Respectable, gowned, Trollopian worthies?

There is a general assumption that most, if not all, almshouse occupants were respectable, elderly, poor men and women, living quietly ordered lives in sheltered retirement. With the variety of founders and institutions outlined in the preceding chapter, however, it might be expected that the recipients of an almshouse place would be similarly diverse. Medieval almshouses and hospitals had catered for a range of different needs, including the sick, lepers and travellers, but with the development of more permanent accommodation from the fifteenth century onwards, the clientele became more commonly elderly and disabled people, but not exclusively so In the brief analysis from which the epigraph to this chapter is taken, Paul Slack suggests that by the end of the sixteenth century there was an ‘increasing fastidiousness’ about who should benefit from an almshouse place, with lepers, lunatics and victims of infectious diseases increasingly excluded. The process by which this marginalisation took place may be seen not only in the categorisation used by founders in determining eligibility for an almshouse place, but also in the type of person that trustees actually admitted. As the following discussion will demonstrate, these suggest a varied and pragmatic approach to the selection process by founders and those administering almshouses throughout the early modern period, but with a discernible shift by the early eighteenth century towards a more limited range of beneficiaries. Yet, as with the parallel introduction of statutory poor relief in England, while the overall trajectory of this transformation in almshouse function may be unarguable, the pace and timing of these changes varied considerably.

Many almshouses were governed by rules set down by the founder, or by later patrons or trustees, covering such matters as who was eligible for a place, how they were to be chosen and with what resources they were to be provided. Some also included directions regarding the way the almshouse was to be run, and how the almspeople were expected to behave. Sometimes these were simply expressed in the founder's will, or not at all, in which case those administering the almshouse interpreted their duties in accordance with their own wishes and assumptions, reflecting contemporary cultural expectations about what an almshouse was and who it was for.