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“Constructing the Poor in Early Seventeenth-Century London”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2017

Claire S. Schen
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Extract

Historians of early modern Europe have become accustomed to the dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, though they still debate the origins of the transformation of attitudes toward the poor and poverty. Historians have studied less carefully the ways in which these presumably static categories flexed, as individuals and officials worked out poor relief and charity on the local level. Military, religious, and social exigencies, precipitated by war, the Reformation, and demographic pressure, allowed churchwardens and vestrymen to redraw the contours of the deserving and undeserving poor within the broader frame of the infirm, aged, and sick. International conflicts of the early seventeenth century created circumstances and refugees not anticipated by the poor law innovators of the sixteenth century. London’s responses to these unexpected developments illustrate how inhabitants constructed the categories of die deserving and undeserving poor. This construction depended upon the discretion of churchwardens and their fellow officers, who listened to the accounts and read the official documents of the poor making claims on parish relief and charity.

Type
Symposium: The Study of the Early Modern Poor and Poverty Relief
Information
Albion , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , Fall 2000 , pp. 450 - 463
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 2000

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the North American Conference on British Studies in October 1998 in Colorado Springs, CO on a panel organized by Anthony Thompson. The author wishes to thank the commentator Michael Braddick (University of Sheffield), the chair Caroline Hibbard (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), the organizer of this forum, Paul A. Fideler (Lesley College), and Albion’s editor for their insightful comments. Special thanks to Drs. Jonathan Harris, Bashir El-Beshti, and Paul Cobb.

References

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3 Erickson, Amy L., Women and Property in Early Modern England (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Mcintosh, Marjorie, “Networks of care in Elizabethan English towns: the example of Hadieigh, Suffolk”Google Scholar, in Peregrine Horden and Smith, R. H., eds, The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, and Institutions in History (London, forthcoming)Google Scholar; Wales, Tim, “Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle: some evidence from seventeenth-century Norfolk”, in Smith, R. H., ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 351–404Google Scholar.

4 SR 35 Eliz. c. 4. Hudson, Geoffrey L., “Disabled Veterans, the State and Philanthropy in England, 1585-1680,” p. 1 and handout; paper presented at the North American Conference on British Studies, October 1998, at Boulder, ColoradoGoogle Scholar.

5 Jiitte, , Poverty and Deviance, p. 168Google Scholar; Johnson, R. C., “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618-1622,” in Reinmuth, H. S., ed., Early Stuart Studies (Minneapolis, 1970)Google Scholar.

6 See Pemberton, Wilfred, “The System of Briefs Illustrated from Leicestershire Records,” Local Historian 15 (May 1983); 345–54Google Scholar, and Slack, , Poverty and Policy, pp. 166, 97Google Scholar.

7 Knutson, Roslyn L., “Elizabethan Documents, Captivity Narratives, and the Market for Foreign History Plays,” English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 75–110Google Scholar. Thanks to Jacob Selwood for this reference.

8 New Cambridge Modern History, [NCMH] vol. 4: 226-38; vol. 3: 252, 347-76. See also, Òzcan, Azmi, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain, 1877-1924 (Leiden, 1997), pp. 1–5Google Scholar. Incidentally, the presence of refugees from non-Western European countries and of survivors of disputes with those peoples and empires reinforce recent arguments about the ethnic and racial pluralism of London well before twentieth-century immigration. See Gerzina, Gretchen, “The Black Presence in British Cultural History,” in Perspectives 35, 5 (May/June 1997): 15–17Google Scholar; Matar, N.I., “Muslims in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Islamic Studies 8, 1 (January 1997): 63–82Google Scholar; Matar, , Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Noonan, Kathleen M., “The Cruell Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People’: Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth-Century Policy and Propaganda,” The Historical Journal 41, 1 (1998): 151–77Google Scholar.

9 Guildhall Library [GL], MS 4051/1, f. 65; GL, MS 1568, Part 2, f. 604.

10 For examples of Bohemian ministers see GL, MS 5026/1, f. 6v; GL, MS 1303/1, f. 44; GL, MS 6836, f. 101v; GL, MS 66, f. 31v. For examples of ministers from the Palatinate see GL, MS 4051/1, f. 43; GL, MS 4835/1, f. 155; GL, MS 1303/1, f. 57v; GL, MS 4524/1, f. 255; GL, MS 2968/2, f. 215v; GL, MS 4409/1, f. 150.

11 GL, MS 2895/2 (1624-25). Perhaps the “Moravian minister” in Holy Trinity the Less in 1628 was Christianus Columbus, GL, MS 4835/1, f. 173.

12 Eg., GL, MS 4524/1, ff. 167v, 185.

13 Tittler, Robert, “Henry Hardware’s Moment and the Puritan Attack on Drama,” Early Theatre 1 (1998): 39–54Google Scholar; see also his The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540-c. 1640 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 318-19.

14 Hughes, Paul L. and Larkin, James F., eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 3: 46–48Google Scholar (#716).

15 GL, MS 577/1, f. 61 (vagrant) and f. 62v (maimed).

16 GL, MS 2968/2, f. 215; see also GL, MS 4524/1, f. 191; GL, MS 577/1, f. 59v.

17 GL, MS 559/1, f. 29.

18 GL, MS 2968/2, ff. 215, 340.

19 GL, MS 951/1, f. 89; for other distressed men from region see GL, MS 1188/1, ff. 220, 229; GL, MS 645/2, f. 39; GL, MS 4457/2, ff. 346, 346v.

20 GL, MS 571/1, f. 70v.

21 Freshfield, Edwin, ed., Accomptes of the Churchwardens of the Paryshe of St. Christofer’s in London, 1575-1662 (London, 1885), p. 63Google Scholar, col. 2.

22 GL, MS 5714/1, ff. 54v, 7.

23 GL, MS 4570/2, ff. 241, 243, 245, 249. For more examples of briefs or certificates, see GL, MS 1124/1, ff. 17, 27v; GL, MS 5090/2, ff. 203, 205v; GL, MS 878/1, ff. 118, 118v, 130, 159v.

24 GL, MS 2596/2, ff. 15, 20v, cf. f. 26.

25 GL, MS 2593/1, f. 218v; see also GL, MS 4051/1, f. 43v.

26 GL, MS 1016/1, ff. 135, 137.

27 GL, MS 6574, f. 119v; GL, MS 66, ff. 40v, 63; GL, MS 4409/1, f. 156v.

28 See Fideler’s, Paul discussion of Martin Bucer: “ Societas, Civitas and Early Elizabethan Poverty Relief,” in Charles Carlton, et al., eds., State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A. J. Slavin (New York, 1998), pp. 61–62Google Scholar.

29 Freshfield, Accomptes, p.49, col. 1, p. 58, col. 1.

30 GL, MS 4071/2, ff. 24, 37v.

31 GL, MS 2601/1, Part 1, f. 49v. Public Record Office [PRO] SP 14/158, f. 37 (new date: 13 Jan. 1624).

32 Schen, “Strategies of Poor Aged Women and Widows in Sixteenth-Century London,” in Pat Thane and Lynn Botelho, eds., Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 (forthcoming).

33 GL, MS 6574, f. 101v. In the 1630s St. Mary Somerset gave 5s. to a “Gretian that had a Certificate under the kinges hand of England that he was a Noble man in his countrye and was taken by the Turks hee and his foure brethren.” (GL, MS 5714/1, f. 83; Dyonisius Coroneus? GL, MS 2593/1, f. 234.)

34 Monastery, St. Catherine’s, on the south Sinai Peninsula, housed one of the oldest Greek Biblical manuscripts until the mid-nineteenth century and sold to the British Museum in the twentieth century, Webster’s Geographical Dictionary (Springfield, Mass., 1949)Google Scholar. On Greeks in London at an earlier time, see Harris, Jonathan, Greek Emigres in the West, 1400-1520 (Camberley, 1995), and idem, “Two Byzantine Craftsmen in Fifteenth-Century London,” Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995): 387–403Google Scholar.

35 Parry, V. J., “The Period of Murãd IV, 1617-48,” in idem, înalcik, H., Kurat, A. N., Bromley, J. S., eds., A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730 (Cambridge, 1976), p. 151Google Scholar.

36 Calendar of State Papers Domestic [CSPD], vol. 259, 13, p. 423 (18 Jan. 1633-34).

37 On writings about conversion, see Matar, Islam in Britain, pp. 120-52.

38 GL, MS 2968/2, f. 339v.

39 GL, MS 1303/1, f. 72; GL, MS 1432/3, f. 167v.

40 Corporation of London Record Office [CLRO], Rep. 39, f. 147.

41 GL, MS 1568, Part 2, f. 604.

42 CSPD, vol. 327, 12, p. 4 (20 June 1636) and vol. 328, 62, pp. 60-61 (14 July 1636).

43 GL, MS 5714/1, f. 115v; GL, MS 3907/1, unfol. (1638-9); GL, MS 66, f. 77v. See CSPD, vol. 196, 24, pp. 101-02 (5 July 1631) for Turkish attacks on Irish coast.

44 GL, MS 5714/1, f. 50.

45 GL, MS 2601/1, Part 1, f. 21.

46 GL, MS 6574, f. 96v.

47 GL, MS 878/1, f. 86v.

48 GL, MS 6836, f. 87.

49 For example, GL, MS 4956/2, ff. 283, 323.

50 en-See Fideler’s discussion, drawing on Felicity Heal’s work on hospitality: “Societas, Civitas,” p. 63.

51 GL, MS 66, f. 44. Bolgar, R. R., “Education and Learning,” NCMH 3, The Counter-Reformation and the Price Revolution, ¡559-1610, p. 430Google Scholar. On the importance of study of Arabic and Islam as well, see Holt, P. M., “The Study of Islam in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of Early Modern History 2, 2, pp. 113–23Google Scholar; Holt, “Edward Pococke (1604-91), the First Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford,” Oxoniensia 56 (1991): 119-30.

52 GL, MS 645/2, f. 41 v.

53 GL, MS 2968/2, f. 232. Heidelberg and Reilingen? St. Mary Colechurch’s churchwardens thought he had come from “Prage,” Prague] GL, MS 66, f. 38.

54 On acts of mercy, see Flynn, Maureen, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400-1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On “survivals” in Protestant London, see Schen, Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500-1620 (Ashgate, forthcoming).

55 GL, MS 4051/1, f. 43.

56 GL, MS 4956/2, ff. 313, 322v, 345v, 346, 353v.

57 ”Gallatia” is Gallada; GL, MS 4409/1, f. 216. For another example, GL, MS 6836, f. 89v.

58 GL, MS 645/2, f. 69v.

59 GL, MS 4457/2, ff. 346v, 352v, 361 v.

60 CSPD, vol. 43, 46, pp. 516-17 (1626?).

61 CLRO, Rep. 40, ff. 103-130v. Knutson, “Elizabethan Documents,” p. 78.

62 GL, MS 2601/1, Part 1, f. 66v.

63 GL, MS 2895/2, f. 31.

64 CLRO, Rep. 32, ff. 208v, 222v.

65 GL, MS 4409/1, f. 121.

66 Larkin, James F., ed., Stuart Royal Proclamations, 2: 637Google Scholar (#272).

67 GL, MS 4956/2, ff. 327v, 313. On trade signs and the consciousness, see Dabydeen, David, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Manchester, 1987), p. 18Google Scholar.

68 GL, MS 2593/1, f. 218v, 234. See also GL, MS 4457/2, f. 273v.

69 GL, MS 4524/1, f. 185v.

70 Roger Finlay estimated that the population of the city of London grew from an estimated 50,000 in 1500 to 200,000 in 1600 and doubled to 400,000 by 1650. Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580-1650 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 51. On debate over the 1590s, see Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991) and Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge, 1989).

71 Larkin, James F. and Hughes, Paul, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations, 1: 47, 25, “A Proclamation against Inmates and multitudes of dwellers in strait Roomes and places in and about the Citie of London: And for the rasing and pulling downe of certaine new erected buildings.” See Schen, “Strategies of Poor Aged Women and Widows.”Google Scholar

72 GL, MS 3907/1, unfol.

73 Fideler’s notions of societas and civitas pertain here, “Societas, Civitas,” pp. 59, 66.