In early modern England many elderly men and women faced deep poverty in old age. A legal obligation to relieve the aged poor was enshrined in the Elizabethan poor law legislation of 1598–1601 (39 Eliz., c. 3; 39 Eliz., c. 4; 43 Eliz., c. 2). Overseers were to dispense the money rated from local inhabitants for relief of the ‘lame impotent old [and] blind’. Under the old poor law, the aged were considered the most deserving of parochial relief. Those who could no longer work due to age and infirmity were generally preferentially treated by the parish authorities: they accounted for the largest group of recipients and they were allocated the largest regular cash payments (pensions), often for many years. It has been argued by Susannah Ottaway that ‘the care of the aged and important poor remained one of [the old poor law’s] most closely guarded principles, and one of its least controversial doctrines’.

Much of the research on the aged poor relates to the period before 1800, yet from the late eighteenth century the old poor law was in a prolonged ‘crisis’. This chapter focuses upon this long period of difficulty and its implications for the aged poor. It is based on evidence from two communities: Campton and Shefford in east Bedfordshire. The study begins before the crisis, in the 1760s, and terminates with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The approach adopted – the creation of 104 ‘pauper biographies’ of the elderly through nominal linkage between poor law sources and family reconstitution – provides unusually detailed evidence on the nature of relief to this group though the assembly of longitudinal pauper biographies. ‘Old age’ has been defined as those aged sixty or above. The methodology of pauper biographies provides evidence that cannot be found in the overseers’ accounts alone; the account books for Campton and Shefford list recipients’ names, the amount given in cash or the value of relief in kind, and, some reasons for relief (such as illness or unemployment). However, once linked to the family reconstitution, the researcher knows the family circumstances of recipients; for the elderly this would include information on their age, whether they had a living spouse, age at widowhood and remarriage, and the number of teenage or grown-up children they had.