Abstract
The Elizabethan poor laws, codified in 1598 and 1601, institutionalised the ancient moral distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.1 The idea that the idle or the shiftless were unsuitable ‘objects of charity’ had scriptural roots in St Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians: ‘if a man shall not work, then neither shall he eat’.2 Discrimination against the wilfully idle, especially those rogues and vagabonds whose lives of itinerant theft by definition threatened the stability of a social order which was anchored in notions of private property, had accordingly been practised long before the Tudor regime began its long series of legislative experiments in social welfare.3 Just as the sixteenth-century statutes sharpened perceptions of, and punishments for, vagrancy, however, they also articulated a more coherent vision of those who were deemed fit for parish relief in cash or kind. By 1598, policy-makers felt able to distinguish vagrants not only from the labouring poor (the under-employed or unemployed who were prevented from adequately maintaining their families either by prevailing levels of wages or structural problems in the economy) but also from the impotent poor (who were simply unable through either physical or mental incapacity to maintain themselves through their labour).4 The deserving poor were, therefore, identified primarily by their inability to labour: they were the ‘lame ympotent olde blynde and such other amonge them being poore and not able to worke’.5
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Notes
Cf. S. Hindle, On the Parish?: The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), ch. 5; W.J. King, ‘Punishment for Bastardy in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Albion, 10 (1978), pp. 130–51;
A.J. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), pp. 252–62.
J. Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555–1800’, in F. Snyder and D. Hay (eds), Labour, Law and Crime: An Historical Perspective (London, 1987), pp. 42–122.
M. Berlin, ‘Reordering Rituals: Ceremony and the Parish, 1520–1640’, in P. Griffiths and M. Jenner (eds), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester, 2000), pp. 59–60; P. Slack (ed.), ‘Poverty in Early Stuart Salisbury’, Wiltshire Record Society, 31 (1975), p. 88; P. Slack, ‘Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597–1666’, in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds) Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (London, 1972), p. 185;
J.C. Cox, Bench-Ends in English Churches (Oxford, 1916), p. 36.
C.S. Sehen, Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620 (Aldershot, 2002), p. 121;
S. Amussen, ‘Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560–1725’, in A.J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), p. 213; J. Hill, ‘Poverty and Poor Relief in Shropshire, 1550–1685’ (Liverpool University Unpubl. MA Thesis, 1973), p. 142.
F.G. Emmison (ed.), Early Essex Town Meetings: Braintree, 1619–1636, Finchingfield, 1626–1634 (Chichester, 1970), p.86;
Harold Smith, The Ecclesiastical History of Essex Under the Long Parliament and Commonwealth (Colchester, 1933), pp. 142–3; Hertfordshire Archives and Local Services (HALS), D/P 65/3/3, pp. 27–8, 30, 32–40; D/P 102/5/1 (19 Sept. 1678);
E.M. Hampson, The Treatment of Poverty in Cambridgeshire, 1597–1834 (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 180, 240, n. 3; I.F. Jones, ‘Aspects of Poor Law Administration, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, From Trull Overseers’ Accounts’, Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society Proceedings, 95 (1951), p. 91.
R. Dunning, A Plain and Easie Method Shewing How the Office of Overseer of the Poor May be Managed (London, 1685), p. 9.
K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1995), chs 5–7;
D. Underdown, Fire From Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992), ch. 3. Cf. M. Spufford, ‘Puritanism and Social Control?’, in A.J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 41–58. For a judicious summary of this debate P. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), pp. 53–76.
P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost Further Explored (London, 1983), p. 133.
F. Hervey (ed.), Suffolk in the XVIIth Century: The Breviary of Suffolk by Robert Reyce (London, 1902), p. 57.
J. Rogers, A Treatise of Love (London, 1632), p. 237.
Cf. K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982), p. 181.
H. Arthington, Provision for the Poore, Now in Penurie (London, 1597), p. 11.
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Hindle, S. (2004). Civility, Honesty and the Identification of the Deserving Poor in Seventeenth-century England. In: French, H., Barry, J. (eds) Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523104_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523104_2
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