England three principal factors in the development of the system; first the orders of the municipal governors, secondly the regulations of Parliament, and lastly the efforts made by the Privy Council to induce the justices of the peace to put the law in execution. [Sidenote: 5. (b) Three periods.]