INTRODUCTION

Since at least the Elizabethan era, poor laws marked a formal distinction between those deserving of relief – the lame, impotent, old or blind – and those who were able-bodied yet idle or vagrant and undeserving. To the deserving poor, relief was provided in the form of money, food or clothing. The undeserving were often sent temporarily to houses of correction. The poor laws were inherently patriarchal in their assumptions and applications. The fate of women and children was by and large determined by the character of their husband/father. Implemented locally, at parish level, the poor laws were secularized instruments of religious charity, framed by moral commandments. By the late eighteenth century, poor laws had become indispensable to the maintenance of political order in Britain’s fast-evolving “commercial society”.

Customary tenures in England had long guaranteed use and access rights to land while defining reciprocal (albeit uneven) obligations between lord and subject. From the later 1600s, however, a variety of means were utilized by large landowners to force peasants to sell their customary tenures in order to consolidate land holdings into private property. These “enclosures” cut personal ties to local parishes and led to a growth of “masterless men” who threatened the political order of the rural idyll. Enclosure facilitated the “marketization” of agriculture, which can be understood for our purposes as a shift from moral obligations regarding the provision of subsistence to a far less personal and amoral mechanism of supply and demand. Concerns over “masterless men” led many to ask whether poor laws could check the apparent disintegration of rural order. Regardless, in 1773 parliament passed an Enclosure Act by which common lands would ostensibly be better cultivated, “improved” and regulated. However, by this point in time the political problem posed by England’s rural poor was already being apprehended in more expansive terms, referencing African enslavement and the plantation economies of the Americas.

In the first part of this chapter I explore late eighteenth-century claims as to the distinctive political heritage of England, said to be characterized as a tradition of orderly independence.