Abstract
What weight and significance ought to be attached to the late seventeenth-century poor law? Such questions need to be asked because they are implicit in the recent elevation of the significance of the English poor law by its recent historians. Paul Slack, as is well known, has identified ‘the growth of social welfare’ in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as ‘a general phenomenon of major importance’.2 His evidence for this statement was the significant increase in poor relief expenditure, found especially in towns and cities, much of which was generated by the increase in the size of parish pensions, some expansion in the numbers of those so relieved, and also by increased spending on ‘casual’, ‘discretionary’ poor relief.3 In the countryside as well, poor relief seems to have become markedly more generous and comprehensive after the middle of the seventeenth century. Pensions paid seem to have been significantly higher after that date and the law itself was increasingly implemented, so that ever larger proportions of English villagers became enmeshed in its machinery, as parish officers or, more often, as recipients.4
This chapter is based on research, currently in progress, on the reconstruction of the biographies of those receiving parish pensions from the parishes of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Westminster. This project focuses on the parish of St Martins-in-the-Fields, and those derived from it subsequently, to 1724. That cut-off date is determined by the erection of a parish workhouse under the 1723 Workhouse Test Act, which significantly altered the size and composition of the pensioner population in St Martin’s, as it also radically changed the local system of poor relief there. I would like to thank my former research assistant, Jean Hosking, who was employed to work on this project for a year on money generously provided by the Research Committee of Newcastle University, 1992–3. The full details of this research are to appear in The Making of the London Poor, to be published by Manchester University Press.
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Notes
P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), p.182.
For the growth of the poor law in rural areas after the middle of the century, see ibid., passim and also, T.C. Wales, ‘Poor Relief and Life-Cycle’, in R.M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp.356–7;
D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560–1765, (Oxford, 1991), pp.346–56;
K. Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982), p.154. See also for some recent research into rural poor relief,
T. Arkell, ‘The Incidence of Poverty in England in the Later Seventeenth Century’, Social History 12 (1), (1987), 23–48;
B. Stapleton, ‘Inherited Poverty and Life-cycle Poverty: Odiham, Hampshire, 1650–1850’, Social History 18, 3 (1993) 339–55;
Mary Barker-Read, ‘The Treatment of the Aged Poor in Five Selected West Kent Parishes From Settlement to Speenhamland (1662–1797)’ (Open University, 1988. PhD, thesis).
Wrightson, English Society, p.181. Most of this sentence has been quoted by Slack, Poverty and Policy, p.208 and also by I. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability. Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), p.99.
Ibid., p.226. See also A. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces. The Government of Stuart England (London, 1986), pp.227 and 279.
V. Pearl, ‘Puritans and Poor Relief. The London Workhouse, 1649–1660’, in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), p.209; Wrightson, English Society, p.181.
S. Macfarlane, ‘Social Policy and the Poor in the Later Seventeenth Century’, in A.L. Beier and R. Finlay (eds), The Making of the Metropolis: London 1500–1700 (London, 1986), pp.256 and 273.
V. Pearl, ‘Social Policy in Early Modern London’, in H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), p.130, notes that some rich city parishes gave relief even to ‘transgressors and malefactors’.
Slack, Poverty and Policy, p.192. He cites the remarks of the MP Richard Cockes, 1698, who exclaimed that ‘the poor … thinks the parish is obliged in old age, extremities, and necessities to provide for him’, ibid. Such attitudes were hardly new, however, since similar sentiments were expressed in the early seventeenth century: see J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), p.95. See also, Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, pp.188, 227.
In particular, vestrymen and churchwardens administered relief with ‘considerable independence from higher authorities’, whilst overseers of the poor in the city parishes were seemingly ‘seldom more than collectors of the poor rates, while effective decision making was left to churchwardens’, Macfarlane, ‘Social Policy and the Poor’, pp.255, 272. For other work done on poor relief in the City of London after 1640 see also, in addition to the work of Valerie Pearl cited above, R.W. Herlan, ‘Poor Relief in the London Parish of Antholin’s Budge Row 1638–1664’, Guildhall Studies in London History 2, 4 (1977); R.W. Herlan, ‘Poor Relief in London during the English Revolution’, Journal of British Studies 18 (1979); R.W. Herlan, ‘London’s Poor during the Puritan Revolution: the Parish of St Dunstan’s in the West’, Guildhall Studies in London History 3, 1 (1977); R.W. Herlan, ‘Social Articulation and Parochial Poverty on the Eve of the Restoration’, Guildhall Studies in London History 2, 2 (1976). See also, S.M. Macfarlane, ‘Studies in Poverty and Poor Relief in London at the End of the Seventeenth Century’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1983).
There appears to be some disagreement about the course of population growth in St Martin’s. Shoemaker, using figures for numbers of households and houses, gives figures that are considerably less than those derived from average totals of baptisms: Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, p.327. One possible reason for the substantial disagreement is that Shoemaker’s method under-estimates the large lodging population. One source reported a population of 40 000 in 1680, which seems a reasonable guess and certainly not exaggerated following the eccentric reference to it in T.R. Forbes, ‘The Changing Face of Death in London’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (1979), p.118. Forbes states that the parish was ‘one of London’s smallest’, ibid.
M. Power, ‘The Social Topography of Restoration London’, in A.L. Beier and R. Finlay (eds), The Making of the Metropolis: London 1500–1700 (1986), p.205. Some sources suggest that the parish of St Martin’s lost status after the division of the parish in the 1680s, although some of this information derives from special pleading from the parish vestry themselves.
The General Sessions for the County of Middlesex, which included Westminster and the West End parishes outside the liberties of the City of London, met eight times a year. In the early eighteenth century, petty sessions met outside the general sessions for each division of the county, and also in each parish, depending on the availability of local justices, For discussions of procedure, see R. Paley (ed.), Justice in Eighteenth-Century Hackney, London Record Society 28, 1991, p.xv. JPs were supposed to exercise close supervision over long-term relief in the 1730s and 1740s, p.xxiv. JPs were given extra responsibility to sanction additions to poor relief lists under the 1723 Workhouse Test Act, 9 Geo. I c. 7: see P. Slack, The English Poor Law 1531–1782 (Basingstoke, 1990), p.63.
For badging, see also Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, pp. 227, 278–9; K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (London, 1979), p. 179 writes of the practice of badging paupers in Terling under the terms of the charity set up by Henry Smith (a London merchant) ‘seventy yearas before the final humiliation of wearing badged clothing was inflicted upon the paupers of the nation at large’.
For a discussion of the constraints imposed by locality in Restoration London, see T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II. Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987), pp.20–1.
For efforts to discipline the poor, which of course increased with the impetus provided by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, and the SPCK, see Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, esp. pp.238–72; T. Hitchcock, ‘Paupers and Preachers: The SPCK and the Parochial Workhouse Movement’, in L. Davison et al. (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive. The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992), pp.145–66.
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© 1997 Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe
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Boulton, J. (1997). Going on the Parish: The Parish Pension and its Meaning in the London Suburbs, 1640–1724. In: Hitchcock, T., King, P., Sharpe, P. (eds) Chronicling Poverty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25260-2_2
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