SETTLEMENT POLICY AND BASTARDY LEGISLATION

A large family was a menace to the rates. This fact lay behind the drastic removals of married men endeavouring to settle in a new parish, and accounted also for the attempts made in some localities to curtail housing accommodation. A marked increase in immorality was in part the natural result of such frustration of the legitimate desire for a normal married life. The only remedies of the age were jeremiads against “the vice and idleness of this present time”, combined with brutal efforts to pass on the ever-increasing burden of illegitimate children to some other parish. Since the place of settlement of a bastard was primarily that of birth, the first glimpse of a pregnant single woman, however precarious her condition, was enough to bestir the overseer to marshal for the fray every weapon which either law or fraudulent ingenuity could devise to get the woman beyond the confines of his parish; or, should he fail in this, to pursue the putative father with the utmost vigilance. The exceeding frequency with which unpleasant entries occur in both constables‘ and overseers’ accounts of this county shows how serious were the obstacles placed in the path of normal marriage.

In June 1721 the overseer of St Botolph's, Cambridge, “paid to Doll Carter, she being near her time, £2.17s. 6d. by which we got ridd of her”—an entry which seems well classified under the heading “Extronardy Disbustments”!