Feeding the hungry: one of the panels of an enamelled terracotta frieze by Giovanni della Robbia, representing various acts

of charity. Sixteenth century, Pismk, Hspital of the Ceppo. (Phototheque A. Colin.) gradually appeared throughout the West, condemning their occupants to forced labour in workhouses, Zuchthaser or Maisons de force for example, that body of semi-prisons, united under the administration of the Grand Hpital de Paris, founded in 1656. This great enclosure of the poor, mad and delinquent, as well as sons of good family placed under supervision by their parents, was one psychological aspect of seventeenth-century society, relentless in its rationality. But it was perhaps an almost inevitable reaction to the poverty and increase in numbers of the poor in that hard century. Significantly, in Dijon the municipal authorities went so far as to forbid the towns citizens to take in the poor or to exercise private charity. In the sixteenth century, the beggar or vagrant would be fed and cared for before he was sent away. In the early seventeenth century, he had his head shaved. Later on, he was whipped; and the end of the century saw -the last word in repression - he was turned into a convict.1 4 2 This was Europe. Things were far worse in Asia, China and India. Famines there seemed like the end of the world. In China everything depended on rice from the southern provinces; in India, on providential rice from Bengal, and on wheat and millet from the northern provinces, but vast distances had to be crossed and this contribution only covered a fraction of the requirements. Every crisis had wide repercussions. The famine of 1472, which hit the Deccan parti cularly harshly, caused large numbers who had escaped its consequences to emigrate to Gujerat and Malwa.143 In 1555, and again in 1596, violent famine throughout north-west India, resulted in scenes of cannibalism, according to contemporary chroniclers. 144 There was another terrible famine, almost everywhere in India, in 1630-31. A Dutch merchant has left us an appalling description of it: Men abandoned towns and villages and wandered helplessly. It was easy to recognize their condition: eyes sunk deep in the head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch hanging down empty . .. One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on the ground dying in misery. The familiar human dramas followed: wives