When Henry Edwards published A Collection of Old English Customs and Curious Bequests and Charities in 1842, he likely knew he was compiling not just a record of philanthropy, but a catalog of eccentricity. Drawn from official government reports into charitable trusts across England and Wales, the book preserves a fascinating picture of how generations of benefactors chose to spend their wealth, not merely in benevolence, but in ritual, spectacle, and sometimes, downright oddity.

Charity in early modern England was as much about remembrance as relief. A loaf of bread or a sermon might feed the body or the soul, but more importantly, it bound the living to the memory of the dead who funded it. That binding often took curious forms, and when read today, they strike us as strange, humorous, or even absurd.

Here are some of the most curious.

Bread and Beer as Charity

One recurring theme is the distribution of bread and ale. Food, after all, is the simplest act of kindness. Yet many of these legacies were highly ritualized:

“At St. Mary, Nottingham, a benefactor left lands for the yearly distribution of bread and ale to the poor of the parish on Good Friday.”

What might have begun as a practical gesture became a fixed annual duty. Parish officers, decades or centuries later, were still compelled to procure bread and beer at specific times, regardless of whether the practice remained relevant. Imagine the villagers filing up on Good Friday, each with their ration, never knowing quite why, except that “it has always been so.”

The Bells Must Ring

Even more peculiar were the bequests tied to bells. At Basingstoke, one man’s generosity left the town with an unusual alarm clock:

“At Basingstoke, £2 yearly is paid for ringing the great bell at five o’clock in the morning on St. Thomas’s day.”

The villagers, whether they liked it or not, were awakened every year by the clang of charity. Few legacies could be more certain to keep the donor’s name alive in local memory. It is, perhaps, the 17th-century equivalent of donating a perpetual car alarm.

Feasts of Obligation

Food and drink were common legacies, but not always in modest form. Some bequests required parishes to provide enormous dinners to the poor, whether they could afford them or not:

“In the parish of Stepney, there is a gift of meat, bread, and beer for 130 poor persons, to be given on Christmas Day.”

The idea is noble — Christmas cheer spread among those who needed it most. Yet parish records reveal that sometimes the costs of these feasts far exceeded the income of the trust, leaving officers to dip into other funds to keep the tradition alive. The poor ate well; the parish accounts suffered. It was philanthropy turned financial burden.

Clothing the Needy — in Perpetuity

Not all gifts were consumable. Some benefactors fixed their charity in cloth and leather:

“At St. Dunstan’s, Canterbury, a benefactor bequeathed a rent-charge for the providing of twelve poor widows with shoes every year.”

Shoes were valuable, especially for widows who might otherwise be destitute. Yet the rigidity of the gift — shoes, and only shoes — illustrates how charity sometimes locked the living into rituals that might no longer match the community’s needs. Even if widows needed food or fuel more urgently, the trust required shoes.

Sermons on Schedule

The care of the soul was another common theme. In Birmingham, a bequest ensured that sermons would never be neglected:

“In the parish of St. Martin, Birmingham, a benefaction was left to pay for a sermon to be preached every Lady Day in perpetuity.”

Lady Day, March 25, was one of the great quarter-days of the English calendar, marking the new year in legal reckoning. Even as society changed, ministers were compelled to mount their pulpits on that date, whether or not their congregations remained. Sometimes the pews were empty, but the sermon was preached, because the charity demanded it.

Processions and Public Duties

Some legacies went beyond material goods or preaching, demanding visible acts from heirs or parish officers. Benefactors sometimes required that food be distributed in public, in procession, or with specific ceremony. Heirs were bound to appear in certain garments, or to walk particular routes, long after the original meaning of the display was lost. These were acts of remembrance disguised as charity — philanthropy as performance art.

When Charity Becomes Comedy

Among these curiosities, some border on comedy. The most humorous, by modern eyes, is surely the Basingstoke bell:

“At Basingstoke, £2 yearly is paid for ringing the great bell at five o’clock in the morning on St. Thomas’s day.”

Picture it: every December 21, the feast of St. Thomas, the town of Basingstoke jolted awake at dawn, not by cockcrow or alarm clock, but by the thunderous ringing of the church bell. Few would thank the donor for his gift as they rubbed their eyes in the darkness. And yet, generation after generation, the bell rang on, because charity demanded it.

The Meaning Behind the Madness

It would be easy to laugh at these peculiarities and dismiss them as quaint. But they reveal something important about charity in pre-modern England. Giving was never only about alleviating need. It was about memory, ritual, and identity. By binding communities to their gifts, benefactors secured their own remembrance. A loaf of bread, a cloak, or a sermon was as much a monument as a stone cross or a brass plaque.

The persistence of these obligations — often centuries after the donors’ deaths — shows how deeply charity was embedded in the rhythms of community life. These were not random acts of kindness. They were deliberate structures, meant to last, meant to shape how people lived, worshipped, and even woke up in the morning.

Echoes Today

Though the details may seem strange, echoes of these practices survive. Parish trusts, some dating back to medieval times, still exist in England today. In a few places, bread, ale, or clothing is still distributed, because the law insists upon it. Even now, the dead bind the living through their eccentric generosity.

Conclusion

Henry Edwards’ book gives us more than a catalog of curiosities; it offers a window into a society where charity, ritual, and memory were inseparable. From bread and ale on Good Friday, to shoes for widows, to sermons preached to empty pews, and bells that rang the town awake, these acts remind us that giving has always been about more than need. It is about how the living remember the dead — and sometimes, how the dead continue to laugh at the living.

✍️ The strangest charities, it seems, were not those that gave the most, but those that never let anyone forget the giver — even if it meant waking an entire town at dawn, every year, for centuries.