Preliminary Programme

Plague remains a subject of enduring fascination for the historian. The dramatic nature of its impact on pre-industrial society shocked contemporaries both through its high mortality rate and the often draconian measures taken by governments to cope with emergencies during epidemics.

This paper will examine contemporary understanding of the cause and nature of plague and secondly relate this to the developing measures taken by the government of Florence during the last outbreak to affect the city in 1630-31. The idea of corrupt air, putrefaction and smell underline these themes, but they also served to underline contemporary perceptions of the poor who were seen as the main foci of disease.

Inevitably the danger in examining plague through the eyes of governments is that yhis leads to a very one-sided version of events; those at the lower end of the social scale are lumped together under the heading of ‘the poor’. While this paper will concentrate largely on the relationship between medical theory and government policy, by examining four main types of plague ‘narrative’, I shall endeavour to clarify the identity of ‘the poor’ and examine their reactions during the plague.

The first plague ‘narrative’ is the official account written by the librarian of the Grand-duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II. This will be compared with the narrative of events as recorded in the deliberations and regulations of the Sanità, the health board responsible for the day-to day campaign against this ‘invisible enemy’. The rationale behind these measures will then be examined, and in particular the relationship between the demands of public order and the contemporary understanding of the nature of plague as recorded in the texts written by contemporary physicians who advises the government. Finally, some idea will be provided about the identity and reactions of the poor through the events narrated in the Sanità’s court records. These trials throw a surprising amount of light on the reactions of the poorer members of society and enable one to talk in more specific terms about the motivation for their actions within the context of their understanding of plague. (Show less)

Thirty years ago Raphael Samuel, in a famous essay on migrants and wayfarers, evoked the life of the army of ‘comers and goers’ who were a crucial part of the labour supply of nineteenth-century cities and so predominant in their social life. [Raphael Samuel ‘Comers and Goers’ in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (Eds) The Victorian City: Images and Realities (1973) Volume 1, 123-160] Yet, implied Samuel, ‘the migrating classes’ left few memorials to their anonymous, often furtive, existence beneath the arches, in night-shelters, in free-dormitories, and most of all in countless common lodging-houses. They fell into several categories and the published census tabulations make it impossible to distinguish the numbers lodging, with or without payment, by the night from the even great army of lodgers in rented (or sub-let) rooms in regular dwellings. In Britain the size and significance of these groups of migrants varied considerably from town to town; some places had economies which depended heavily on mobile day labourers, not least those which employed thousands of Irish immigrants and their children. Whatever their numbers they presented a challenge to the emerging regulators of public health.

This paper has three parts. First, I will attempt some summary of the evidence as to the number of lodgers of various kinds in British cities in the mid-nineteenth century. Secondly, I will discuss the emergence of lodging house regulation and especially how and why it was regarded as a significant battle in the campaign for better public health. Thirdly, I will discuss the case of Liverpool where in 1847 the Medical Officer, supported by a powerful Health Committee, established an elaborate system of licensing and regulation of lodging-houses. In 1861 Liverpool had over 700 licensed lodging houses. Some comparisons will be drawn with other cities, notably Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester. The first two parts will be necessarily briefer than the third. Among the questions to be addressed are the following. Were the differences in the approach to lodging-houses between cities more significant than the general moral climate of the times in determining the balance between environmental regulation for demonstrable sanitary benefits and policing an underclass for social or moral purposes? Is there any evidence (in epidemiological or mortality data) that lodging-house regulation had any significant health benefits? (Show less)

This paper considers as a back cloth to its main argument the provsioning of formal and informal welfare in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and Europe. France is treated in certain qualified respects as exemplary of larger parts of Europe, although it is noted that the contrast is drawn in a relatively stark fashion to identify certain principles that are deemed responsible for some demographic features found in some abundance in early modern England, but relatively infrequently in much of continental Europe. Emphasis is placed on the relatively high share that poor relief constituted of national income in England. The relatively high proportion of relief provided in urban locations in French towns relative to the French countryside and the substantial share of welfare that is allocated to urban relief recipients through 'indoor' schemes. In England the relatively large and growing share of relief provided to rural populations relative to towns is stressed as well as the tendency for the bulk of that relief to be providerd to persons in their own or the households of others. Contrasts in the ideologies underpinning the different sources of relief funds, the role played by the parish and the institutional determinants of welfare 'entitlements' are briefly discussed. The bulk of the paper concerns the impact of these ideological differences on the links between short-term movements in prices and mortality rates, comparisons between infant mortality levels, illegitimacy ratios in town and counytry, and geographical movements of population and their epidemiological cosequences during periods of dearth and disruption to food supplies. (Show less)