Poor women and urban assistance in Early Modern Portugal: the case of Hospital of Santiago of Braga

* This work was supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under grant ref. 2020.04746.BD. Abstract Any study of Hospital of Santiago has remained untackled to date. This institution housed women in a situation of great economic and social vulnerability, mainly elderly, single or widows with few or no surviving family relations. This text aims to discuss the women’s poverty by comparing their stances towards death. The study is based on the analysis of parish records and accounting sources considered via a qualitative methodology. The results problematize the phenomena of the impoverishment of women in an urban context and debate the relevance of work, networks and formal assistance in the survival of the poor during the Early Modern Age.


Introduction
The "entail 1 of Morreira" was founded in the thirteenth or fourteenth century by Dom Martim Martins de Barros. Under the terms of this institution, the rights of usufruct of the property were reserved to the holder of the Barros lineage, provided that he fulfilled the pious obligations contained therein, namely that he ordered a series of masses and administered the Hospital of Santiago. This institution of assistance to the poor housed women until the nineteenth century. This foundation was located on Rua Santa Maria or Rua do Poço and was part of a set of properties that headed the linked properties. The building was next to Porta de São Tiago, next to the college and behind the parish church of Cividade (see Figure 1) 2 . It was erected in the core of the medieval Braga next to an important transit route, as it led the south gate of the medieval wall to the cathedral, representing the temporal and spiritual power of the archbishop, lord of the city and of his municipality. Each floor would have had a little more than one hundred square meters and its elevation did not architecturally demarcate its function from the surrounding buildings, as was common with medieval foundations. The poor lived on the ground floor of these noble houses 3 of the Barros Family 4 . 79 Poor women and urban assistance in Early Modern Portugal: the case of Hospital of Santiago of Braga Recolhimento de Santo António 10) Church of Terceiros A hospital was a symbol of power 5 and a mechanism for representing its benefactors 6 . These assistance institutions had a sacral dimension, as their daily life involved spiritual care and the founding act regularly imputed to administrators the fulfilment of masses by the soul of the founders. This foundational moment, fixed by will or contract, was protected by civil and ecclesiastical orders as an individual will was considered an immutable law 7 . Despite not having any chapel integrated into the hospital's physical complex, the Barros Family entail comprised a place to say mass and bury family members. If these infrastructures were originally located in the central nave of the Cathedral next to the south door, at the beginning of the century of five hundred 8 , the chapel is transferred to the cloister, with the invocation of Our Lady of Grace. Chapel and hospital were forms of public proclamation of family authority 9 and embodied in time and space the antiquity of the lineage's name and economic power.
Since the Late Middle Ages, voluntary poverty was valued in the spiritual experience of religious orders and in individual lay experiences of holiness 10 , The poor were structural to the economy of salvation because it was through them that the rich alleviated sins and freed their souls from Purgatory 11 . Then "Lei das Sesmarias" (1375), Portuguese authorities have tended to categorize the poor into three groups: the false poor; the poor allowed to beg; poor worthy of formal assistance as long as they did not beg. Sick, helpless children and old people were included in this last group and were "deserving poor". Probably due to the mismatch between assistance resources and the growth in the number of 5 81 Poor women and urban assistance in Early Modern Portugal: the case of Hospital of Santiago of Braga poor people, this system showed a concern to distinguish those who deserved help from those who were idle and did not want to work 12 . With the exception of the more or less temporary institutionalized poor, most of those who were assisted by the institutions of the Early Modern Age should be regularly visited by the donors, who verified the situation of poverty and assessed the need for alms. This gift economy was based on the geographical proximity between donors and the poor and was carried out based on local inquiry or by resorting to parish priests, who were responsible for issuing a poverty certificate. Among the visited poor, who received continuous support and were at the top of the hierarchy of access to the goods of charity, and the poor who received extraordinary alms, populated numerous subgroups in different situations of need 13 . In addition to the institutions dedicated to the support of sick fellow clergymen, those specialized in the treatment of contagious pathologies or those intended for the reception of children, some hospitals were founded in Portugal with the aim of assisting exclusively female poor 14 .
The current normative systems (European common law, medicine and Judeo-Christian morals) 15 considered the feminine gender inferior to the masculine one. Women were naturally fragile and physically and morally weak beings. They tended towards imperfection and sin, the virtue of honesty being the control mechanism for this natural weakness 16  responsible for caring for female honour. As a result of paternalistic control over the feminine virtue, women's exclusion from the exercise of intellectual and liberal professions, and the depreciation of their wages compared to the value of male work, women were prominent charitable agents 17 and recipients of assistance 18 . This relevance of female poverty has remained constant throughout the early modern period in Portugal. In addition to hospital-type assistance, women were institutionally placed in retreats, mercearias 19 or received various support from the scope of formal assistance, such as alms or dowries. The Santa Casa da Misericórdia (Brotherhood of Holy House of Mercy) 20 , for example, developed a very consolidated activity in the pursuit of this support, both as direct managers of the poor's heritage and as executors of the pious wills of private founders 21 . Lay and ecclesiastical lords, in the field of their sociopolitical functions, also performed charitable and assistance works in their domains 22 . Alms were a cohesive factor in the current corporate model based on discriminatory principles 23 19 An institution where a poor person (the merceeiro/a) periodically receives alms (housing, money, food or clothing) in exchange of the obligation to pray for the soul of one benefactor. 20 Brotherhoods of immediate royal protection, governed by a commitment granted by the crown, composed, and managed by lay men from the local elites where they were implemented (noblemen and officers), carried out works of mercy and other charitable acts for the poor. During the 16 th century, they became, by royal initiative or by local lords, administrators of several hospitals. The first brotherhood was founded in 1498, in Lisbon, and its diffusion and implementation in the kingdom and empire of Portugal was quick. The bibliography on these institutions is very extensive, but we must highlight the ten volumes of the Portugaliae Monumenta Misericordiarum coordinated by José Pedro Paiva. 21 83 Poor women and urban assistance in Early Modern Portugal: the case of Hospital of Santiago of Braga social hierarchies that, at all levels, included the provision of clientele-type services. These relationships involved the transfer of goods with an economic value whose retroactive effects did not always have a monetary aspect. The social actors of the architecture of the powers of the Early Modern Age fit into this system of gift since everyone had someone above them to whom to render service and from whom to receive compensations 24 .

Hospital feminine noun: sources and delimitation of the problem
Acknowledged the issues of the rich, which are summarized in the previous paragraphs 25 , this text takes a look at 111 cases of the poor 26 that, in the 1630-1830 period, we identified as inhabitants of Hospital of Santiago. Our methodology is qualitative and is based on the crossing and questioning of references present in sources of different nature, as it was not possible to identify any institutional documentation. Much of this analysis focuses on the parish register of the neighbouring parish of the hospital (São Tiago of Cividade), where 56 women who died at the institution were buried, and on the expense books of the steward of Santa Casa da Misericórdia official of its administrative bureau who was responsible for shrouding all the poor who could not afford it 27 . The responsibility of burying these women was triggered by Santa Casa as work of mercy (burying the dead) when the dead did not have enough goods to pay for the religious service in the parish church. The documents that support this analysis were produced by third parties at the end of the life of the poor (see the 24 The importance of the donation economy for the social structure of the Early Modern Age was established by Ângela Barreto Xavier e António Manuel Hespanha, "As redes clientelares" in José Mattoso (dir.), História de Portugal: O Antigo Regime (1620-1807), vol. 4, Lisboa, 1998, p. 340-346. 25 See note 5. 26 We consider a case, any episode related to someone identified as a resident in the hospital. From the crossing of parish records and the steward's expense books, we found 111 cases. The examples that we mentioned below regarding alms in clothing were collected from our master's dissertation and are not part of the documentary corpus of the sample of this work. 27 Contrary to what happened in other European geographies, such as in England, where assistance to the poor was predominantly developed by parishes, in Portugal these competences were mostly assigned to secular institutions. Cf 28 , allowing us to compare their attitudes towards death 29 and to glimpse the care profile of this hospital throughout the early modern period.
Despite the fact that the institutional data are evidently lacking 30 , our methodology allows us to reveal the diversity of institutionalized poor people and discusses impoverishment and gender in the urban context during the Early Modern Age. This text confronts questions from the history of poverty with the history of women, highlighting that life paths and the position towards family, marriage and motherhood are structural elements to an integrated understanding of the feminization process of poverty. The study of the Hospital of Santiago calls for important considerations regarding the status of elderly women, whether single or widowed and the role of care institutions as social inclusion entities for women without active guardianship of a male relation (husband, father or son). To this end, we must examine the importance of local neighbourhood and institutional assistance networks, as they made it possible to add to the housing supply guaranteed by the Barros Family the other essential assets for the survival of the poor (food and clothing) 31 , but also to confront the activities performed by women in the urban economy. Our methodology, despite being based on sources that were not directly produced by the poor, reflects a discourse of otherness that observes the resources and life paths of the poor 32 , certainly complementing that which emanates from documents of a strictly institutional nature. 28 The references do not seek to understand the typicality of those poor men or women who may have been admitted by the institution. This insufficiency is determined by the methodology employed and the working time available, which prevented the study from being extended to other documentary centers, but also by the internal limitations to the selected sources. There are only expense books by the steward of Misericórdia de Braga for the 1628-1748 period. However, from 1713/1714 onwards, expenses with the masses of the poor appear aggregated without mentioning the name or provenance of the deceased. This limitation is partly overcome by the existence of a single mass book for the poor, whose chronology covers the 1747 -1793 period. The death records of the Cividade parish are exhaustive to the defined chronology (1630-1837). These limitations of the resources do not allow us to determine the representativeness of this sample in relation to the total number of women assisted during the chronology established by this work. 29 Similar treatment was given to the parish records of women collected in "Convertidas", in Braga, in the work of Maria Marta Lobo de Araújo Going through its toponymic evolution, it remains that this institution persisted for a long time based on the social function it occupied: giving shelter to women who, weakened by old age and or unable to work, saw their productive autonomy diminished or extinct and were transformed into structural poor. Physically and mentally handicapped, incurable sick, embarrassed poor, orphans, widows, and old people were among the types of poverty that have been granted alms since the Middle Ages 33 . These typologies remained in force throughout the Early Modern Age 34 . According to the Pullan 35 and Gutton's 36 classification model for the "structural poor", there was the vastness of "cyclical" poverty to which 75 to 80% of the European population was subjected. At any time, given the fragility of work and the production system, the majority of the population could fall into a situation of vulnerability that made it incapable of guaranteeing its survival. The productive crises generated hunger, high price inflation and reduced purchasing power. These situations exposed the poor income of the population to market variations that prevented the autonomous survival of households 37 .
Pullan and Gutton categorized poverty according to a static criterion that took into account the situation of a poor person at a certain point in his/her life. As Montserrat Carbonell i Esteller pointed out, a dynamic perspective of poverty must cross the phenomenon of impoverishment with the family, the world of work and the social representations of the sex and gender of the poor 38 . Women, despite being subordinate to the mental and moral schemes of the time, had social visibility because they performed relevant family and economic functions that gave them social capital 39 . The place of women in the history of poverty, therefore, has to consider the subject's spatial-temporal coordinates before her position in relation to the marital status, professional occupation, life stage or the degree of family integration 40 . These criteria are decisive for the historian to problematize women as protagonists of production and consumption, both inside and outside the doors of their homes 41 .
In the urban context and from an intersectional perspective, women alone, single or widowed, were more vulnerable to poverty. Nuclear family coherence, namely the presence of both husband and wife, was one of the structural guarantees for economic stability 42 . A young woman who could not save money for a dowry and position herself in the marriage market 43 , or a woman who did not remarry, would face serious difficulties in supporting herself independently; a situation that worsened in the presence of dependents 44 . The care institutions were protective of the family in a double sense: on the one hand, they reproduced their solidarity by compensating for the economic imbalances caused by changes in the environment and structure, distributing cash or in-kind support; on the other hand, they replaced it, when they protected the public reputation of some of its members 45 , providing places where women could hide from scandal and ensure that they arrived at marriage with their honour preserved. This virtue, which was opposed to the allegedly degenerate condition of women, was attached to the legal, religious and cultural norms of the period.
Seclusion was a "virtue" in itself. André Vauchez highlighted it clearly in the experience of medieval lay religiosity, stating that seclusion and reflection 40 On the social situation of Portuguese women in relation to work and the performance of economic activities in the European context cfr. the discussion present in Filipa  who [the old women] live in the lower part of a gallery of some noble houses" of the Majorat of Real. At the end of the nineteenth century, the house started to be called Asilo das Velhas (Old Women Asylum) or Casa das Inválidas (Home of the Disabled Women)" 53 .

Owners of trapetes and farrapinhos 54 : the hospital's poor women
By housing women for alms, the Hospital of Santiago was a mechanism for monitoring honour and constituted a public proclamation on the honesty of its residents. Due to the circumstances of their lives that led to their impoverishment, the women in the hospital were deprived of male guardianship. The experience in the hospital guaranteed that they lived in opposition to their nature, for which they were considered less dignified, more fragile, passive, lustful, cunning and evil than men. This perspective on gender converged from normative structures based on the assumptions of European civil, canonical and common law, on the ancient medicine theories and on Jewish tradition 55 . In order to avoid entropies in the economic-social system, the normative framework, which subordinated the female element to male tutelage, opened a legal opportunity to those outside the domain of pater familias (householder), to whom it attributed total contractual and negotiating autonomy. Single women over 25 and widows were legally capable and autonomous to act economically 56 . The poor who sought shelter in the Hospital of Santiago were free to make this choice. The institution replaced the male family guardianship of the father, husband, or children with the guardianship of the administrator of the entail of the Barros Family.
Since women's work was depreciated in relation to men's, and women's wages were lower, their survival was conditioned by the economy of improvisation 57 . In addition to activating local, parochial or institutional solidarities, sharing housing with employers, family members or strangers was one of the possibilities to guarantee the joint sharing of basic expenses. Hufton called the cohabitation strategy of several women without biological ties to 53 63 We were able to identify a record of a list of confirmation, dated of 1626, in which Francisca Dias is identified as "now" living in Hospital of Santiago. We deduced that she would have recently become a widow. As a result of her poverty situation, she would have been able to secure a place in the hospital. The woman died in late 1646. Cf (1635) or Serafina (1636), she was the depository of the secret of the identity of the true parents of the girls, protecting the parents of infamy, and, in the case of the second girl, she was responsible for taking her to the wet nurse that the priest determined. She was godmother, and probably midwife, of Catarina (1630), the daughter of a couple from Amares who had come to the city to obtain "goods necessary for their home". She baptized Francisco (1629) and Eugénia (1642) by her own hands, due to the danger of imminent death at their birth. She sponsored João (1633), Francisco (1639) and Isabel (1646) together with one of her two sons 65 . These boys, Francisco, a shoemaker, living on Rua de Maximinos (in front of the Cathedral), and Frutuoso, a tailor, after being conducted to learning a trade, lived in different places than their mother, but continued to share family and public acts. As a midwife, Francisca Dias participated in exclusively female sociability related to honor and sexuality 66 , and had a common professional occupation among the urban female population in the lower strata 67 . Her consideration as a deserving poor, which allowed her access to free accommodation at the Hospital de Santiago, must have resulted from her husband's death with minor children. Female widowhood and the problem of material and spiritual impoverishment were latent concerns of the paternalistic structures of modern society 68 . Other death records showed that, even though they lived in the hospital, a minority of women had live sons and daughters. Catarina (1734) 69 and Maria dos Santos (1746) 70 were single mothers. The second woman's daughter was raised in the house of Estevão Falcão. Benta, daughter of Maria de Oliveira (1746), served, at the time of her mother's death, in the convent in Vila do Conde 71 . Penitência Jerónima da Silva (1750) 72 was a widow and had two daughters, Catarina and Maria, who were her heirs. Inácia de Amorim (1753) 73 had a niece called Páscoa. But these were exceptional cases. Most of the hospital's poor women were alone and without any social support network at the time of death. These women designated their own soul or the parish priest as heirs, thus giving him the order to sell the few goods and contribute to the salvation of his soul -see goods. Therefore, the priests intervened as sellers in the second-hand market, which was extremely important for the survival of the poor and the economy of "improvisation", as has been proven by international studies on the subject 74 .
Though we do not know if any of the babies who Francisca was a godmother to were born in the hospital, we identified children who lived in the institution. Francisco, foundling and resident at the Hospital of Santiago, was confirmed in 1626, together with one of Francisca Dias' children. 75 Luís, a foundling, was identified as a resident in the institution and received a shroud, mass and grave of Misericórdia 76 . In the middle of the first quarter of eighteen hundreds, Joana da Conceição, aged eight to nine, lived with her mother in the hospital 77 . More than simply a place for elderly women, Hospital das Velhas was also a place where children occasionally lived.
Of the 111 identified women housed in the Santiago hospital, forty-four possess references to their marital status. Of these cases, twenty-four women are identified as widows and twenty as single (see the table in Annex 1). As we have seen, most of the women staying at the hospital had few or no active family networks and lived without the close presence of male guardianship. We   78 In the absence of integrated information in relation to the demographic structure of the Portuguese population, we base these conclusions on the works developed in Spain on the censuses of Aranda (1768), Floridablanca (1787) and Godoy (1797). In comparative terms, in 1864, the date of the first statistical survey of the Portuguese population, the number of people aged over 60 per 100,000 inhabitants was slightly above Spain and Italy, and slightly below Belgium and France. (see Estatística de Portugal. População. Censo no 1. o de Janeiro. 1864, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional, 1868, p. XI). The Spanish aging process was in line with coeval European trends, especially with Mediterranean countries. We believe that the demographics of northern Portugal can be compared to the Spanish population structure, especially in Galicia.

93
Poor women and urban assistance in Early Modern Portugal: the case of Hospital of Santiago of Braga age 79 and, therefore, reached the state of its life that, for natural reasons, was unable to support itself autonomously. Family integration and ownership of properties were decisive for the experience of a dignified and respected old age.
To have or not to have property to transfer to those to come was a fundamental condition for guaranteeing close family members who could sympathetically support aging 80 . The scarcity of old people led to their social appreciation, as they were seen as depositories of wisdom and other cultural assets 81 . When they had their own, the elderly kept ownership of the house, conducted their destinies and used that position to guarantee the presence of productive elements that showed solidarity towards their old age 82 . In the middle of the eighteenth century, only a minority of Portuguese women would have this safeguard, since only fourteen percent of the heads of the family were occupied by people of the female gender 83 . Formal care and family networks were structural to the survival of elderly people 84 .
The aging phenomenon affected women and men and urban or rural contexts differently 85 . The demographic structure, the moral disincentive to female remarriage, the biological cycle, the differential age at the date of marriage and the woman's long temporal permanence in widowhood determined that this state was culturally associated with the female gender 86 . Bluteau defined that widowhood" was "the state of the widower" and that "widower" was the "man who lost his wife" 87 . In turn, "widow" was the woman "whose husband had died" or who had "useless husband", that is, imprisoned or absent, and "the woman who lives alone and out of wedlock" 88 . To this definition, the author added observations of a moralistic nature, namely that "marrying a widow was a kind of odious bigamy". In Norwich, England, public authorities treated elderly single women, widows and those abandoned by their husbands in an equal and privileged manner. Young single women who lived alone were not considered poor to be worthy of alms 89 . Marital status and life cycle were moral catalysts for assistance and socio-cultural categorization 90 .
The state of formal or informal widowhood posed enormous challenges to the survival of the families most economically exposed to poverty, whose survival depended on the working capacity of its various elements. In the face of the loss of a family member and the presence of small children in the household, the social situation of the widower or widow was easily degraded 91 . As we have seen, charities acted in these cases, replacing the family in the economic and/ or moral dimensions. The professional renewal of the children alleviated this burden, as there were many young girls and boys who were single and who, working as servants or apprentices, hoped to be able to pay a dowry and position themselves in the marriage market, in order to constitute their own family 92 .
The economic and productive system that attracted surplus human resources to the city in the countryside also provided a greater concentration of the elderly population in urban centres. The nature of the migratory movements of the populations, with high rates of male emigration, higher mortality of men and women's inferior age for marriage, have been pointed out as other factors that favoured that phenomenon. Historical demography has shown that female populations in cities showed less nuptiality and less matrimonial intensity than their rural counterparts, which posed objective challenges in achieving a stable marriage relationship. Cities had higher rates of permanent celibacy for single 87  women and a higher concentration of widows. The great family dependence in the face of conjunctural and structural oscillations could be overcome through cohabitation with younger or "apparent consanguinity" relatives, such as those who the maids established with their employers. The fragility of the old woman and/or poor widow and without a family that framed her won several solidarities, either through charities or fraternal networks 93 . Charity managers seem to have recognized this situation by directing specific care practices for orphaned women through the granting of dowries, enabling them to take an advantageous position in the marriage market and thus escape from the situation of poverty in which they found themselves. This was an objective way to prevent these young women from seeing their honour affected, from falling socially, slipping into begging or prostitution and affecting the functioning of the established social order. As the ideal maiden was the one who remained honourable until marriage and the ideal widow was the one who did not remarry and who practiced the virtue of seclusion, the efforts directed at these feminine states led by the men who managed the charity are understandable, as in this case of the Barros Family of Real, the local elites, integrated in Misericórdia, or the archbishops, as lords of the city 94 . The powers identified the exercise of their public authority and prestige with the donation. The mental frames of the time valued the support given to women, especially widows, single women and orphans.
The fraternities, brotherhoods, hospitals and individuals, as public agents, created resources that responded to the mismatch between the economic model of "improvisation" and the social valorisation of old age 95 . We identified sick or disabled women who found a roof at Hospital of Santiago. Like the cases of the woman entrevada 96 to whom the Misericórdia, in 1671, paid for shroud, mass and grave 97 ; Maria Paneta, mad (1737); Custódia de Jesus, blind (1760); and Ana Maria (1803), who died at the age of seventy 98 . It was also a structural poor the sick woman who had been stuck in a tall bed for two years in Hospital of Santiago, for whom Dom Frei Bartolomeu dos Mártires (p. 1559-1590) commissioned alms care to the governor of his archbishopric during the stay of that prelate in the Council of Trento (1545-1563) 99 . Physical inability to work, due to mental/physical illness or age, which made independent survival impossible, was one of the structuring facts of the hierarchy of meritorious poverty in force in the Early Modern Age. The poor in this condition occupied the top of the system of selection and differentiation that mediated access to alms. For this reason, they were provided with regular support given by the assistance agents who operated in Portugal during this period 100 .
In half of the cases identified 101 , women were so poor that they died unable to pay a dignified burial at their own expense. Nevertheless, we identified examples in which poverty was relativized, at the time of death, by the ownership of goods and solidarities that guaranteed a good death, according to the prescriptions of the time. Isabel de Jesus was a beata 102 , lived in the hospital and was buried with her own habit 103 and Marta Fernandes, single, had been the housekeeper of a canon 104 . One made a will and the other did not, but in both episodes there was enough assets to pay for services. Marta left the parish priest as her heir, took the habit of São Francisco, was accompanied by the twelve clerics who sang in the choir of the Cathedral and by twenty priests. She was buried in a bier of Santas Chagas, had four masses with the body present at the privileged altar of São Pedro de Rates and thirty masses and a service of three lessons by clerics who sang in the choir of the Cathedral and their six assistants were said for her. Of the goods that devout Isabel had with her, the priest made money, in 1722, to pay for the bier of Confraria das Santas Chagas 105 , to say five masses with the body present at the privileged 97 Poor women and urban assistance in Early Modern Portugal: the case of Hospital of Santiago of Braga altar of the same confraternity, to pay the accompaniment by seven priests and to have three services of ten priests with masses included said. If they were structurally poor and the hospital only gave them accommodation, with what did these women eat and how did they dress? We know that Braga had other agents who, in a supplementary way and integrated with Hospital of Santiago, could help these poor women 106 . The ecclesiastical lord regularly attended to the poor and we know that, on certain occasions, the chapter distributed alms 107 . Santa Casa, the largest institution of assistance in Braga, had a charitable activity implemented in the hospital area, since it had been managing Hospital of São Marcos since 1559 and supported women through Recolhimento de Santo António (retreat) 108 , located in Campo da Vinha, in operation since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Misericórdia gave dowries to single girls and practiced ritualized alms, at Easter, Visitation day (2 of July at that time), All Saints' Day and Christmas. It supported pilgrims, prisoners, orphaned or abandoned children, women, the sick or apprentices 109 , through the dispatch of petitions in cash or in kind 110 . Using the royal privilege it had held since the end of the sixteenth century 111 , Santa Casa buried the poor free of charge, carrying out the seventh work of mercy (burying the dead) 112 . The great material scarcity illustrated in table 1 and the physical incapacity to work shown in Annex 1 lead us to infer that the women of the Hospital de Santiago survived by articulating family-type care, provided by living with other women within the institution, with the local solidarities, activating possible help in the surroundings of the institution 113 , and formal assistance to the poor provided by the Misericórdia or other brotherhoods of which they belonged 114 . The case of Francisca Dias also proves to us that it would be possible to reconcile institutionalization with work 115 . Although we do not have data to prove it, access to the yard, orange grove and well, outhouses in the back of the house where they lived and property of the Barros family, could allow the production of foodstuffs for self-subsistence.
Half of the women housed in Hospital of Santiago were accompanied and buried free of charge by Misericórdia. Santa Casa had a tomb for the poor that, due to its commitment, had to bury "with decency and Christianity and with respect for the people who died" 116 . The steward of the house was to give a shroud 117 to all the poor who died, thus guaranteeing the minimum dignity to all, regardless of social status 118 . These poor people were buried in the cemetery that the institution had in the cloisters of Santo Amaro da Sé, at the back of its church, next to some olive trees 119 . Burials were moments of consolidation of the public image of Santas Casas, as 99 Poor women and urban assistance in Early Modern Portugal: the case of Hospital of Santiago of Braga their apparatus was illustrated and social respectability was promoted 120 . These deceased were at the end of the line of social representation, which quoted honourability according to the burial apparatus and the number of masses sent to pray after death. The number of masses with the body present and for the soul, the use of the shroud, the quality of priests and accompaniment, the place where the body was deposited showed the condition of the deceased 121 . After they had said the mass offered by Santa Casa, they only had the suffrages of All Souls' Day and the action of Confraria das Almas (Brotherhood of Souls) that had the mission of praying to free all souls from purgatory 122 . In addition to "burying the dead", Santa Casa, as the manager of Hospital of São Marcos, was working at another level as a supplementary resource in alleviating the condition of poverty of the "old women" in Santiago. At that hospital, all admitted sick women found a roof, bed, food, clean clothes, medicine and spiritual comfort 123 . Despite sharing the designation with that institution, Hospital dos Barros did not provide medical assistance. Maria de Freitas (1794), single, and Esperança Francisca (1795), widow, died in Hospital of São Marcos 124 . This small medieval hospital, which in the nineteenth century was supposed to resemble an asylum in order to take this toponym, lived and interacted with a hospital with its own modern medical staff in the sense of that term.
The women from the Hospital of Santiago managed to activate other solidarities. Suffrages for the soul should be carried out in the parish church of the deceased, unless testamentary statement to the contrary 125 . The priests of Cividade made money from some goods to fulfil their wishes (see They channelled the economic resources left by the deceased to the services provided within that parish church; in thirty-six of the cases, women were buried inside or outside that temple (see table 2). Confraria das Santas Chagas, which operated in Church of Cividade, was one of the most important brotherhoods of the city of Braga because it had a privileged altar 126 and a bier of its own, which it rented regularly 127 . The privileged altar of Santas Chagas was much in demand by eighteenth century Braga testators. This popularity was based on the belief that the masses said at these altars guaranteed greater benefits to the salvation of the soul 128 . The Chagas' bier was the second most requested in the cases under study (see table 3). Thus, Church of Cividade had a network of services that allowed the death of these women to be lived according to the mental assumptions of the time, that is, in the exact measure of their patrimony. Apart from those that shrouded themselves at the expense of Misericórdia with a simple sheet in "burel" or "soria" 129 , few poor women managed to pay for a habit and reap the salvific properties of these garments. By dressing like religious orders, the dead person aspired to transport his/her secular, civil and sinful dimension, to the sanctity and sacredness idealized in the hereafter. 130 A habit was a distinct asset, with various prices and qualities, but always quite expensive. 131 As a way to prevent the difficulties and obstacles caused by an eventual social disgrace and fall, individuals could join a fraternity during their life. These institutions, in the context of their assumptions of peer solidarity, gave shrouds, accompanied burials, ordered suffrages for their deceased fellow clergymen, and, in some cases, prescribed visits in case of illness or granted alms to poor fellow clergyman 132 . Margarida Gonçalves, widow, who died on 126 Norberto Tiago Gonçalves Ferraz, A Morte e a Salvação da Alma..., cit., p. 335. 127 Tiago Ferraz showed that the Confraria das Santas Chagas had its own bier since 1720 (Norberto Tiago Gonçalves Ferraz, A Morte e a Salvação da Alma..., cit., p. 214). The parish records show that, already in 1631, Maria Lopes was taken in the bier of this fraternity in exchange for alms. The record of Beatriz Fernandes, who died on January 10, 1632, indicates that the priest paid one cruzado for the rental of that bier of Chagas. Cf 131 The most requested shroud in the wills of Braga, in the seventeen hundreds, cost 2400 réis and the most economical one thousand réis. Cf. Norberto Tiago Gonçalves Ferraz, A Morte e a Salvação da Alma..., cit., p. 140. 132 On the charitable action of some fraternities from Braga towards their poor fellow clergymen see Maria Marta Lobo de Araújo, "As confrarias de Braga e a ajuda aos pobres na Idade Moderna. Estudo preliminar", Revista de Ciências Sociais 2, n. 1 (2014), p. 15-32; and Ariana Almendra, "A confraria de São Vicente no século XVIII: funcionamento e práticas September 17, 1637, was transported in the bier of Confraria de Santa Ana, for being its sister 133 . Ana da Silva, widow of António Álvares 134 , buried in the middle of the eighteenth century, was accompanied as a sister by Confraria de Nossa Senhora dos Prazeres 135 .
We believe that some cases illustrate examples of "new poor". Maria Amorim, widow, who died in December of 1738, seems to be an example of a woman who has seen her social situation altered in the course of her life. The priest said that she was accompanied by Confraria de Santa Ana and Confraria de São Sebastião "in which she had entered in life when she was richer" 136 . Catarina Simões, single, born in Tadim (municipality of Braga), had made a will signed by two witnesses where she stated she wanted to be buried by Irmandade de Santa Cruz, one of the most expensive and prestigious in the city. Fearing that she would not have enough money to fulfil this wish, she confessed to three of her hospital companions that she wanted to be buried in Church of Cividade. She was accompanied by Confraria do Espírito Santo, which had some masses said for her. The sale of two small boxes, two mantéus 137 and small clothes made more than 7500 réis, which were used to pay the ten priests who accompanied her, in the parish rights of the burial. She had 600 réis in cash which, with the remainder of the clothes, allowed 56 masses to be said for her soul 138 . Catarina Simões was, of all the women identified in the hospital, for whom more suffrages were prayed. On average, the deceased women managed to pay only three masses 139 , a number that, together with the other data, illustrates the great poverty of these women.

Concluding Notes
The Hospital of Santiago housed women in a situation of great economic and social vulnerability, mainly elderly, single or widows with few or no surviving