Once we become poor, we are transformed in an instant into base slaves, villains and wretched drudges. To be poor is to be a knave, a fool, a wretch, a wicked, hateful fellow, an eyesore to everyone: say “poor” and you have said it all. They are born to toil and misery, to carry burdens like beasts of burden, “to eat pounded dung” with Ulysses’ companions, and, as Chremylus objected in Aristophanes, “to lick salt”—lick salt; to empty privies, clean gutters, carry away dirt and dung, sweep chimneys, groom horses and so on.

I say nothing of the Turks’ galley slaves, bought and sold like beasts of burden, or those enslaved Black Africans, or the poor Indigenous labourers: “every day they succumb to carrying loads here and there; for everything that oxen and asses carry and draw among us is laid upon these wretched Indians,” and so on. They are ugly to look at; though formerly neat, they are now shabby and filthy because they are poor: “squalor naturally follows wretched circumstances.” It is generally so.

Others eat to live, but they live to drudge: “an enslaved and wretched people dares refuse nothing,” a servile race that dares refuse no task.

“Hey, Dromo, take this fan and make a breeze here while we wash.” Boy, fan us while we wash, and tell your fellow servant to rise early in the morning. Fair weather or foul, tomorrow he must run fifty miles on foot to carry a letter to my mistress. “Sosia, to the mill!” Sosia must stay home grinding malt all day; Tristan must thresh.

Such are their orders. Some of them are treated like footstools for rich men to tread on, mounting blocks to help them onto their horses, or walls for them to piss against. Commonly they are people like this: uncultivated, simple, superstitious fools, filthy, unclean, lousy, poor, downcast and servilely humble.

As Leo Africanus observes of the common people of Africa, “they are base by nature, and their rulers value them no more than if they were dogs”: base by nature and no more valued than dogs. “They lead a miserable, laborious, calamitous, destitute and unhappy life, more ignorant than asses, so that you would say they were plainly born of beasts”: no learning, no knowledge, no refinement, scarcely common sense, nothing but barbarism among them.

“They live like beasts and wear neither shoes nor clothes.” Like rogues and vagabonds, they go barefoot and barelegged, their soles as hard as horses’ hoofs, as Radziwiłł observed at Damietta in Egypt. They lead a laborious, miserable, wretched, unhappy life, like beasts and pack animals, if not worse—for a Spaniard in Yucatán sold three Indigenous boys for a cheese and a hundred enslaved Black people for a horse. Their talk is coarse abuse; their “highest good,” a pot of ale.

There is no servile task these wretches will not undertake. “Among them many empty privies; others work in kitchens, tend stables, work as divers and pursue similar occupations,” and so on. Like those people who live in the Alps—chimney sweeps, privy cleaners, plasterers, wandering rogues—some labour hard and still cannot obtain clothes to wear or bread to eat.

For what else can filthy poverty offer but beggary, disgusting filth, squalor, contempt, drudgery, toil, ugliness, hunger and thirst, “a multitude of lice and fleas”? As the speaker in Aristophanes aptly continues: fleas and lice; “a torn garment instead of a cloak, and a good-sized stone under the head instead of a pillow”—rags for clothing and a stone for a pillow; “the broken top of a pot instead of a chair”—he sits in a broken pitcher or on a block for a chair; “and eats mallow stalks instead of bread”—he drinks water and lives on cabbage leaves and pulses like a pig, or scraps like a dog.

“As our life now stands, who would not consider it madness and unhappiness?” As Chremylus concludes his speech: given the way we poor people live nowadays, who would not regard our life as unhappiness, misery and madness?

Even if their circumstances are a little better than those of these base wretches, starving beggars, wandering rogues, ordinary slaves and day labourers, they are commonly so preyed upon by extortionate officers for breaking laws, and by tyrannical landlords, so flayed and fleeced by constant demands, that in some countries they cannot make a living, however hard they toil, however poorly they eat and however much they deny themselves. Whatever they have is instantly taken away. Their very struggle to live, to drudge and support their poor families—their trouble and anxiety—“takes away their sleep,” Sirach 31:1, and makes them weary of life.

When they have taken every trouble and done their honest best, if sickness sets them back or age overtakes them, no one pities them. Hardhearted, merciless and uncharitable, people leave them in such distress to beg, steal, complain and rebel, or else starve.

The experience and fear of this misery drove the ancient Romans whom Menenius Agrippa pacified to resist their rulers, and drives outlaws and rebels in most places to take up arms in revolt. In every age it has caused disturbances, complaints, seditions, rebellions, thefts, murders, mutinies, quarrels and conflicts in every commonwealth, and resentment, repining, complaints and discontent in every household. They lack the means to live according to their station and bring up their children; it breaks their hearts that they cannot do as they wish.

There is no greater misery than for a lord to have a knight’s income, a gentleman a yeoman’s, and be unable to live as his birth and rank require. Poverty and want generally eat away at people of every kind, especially those who once prospered and are suddenly in distress: people nobly born and generously brought up, brought miserably low by some disaster or mischance.