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“It Is Extreme Necessity That Makes Me Do This”:1 Some “Survival Strategies” of Pauper Households in London's West End During the Early Eighteenth Century”*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2010

Jeremy Boulton
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Although research on survival strategies is still at a relatively early stage, there are clearly some areas where there is considerable difference in emphasis placed by historians on the relative importance of particular “expedients” deployed by the poor in extremis There is, for example, uncertainty regarding the amount of support given by neighbours as opposed to relatives. There is some historical contention, too, over the importance to the elderly of care by their children, as opposed to alternative sources of maintenance such as earnings, charity and especially the formal institutions of poor relief. After all, in the early modern period the principle source for a study of the survival strategies of poor people is always likely to be the records of poor relief or charitable agencies and institutions. The obvious danger here is that historians of poor relief consistently overestimate the importance of such relief to the poor. Both Richard Wall and Pat Thane, using evidence from nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, for example, have demonstrated that the elderly received far more support from relatives than has been realized. Professor Thane has argued that this situation is unlikely t o have been new. Other historians, however, are much more sceptical over the value of intergenerational flows of wealth from children to elderly parents.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 45 , supplement S8: Household strategies for survival 1600–2000: fission, factions and cooperation , December 2000 , pp. 47 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 2000

References

2. Jüitte, Robert, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge, 1994), especially pp. 83–99Google Scholar . As always, much of the literature is summarized expertly, or anticipated, in seminal, Paul Slack'sPoverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (Harlow, 1988), esp. pp. 73–85Google Scholar . See also the contributions in the special issue of Social History, 18 (1993)Google Scholar ; and Leeuwen, Marco H.D. van, “Logic of Charity: Poor Relief in Pre-industrial Europe”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 24 (1994), pp. 589–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Lis, Catharina and Soly, Hugo, “Neighbourhood Social Change in West European Cities: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries”, International Review of Social History, 38 (1993), pp. 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Another particularly insightful contribution relating to the nineteenth-century city is that by Mandler, Peter, “Introduction”, in Mandler, Peter (ed.), The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Reliefin the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia, PA, 1990), pp. 1–37Google Scholar ; Lis, Catharina, Social Change and the Labouring Poor: Antwerp, 1770-1860 (New Haven, CT, 1986), pp. 150–162CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For another comprehensive and insightful discussion see, Horden, Peregrine, “Household Care and Informal Networks: Comparison and Continuities from Antiquity to die Present”, in Horden, Peregrine and Smith, Richard (eds), The Locus Of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions, and the Provision of Welfare Since Antiquity (London, 1998), pp. 21–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For a modern study see, Foster, Donald W., Survival Strategies of Low-Income Households in a Colombian City (Urbana, IL, 1975)Google Scholar , a published Ph.D. thesis, a work of urban anthropology which uncovers a range of survival strategies very familiar to early modern historians.

3. Valuable work can also be done using exceptionally detailed household listings of the poor, although survival strategies have usually to be inferred from patterns of co-residence. See, Pelling, Margaret, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (Harlow, 1998), pp. 145–148, 152Google Scholar . Pelling prefers “expedient” to “strategy” to “reduce the connotation of deliberate (and free) choice”; Sokoll, Thomas, Household and Family Among the Poor: The Case of Two Essex Communities in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Bochum, 1992)Google Scholar . Sokoll published some preliminary observations in his, “The Pauper Household Small and Simple? The Evidence from Listings of Inhabitants and Pauper Lists of Early Modern England Reassessed”, Ethnologia Europaea, 17 (1987), pp. 25–42Google Scholar.

4. For similar sentiments see Hitchcock, Tim, “Habits of Industry: The Eighteenth-Century English Workhouse Movement”,(unpublished typescript, 1993)Google Scholar.

5. Thane, Pat, “Old People and Their Families in the English Past”, in Daunton, M. (ed.), Charily, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996), pp. 113–138Google Scholar ; Thane, Pat, “The Family lives of Old People”, in Johnson, Paul and Thane, Pat (eds), Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity (London, 1998), pp. 180–210Google Scholar , the quotations are from p. 206; Wall, Richard, “Relationships Between the Generations in British Families Past and Present”, in Marsh, Catherine and Arber, Sara (eds), Families and Households: Divisions and Change (London, 1992), pp. 63–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar . See also Wall, Richard, “Beyond the Household: Marriage, Household Formation and the Role of Kin and Neighbours”, International Review of Social History, 44 (1999), pp. 55–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Smith, Richard M., “The Structured Dependence of the Elderly as a Recent Development: Some Sceptical Historical Thoughts”, Ageing and Society, 4 (1984), pp. 409–428CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Richard Wall's work suggests that much of the help received by the elderly in the nineteenth century was not in a financial form.

7. This paper derives from the author's long-term reconstruction of the lives of the poor in London's West End, based on a biographical reconstruction of all those who received pensions from the parish. This will appear as The Making of the London Poor (Manchester, forthcoming). For preliminary forays see, Boulton, Jeremy, “Going on the Parish: The Parish Pension and its Meaning in the London Suburbs, 1640-1724”, in Hitchcock, Tim, King, Peter and Sharpe, Pamela (eds), Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640-1840 (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 19–46Google Scholar ; idem, “The Poor Among the Rich”, in Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner (eds), LondinopoUs (Manchester, 2000, forthcoming); idem, “The Most Visible Poor in England? Constructing Pauper Biographies in Early Modern Westminster”, Westminster Historical Review, 1 (1997). PP. 13-18.

8. For this legislation, see Slack, Paul, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782 (Basingstoke, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . It seems likely that the examination books were initiated by a statute of 1692, which ordered that no names were to be added to parish pension lists unless authorized by a Justice of the Peace. A list of paupers drawn up in 1707 (which omits orphans) contains a number of entries which suggest that pensioners lacking age information had entered the lists “before 1692”; WAC F4509. It seems likely that the two earlier examination books have been lost, since the second surviving book is entitled “This is the fourth Book”; WAC F5002/1.

9. , Slack, English Poor Law, pp. 40–48Google Scholar . The best survey of the rise of indoor relief in early eighteenth-century England is Hitchcock, Tim, “Paupers and Preachers: the SPCK and the Parochial Workhouse Movement”, in Davison, Lee, Hitchcock, Tim, Keirn, Tim and Shoemaker, Robert B. (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750 (Stroud, 1992), pp. 145–166Google Scholar.

10. For this strategy, see Sharpe, Pamela, “‘The Bowels of Compation’: A Labouring Family and the Law, c. 1790-1834”, in , Hitchcock, , King, and , Sharpe, Chronicling Poverty, pp. 87–108Google Scholar.

11. Calculated from WAC F4509, F4539.

12. This has been estimated by inflating the number of pensioners in 1716 to take account of those whose ages were missing, and applying to a total population of 45,000 the age structure for eighteenth-century London estimated in Landers, John, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670-1830 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 180CrossRefGoogle Scholar . The figures are minimum ones, since they take no account of any aged spouses, who were not usually listed, and the twenty-seven to thirty parish almswomen, who were also not listed.

13. Archer, Ian W., The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), p. 195CrossRefGoogle Scholar , for example, after an exhaustive reconstruction of pauper budgets, concludes that the parish pension “was no more than an income supplement”.

14. WAC F4509/9.

15. Peter Laslett's comment that “only a small proportion of persons in need, therefore, could lave been completely and permanently dependent upon the community” seems amply borne out n this parish; Laslett, Peter, “Family, Kinship and Collectivity as Systems of Support in Pre-ndustrial Europe: A Consideration of the ‘Nuclear Hardship’ Hypothesis”, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988), pp. 153–175. 164CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. WAC F5001/44.

17. WAC F4002/11 and the following overseers accounts: WAC F444/154, F445/148, F446/140, F447/153, F449/167, F451/180, F452/167, F454/159, F459a/220. Diana was listed in 1716 as a sixty-seven-year-old pensioner, F4539/43.

18. Tim Hitchcock has described how “at St. Margaret's, Westminster, 108 people were listed as receiving collection from the parish in 1726, all of whom were offered the house when it opened. Only forty-one people eventually entered, the rest giving up their weekly doles. At Tavistock in Devon, thirty-one people were listed on the poor books in 1747. When the parish opened a workhouse, seventeen of these refused to enter and lost their pensions”, Hitchcock, “Habits of Industry”.

19. For the notion that workhouses might play a central role in paupers' survival strategies, see Lis, Catharina and Soly, Hugo, “‘Total Institutions’ and the Survival Strategies of the Labouring Poor in Antwerp, 1770-1860”, in , Mandler, Uses of Charity, pp. 38–91Google Scholar . For an Italian example, see Gozzini, Giovanni, “The Poor and the Life-Cycle in Nineteenth-Century Florence, 1813-59”, Social History, 18 (1993), pp. 300–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar . His Pia Casa took in “above all those expelled temporarily or definitively from their original nuclear families which were no longer able or willing to provide for their support”; Ibid., p. 313.

20. See, O'Hara, Diana, “‘Ruled by My Friends’: Aspects of Marriage in the Diocese of Canterbury, c.1540-1570”, Continuity and Change, 6 (1991), pp. 9–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; idem, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester, 2000), pp. 30-56.

21. , Laslett, “Family, Kinship and Collectivity”, p. 166Google Scholar . This assumption surely informs the famous English example cited in Laslett, Peter, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977), p. 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Boulton, Jeremy, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century, (Cambridge, 1987), p. 260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. The quotation is from Anderson, Michael, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire, (Cambridge, 1971), p. 56.Google Scholar

24. George, M. Dorothy, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 405.Google Scholar

25. This is a typical finding for the period before 1750. A large family was the smallest percentage ‘cause’ of poverty in Norwich in 1570, and Salisbury in 1635; , Slack, Poverty and Policy, p. 79Google Scholar.

26. To “leave a child on the parish” means to abandon a child as a foundling. This is not to be confused with applying for, or being granted, an orphan's pension. Parish orphans usually stayed with the surviving parent, if any. All foundlings, but only a minority of orphans, were cared for by professional parish nurses. In the accounts, foundlings and orphans are lumped together as the “parish orphans”. Some foundlings can be identified from their surnames, which were often the names of the streets in which they were abandoned.

27. WAC F5001/35, 51, F5002/125.

28. WAC F5002/fo. 165a'. These letters left with foundlings in St Martin's are discussed, and reproduced in full, in the useful survey by Fildes, Valerie, “Maternal Feelings Reassessed: Child Abandonment and Neglect in London and Westminster, 1550-1800”, in Fildes, Valerie (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren (London, 1990). pp. 139–178. (letters on pp. 153-155)Google Scholar.

29. Between 1768 and 1772, some 15.5 per cent of successful petitioners to the London Foundling Hospital were married or widowed women; Outhwaite, R.B., “‘Objects of Charity’: Petitions to the London Foundling Hospital, 1768-72”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32 (1999), pp. 497-510, 505CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. For the hospital, see the important article by Wilson, Adrian, “Illegitimacy and Its Implications n i Mid-Eighteenth-Century London: The Evidence of the Foundling Hospital”, Continuity and Change, 4 (1989), pp. 103–164CrossRefGoogle Scholar . , Wilson argues that “neither marital poverty nor orphaning led parents to take their children to the Foundling Hospital” (p. 135) and that most foundlings were illegitimateGoogle Scholar . Valerie Fildes has argued, conversely, that many foundlings of London and Westminster were “legitimate children whose parent(s) could not afford to feed another mouth”; Fildes, “Child Abandonment and Neglect”, p. 157.

31. , Smith, “Structured Dependence”, p. 426Google Scholar , argued that this category, together with the elderly, “overwhelmingly dominate the bulk of recipients of relief in the Poor Law account books and censuses of the poor which survive from the sixteenth century”.

32. Adrian Wilson suggests that in the event of a woman losing her partner whilst pregnant, or shortly after the birth, either the woman remarried or “a parent's own family rallied in support”; Wilson, “Illegitimacy and Its Implications”, p. 136.

33. WAC F5002/47.

34. , Boulton, “Going on the Parish”, pp. 26–33Google Scholar ; idem, “The Poor Among the Rich”.

35. Earle, Peter, “The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries”, Economic History Review, 42 (1989), pp. 328–353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. For the occupations listed here, see WAC F5001/38, 92, 100, 103, 115,123, 131, 151, 160; F5002/ 28, 37, 42, 43, 59, 60, 74, 95, 101, 153.

37. , Outhwaite, “Objects of Charity”, p. 506.Google Scholar

38. , Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society, p. 221Google Scholar . For the mobility of Londoners see also , Wall, “Beyond the Household”, pp. 62–64Google Scholar.

39. Thale, Mary (ed.), The Autobiography of Francis Place 1771-1854 (Cambridge, 1972), p. III.Google Scholar

40. , Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society, pp. 247–261.Google Scholar

41. Sharpe, Pamela, “Survival Strategies and Stories: Poor Widows and Widowers in Early Industrial England”, in Cavallo, Sandra and Warner, Lyndan (eds), Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Harlow, 1999), pp. 220–239, 225-226.Google Scholar

42. Elliott, Vivien Brodsky, “Single Women in the London Marriage Market: Age, Status and Mobility, 1598-1619”, in Outhwaite, R. B. (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London, 1981), pp. 81–100, 93.Google Scholar

43. Cressy, David, “Kinship and Kin Interaction in Early Modern England”, Past and Present, 113 (1986), pp. 38–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. , Thane, “Old People and their Families”, p. 117.Google Scholar

45. WAC F5002/169. One Charles Rumbold married an Abigail Gouch at St James's Duke Place, once a notorious centre of clandestine marriage, in 1706. Charles, their son, was baptized in St Andrew's Holborn on 30 April 1708.

46. WAC F5001/161. Margaret (earlier known as Meade, Holemead might have been a scurrilous nickname) gave a somewhat different account of her circumstances in an earlier examination; WAC F5001/149.

47. WAC F5001/4. Following her examination Joan was granted a pension by the parish, which began at is 6d per week in 1708 rising to 25 a week in the last recorded year of her pension in 1721; WAC F438/183, F440/229, F441/155, F442/167, F444/151, F445/146, F446/138, F447/150, F449/ 164, F451/177, F452/163, F454/15.

48. WAC F5001/101.

49. WAC F5002/24. Her pension started at is 6d a week and rose to 2s by the year of her last recorded payment in 1719. WAC F440/231, F441/156, F442/168, F444/152, F445/147, F446/139, F447/152, F449/166, F451/179.

50. WAC Fj001/14. A neighbour later stood security for 40s (£2) to enable her to go back to Ireland, WAC F5001/15.

51. Frances Taton, a seventy-year-old widow, for example, “believes she has one Child in the Army”, WAC F5001/21. She was granted a pension of is 3d a week in 1708 and continued receiving it until 1715, by which time it was worth 2s; WAC F438/191, F440/239, F441/161, F442/175, F444/158, F445/152.

52. WAC F5001/139. 53. WAC F5001/8, 155.

54. WAC F5002/28.

55. WAC F5002/134. Hester falsely claimed to be married to another soldier as well.

56. WAC F5002/53.

57. WAC F5002/38.

58. WAC F5002/124. The passage to Scotland cost 20s (£1), on security from a Mr Lindsey, who “promises to return it if she does not go”.

59. WAC F5001/9. Another relative, one Edward Somerton, was amongst those standing surety for this money.

60. WAC F5002/89. It was noted that the daughter “had something to carry them thither”. Morgan (and his family) seems to have been lodging in the Strand, after being a housekeeper at two previous addresses in the parish.

61. Elliott, Brodsky, “Single Women”, p. 93 (column showing kin providing lodgings).Google Scholar

62. WAC F5001/66. See also, 77, 80 for the same case. A William Naylor received a pension for four months in 1712, WAC F442/171.

63. WAC F5002/135. In the event Ann was on the orphans' book at a pension of is a week until she was bound apprentice in 1712, F440/211, F441/170, F442/154.

64. , Wall, “Beyond the Household”, pp. 64–66Google Scholar , notes the qualitative differences revealed between support from neighbours and kin in his sensitive analysis of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford. Of neighbours he notes that “relationships were not always harmonious, and that the nature of the contacts although frequent avoided the creation of burdensome and expensive ties of obligation in that meals were never provided nor would neighbours undertake the personal care of the ill and elderly”, Ibid., p. 66.

65. WAC F5001/95. For the case of a female newspaper-seller, Ann Crook, the examining justice recorded that she “did lodge in at Mrs Wyatt's in Shugg Lane, who nursed her Child & her Child s i there now & she says she pays 2s 6d per week for keeping her Child”; WAC F5002/37.

66. WAC F5002/106. Anne sated that “she has known him 18 years”.

67. Muldrew, Craig, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar , points out the immense financial value to the poor of the extent of debt forgiveness. The amount of unpaid debts was “in fact many times larger than charitable bequests and poor rates”, and was an important income supplement which would have raised the income of “poor labourers'” families to a much higher level than that indicated by wage rates.

68. , Outhwaite, “Objects of Charity”, p. 508.Google Scholar

69. WAC F5002/91, 155.

70. WAC F5001/63. Jane had one bastard child, a stepson, and two children from her current marriage. One child was placed on the orphans' book.

71. WAC F4509/5. A Margaret Crutchley living in Hartshorn Lane, receiving, however, just 4s a month from her pension, was crossed out of a list of pensioners made the year before this examination.

72. For this see also, Kent, D.A., “‘Gone for a Soldier’: Family Breakdown and the Demography of Desertion in a London Parish, 1750-91”, Local Population Studies, 45 (1990), pp. 27–42.Google Scholar

73. WAC F5002/167. From a letter attached to a foundling dropped in Durham Yard, 1709.

74. Boulton, “Poor Among the Rich”.

75. For foundlings in Europe see, for example, Sa, Isabel Dos Guimaraes, “Child Abandonment in Portugal: Legislation and Institutional Care”, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994), pp. 69–89Google Scholar ; Kertzer, David I. and White, Michael J., “Cheating the Angel-Makers: Surviving Infant Abandonment in Nineteenth-Century Italy”, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994), pp. 451–480CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76. See above, note 30.

77. Woolf, Stuart, “The Societe de Charite Maternelle, 1788-1815”, in Barry, Jonathan and Jories, Colin (eds), Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State (London, 1991), pp. 99–103Google Scholar . The estimate was of some 800 legitimates, out of between 5,500 and 7,500 total foundlings. The proportion of legitimate foundling children is remarkably similar to the estimate for London at the same period; see above note 19.

78. For this point see also King, Steve, “Reconstructing Lives: The Poor, the Poor Law and Welfare in Calverley, 1650-1820”, Social History, 22 (1997), pp. 318–338CrossRefGoogle Scholar . One can only agree with one of Dr King's concluding comments that ”there is scope for a renewed focus on the role of kinship in the welfare patchwork deployed by individuals and families'1, ibid, p. 338.

79. Mclntosh, Marjorie K., “Local Responses to the Poor in Late Medieval and Tudor England”, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988), pp. 209-245, 219–220.Google Scholar

80. WAC F4002. The exact period covered by this first admissions book is a seven-month period from 29 July 1725 to 26 February 1726.

81. The examinations are very far from the more familiar, relatively formulaic and formally written-up settlement examinations. For a splendid example and a guide to the English law of settlement, see Hitchcock, Tim and Black, John (eds), Chelsea Settlement and Bastardy Examinations 17IJ-1766, London Record Society 33, (London, 1999)Google Scholar.