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The Origins of Modern Social Legislation: The Henrician Poor Law of 1536

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Neil L. Kunze
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Extract

It is the purpose of this essay to rescue the Henrician Poor Law of 1536 from its relative obscurity by examining the statute as the beginning of a new legislative era in English economic and social history. Although the non-exist ence of House of Commons Journals for this period prevents a detailed study of the making and makers of the Henrician poor law legislation, documents hitherto neglected, exist for a comparative study of Tudor poor law policy. Whether dealing with the nineteenth-century corn law question or with the sixteenth-century poor law policy, few historians give sufficient time and attention to a detailed analysis of the actual statutes of the realm.

Historians have ignored the Henrician statutes and usually begin their discussions of English poor relief by describing and interpreting the famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. If mentioned at all, the Henrician legislation is presented as an ineffective attempt to solve the problem of poverty. Often this legislation is the subject of unfavorable generalizations:

The social legislation of Henry's Parliaments was not only scant but brutal and demoralizing in that it reflected a puritanical callousness in assessing poverty as the just desert of sloth and evildoing. … Thus Elizabeth inherited the problem of widespread poverty with her crown; and her legislative program was immediate, massive, and positive.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Spring 1971 , pp. 9 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1971

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References

NOTES

1 Hughes, Paul L. and Fries, Robert F., Crown and Parliament in Tudor-Stuart England (New York, 1959), 100.Google Scholar

2 23 Edward III, the Statute of Laborers. 1349. If the workers refused to accept the wages they were sent to the gaol. This statute is generally regarded as having insticated the first step towards the national control of poor relief. See de Schweinitz, Karl, England's, Road to Social Security (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

3 12 Richard II c. 3, 4, and 7. This statute further restricted the movement of beggars and laborers to their place of residence.

4 11 Henry VII c. 2 and 19 Henry VII c. 12. The acts did make special provisions for pregnant women and persons over sixty years of age.

5 Leonard, E. M., The Early History of English Poor Relief (Cambridge 1900), 12Google Scholar. C. S. L. Davies, in his work on the Vagrancy Act of 1547, discusses the changing; definition of vagabondage during the sixteenth-century. He declares that “By 1572 the definition of a vagabond as one refusing to work for reasonable wages had become normal.” Davies, C. S. L., “Slavery and Protector Somerset; the Vagrancy Act of 1547.” The Economic History Review, XIX (December, 1966), 535.Google Scholar

6 22 Henry VIII c. 12., section II.

7 In his study of Lincoln, J. W. F. Hill found two cases under the 1531 statute in which the common council ordered searches for vagabonds. Hill, J. W. F., Tudor and Stuart Lincoln (Cambridge, 1956), 39.Google Scholar

8 22 Henry VIII c. 12., section III. Abbreviations and contractions have been expanded throughout this paper; the spelling remains unchanged.

9 Ibid.

10 The failure of early critics to supply a dynamic theory of social and economic life is discussed in Ferguson's, Arthur B.The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, 1965)Google Scholar. Ferguson maintains (229) that “Sensitive as these earlier critics were to the plight of the poor, and ready at times to preach a social gospel in which the poor man was given almost Christlike attributes, subtle as were the canon lawyers in defining the obligations of the community for the relief of the poor, the medieval mind failed to see the necessity of investigating the causes of poverty.”

11 The best account of the 1536 statute is found in Holdsworth's, W. S.History of English Law, IV, (Boston, 1924), 392.Google Scholar

12 27 Henry VIII c. 25., section I.

13 Even the famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1572 permitted the poor of the towns to be licensed to beg in the counties. 14 Elizabeth c. 5., section XL.

14 27 Henry VIII c. 25., section IV.

15 Ibid., section XIII.

16 Ibid., section IX.

17 Ibid., section XIV.

18 Ibid., section XV. The constable or churchwarden retained custody of these yearly account books.

19 Ibid., section XVII.

20 Ibid., section XXIII.

21 Ibid., section VI. This system of apprenticeship seems mild when compared to the system enacted under the Poor Law of 1547. This Edwardian statute declared that the sons of vagrants might be apprenticed until they were 24 and the daughters until they were 20. The punishment for attempted escape was slavery. I Edward VI c. 3., section III.

22 18 Elizabeth c. 3.

23 C. S. L. Davies feels that "The fear of the social consequences of idleness, the increasingly practical attitude to alms-giving, the emphasis on the Christian duty of making the unwilling work, explain the harshness of the vagrancy laws in general.” Davies, , “Slavery and Protector Somerset,” 545.Google Scholar

24 27 Henry VIII c. 25., section XI.

25 Davies, in his article on the Vagrancy Act of 1547, maintains that the beggers “…. were a useful excuse to make palatable a policy of enforced employment, and, by implication at least, to reduce still further the worker's limited ability to bargain.” Davies, , “Slavery and Protector Somerset,” 536.Google Scholar

26 3&4 Edward VI c. 16.

27 The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1572 returned to the principle of the 1536 act in declaring that vagabonds were to be considered as felons. 14 Elizabeth c. 5., section IV.

28 Hill, , Tudor and Stuart Lincoln, 66Google Scholar. Steele, Robert, Tudor and Stuart Proclamations (Oxford, 1910), Nos. 273, 297Google Scholar. Other examples of the problem of vagrancy are found in Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. Brewer, J. S., Gairdner, J. and Brodie, R. H. (London, 1862–1929), XII (ii), 14Google Scholar; XIII (ii), 1171, 1229.

29 27 Henry VIII c. 25., section I.

30 18 Elizabeth c. 3., section IV. The statute provided Houses of Correction for those who refused to accept the work. The beggars received both punishment and work in these Houses.

31 Leonard, , English Poor Relief, 79–80.Google Scholar

32 Elton, G. R., “An Early Tudor Poor Law,” The Economic History Review, VI (August, 1953), 55–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Ibid., 56.

34 Ibid., 58.

35 27 Henry VIII c. 25., section I.

36 Wright, Thomas, Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Supression of Monasteries (London, 1843), 38–39Google Scholar. Dorset's, letter is found in Letters and Papers, X, 462Google Scholar. The first section of his letter described the feelings of the religious reformers just before the dissolution of the smaller monasteries.

37 Letters and Papers, X, 494.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 495.

39 Elton, , “Early Tudor Poor Law,” 67.Google Scholar

40 Georg Schanz, who investigated the draft in the late nineteenth-century, called the draft a sketch of a “Parlamentsacte vom Jahre 1536,” Schanz, Georg, Englische Handelspolitik Gegen Ende Mittelalters, I, (Leipzig, 1881), 478.Google Scholar

41 Letters and Papers, IX, 558.Google Scholar

42 Ibid, IX, 213.

43 Strype, John, Ecclesisatical Memorials, I, (London, 1721), 271–72Google Scholar. Strype believed the writer of this letter to be Dr. Richard Cox, who later became tutor to Prince Edward, Dean of Westminster, and Bishop of Ely.

44 Ibid., 272. A 1538 plan to annex monastic revenue in order to employ beggars on the repair of highways is found in Letters and Papers, XIII (ii), I.Google Scholar

45 The idea of free medical attention at the public expense is found in a letter of Sir Richard Gresham, Lord Mayor of London, to Henry VIII. Gresham asked that the Mayor and Aldermen of London be given the governance of three hospitals in order that “a great Number of poor, needy, sickly and indigent Persons shall be refreshed, maintained and comforted, and also healed and cured of their Infirmities, frankly and freely, by Physicians, Surgeons and Protecaries: Which shall have stipend and salary only for that purpose. So that all impotent Persons, not halbe to Labour, shall be relieved; and all sturdy Beggars, not willing to Labour, shall be punished.” Strype, , Ecclesiastical Memorials, 266.Google Scholar

46 Elton, , “Early Tudor Poor Law,” 61Google Scholar. 27 Henry VIII c. 25., section IX.

47 Ibid., 27 Henry VIII c. 25., section VI.

48 27 Henry VIII c. 25., section XVI. Elton, , “Early Tudor Poor Law,” 61.Google Scholar