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Poor Relief in London During the English Revolution*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Ronald W. Herlan
Ronald W. Herlan*
Affiliation:
State University Collegeat Brockport
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Extract

In recent years the interest of English historians in poverty and poor relief during Tudor-Stuart times has grown appreciably. Besides new research on certain cities, towns, and counties, a number of studies, both published and unpublished, focus attention on the vital center of English poor relief operations — the parish. This growing emphasis on parochial responses to the problems associated with poverty and the poor in England reflects the view of a recent student of English poor relief, Geoffrey W. Oxley, who has insisted that there really can be no history of poor relief per se, “only the history of poor relief in particular parishes.”

It is common knowledge that London parish records have enormous value for students of English poor relief. A careful survey of essential documents such as accounts of the churchwardens and overseers of the poor, vestry minutes, and parish registers which survive for London's 108 parishes led to the selection of the seven parishes in this study. Regrettably, the ravages of time and circumstance have destroyed a substantial proportion of the City records of this type which once existed for the period. Almost without exception the larger, densely populated, and generally poverty-stricken parishes outside London's walls suffered the greatest losses. Consequently, the study which follows represents only the range of responses for ameliorating poverty which emerged within a limited sample of smaller, less highly congested, intramural City parishes.

At the same time this group of London parishes provides a fuller awareness of the ways in which England's poor relief regime developed and functioned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Spring 1979 , pp. 30 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1979

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to acknowledge the financial assistance of the State Universi y of New York and Research Foundation in supporting the research on which this article is based.

References

1. For an assessment of these regional and parochial studies, see Herlan, Ronald W., “Poor Relief in the London Parish of Antholin's Budge Row, 1638-1664,” Guildhall Studies in London History, II, No. 4 (April, 1977), 179–99Google Scholar. Cf. Hey, David G., An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester, 1974)Google Scholar.

2. Oxley, Geoffrey W., Poor Relief in England and Wales 1601-1834 (Newton Abbot, 1974), p. 12Google Scholar.

3. This includes 97 parishes within the City walls and 11 parishes without. Three parishes in Southwark—George, Saviour's and Thomas—, which are often referred to as constituting part of the 16 parishes without the City's walls, lay outside the jurisdiction of London. Two other districts, the precincts of Bridewell and Whitefriars, which were also usually included in the contemporary records as part of the City's 16 extramural parishes, were also exempt from London's direct control until their privileges were abolished by the Act of 8 and 9 William III, c. 27 (1697). See Harben, Henry A., A Dictionary of London (London, 1918), pp. 104, 624–25Google Scholar. The prefix St. has not been used in the present study since it was removed for the period from November 3, 1642 through August 7, 1660. See Wilson, Frank Percy, The Plague in Shakespeare's London (London, 1963), p. 199Google Scholar.

4. One notable exception to this statement is the extramural London parish of Dunstan in the West. For an assessment of its poor relief practices in the seventeenth century see Herlan, Ronald W., “Poor Relief in the London Parish of Dunstan in the West during the English Revolution,” Guildhall Studies in London History, III, No. 1 (Oct., 1977), 13–36Google Scholar.

5. Among those historians who shared this view are , Sidney and Webb, Beatrice, English Local Government: English Poor Law History, Part I: The Old Poor Law (London, 1927), pp. 60–100Google Scholar; Tawney, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926), pp. 210–26Google Scholar; Margaret, James, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution, 1640-1660 (London, 1930), pp. 249–310Google Scholar; Brailsford, H. N., The Levellers and the English Revolution (Stanford, 1961), pp. 319–20Google Scholar. A number of important authorities did not share this view of collapse, notably Sir George Nicholls, who maintained that the poor law system continued on “its accustomed course” under the supervision of its venerable officers. A History of the English Poor Law in Connection with the State of the Country and the Condition of the People (rev. ed.; London, 1898), II, 265Google Scholar. E. M. Leonard's pioneering work on poor relief in Elizabethan and early Stuart times suggested that the poor relief regime of the revolutionary period was less effective than Charles I and his Privy Council had been in the 1630s, but functional nonetheless. The Early History of English Poor Relief (Cambridge, 1900), pp. 238, 268Google Scholar. G. M. Trevelyan adopted Leonard's view in his standard history of England in the seventeenth century, England under the Stuarts (21st ed.; London, 1965), p. 503Google Scholar.

6. Tawney, , Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp. 210–26Google Scholar; James, , Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution, 1640-1660, pp. 249–310Google Scholar; Schenck, Wilhelm, The Concern for Social Justice in the Puritan Revolution (London, 1948), pp. 17–19Google Scholar; Hill, Christopher, “Puritans and the Poor,” Past and Present, No. 2 (Nov., 1952), 32–50Google Scholar; Notestein, Wallace, The English People on the Eve of Colonization, 1603-1660 (New York, 1954), pp. 245–47Google Scholar.

7. “But at no time in our period were the sums raised by rates substantial or particularly significant when compared with the great amounts available as a consequence of the ever-mounting endowments created by private generosity.” Jordan, Wilbur K., Philanthropy in England 1480-1660: A Study of the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations (New York, 1959), p. 139Google Scholar.

8. Based on the London Topographical Society's map showing parish boundaries prior to the Union of Parishes Act, 1907 and Mrs.Wilson's, E. map in London Inhabitants Within the Walls 1695, London Record Society Publications, Vol. II (Chatham, 1966), xxiiGoogle Scholar. The parish of Olave, Southwark was located at the southern end of London Bridge in the Ward of Bridge Without and is indicated by an asterisk on the map.

9. For a recent discussion of the nature and function of London's parochial and municipal administration in the mid-seventeenth century, see McCampbell, Alice E., “The London Parish and the London Precinct, 1640-1660,” Guildhall Studies in London History, II, No. 3 (Oct., 1976), 107–24Google Scholar. The first compulsory English poor rate mandated for London in 1547 by Common Council order required that “collectours” were to be appointed who would gather monies from the “citizeins and inhabitantes” assessed towards the relief and maintenance of the City's poor. It was quite appropriate, therefore, to refer to these officials as collectors or assessors for the poor. See Herlan, Ronald W., “Poor Relief during the Great Civil War and Interregnum, 1642-1660” (Ph.D. thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1973), pp. 13-14, 257–58Google Scholar.

10. Vestries probably took their name from the ecclesiastical vestments which hung in the rooms where they held their meetings, usually adjacent to the sanctuary of the church. Select vestries evolved, it appears, out of two recurring tendencies: larger parishes found it necessary to administer parochial affairs with a group of more efficient size; and, the general body of parishioners (i.e., the general vestry) ceased to interest themselves in parochial government. See Pugh, R. B., How to Write a Parish History (6th ed.; London, 1954), p. 100Google Scholar.

11. These and related data are derived from Guildhall Library, MSS 7673/1, 2; 7674; 2088/1; 2089/1; 942/1; 942A; 4409/1, 2; 1013/1; 8099/1; 4352/1; 4383/1; 4384/1, 2.

12. Jordan, , Philanthropy in England, p. 140Google Scholar. For an analysis of the way Jordan arrived at this conclusion, see Herlan, , “Poor Relief in Antholin's Budge Row,” Guildhall Studies in London History, II, 182, n. 17Google Scholar.

13. See appendix for details. The average annual range varies more widely in some parishes because certain bequests were first received during the revolutionary epoch.

14. The parish was able to purchase properties out of a £500 bequest by Charles Yeoman. The leases of these properties returned an annual income of £22 10s for relief of the parish's poor. The more substantial sum of £52 per annum was added to the parish's poor relief resources from the shop rentals in 1656-57. Freshfield, Edwin, The Vestry Minute Books of the Parish of St. Bartholomew Exchange in the City of London 1567-1676 (London, 1890)Google Scholar, Book Two, pp. 5-7, 26, 37, 108; The Account Books of the Parish of St. Bartholomew Exchange in the City of London 1596-1698 (London, 1895), pp. 134-36, 139, 142, 145, 147-50, 153, 155, 157Google Scholar.

15. Guildhall Library, MSS 4409/1, 2; 4451/1; 4413. This parish was one of five London parishes which collectively provided over 25% of the City's entire charitable giving in the period of Jordan's study. Jordan, , Philanthropy in England, pp. 34–36Google Scholar.

16. Stone, Lawrence, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 (London, 1972), p. 155, n. 83Google Scholar.

17. Guildhall Library, MS 2089/1, 1640-60, unfoliated.

18. Table 3's statistics are based on Guildhall Library, MSS 7674; 942A; 4409/1, 2; 8099/1; 4352/1; 4383/1; Freshfield, Edwin, The Vestry Minute Book of the Parish of St. Margaret Lothbury in the City of London 1571-1677 (London, 1887)Google Scholar; The Account Books of St. Bartholomew Exchange.

19. The actual percentages are: 49.66% (Giles without Cripplegate); 30.54% (Sepulchre without Newgate); 7.08% (Botolph without Bishopsgate); and 6.74% (Botolph without Aldgate) for a total of 94.02%.

20. Parish number 107 on the map, p. 33.

21. Parish number 108 on the map, p. 33.

22. Katherine, Coleman, parish number 42; Allhallows, Barking, parish number 1; Andrew by the Wardrobe, parish number 15 on the map.

23. Herlan, Ronald W., “Social Articulation and the Configuration of Parochial Poverty in London on the Eve of the Restoration,” Guildhall Studies in London History, II, No. 2 (April, 1976), 43–53Google Scholar.

24. Glass, D. V., London Inhabitants Within the Walls 1695 [London Record Society Publications, II] (Chatham, 1966), ix–xliiiGoogle Scholar.

25. Jordan, , Philanthropy in England, p. 368Google Scholar. The regular operating expenditures for the five parishes surveyed in Table 4 are drawn from Guildhall Library, MSS 7673/2; 2088/1; 942/1; 4409/1, 2; Freshfield, The Account Books of St. Bartholomew Exchange.

26. Gutton, Jean-Pierre, La Société et les pauvres: L'Exemple de la généralité de Lyon, 1534-1789 (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar.

27. This estimate is based upon a comparison of total estimated parish populations extrapolated from various seventeenth-century sources (such as the number of parish houses reported in an ecclesiastical survey of 1638, poll tax returns for 1641, and annual average numbers of baptisms and burials recorded in the parish registers) to the recorded numbers of structural poor assisted by those same parishes. About one of thirty-five inhabitants could be classified as the structural poor in the parishes of Alban, Wood Street, Olave, Old Jewry, Mary, Wool-church, and Bartholomew by the Exchange. Similarly, the structural poor numbered about one of twenty-five parishioners in Botolph, Billingsgate and one of fifteen to twenty residents in the parishes of Margaret, Lothbury and Andrew by the Wardrobe. See Dale, Thomas Cyril (ed.), The Inhabitants of London in 1638 (London, 1931), pp. 1-2, 27-29, 36-37, 42-43, 97-98, 121-22, 171–72Google Scholar; Returns Made by Parishes, Wards and Livery Companies of the City of London to the Exchequer of Persons Assessed for Payment of the Poll Tax of 1641 (London, 1934–1938), pp. 18-22, 40–46Google Scholar; Guildhall Library, MSS 4346/1; 4374/1; 4400/1, 2; 4502/1; 4507/1; 7644. More reliable population information for six of the seven parishes in 1695 is available in the classic study of Jones, P. E. and Judges, A. V., “London Population in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Econ. Hist. Rev., VI, No. 1 (Oct., 1935), 45–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. MacCaffrey, Wallace T., Exeter, 1540-1640. The Growth of an English County Town (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 12, 112–13Google Scholar.

29. Pound, John F., “An Elizabethan Census of the Poor: The Treatment of Vagrancy in Norwich, 1570-1580,” Birmingham University Historical Journal, VIII, No. 2 (1962), 135–51Google Scholar; The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570 [Norfolk Record Society, XL] (Norwich, 1971) pp. 5–21Google Scholar.

30. Beier, A. L., “Studies in Poverty and Poor Relief in Warwickshire, 1540-1680” (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1969), pp. 55–56.Google Scholar

31. Slack, Paul, “Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597-1666,” in Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500-1700: Essays in Urban History, eds. Clark, Peter and Slack, Paul (Toronto, 1972), p. 161Google Scholar.

32. Ibid., pp. 173-76. Elizabeth Ralph and Mary E. Williams report that 11% of St. Philip and Jacob parish and 5% to 6% of Temple parish were in receipt of relief in Bristol in 1696. Ralph, Elizabeth and Williams, Mary E. (eds.), The Inhabitants of Bristol in 1696 [Bristol Record Society] (Bristol, 1968), p. xxivGoogle Scholar.

33. Natalie Zemon Davis concludes “that slightly more than 5% of the inhabitants” of Lyon were being helped by the Aumône-Générale during the interval from 1534 to 1561 in “Poor Relief, Humanism and Heresy: the Case of Lyon,” in Bowsky, William M. (ed.), Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, V (1968), 274–75Google Scholar. Jean-Pierre Gutton calculated that between 8 and 16% of Lyon's population was aided by charitable institutions in the early modern period. La Société et les pauvres, p. 53. Pierre Deyon demonstrated that in the early years of the eighteenth century 3 % of the population of Amiens received some sort of help. Amiens, capitale provinciale: Étude sur la société urbaine au 17e siecle (Paris and La Haye, 1967), p. 358Google Scholar. In late eighteenth-century Bayeux Olwen Hufton discovered that approximately one-sixth of its population was dependent on relief to survive. Bayeux in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Social Study (Oxford, 1967), p. 86Google Scholar. About 20% of Aix-en-Provence's population of some 25,000 “received some sort of charity” in the late eighteenth century according to Fairchilds, Cissie C., Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 1640-1789 (Baltimore, 1976), p. 75Google Scholar.

34. These conclusions are based only on those accounting years where specific information was included. The other parish group of conjunctural poor whose assistance was of a more infrequent and temporary nature would easily double the yearly totals of Alban, Wood Street's residents or transitory inhabitants deserving assistance. Guildhall Library, MS 7674, fols. 1-94.

35. The annual average monetary payments to pensioners whose mean numbers totalled approximately 27 reached nearly £ 58. Expressed more simply, each pensioner received approximately £ 2 2s on the average in direct payments from the parish. This sum is only slightly less than the annual average payments given to each poor person out of public funds in the period 1611-60 reported by Jordan, in Philanthropy in England, pp. 131-32, 136, 138–39Google Scholar. In any case the annual average stipends to the poor of Andrew by the Wardrobe represented “a considerably larger amount than that which charitable donors of the period reckoned sufficient to lend at least subsistence support to a rural family.” Ibid., pp. 132-33. The £ 58 paid yearly to the parish's structural poor equalled 60% of the total annual average disbursements from the poor accounts. Guildhall Library, MS 2089/1.

36. Some £22.35 was spent on 3.25 children each year on the average during that interval, while £17.875 was expended on 4.625 pensioners throughout the same period on the average each year. £22.35 ÷ 3.25 = £6.88 per child; £17.85 ÷ 4.625 = £3.86 per pensioner. The first sum is approximately 78% higher than the second. Statistical material derived from Freshfield, Edwin, The Vestry Minute Book of St. Margaret Lothbury, pp. 105–27Google Scholar.

37. Guildhall Library, MS 8099/1, fols. 1-23v.

38. Ibid., fols. 9-10.

39. A detailed breakdown of the sums spent on the widows and children reveals the following information: £5 2s were paid to Widow Feild as her weekly pension (2s weekly for 51 weeks); £6 were given to a nurse to look after Widow Feild (2s 6d weekly for 48 weeks); and 10s 2d were also expended for a pair of sheets, two bushels of coals as well as for providing this needy woman with a little extra cash. Another pensioner, Widow Chamberlin, was given £3 18s for the thirty-nine weeks which elapsed before her death on January 26, 1656, and another pound was paid out for her burial expenses. £9 12s were spent on the nursing costs for two children of Henry Adyes and 5s more for stopping the bleeding of one of them “being very weake.” A total of £4 18s was spent on Mary Buck for being nursed by Anne Ward of Shoreditch for forty-nine weeks, and another 14s 9d were expended on her schooling and purchase of a waistcoat. James Munday (his sister presumably) burdened the parish with £5 12s 8d in charges for identical purposes. (It would be interesting to know whether the higher weekly costs for schooling James — 3d per week versus 2d per week for Ann — reflected a difference based on the children's age, sex, or separate teachers' fees). Four other parish children by the names of Mary Gold, Mary March, Thomas Storme, and John Broadboard, involved the parish in outlays totalling £20 16s (£5 4s each).

40. Guildhall Library, MS 943/1, fol. 75.

41. Guildhall Library, MSS 8099/1; 1012/1; 1013/1.

42. See note 41 above and Freshfield, , The Vestry Minute Books of St. Bartholomew Exchange, pp. 5-7, 26, 37, 108Google Scholar; The Account Books of St. Bartholomew Exchange, pp. 134-36, 139, 142, 145, 147-50, 153, 155, 157.

43. See notes 23 and 24 above.

44. Rates-in-aid were frequently required of the London parishes of Antholin's Budge Row and Dunstan in the West during this period. See Herlan, , “Poor Relief in Antholin's Budge Row,” Guildhall Studies in London History, II, 196Google Scholar; “Poor Relief in Dunstan in the West,” ibid., III, 28-29. Study of the Churchwardens Accounts for the extramural London parish of Bride near Fleet Street (Parish number 104 on the map) reveals that several intramural City parishes (including Benet, Gracechurch; Gregory by St. Paul's; Leonard, Foster Lane; Michael le Querne; Nicholas Aeon; Peter, Westcheap; Stephen, Walbrook; Vedast) contributed rates-in-aid to it amounting to over £59 per annum throughout the period from 1639 to 1666. Guildhall Library, MS 6552/1, pp. 5, 49, 89, 118, 139, 149, 159, 171, 181, 192; 1650-51 through 1665-66, unpaginated. Unfortunately, the poor accounts from this parish are no longer extant thereby limiting its value for studies such as this one.

45. Jordan, , Philanthropy in England, p. 68Google Scholar. A contemporary estimated that there were some 40,000 poor people in London and its suburbs in 1644, which would amount to about one of ten inhabitants, if modern estimates of the City's population in 1650 are reasonably accurate. See Lee, Leonard, A Remonstrance Humbly Presented to the High and Honorable Court of Parliament (London, 1644), p. 5Google Scholar; Wrigley, E. A., “A Simple Model of London's Importance in Changing English Society and Economy 1650-1750,” Past and Present, No. 33 (April, 1966), 44Google Scholar. About one in five Englishmen was poverty-stricken in pre-industrial times — an estimate that includes both the structural and conjunctural poor — according to Clarkson, L. A., The Pre-Industrial Economy in England, 1500-1750 (New York, 1972), p. 233Google Scholar.

46. These conclusions are not dissimilar to those which Anthony Fletcher reaches regarding the problem of poverty in his recent book on seventeenth-century Sussex, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600-1660 (London and New York, 1975), pp. 155–59Google Scholar.

47. Freshfield, , The Vestry Minute Books of St. Bartholomew Exchange, Book Two, pp. 19, 21Google Scholar; The Account Books of St. Bartholomew Exchange, pp. 118, 120, 123, 125, 129, 133, 146, 167, 176-77.

48. Freshfield, , The Vestry Minute Book of St. Margaret Lothbury, pp. 100, 103Google Scholar. For an account of this important agency of social welfare reform created during the English Revolution, see Herlan, , “Poor Relief during the Great Civil War and Interregnum, 1642-1660,” pp. 184–238Google Scholar; and Pearl, Valerie, “Puritans and Poor Relief, The London Workhouse, 1649-1660,” in Puritans and Revolutionaries. Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill, eds. Pennington, Donald and Thomas, Keith (Oxford, 1978), pp. 206–32Google Scholar.

49. Aylmer, G. E., The State's Servants. The Civil Service of the English Republic 1649-1660 (London, 1973), pp. 308–11Google Scholar; Cooper, J. P., “Social and Economic Policies under the Commonwealth,” in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646-1660, ed. Aylmer, G. E. (Hamden, Conn., 1972), pp. 121–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Charles Webster's assessment of these matters is rather non-commital in his valuable study, The Great Instauration. Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660 (London, 1975), pp. 360–63Google Scholar.

50. Among the principal causes of England's poverty prior to the Industrial Revolution one authority cites the low productivity of labor, inadequate technology, a smill and rather primitive stock of capital equipment, and fluctuations in harvest conditions. Clarkson, , The Pre-Industrial Economy in England 1500-1750, pp. 234–38Google Scholar.

51. Peacham, Henry, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in London, Heltzel, Virgil B. (ed.) [Folger Documents of Tudor and Stuart Civilization] (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), p. 243Google Scholar.