Preliminary Programme

A consensus has prevailed among early modern social welfare historians that, at least up to the Civil War years, the Elizabethan Poor Law’s provisions allowed (encouraged?) ‘middling sort’ local magistrates and parish overseers to try to control the misbehavior of the poor often, it seemed, as an alternative to relieving them. Keith Wrightson and David Levine made a compelling case for this in their Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525-1700 (1995 [1979]), and Marjorie McIntosh’s Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370-1600 (1998) rooted this syndrome in the suspicion of vagrants that intensified in the post-Black Death decades of the fourteenth century. A particularly hard-edged Puritanism is usually credited for the intense commitment to control in turn-of-the-seventeenth-century localities.

In this paper I will refract the moral discourses at play in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to demonstrate that attitudes toward the poor and their relief went beyond and even challenged Puritan social ethics. This will involve two stages of disentangling. In the first and briefest of these, I will distinguish the ‘reform’ discourse (essentially Protestant ethics) from Christian humanist ‘policy’ assumptions on poor relief. The two seemed to agree on important issues—curtailment vagrancy, liberality to the deserving poor, preservation of the social order—but were deeply divided by their contrary assumptions about human nature and the appropriate way to social concord.

The second and most important disentangling, however, is confined to the humanist canon. I will separate the feverish Cicero- and Erasmus-inspired civic involvement of the earlier sixteenth century from the ‘new’ humanism that begins to show in the 1580s. Centered on Seneca, it was prompted by the fascination with Tacitus’s disenchantment with government that Justus Lipsius and Michel de Montainge were articulating. The flow here was away from Ciceronian negotium and toward Senecan otium. I will draw heavily on De beneficius from Thomas Lodge’s 1614 English translation of Lipsius’s mammoth edition of Seneca and sketch the Third Way that the great Stoic offered to English readers. The ‘commerce of benefits’, Seneca’s own felicitous characterization, differed from humanist ‘policy’ and Protestant ‘reform’. It emphasized the arts of sociability not statecraft or control: the cultivation of friendship, mutual regard, dependence, liberality, and reciprocality. Oxbridge students’ commonplace books in these years reveal Seneca to be the most frequently cited writer on wealth, poverty, and charity. (Show less)

This paper analyses the extraordinarily rich parish and estate archives of Chilvers Coton (Warwickshire), especially its census-type listing of 1684, to reconstruct the life-histories of both overseers and collectioners in a late seventeenth-century rural community. In several respects—the gradual supplementation (perhaps even displacement) of testamentary charity by formal poor relief; the rapid inflation of welfare costs; the assiduous policing of settlement; the marking out of the poor as a separate and dependant class—the parish economy of welfare in Chilvers Coton sits very comfortably alongside those of other late seventeenth-century rural communities. Only in the very close personal interest taken in the charitable distribution of resources by its landlord does Chilvers Coton seem exceptional. But precisely because of Newdigate’s extraordinary attention to detail, it is possible in the case of this particular parish to map the social topography of poverty, and especially the identity of, and relationship between, its overseers and collectioners. Indeed in the context of a historiography which has arguably been less interested in the concerns of overseers than of those whom they relieved, the Chilvers Coton listing and associated maps provide an unparalleled opportunity to reconstruct the perspective of the parish officers. Overseers were, after all, caught on the horns of a particularly uncomfortable dilemma, confronted on the one hand with the desire of their fellow ratepayers to prevent the unnecessary inflation of welfare costs and on the other with genuine cases of human misery and despair. (Show less)

Much work has been done by historians, historical geographers and demographers to identify and describe the households of the poor in the European past. But very little analysis has been attempted to explain the agency of the poor (or lack thereof) in determining the makeup and location of their households. This paper begins with an examination of the household structure evident in the parish of Puddletown, Dorset, using the remarkably rich evidence left in the papers of the Reverend Henry Dawnay. I then briefly go on to contrast the residential patterns of the different social orders in the parish. When this evidence is put into the context of the parish overseers’ accounts, we can see the many ways in which the overseers, churchwardens and vestrymen of Puddletown sought to determine the placement and structure of the households of the poor. A quick overview of the existing historical work on poor families allows us to put Puddletown into a broader comparative perspective, showing that it was very typical in this regard.

After this brief examination, the paper will go on to assess the ways in which the local interference of poor law officers in the household strategies of the poor was encouraged and facilitated by laws and attitudes towards the families of the poor. We can find these attitudes not only in guides for parish officers and poor law reform tracts, but also in sources that have been neglected for such studies, such as friendly society accounts and debates over charitable institutions. In the end, this paper demonstrates the tremendous fragility of the poor household in the face of the hostility and interference of the parish elite. (Show less)