7th century, Maximus the Confessor: "24. Thus, the one who imitates God by giving alms knows no difference between evil and good or just and unjust in regard to the needs of the body, but distributes to all without distinction according to their need even if he prefers the virtuous person over the wicked because of his good intention. 25. Just as God who is by nature good and free of passion loves all in an equal way as his creatures but glorifies the virtuous man for having become his friend through his intention and has mercy on the wicked out of his goodness and converts him by chastening him in this life, so also does one who is good and without passion through his intention love equally all men--the virtuous because of his nature and good will and likewise the wicked because of his nature and compassion by which he pities the one who is foolish and makes his way in darkness" (Four hundred chapters on love 1.24-25, trans. George C. Berthold, Maximus Confessor: Selected writings, Classics of Western spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 38).
High Middle Ages: Irina Metzler, "Disability in the Middle Ages and Cultural History," Werkstatt Geschichte no. 65 (March 2015): 55–65: "By the high Middle Ages the notion of indiscriminate charity
was becoming refined. High medieval canonical theory tried to make ethical
differences: only the ›just‹, the ›honest‹ and the ›shameful‹ poor were to receive
charity. In such a way the giving of alms came to be connected more closely
with exhortations to make oneself useful– the notion of utilitas became more
important, as expressed in the New Testament verse »who does not work shall not
eat«. The categorization of persons according to their ability to work (if they
were able to do so then begging was forbidden) or inability (whence begging was
allowed) constituted a paradigmatic underpinning of the discourse pertaining to
concepts of deserving and undeserving poor. In short, to that degree by which
the value of work increased, the status of beggars decreased" (61).
Late Middle Ages: Giacomo Todeschini, "Servitude et travail à la fin du Moyen Âge: La dévalorisation des salariés et les pauvres « peu méritants »," Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 70, no. 1 (January 2015): 81–89.
14th-15th centuries: Mireia Comas-Via, "Widowhood and Economic Difficulties in Medieval Barcelona," Historical Reflections 43, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 93–103, gives the medieval distinction as pauperes verecundi and pobres de solemnitat or matricularii.
1300-1650: Hadewijch Masure, "'Eerlycke huijsarmen' of 'ledichgangers'? Armenzorg en gemeenschapsvorming in Brussel, 1300-1640 [(Poor relief and community building in Brussels, 1300-1640)]," Stadsgeschiedenis 7, no. 1 (June 2012): 1–21.
1520 December: Erasmus, In epistolam Iacobi canonicam paraphrasis at James 2: "Therefore, the man who has by his flattery shown a preference for the undeserving rich man [(diuitem immerentem)] over the deserving poor man [(pauperi promere[n]ti)] is accountable for all the sins which are usually perpetrated against the love of neighbor, since he has broken this part of the law of love" (Collected works of Erasmus, ed. Robert D. Sider, vol. 44, Paraphrases on the epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon; the epistles of Peter and Jude; the epistle of James; the epistles of John; the epistle to the Hebrews, trans. John J. Bateman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 149; Tomus secundus continens Paraphrasim D. Erasmi Roterodami in omneis apostolicas epistolas (Basil, 1532), p. 336; cf. Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami VI.10 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. ). With thanks to Dr. Owen Ewald for his help with the abbreviation "promereti".
1525-1537: Davis, Barbara Beckerman. “Reconstructing the Poor in Early Sixteenth-Century Toulouse.” French History 7, no. 3 (September 1993): 249–85. "Most 16th-century poor relief programs institutionalized the practice of discriminating between "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. In addition, the people of Toulouse began to view charity as less a sacred duty and more a secular act. In response to short-term crises and deeper expectations raised after the Hundred Years' War, the city's population grew "more secular and less tolerant" of poverty and the poor. These feelings developed in a cultural climate of prosperity, order, and respectability."
1549, "Coverdale", translation of Erasmus' Paraphrasis of James 2:1-7: "He yt hath..preferred the vndeseruing rich man before the deseruing pore man" (Oxford English dictionary).
1560-1650: John McCallum, "Charity doesn’t begin at home: Ecclesiastical poor relief beyond the parish, 1560-1650," Journal of Scottish historical studies 32, no. 2 (November 2012): 107–26.
17th century: Claire S. Schen, "Constructing the poor in early seventeenth-century London," Albion 32, no. 3 (June 2000): 450–63. "Examines the flexibility in early-17th-century London of the categories of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, which were constructed around demographic, military, religious, and social crises."
1650-1750: David Hitchcock, Vagrancy in English culture and society, 1650-1750 (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
1780-1850: Samantha A. Shave, Pauper policies: Poor law practice in England, 1780–1850 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017). "The sharpening distinction that [Shave] perceives in select vestries after 1819 between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor further supports her contention that the adopters were looking to reduce expenditure on poor relief" (2019 JIH review by Richard Smith).
[1840 (or earlier, given Alison, below)], Thomas Chalmers: "mark the effect of the two discriminations. With our system, when fully carried out, the practical result were a full measure of relief for the deserving, with a leaving out of the undeserving poor. With their system when fully carried out, the practical result is that the undeserving, the men of hardihood, who can brook the indignities of a work-house and the violence there done to the feelings of relationship, are all taken in—while the deserving are revolted and scared away"(Thomas Chalmers, On the sufficiency of the parochial system, without a poor rate, for the right management of the poor (Glasgow: Wm. Collins, 1841 [ ]), 161).
1840, William Pulteney Alison: "The practical object which Mr Bosanquet seems to have in view, so far as his desponding views allow him to anticipate any improvement, is nearly the same as that of Dr Chalmers (except that he professes no intention of 'leaving out' a class of undeserving poor, maintaining, on the contrary, as I do, and as is almost universally done in England, that all misery is entitled to consolation and relief)—viz. to impress on the minds of the higher ranks of society so strong a sense of the Christian duty which the state of the poor imposes on them, as to induce them to make a liberal and discriminating voluntary provision for them ‘on the plan of district visiting,’ in all parts of the country" (William Pulteney Alison, Observations on the management of the poor in Scotland: and its effects on the health of the great towns, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1840), 40; Dr. Chalmers (above) is quoted on p. 5 and elsewhere).
1878 February 1: "The frontier provinces of France and Germany, in the later Middle Ages, seem to have suffered as much from tramps as the thinly peopled rural districts in the United States do at the present day. In 1391 the town of Bâle made an alliance with the Bishop of Strasburg and with other lords against the troops of marauding beggars who devastated the lands on the Rhine. The league seems to have been so far successful that private persons could be trusted, for the future, to guard their own property, if only they were able to discriminate between the 'deserving' and the undeserving poor. For the guidance of the benevolent, a writer who calls himself expertus in trufis, 'skilled in knaveries,' produced at the end of the fifteenth century the 'Liber Vagatorum,' or 'Book of Tramps.' The author of this manual is supposed by some authorities to have been Sebastian Brant. . . . Others will have it that he was one Murner" ("A book of tramps," The Pall Mall budget, being a weekly collection of articles printed in the Pall Mall gazette from day to day: with a summary of news 19, [no. 18] (Friday, 1 February 1878), p. 11, col. 2).
1891, Henry Sidgwick: "the distinctive principle of the English system is that Government is not to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor, but to secure to all who are destitute a minimum of subsistence under conditions deterrent but not painful: and this principle would be rejected as too harsh by many who now accept it, were it not for the assumption that private almsgivers will be ready to undertake the task of discrimination which Government declines, and to accord more generous and tender treatment to those who have fallen into distress through undeserved calamities" (Henry Sidgwick, The elements of politics (London: Macmillan & Co., 1891), 202). A debate over the justice of the distinction seems to have raged during the Victorian period, so there is much more where this comes from.
Indeed, according to the OED, the roots of it might be traced back, in English at least, to 1549 (above), if not before. For but one example of the opposite opinion, see 1907 (below).
1900-1930: David T. Beito, "Mutual aid, state welfare, and organized charity: Fraternal societies and the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, 1900-1930," Journal of policy history 5, no. 4 (October 1993): 419–34. "Examines two [American?] working-class aid societies that provided welfare assistance to members."
1907 October (W. M. Lightbody): "One must, of course, admit the full force of the objection that, although the present system does not reform the neglectful parent, the proposed system would tend to demoralize those who at present do their duty. That such would be the effect under our existing Poor Law administration admits of little doubt; for little or no attempt is made to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor, or between different causes of poverty" (W. M. Lightbody, “The State and the children,” Economic review 17, no. 4 (October 1907): 439).
c. 2001, supposedly "Dorothy Day" (pseudo-Dorothy Day): "The gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor." Though Dorothy Day (1897-1980) does indeed seem to have been of this opinion, and invokes the distinction more than once, I have yet to track this very sentence to any of her known works or sayings, not even in the Catholic Worker-sponsored Dorothy Day Library on the Web. (Update: Some have cited the issue of The Catholic worker dated May of 1940, but it was not present in any of the four articles she wrote for that issue that had been uploaded to that "complete set" of her contributions by 6 August 2020.) Nor was I able (in mid-July of 2015) to get Google to turn it up in a search limited to the years before 2001. What is more, Day specialists and authors James Allaire (Webmaster, Dorothy Day Library on the Web), Robert Ellsberg (Publisher, Orbis Books), Jim Forest (like some of the others a Day biographer), and Phillip M. Runkel (Archivist, Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection, Special Collections and University Libraries, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University) all concur in suspecting it (which is to say the very sentence) of inauthenticity (correspondence with Steve Perisho, week of 13 July 2015). My guess is that it derives from (at best) some second party's encapsulating summary or reformulation of her position (itself somewhat unoriginal (Sidgwick and others, above)).
Needless to say, people have obviously been taking sides around this distinction for a very long time, such that what I have provided above (whether in the way of quotations or of scholarship) is but a very small fraction of what one easily could. (Many of the promising hits on "undeserving poor" in TX All Text AND NOT Review in the Atla Religion Database, Historical Abstracts, and America: History and Life dated later than 2005 were not examined, nor were any dated earlier.) Some of the adjectival alternatives I've encountered so far: deviant, meritorious, pauvres peu méritants, sturdy, (un)worth*, wandering, etc.
