Expic er en es of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France P late 1 Widener 1, Fol. 15v. The poor receive alms from Charity, while Murder attacks in the background Source: Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Edited by
Anne M. Scott The University of Western Australia First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Scott, Anne M. Experiences of poverty in late medieval and early modern England and France. 1. Poor--England--History--To 1500. 2. Poor--England--History--16th century. 3. Poor--France--History--To 1500. 4. Poor--France--History--16th century. 5. Poor--Services for--England--History--To 1500. 6. Poor--Services for--England--History--16th century. 7. Poor--Services for--France--History--To 1500. 8. Poor--Services for--France--History--16th century. I. Title 305.5'69'0942'09024-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scott, Anne M. Experiences of poverty in late medieval and early modern England and France / edited by Anne M. Scott. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4094-4108-3 (hbk.) 1. poverty--England--History. 2. Poverty--France--History. 3. Poor--England--History. 4. Poor--England--History. 5. England--Social conditions 6. France-- Social conditions. I. Title. HC254.4.S36 2012 339.4'6094209024--dc23 2012026017 ISBN 9781409441083 (hbk) ISBN 9781315581491 (ebk) Contents
List of Figures and Plates ix List of Tables xi Notes on Contributors xiii Preface xvii
1 Experiences of Poverty 1 Anne M. Scott
Part I: Survival Strategies
2 The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 19 Christopher Dyer
3 ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’: Survival Strategies for Single Mothers and Their Children in Late Medieval England 41 Philippa C. Maddern
4 Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire: A Positive Experience? 63 Ann Minister
5 The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich: ‘Rank Beggars, Gresse Maydes and Harlots’ 85 Lesley Silvester
Part II: Forms of Poor Relief
6 ‘The Names of All the Poore People’: Corporate and Parish Relief in Exeter, 1560s–1570s 107 Nicholas D. Brodie vi Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
7 The oliticsP of Charitable Men: Governing Poverty in Sixteenth-Century Paris 133 Susan Broomhall
8 Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France: The Nevers Foundation and Single Poor Catholic Girls 159 Lisa Keane Elliott
9 Reckliss Endangerment?: Feeding the Poor Prisoners of London in the Early Eighteenth Century 183 Margaret Dorey
10 Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 199 Michael Bennett
Part III: Textual and Visual Representations
11 Poverty as a Mobile Signifier: Waldensians, Lollards, Dives and Pauper 227 Mark Amsler
12 Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse and a Luxury Book, Widener 1, Free Library of Philadelphia 253 Anne M. Scott
13 The Gifts of the Poor: Worth and Value, Poverty and Justice in Robert Daborne’s The Poor Man’s Comfort 279 Mike Nolan Contents vii
14 ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’: Changing Perceptions of Rural Poverty and Plebeian Noise in Eighteenth-Century Britain 295 Peter Denney
Select Bibliography 313 Index 327 This page has been left blank intentionally List of Figures and Plates
Figures
6.1 Exeter average weekly collection and distribution (pence), 1564–72 130
9.1 Transcription of bill of fare for the workhouse at St Giles in the Fields 196
Plates
1 Widener 1, Fol. 15v. The poor receive alms from Charity, while Murder attacks in the background 2 Widener 1, Fol. 1r. Want, Necessity, Suffering, and Hunger visit Newlywed 3 Widener 1, Fol. 28r. Reason shows Newlywed the path to the House of Poverty 4 Widener 1, Fol. 61v. The Castle of Labour This page has been left blank intentionally List of Tables
3.1 Marital, religious and social status of fathers and mothers of illegitimate children in England, 1350–1500 47 3.2 Known circumstances of illegitimate children and their mothers: 1350–1500 50
4.1 Trades of pauper and private apprentices 68 4.2 Ages of parish apprentices 1750–1837 77 4.3 Age on leaving home 77 4.4 Distance from settlement of parish apprentice placements 79
6.1 Exeter alms recipients 115 6.2 Exeter average and modal corporate alms payments 117 6.3 Parochial retention of Exeter Poor 1563–67 122 6.4 Exeter pauper inter-parochial movement and adjusted corporate gross retention 1563–67 123 6.5 Exeter poor relief contributors and contributions 128
9.1 Standing expenses for the welfare of poor debtors in Wood Street Compter 187 This page has been left blank intentionally Notes on Contributors
Anne M. Scott, The University of Western Australia, editor and contributor Dr Anne M. Scott was, until recently, Convenor of the Australian Research Council Network for Early European Research 2006–2010 and is currently an honorary research fellow at The University of Western Australia. Her field of research is in fourteenth-century English literature, and she has published a monograph, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), three volumes of collected essays, and several essays on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature. She is Editor ofParergon , the journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, now available as part of the Project MUSE database.
Mark Amsler, The University of Auckland Dr Mark Amsler teaches medieval studies, writing studies, and critical discourse at the University of Auckland. His books include Etymology and Grammatical Discourse (John Benjamins, 1989), anthologies on creativity in the humanities and sciences, and most recently, Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Later Middle Ages (Brepols, 2012).
Michael Bennett, The University of Tasmania Michael Bennett is Professor of History at the University of Tasmania. The author of four books on late medieval and Tudor England, he has recently undertaken a major project on the history of smallpox prophylaxis and the global spread of vaccination. He is currently writing a book, The War against Smallpox, for Cambridge University Press.
Nicholas D. Brodie, The University of Tasmania Dr Nicholas D. Brodie completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in history at The Australian National University in 2004. He had majored in history and archaeology. In 2005 Nicholas worked as a researcher at the National Archives of Australia, and also within the software industry. In 2006 he moved to Tasmania to undertake a PhD in history. His thesis ‘Beggary, Vagabondage, and Poor Relief: English Statutes in the Urban Context, 1495–1572’ passed examination and he graduated in 2010. Various aspects of the material presented xiv Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France in his chapter in this volume were presented at Cambridge University in 2009 and at Perth, Australia, in 2010 as Nicholas has developed this project.
Susan Broomhall, The University of Western Australia Susan Broomhall is Winthrop Professor in Early Modern History at The University of Western Australia. Most recently, she has published (with Jacqueline Van Gent) Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others (Ashgate, 2011) and (with David G. Barrie) A History of Police and Masculinities, 1700 to 2010 (Routledge, 2012). She is currently completing a study of the experience of the poor in sixteenth-century France.
Peter Denney, Griffith University Dr Peter Denney completed his PhD in the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. He has published on various aspects of the literature and history of eighteenth-century Britain, and is currently writing a monograph on the rural soundscape and the rise of picturesque landscape taste. He worked for a year as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sydney, and is now a Lecturer in the School of Humanities at Griffith University.
Margaret Dorey, The University of Adelaide Dr Margaret Dorey is a Visiting Research Fellow with the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide. She completed her doctoral thesis ‘Unwholesome for Man’s Body?: Concerns about food quality and regulation in London c.1600 – c.1740’ in 2011. Prior to commencing her doctoral research she wrote a dissertation on innovation and diet, examining the arrival and reception of New World food plants into England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her article ‘Controlling corruption: Regulating meat consumption as a preventative to plague in seventeenth-century London’ was published in Urban History in April 2009.
Christopher Dyer, The University of Leicester Christopher Dyer is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leicester, and recently held a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship. He is the author of various books and numerous articles on economic and social history, landscape history and archaeology of medieval England. He pays particular attention to the west midland region, but has also written about other parts of England, including East Anglia. His book entitled A Country Merchant, which explores the life and times of John Heritage, a Cotswold wool merchant who was active Notes on Contributors xv in the period 1495 to 1520, was published in June 2012 by Oxford University Press.
Lisa Keane Elliott, The University of Western Australia Lisa Keane Elliott is a doctoral candidate at The University of Western Australia. She is working on her doctoral thesis on the Paris Hôtel-Dieu in the sixteenth- century and will be submitting in December 2012. Lisa is celebrating the recent release of her first academic publication, a paper titled ‘Jean Martin, Governor of the Grand Bureau des Pauvres, on Charity and the Civic Duty of Governing Men in Paris, c.1580’ appearing in the collection, Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Self and Others, edited by Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent.
Philippa C. Maddern, The University of Western Australia Philippa C. Maddern took her BA in British History and Indonesian Studies at the University of Melbourne, and her doctorate at Oxford. She researches the social, cultural and gender history of late-medieval England, and has published on violence and social order (including domestic violence), friendship, women’s letter-writing, gentry culture and identity, marriage and servanthood, and children’s life-cycles in late-medieval England. She is currently Winthrop Professor in Medieval History at The University of Western Australia, and Director of the Australian Research Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100–1800).
Ann Minister, The University of Western Australia Dr Ann Minister recently completed her doctoral thesis at The University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on the labouring poor of Derby and South Derbyshire in the period 1750–1834 and examines the ways in which poor families survived the pressures of the period in a county which is associated with new industries and factory development. The chapter on pauper apprenticeship is part of that wider research. Until taking early retirement and migrating to Australia to join her family, Ann was a teacher who lived and taught in South Derbyshire.
Mike Nolan, La Trobe University Dr Mike Nolan lectures in English at La Trobe University Melbourne. His areas of study include the playwrights of the Early Modern Theatre, with particular emphasis on the dramatic works of Philip Massinger, John Fletcher and Robert Daborne, as well as the nature of tragedy in Film Noir. He is currently compiling an anthology of the writings of eighteenth-century curés from the Sarthe region xvi Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France of France and is involved in a project to recover the voices of French peasant communities.
Lesley Silvester, The University of Western Australia In 2007 Lesley Silvester completed requirements for Master of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at The University of Western Australia. She is currently enrolled as a PhD candidate in the discipline group of Medieval and Early Modern Studies within the School of Humanities at The University of Western Australia. Preface
Preparing this book has been a labour of love. It has brought me into collaboration with scholars whose work I respect and have consulted over the years, and introduced me to talented and emerging scholars whose work is developing in new and exciting directions. The work that produced this volume of essays builds on collaborations developed under the Australian Research Council’s Network for Early European Research (NEER), which ran from 2004 to 2010. During the life of NEER, interdisciplinary research clusters were formed with a stated policy of bringing together scholars from different disciplines, more than one country, and different stages of professional development; a NEER research cluster included postgraduate and early career researchers alongside established scholars, working together on a clearly defined project. It had always been my intention to develop a ‘NEER Poverty Cluster’, but the time was not right for me during the Network’s funded life. This book, however, is the fruit of exactly the kind of collaboration that NEER initiated, and is a direct legacy of the Network. The conference at which all the papers came together was sponsored by the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group and the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at The University of Western Australia in June 2010. Ashgate Publishing, whose commissioning editor, Emily Yates, has been unfailingly supportive and accommodating, agreed to undertake publication. Numerous people have helped in the preparation of the book and I thank them all for their generosity. They include Sue Broomhall, Andrew Lynch, Chris Dyer and Michael Bennett, who have given advice and critical comment promptly and unstintingly. Others whose advice has been invaluable are Jo McEwan, David Barrie, Steph Tarbin and Jenna Mead. Practical help in preparing the manuscript has been given by Lesley O’Brien, who has guided editor and authors through the intricacies of the Ashgate house style requirements and insisted on meticulous referencing. Larissa Welmans tackled the bibliography, and Brett Hirsch protected me from frustration by taking care of the electronic aspect of the final submission. I must not forget to thank Joseph Shemtov, librarian in the Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia, who went beyond the call of duty to ensure that the correct images from the lovely manuscript, Widener 1, were scanned and delivered without fuss; and his colleague Katharine Chandler, xviii Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France reference librarian, who went to a great deal of trouble to find information for me through the library’s ‘Ask a librarian’ electronic query system. My final thanks go to my husband, Joe, who has never been less than 100 per cent supportive of my research and publishing activities. Without his support I might have lost heart long ago.
Anne M. Scott The University of Western Australia Chapter 1 Experiences of Poverty
Anne M. Scott
A considerable body of scholarship on the poor and their experience already exists deriving from historical investigation, literary criticism and the study of religion. Since the seminal works of Michel Mollat and his Sorbonne teams in the 1960s and 1970s,1 those of the British economic historians Rodney Hilton, E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill in the 1960s and 1970s,2 and that of Bronislaw Geremek in the 1980s and 1990s on life at the margins in medieval Paris,3 the history of the poor has come to occupy an important place in the study of non-elites in pre-modern Europe. Much research has, in the past, been devoted to conceptualizations of the poor made by the non-poor, and civic attempts to relieve, extirpate or conceal poverty,4 but progress has been made of recent years in developing an understanding of the experience of being poor, an approach taken by Christopher Dyer,5 and further developed by Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe in their Chronicling Poverty
1 Michel Mollat (ed.), Etudes sur l’histoire de la pauvreté, Moyen age – XVIème siècle, 8 (Paris, 1974); Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, 1986). 2 A few representative works from the many by these scholars are: Rodney Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975); E.P. Thompson,The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964); Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530–1780 (London, 1968). 3 Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (Oxford, 1994); Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1987). 4 Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, 1987); Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998); Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988); Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994). 5 Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (London, 1994); Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c.1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989). 2 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France which has led the way in research that seeks to read history ‘from below’.6 Sharon Farmer developed a prosopography of the named poor in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century medieval Paris,7 while, for the early modern period, Patricia Crawford’s work on parents of poor children,8 and the collection of essays on the housing and living arrangements of the English poor edited by Joanne McEwan and Pamela Sharpe9 give considerable detail about family life and day-to-day conditions of poor people in England between 1600 and 1850. Literary scholars have progressed from scattered articles dealing with aspects of poverty, particularly in Piers Plowman, to monographs that contextualize works of literature within their historical moment. Much recent work has been devoted to texts reflecting contemporary attitudes to the poor in the middle ages and early modern period.10 Commenting on these texts, critics have wrestled with the complexities of contemporary debate on work, idleness, begging, vagabondage, charity and pauper virtue and criminality. Interest in poverty is now burgeoning: in July 2011 approximately 525 individual papers on the subject of poverty and wealth were delivered at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds. Subject areas were wide-ranging – historians of art, archaeologists, theologians, literary scholars, economic and social historians considered aspects of poverty and wealth as experienced across the known world in the middle ages. From all these approaches it emerges that there is no single concept of ‘poverty’ or ‘the poor’, and in the chapters which follow, the authors explore a range of poverty experiences, socioeconomic, moral and spiritual. This collection presents, in one volume, essays that explore both the assumptions and strategies of those in authority dealing with poverty and the ways in which the poor themselves tried to contribute to, exploit, avoid or challenge the systems for dealing with their situation. The book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to share their findings on the experience
6 Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe, Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Houndsmills, 1997). 7 Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca, 2002). 8 Patricia Crawford, Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2010). 9 Joanne McEwan and Pamela Sharpe, Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c.1600–1850 (Basingstoke, 2011). 10 Anne M. Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin, 2004); Dinah Hazell, Poverty in Late Middle English Literature: The Meene and the Riche (Dublin, 2009); Kate Crassons, The Claims of Poverty (Notre Dame, IN, 2010); Gary Lee Harrison, Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty, and Power (Detroit, 1994); William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, 1996). Experiences of Poverty 3 of poverty in pre-modern Europe, concentrating on England and France. The innovative strength of this book is that it considers a number of almost untouched works, especially the archival records, and looks at recognized material in new ways. Its unique contribution to the field lies in allowing us to explore the symbiotic relationship between those in authority dealing with poverty and the poor themselves. The group of authors comprises social historians, genealogists, historians of science and medicine and literary scholars, and collectively they explore the relationship between poor and non-poor, analysing strategies adopted by the poor, the community and legislative authorities, to relieve the worst effects of pauperism. Each author has concentrated on unique sources to address one or more of the following questions: what can selected records reveal about the ways in which the pre-modern poor managed their poverty? How did the non-poor manage their obligation to care for the poor and needy? What can literary texts reveal about attitudes towards the poor and poverty in the pre-modern period? And across the volume runs the underlying question: what similarities and differences in the perception and management of the poor can be detected over the 400-year period from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century? The chapters explore the experience of poverty from three perspectives: evidence about specific poor people and specific situations from which a modern reader can infer the conditions that led to the individuals’ status and experience as ‘pauper’ (Dyer, Maddern, Silvester, Minister, Brodie); evidence of particular ways of dealing with poor people and their response to measures taken on their behalf (Broomhall, Elliott, Dorey, Bennett); and literary and artistic explorations of the meanings of poverty and wealth, and their place in defining the roles of poor and rich within the culture and society (Amsler, Scott, Nolan, Denney). The picture that emerges from these chapters is multifaceted. Each chapter is a discrete unit, and the choice of subject has been determined by the research interests of the authors; all, however, concern themselves with the symbiotic relationship between poor and non-poor.
Poverty and Need
Poverty is far from a simple concept. The World Bank website, in striving to define poverty, suggests that:
well-being comes from a capability to function in society. Thus, poverty arises when people lack key capabilities, and so have inadequate income or education, or poor health, or insecurity, or low self-confidence, or a sense of powerlessness, 4 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
or the absence of rights such as freedom of speech. Viewed in this way, poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon.11
Most writers on poverty recognize this ‘multidimensional’ quality of poverty. Paul Slack is one among many writers who endorse what he calls ‘the obvious fact that poverty is a relative and not an absolute concept. Perceptions of it change as assumptions about what is an adequate standard of living change. Hence there can be no universally applicable measure of poverty which is unadulterated by changing social expectations.’12 Running through all the differences of time and geography, however, are some timeless concepts that go beyond questions of standards of living. The statesman and historian, Michael Ignatieff, sums them up in his discussion of ‘need’:
In the end, a theory of human needs has to be premissed on some set of choices about what humans need in order to be human: not what they need to be happy or free, since these are subsidiary goals, but what they need in order to realize the full extent of their potential. There cannot be any externally valid account of what it means to be human. All we have to go on is the historical record of what men have valued most in human life. There does exist a set of words for these needs – love, respect, honour, dignity, solidarity with others.13
In varying ways, the chapters in this collection approach issues of need and explore the manner in which needs are expressed and addressed. It will emerge that circumstances vary considerably both in time and place, and it is not the intention of this volume to suggest that, for example, the experiences of needy single women in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Norfolk (Maddern and Silvester) can shed light on the lives of pauper apprentices in eighteenth-century Derbyshire (Minister). Nor would it be sensible to conclude that the impulse of charitable giving that led to providing dowries for poor girls in sixteenth- century France (Elliott) was similar to the medically driven campaign for the inoculation of children of the poor in eighteenth-century England (Bennett). Nevertheless, through all the chapters runs the thread of reciprocity and interdependence between the poor and the non-poor. The juxtaposition in this book of chapters on France and England, written from literary and historical perspectives, and dealing with issues across a 400-year span from late medieval
11 Jonathan Haughton and Shahidur R. Khandker, ‘What is Poverty and Why Measure it?’, in Handbook on Poverty and Inequality, available from World Bank, Documents & Reports, http://go.worldbank.org/W75200J8V0, accessed: 4 January 2012. 12 Slack, p. 2. Other writers who make the same point are: Crassons; Scott; Jütte. 13 Michael Ignatieff,The Needs of Strangers (London, 1983), p. 15. Experiences of Poverty 5 to late early modern times, provides an unusual opportunity to illuminate key philosophies such as this.
Meanings of Poverty
Each of the authors in this volume sets out to define what they understand by poverty in the context of their research. In the late medieval period, which marks the starting point of the essay collection, poverty was regarded as multidimensional, just as it is perceived at the present day, though the dimensions have changed. Some modern critics perceive a simple dichotomy in the meaning of later medieval poverty, based on an antithesis which Mollat perceived between the poor as pauperes Christi and as needy individuals,14 but close study of texts reveals that fourteenth-century writers made more subtle distinctions, recognizing at least five separate ways of considering poverty.15 These cover the inevitability of poverty as a harmful social condition; the requirement that it should be alleviated, though not eradicated; the virtuous nature of poverty patiently borne; the religious vocation of voluntary poverty lived in imitation of Christ; and, finally, detachment from possessions seen as a philosophical good that brings peace of mind. In comparing modern and medieval expressions of human need it becomes obvious that many medieval moral and religious writers have as keen an understanding of need within their societies, as do modern writers. Need, for them, is defined by lack of material essentials: food, shelter and clothing, as well as the spiritual and emotional requirements of dignity, solidarity, justice and love. Langland, in Piers Plowman, for instance, makes it clear that each person has a duty to ensure that fellow human beings are not left to suffer unrelieved want, at the same time, recognizing the value of poverty borne in imitation of Christ, but never losing sight of the humane requirement to practise charity towards those in need (Plate 1). The requirement to determine who is genuinely in need of relief has long been part of Christian and, in recent centuries, secular social thinking. This has been a dilemma throughout the medieval period, when writers and providers gave the matter serious consideration, and continued to trouble those framing modern Poor Law legislation, and into recent times according to modern prescriptions recorded by Mark Peel in his survey of twenty-first century Australian poor.16 Writers as early as Ambrose (d. 397), Chrysostom
14 Mollat, Poor in the Middle Ages, pp. 8–9. 15 Scott, p. 25. 16 Mark Peel, The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty (Cambridge, 2003). 6 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
(d. 407), Augustine (d. 430) and Gregory (d. 604) wrestle with ideas of how to deal with the needy. Chrysostom adamantly advocates indiscriminate charity: ‘Quiescamus ab hac absurda curiositate, et diabolica, et peremptoria … Si vero pro nutrimento postulat, ne in his examines.’ [Let us put a stop to this ridiculous, diabolical, peremptory prying … If someone genuinely asks for food, do not put him to any examination.]17 Ambrose is more circumspect, recommending that priorities be established, starting with those closest, kith and kin, and Christians, before proceeding to give what is left to others.18 Augustine comes closer to an idea of discriminating deserving from non-deserving in excluding from almsgiving those who are unjust, lest they should be encouraged in their sin, and later canonists attempted to give some definitions of who is to be considered unjust. Rufinus, whoseSumma 19 was one of the first commentaries on the Decretum, writes:
If the one who asks is dishonest, and especially if he is able to seek his food by his own labour and neglects to do so, so that he chooses rather to beg or steal … nothing is to be given … but he is to be corrected … unless perchance he is close to perishing from want, for then, if we have anything we ought to give indifferently to all such.20
Many historians writing on poverty and the poor in the medieval and later periods address these same issues in connection with legislation and with practical steps taken for the administration of poor relief.21 Crawford is one among many who, writing of the period 1580–1800 tells us: ‘contemporaries distinguished between those poor who were deemed worthy of relief, and those who were believed to be poor through their own moral failings, and therefore to be set to work, and denied welfare’.22 In this volume discernment of the deserving from the undeserving poor underlies Elliott’s essay describing provision of dowries for poor but deserving girls in sixteenth-century Nevers. Elliott describes how the conditions laid down for the distribution of these dowries was determined by strict rules of precedence,
17 E. Friedberg (ed.), Corpus Iuris Canonici (2 vols, Leipzig, 1879–81; repr. 1959); Dist. 42, C.2, p. 152, col. 2. 18 St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, Three Books on the Duties of the Clergy, Book 1, Chapter 30, §§148–50. Version consulted available at New Advent, www.newadvent.org/ fathers/34011.htm, accessed: 15 January 2012. 19 This was completed some time before 1159. 20 Rufinus,Summa ad Dist. 42 ante c.1. Quoted in Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Application in England (Berkeley, 1959), p. 59. 21 For example, Geremek, Margins of Society, p. 30; Jütte, pp. 158–77; Slack, pp. 91–107. 22 Crawford, p. 6. Experiences of Poverty 7
‘to enable these sixty poor girls to make a “good match” thereby guarding against a slide into vice, corruption and moral ruination – conditions into which poverty was perceived to inevitably lead’. The practices involved in meting out assistance to the poor and needy of Paris, and, to some extent the whole of France, are analysed by Broomhall who charts in detail the growing influence of secular, civic men in administering increasingly discriminatory regulation of the poor and vulnerable over the course of the sixteenth century. By implication, recognition of ‘the deserving poor’ also underlies Nolan’s analysis of justice denied to the heroine of The Poor Man’s Comfort, the English sixteenth-century play by Daborne; and the lists contained in the City of Exeter’s Accounts of the Poor (Brodie) form a systematized testimony to the process of discernment and discrimination established by Exeter’s civic fathers. The French textLa Voie de Povreté et de Richesse portrays poverty as a decidedly blameworthy condition, the result, not of misfortune or hardship, but of idleness (Scott), a theme taken up in the final chapter by Denney who describes how, by the end of the eighteenth century, writers on agricultural improvement and lovers of ‘the picturesque’ had categorized the good poor as docile, industrious and quiet, as opposed to the bad poor who were noisy, boisterous and idle. Rather than showing that there is a progression in the way people experience poverty and think of the poor, this book suggests that the recurrence of this dichotomy between the deserving and the undeserving poor from earlier to later periods, and in different geographical environments, indicates a fundamental continuity of perception over the centuries.
Reciprocity between Poor and Non-poor
Perceptions of the inevitability of poverty as a harmful social condition and the requirement that it should be alleviated form another thread of continuity from the earliest church teachings, through the sermons, writings of the canonists, and literary texts of the middle ages, to the early modern period. Chrysostom said: ‘Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs.’23 This, in turn, underlies the concept of reciprocity – the mutual needs of poor and rich. In this tradition of thought, poor and non-poor enjoy a reciprocal relationship in which the rich can fulfil the corporal works of mercy by attending to the needs of the poor, and the poor can justify their existence by praying for the souls of
23 St John Chrysostom, Hom. In Lazarum 2, 5: PG 48, 992, translated in Catechism of the Catholic Church (London, 1994), p. 523. 8 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France the rich.24 The same biblical references were used by sixteenth- and seventeenth- century writers as by those in earlier times to illustrate the continuing philosophy. Amsler in this volume analyses the Middle English treatise Dives and Pauper, referencing the parable which, as Crassons and Scott have both shown, was integral to the vision of the poor in Piers Plowman, as well as to sermons going back at least to Augustine. Slack points to its use later: ‘It was commonplace in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to compare the lot of rich and poor, of Dives and Lazarus, in order to determine the ideal type of each, and hence their reciprocal obligation.’25 Dyer sets his study of 114 poor individuals within their society, against a background of thought and policy informed by these concepts. He stresses how ‘These religious ideas strengthened the sense of communities bound together by mutual obligations, in which employers and workers, sellers and buyers (of foodstuffs in particular), patrons and clients, all felt some duty to their neighbours.’ I have suggested that the chapters in this volume all, to a greater or lesser extent, reveal a symbiotic relationship between poor and non-poor, and the idea of reciprocity is one strong way in which this is experienced. Of course it can take a variety of forms. Broomhall’s chapter finds reciprocity in the way that, over the course of the sixteenth century, the government of the hospitals increasingly became the province of secular men. Her chapter assesses how, during that long period, management of the day-to-day relief of the poor was taken up as a personal responsibility by many bourgeois, and contributed to a new-found sense of identity and standing as civic men. ‘For men like Jean Martin, the Grand Bureau had opened up possibilities for a new type of urban man to play a role in the governance of the city at large, men who were not those senior leaders like Jean Briçonnet who controlled the board of the Hôtel-Dieu.’ Denney gives a clear exposition of how the rural poor in the eighteenth- century English countryside were considered essential to the romantic rural idyll celebrated in literature and art. Yet it was an idyll that preferred to ignore the unromantic work circumstances that ruled the lives of the rural poor. The noise of industry offended the sensibilities of visitors and observers, who did not seem to appreciate that the sounds were necessary if the poor were to be employed. The tension thus generated indicates a critical rift within the community – a community at odds with itself.
24 Maria Moisa makes this point, taking Bromyard’s Summa Praedicantium as her reference, in her article: ‘Fourteenth-Century Preachers’ Views of the Poor: Class or Status Group?’, in R. Samuel and G. Stedman Jones (eds), Culture, Ideology and Politics (London, 1982), pp. 160–75, at p. 165. See also Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 236. 25 Slack, p. 18. Experiences of Poverty 9
Bennett’s account of eighteenth-century inoculation gives a clear sense of how the prevailing needs of the community for protection from the spread of smallpox stimulated people of power and influence throughout the nation, and over many decades, to recognize the interlocking destinies of poor and non- poor. He shows how members of the aristocracy, statesmen, politicians, parish councils, as well as lords of the manor, and even medical practitioners, were prepared to subsidize the practice of inoculation or even administer it gratis for the poor, in order to contain the spread of such a devastating disease. The value of the poor to the rich and vice versa is a truism often quoted by writers on medieval culture, but the interest of this book is that it demonstrates these reciprocal needs in a number of different contexts, across time, religion, politics and place.
Changes
In tandem with the continuities that run through the 400 years with which this volume is concerned, there are changes nonetheless. Several historians from Mollat26 through to Slack, Rubin, Jütte and McIntosh point to the hardening of attitudes against the poor, on account of their idleness, propensity to crime and susceptibility to disease. While Mollat attributes this change to the rise of humanism,27 Scott, in this volume, detects this revulsion already in the fourteenth-century poem La Voie de Povreté et de Richesse which attributes poverty to the sin of sloth. From Maddern’s and Silvester’s research we can infer that some fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poor, single women in various counties of England had to engage in legal struggles to gain support for themselves and their illegitimate children, which one must assume was not forthcoming through any charitable impulse from the alleged father. Silvester points out, that even if justice in such cases might be denied, the poor women sometimes worked together to provide mutual assistance. In France, by contrast, Elliott finds a sixteenth-century aristocratic family still making the kind of charitable provision to assist the marriages of needy women that is advocated in the fourteenth-century English Piers Plowman,28 but it is made as a statement
26 Mollat, Poor in the Middle Ages, pp. 251–8. 27 Ibid., p. 255. 28 William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London, 1995), B.7.29. See also Mollat, Poor in the Middle Ages, p. 241: ‘The Italian jurist Baldo degli Ubaldi offered the opinion that a nobleman unable to provide for his daughters’ dowry was entitled, as an indigent, to receive aid from 10 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France of Catholicism in the face of religious conflict, as well as being an act of charity towards the needy. Other changes relate to political and class as well as economic changes. Crawford reminds us that ‘across the period 1500–1800, England changed profoundly, becoming a class society and a nation, Great Britain, forged from England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, with an empire’.29 National prosperity increased, and Minister’s chapter points to the possibility of some pauper apprentices rising out of poverty and taking a modest but significant role in society as a result of their apprenticeship, breaking the cycle of poverty that, in the seventeenth century, seemed inevitable for most poor people. Bennett’s account of inoculation traces the progress of an advanced medical procedure, developed in collaboration with poor as well as with wealthy families, that would vastly improve the health of all sectors of the population. While circumstances for the very poor could still be dire and the poor regarded with disgust and loathing, the chapters by Brodie, Dorey, Elliott, Broomhall and Bennett all outline clear ways in which, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, in both England and France, authorities set up administrative and regulatory systems to deal with the most extreme problems of the poor. The chapters in this book show that management of the poor was a long-drawn-out process, with solutions often proving to be temporary, affected by the good will of others – a notoriously unreliable commodity (Broomhall, Elliott, Dorey, Bennett) – and sometimes vitiated by the poor themselves. A sense of the needs and desires of the poor themselves is strongly evoked by Dyer, Maddern, Silvester, Minister, Dorey, Amsler, Nolan and Bennett. Through examination of the sources it becomes possible to deduce the circumstances underlying poverty and to see how individual poor people – named in many cases – managed their survival and that of their families. From court depositions examined by Dyer, Maddern and Silvester, Dorey’s accounts of recorded complaints made by eighteenth-century prisoners, and Nolan’s exposition of The Poor Man’s Comfort, we get a strong sense of voices raised in protest against injustice, and individual poor people taking whatever action lay legally within their power to improve their circumstances. These chapters add to an expanding scholarship which aims to tune into paupers’ voices. They point the way forward to potential further study of the kind initiated by Tom Sokoll’s analysis of paupers’ letters,30 and Mark Cohen’s commentary on documents from the his bishop, “father of the poor” … Derogation of the nobility was unquestionably a symptom of the spread of poverty.’ 29 Crawford, p. 20. 30 Thomas Sokoll (ed.), Essex Pauper Letters, 1731–1837 (Oxford, 2001). Experiences of Poverty 11
Jewish Community of Cairo Geniza which express the rarely heard ‘Voices of the Poor’.31
Sources and Challenges
Some of the sources selected for research reflect the difficulties scholars have experienced in attempting to give some identity to the poor in pre-modern times. Whereas most pre-modern records have been created by those in authority, Dyer has set himself the task of finding ‘paupers with names (and addresses) who can be placed into a context of place and time’ in order to provide a prosopography. For this he looks into local records of manorial courts where names and details which originated with information supplied by neighbours have been recorded. From these, with something of a detective’s eye, he finds evidence of individual people’s circumstances and deduces elements of a life story. Maddern’s challenge, in the face of earlier scholars’ disappointment, is to find late medieval evidence of illegitimacy among the poor, and strategies for coping with the poverty attendant upon such circumstances. For this she turns, not to demographic statistics, but to ‘canon law texts for rulings on the responsibilities of parents, wills for testimony as to the kinds of provision made for some illegitimate children in particular cases, and most pertinently, records of ecclesiastical courts and Chancery petitions for what they tell us of the life- circumstances of substantial numbers of illegitimate children and their mothers’. Silvester’s challenge to find the voices of early modern poor women takes her to the 1570 Norwich Census of the Poor. Using genealogical methodologies and nominal record linkage, she has pieced together the life histories of 80 individuals and families in a longitudinal study, building on and developing the methodology pioneered by Steven King and Alannah Tomkins.32 Like Silvester, Ann Minister applies the genealogist’s tools to selected individuals, managing to portray a more nuanced picture of eighteenth-century pauper apprenticeships than the largely negative one frequently given. By examining pauper apprenticeship indentures in three rural south Derbyshire parishes, Melbourne, Repton and Ticknall in the period 1750–1837, and following the individuals through census returns from the period 1841–81, she constructs an outline of these selected life stories, which lead her to conclude that pauper
31 Mark R. Cohen, The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza (Princeton, 2005). 32 Steven King and Alannah Tomkins, The Poor in England 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester, 2003). 12 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France apprenticeship was not always a negative experience, and could have positive outcomes. Brodie has identified what he calls one of the City of Exeter’s best-kept secrets, a hitherto largely unexamined and unknown manuscript volume from Exeter in the 1560s and early 1570s, the ‘Accounts of the Poor’. This document contains three lists of names of contributors to the city’s corporate relief scheme – one from 1564–65, one from 1570 – and a partial list probably from 1563. It also contains four lists of poor in receipt of relief – 1563, 1565, 1567 – and a partial list containing poor in the South Quarter of the city in 1564. From these lists, Brodie is able to reconstruct what he considers to be the administration of poor relief in a normal sixteenth-century city, from its inception through several years of its operation. One of his conclusions is that there may well have been much earlier and potentially more widespread parish collecting than historians have been willing to allow, even starting as far back as the 1536 Act itself. Broomhall, recognizing the difficulties raised by the loss of records for the Grand Bureau des Pauvres, which would have been an obvious place to research experiences of poverty in sixteenth-century Paris, examines the accounts and deliberations of the Hôtel-Dieu, the deliberations of the city council, edicts of the crown, parliamentary papers as well as eyewitness accounts and chronicles of the period. Concentrating on these sources, produced by the civic men of power and influence in the capital over a period of nearly a century, Broomhall traces the rise of a new breed of secular elite who developed a collective identity of public service through their work in administering organizations for the care and control of the poor and vulnerable. A single document of 1605, establishing funding in perpetuity for the marriages of 60 poor girls, is the source which Elliott uses to explore not only the French Catholic aristocratic attitude toward single poor girls and the expression of individual Catholic charity in the late sixteenth century but also the peaceful approaches to the religious conflict with the Protestant ‘heretics’ that many moderate Catholics came to favour. She examines what this document reveals about the perception of and attitude towards charitable recipients and the use of charity to promote a religious cause in late sixteenth-century France, a period dominated by the horrors of the Wars of Religion. Moving into study of the eighteenth century, it becomes easier to find texts produced by the poor themselves. Access to the documents surrounding a series of petitions made in the first two decades of the eighteenth century by the poor debtors held in three London prisons allows Dorey not only to analyse food quality and dietary conditions for the prisoners, but to explore the attempts made by the prisoners to claim their right to the bare necessities of life. The complex attitudes of the authorities towards the prisoners and their complaints, Experiences of Poverty 13 often supporting their rights in theory, but not enforcing these conclusions in practice, demonstrate the limits on how far prisoners could secure justice for themselves. Bennett, using a range of published and archival sources, including personal correspondence, newspapers and journals, parish records and the records of the Foundling Hospital, London, traces the progress of smallpox inoculation through the eighteenth century, examining the role of paupers and poor families who were, in some cases, virtually compelled to submit to the process. The literary chapters in this volume examine texts which are less frequently read today but were, in the case of La Voie de Povreté et de Richesse (Scott), Waldensian and Wycliffite tracts,Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply and the fifteenth-centuryDives and Pauper (Amsler), influential for their contemporary readers. There has been a considerable amount of recent work on texts reflecting contemporary attitudes to the medieval poor; much of this work concentrates on well-known, canonical texts, notably Piers Plowman, but also, in the case of Hazell, a range of texts from Chaucer, the romances and various satirical and polemical texts. Crassons, in her book The Claims of Poverty, recognizes that ‘poverty is as much an economic force as it is an epistemological issue that challenges our ability to know and fix the precise nature of material reality’.33 She teases out the importance of literary texts to the study of poverty, commenting on Piers Plowman, Pierce Plowman’s Creede, The Boke of Margery Kempe and fifteenth-century drama. Amsler, in this volume, addresses the concept of poverty as a mobile signifier, adding discussion of the polemical texts to those already considered by Crassons, Hazell and Scott, to demonstrate the discursive power of poverty as a signifier at this crucial stage – the late fourteenth century – in the development of the vernacular as a polemical tool. The mindset represented in these medieval texts is that of the contemporaries of those who undertook to alleviate poverty in ways described throughout the volume. The fourteenth-century poem,La Voie de Povreté et de Richesse, presents poverty as something sinful, to be avoided at all costs, and offers work as the one way in which to overcome poverty. While this is a fourteenth-century French allegory, its values resonate for many of the poor whose experience of poverty comes to be considered blameworthy, as reflected in some of the chapters written by social historians in this collection. Amsler’s chapter on Waldensians and others who chose a state of voluntary poverty proposes a rationale both for giving charitable assistance to the poor and for sublimating the experience of poverty in order to attain spiritual good. This interconnects with the chapters by Broomhall and Elliott, and by Nolan who finds that Daborne, inThe Poor Man’s Comfort,
33 Crassons, p. 5. See also her discussions of wasters, pp. 22, 34, 77. 14 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France portrays the poor as having an inherent value that can transcend the fixed idea of worth being established solely through wealth. This play acts in some ways as a commentary on the declining fortunes of some seventeenth-century gentry, examining the prejudices that keep the poor unjustly in their place – a place which is theirs only by accident of fate. Denney further complicates the relationship between poor and non-poor in examining depictions of rural life in eighteenth-century poetry (Goldsmith and Cowper) and in texts drawn from agricultural improvement literature and picturesque tour writing. He concludes that the non-poor enjoyed the spectacle of the rural poor as adding to the picturesque, but dislike the noise that they made which spoilt the outsiders’ enjoyment of the rural scene.
Conclusion
This book adds to study of the poor and poverty in several important ways. First, the essays in this collection demonstrate that poverty is by no means a simple phenomenon. It can vary according to gender, age and geographical location; and the way it is depicted in speech, writing and visual images can as much affect how the poor experience their poverty as how others see and judge them. Secondly, it brings together in one volume essays that cover the experience of poverty across a significant timespan, from late medieval times to the late eighteenth century, a period that saw monumental changes in socioeconomic experience as well as fundamental changes in philosophy and ideology. While the collection cannot be comprehensive, this approach can be exemplary, showing how the experience of the very poor may be modified by changes in society. Thirdly, grouping articles which explore ideas of poverty over a wide temporal span allows the volume to correct the presumption by historians that the phenomena they observe began in their period, whereas they often had an earlier origin. This is seen in discussions of deserving and non-deserving poor which go back to the early Christian church and are also found in modern journalism. Other ideas that persist into modern times – such as that poverty is something the poor have brought upon themselves by idleness – are already strong in the thirteenth century. Scott detects a humanistic approach to work and the accumulation of wealth in a fourteenth-century French poem, ahead of the fifteenth century when the attitude is more usually considered to have become strong; and Brodie believes he has found evidence of parish collecting much earlier than historians have hitherto allowed. Finally, the collection allows us to see the relationships between the authorities dealing with poverty and the poor themselves, and to track repeated Experiences of Poverty 15 attempts to deal with the problems of poverty in ways informed by the ideology of the times and the needs of the poor as perceived by themselves. Scott’s chapter which considers La Voie de Povreté et de Richesse as the expression of an educated, by-no-means poor court cleric, highlights the status of the poor as contemptible and sinful in the eyes of the non-poor, an attitude that medieval and early modern society felt able to run in parallel with ideas of caring for the poor as a mark of Christian virtue. This is a polarity that runs through all the chapters to a greater or lesser extent, expressing, as it does, the tensions that society perennially experiences in its attempts to achieve justice, tensions identified by the Governor General of Australia, Sir William Deane, who said, in connection with homelessness in twenty-first-century Sydney: ‘[this problem] is a challenge not only to our governments but also to each of us personally. … For ultimately, the test of our worth as a nation and as a people is how we treat the most disadvantaged and vulnerable of our fellow Australians.’34
34 Address by Sir William Deane, Governor-General of The Commonwealth of Australia, on the Occasion of the NSW Department of Community Services Inner City Homelessness Plan Launch, Sydney, Thursday, 17 May 2001. This page has been left blank intentionally Part I Survival Strategies This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 2 The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England
Christopher Dyer1
Historians of poverty give more attention to the rich than they do to the poor. They are concerned to investigate the attitudes of potential donors, and the policies of secular governments and the church towards poverty. They are drawn in this direction because the sources – wills, the regulations of almshouses and hospitals, sermons, theological treatises, the legislation of national and local government – were written by and for the better-off.2 This chapter is centred on the experience of the poor, and investigates their origins, place in society, outlook and perceptions. It will draw some evidence from the sources deriving from those who were not poor, because even if they lacked objectivity, they might still have reflected some of the circumstances and attitudes of those who received alms and support. The character Will inPiers Plowman, who may share some perspectives with the supposed author of the
1 I am grateful to The University of Western Australia Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group for their invitation to speak at their conference in June 2010. On that occasion and subsequently, Anne M. Scott has been a patient and encouraging editor. An invitation to speak to the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in July 2011 also gave me an opportunity to learn more about poverty, and I am grateful to Axel Mueller for his welcome and hospitality. My chairs on these two occasions, Philippa Maddern and Sharon Farmer, and those attending, stimulated my understanding of the subject with questions, comments and suggestions for reading. Jenny Dyer, Phillipp Schofield and Stuart Wrathmell have helped in various ways. I refer to eight archives and record offices in footnotes, and have used at least five more in the course of compiling my sample of evidence, and am grateful to the archivists who do so much to make sources accessible. 2 Works on policy towards poverty include Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, 1986); Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, 1987); Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Local Responses to the Poor in Late Medieval and Tudor England’, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988): pp. 209–45. 20 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France poem, William Langland, had been poor and recorded some of the lives and ideas of paupers, but this was an exceptional piece of writing.3 Everyone, rich and poor, was aware of the obligation of the better-off to give alms. This was a spiritual necessity because good works lifted the burden of sin, and shortened the time spent by souls in purgatory. Not only did the alms earn credit towards the atonement of sin, but the poor returned the gifts with prayers which helped the souls of the donors: they brought to the task spiritual qualities which made their prayers especially valuable. These religious ideas strengthened the sense of communities bound together by mutual obligations, in which employers and workers, sellers and buyers (of foodstuffs in particular), patrons and clients, all felt some duty towards their neighbours.4 These ideals of solidarity and social harmony were advocated more than they were practised. The elite had selfish motives, because as well as spiritual benefits they also gained status from their role as donors. Clerical authors, reflecting widely held views among the upper ranks of society, might criticize the recipients of charity. In thirteenth-century France, they contrasted the patient poor who accepted their condition with those who cursed their misfortune and blasphemed against God. Beggars were suspected of faking their illnesses and defrauding the almsgivers with feigned distress.5 This was in a period of low wages, high food prices, occasional bad harvests, when large numbers of people were living on smallholdings of land. Throughout western Europe poverty reached its highest level. The distrust of the poor in England was strengthened after 1349 when legislation was directed against those who begged when they could be employed, helping to increase the labour shortage and raise wages.6 Those who wandered from place to place were seen as both idle and a threat to settled and respectable society, which encouraged governments to direct punitive policies against them. There were attempts, for example, to force vagrants to return to their place of origin. In late medieval London, beggars were equated with petty criminals and prostitutes.7
3 Anne M. Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin, 2004), pp. 25–67, 161. 4 Scott, pp. 231–5; D. Hazell, Poverty in Late Middle English Literature: The Meene and the Riche (Dublin, 2009), pp. 43–53. 5 Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca, 2002), pp. 49–66. 6 Anthony Musson, ‘New Labour Laws, New Remedies? Legal Reactions to the Black Death “Crisis”’, in Nigel Saul (ed.), Fourteenth Century England, 1 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 73–88. 7 Frank Rexroth, Deviance and Power in Late Medieval London (Cambridge, 2007). ‘Vagabond’ in late medieval Kent meant ‘not in employment’: K. Jones, Gender and Petty The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 21
Nonetheless, the better-off continued to fund charity, and showed some concern that their gifts should be concentrated on the widows, orphans and disabled who deserved help. The donors seem to have aimed at effective and targeted giving, to the inmates of almshouses and hospitals, for instance, or to householders afflicted by illness or unemployment. As the number of almshouses rose in the fifteenth century, the amount of help probably increased and more was given per head both in cash and kind. Monasteries are now thought to have made a more substantial contribution than was previously believed, and the effectiveness of their alms was improved as they were concentrated on a smaller number of paupers.8 Between 1375 and 1520, when land was plentiful, wages high and food relatively cheap, the indigent population must have fallen greatly since the worst of the hard times in the period 1290–1330. In answering the question, ‘Who are the poor?’ contemporaries distinguished between different categories, as did William Langland writing in the later years of the fourteenth century. He sympathized with the poor who lived in cottages and struggled to bring up their children on low wages, but castigated lazy ‘wasters’ who refused to work but still expected to eat.9 Similarly, those who ran almshouses, while welcoming obedient and humble widows, framed regulations which sought to discipline inmates who were absent, drunken, unhygienic, rebellious and prone to gossip.10 The negative attitudes certainly helped to create a sense of social distance between the poor and settled society, which perhaps has encouraged modern historians to view the poor as a mass without names or identities. The royal courts recorded anonymous deaths like that of a ‘poor woman’ who was found in a ditch at Barford in Bedfordshire in February 1269, having apparently succumbed to cold. Beggars without names could get away with crime: a couple were given shelter at Long Buckby in Northamptonshire by Michael Darling in 1321, and during the night the woman was killed by the
Crime in Late Medieval England: The Local Courts in Kent, 1460–1560 (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 189–94. 8 P.H. Cullum and P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Charitable Provision in Late Medieval York: “To the Praise of God and the Use of the Poor”’, Northern History, 29 (1993): 24–39; Neil S. Rushton and Wendy Sigle-Rushton, ‘Monastic Poor Relief in Sixteenth-Century England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2001): 193–216; Neil S. Rushton, ‘Monastic Charitable Provision in Tudor England: Quantifying and Qualifying Poor Relief in the Early Sixteenth Century’, Continuity and Change, 16 (2001): 9–44; Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England 1100–1540 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 7–33. 9 Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 151–3, 164–5. 10 John A.A. Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion and Architecture in a Fifteenth-Century Almshouse (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 238–42. 22 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France man, who then escaped.11 If gathered in numbers, the poor were threatening and offended against the rules of society, like the hundred people in Shrewsbury in 1381 who were ‘wandering and fleeing from street to street’ when the poll tax collectors were compiling their lists.12 Such records might lead to us to characterize the poor as a wretched underclass of marginalized and homeless beggars and vagabonds. An alternative approach is to find paupers with names (and addresses) who can be placed into a context of place and time. Most poor people lived in the countryside, and were able to survive through their own efforts (‘self-help’ as the Victorians called it, or by means of the ‘cottage economy’ practised in the eighteenth century) and through the practical aid of family, neighbours and the village community. In the middle ages, as in our own times, some of the most useful support for the poor came from their equals rather than from their social superiors.13
Identifying the Poor
My main aim is to outline, with much uncertainty and caution, the poor persons’ experience of their condition, by identifying and classifying them, based on their appearance in administrative sources, and then attempting to find clues to their outlook and attitudes. The method involves focusing on individual people, which enables the compilation of biographies of paupers that will amount to a prosopography.14 We can begin to answer such questions as ‘Who were the poor?’ and say something about the process by which they came to be categorized as paupers. We have no access to autobiographical sources, but in local records of manorial courts we can recover names and details that originated with information supplied by their neighbours. Of course the courts represent the interests of superior authorities, but lords depended on the co-operation of the peasants and artisans who acted as officials in the courts.
11 Charles Gross (ed.), Select Cases from the Coroners’ Rolls 1265–1413, Selden Society, 9 (London, 1895), pp. 12, 74. 12 Carolyn C. Fenwick (ed.), The Poll Tax of 1377, 1379 and 1381, Part II, British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, 29 (Oxford, 2001), p. 384. 13 Christopher Dyer, ‘Did the Rich Really Help the Poor in Medieval England?’, in Ricos y pobres: opulencia y desarraigo en el Occidente medieval: actas de la XXXVI Semana de estudios medievales (Pamplona, 2010), pp. 307–22. 14 A prosopographical approach has been used for lists of miracles attributed to medieval saints: Farmer, Surviving Poverty; Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c.1100–1400 (London, 2006), pp. 165–9. The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 23
A case from the jurisdiction of the church rather than a lord shows how dry factual material can reveal the vivid details of an individual’s misfortunes.15 In 1481, a Yorkshireman named William Akclum died at Wharram le Street, a village high up on the wolds. An inventory of his goods was made at the end of May, to serve the needs of the church, which administered the probate of wills. The list of goods was compiled by William’s neighbours, and we could not ask for a more routine and functional source drawing on the everyday experience of ordinary villagers, whose spoken language is revealed in the terms they used for the implements that he owned: heckle, swyngelstok, skot and siff, for example. The inventory made no explicit reference to his poverty, but Akclum’s acute problems are all too apparent. He was potentially well-off, as he was the tenant of two bovates or oxgangs of land, which would have amounted to at least 20 acres of arable land. A good proportion of this holding, 13½ acres, was planted with crops. But how had it been cultivated and planted? The inventory includes no plough or cart, and not a single ox or horse. He had once owned these implements and animals, as there were still bits and pieces of harness among his possessions, and he had once been accustomed to sell part of his grain, as his inventory included a bushel measure. Whereas he had once made money by selling produce from his holding, he was now chronically in debt. His assets were valued at less than £3, and he owed more than £12. Sometime during the year or two before May 1481, a disaster had overtaken William Akclum that forced him to sell his most valuable animals and equipment. He had even had to part with his brass cooking pot, a standard item placed near or suspended over every domestic hearth. He was left with a pig and some poultry, like cottagers with very little land, and like them also he had the equipment to prepare flax and spin linen thread, which his wife could use to raise some income. William must have been seriously ill, suffered an accident or had a mental breakdown. By May 1481, he still had the means to feed his family for another year on bread, pottage and ale, with occasional eggs and slices of bacon, but in previous years he had borrowed from relatives, local people and the vicar of Wharram le Street in order to keep going. These sums – which mostly amounted to between 4s. and 16s. from each person – must have been consumption loans, allowing him to pay the rent, buy food, clothes and shoes, keep his house in repair and employ others to do the agricultural work such as ploughing which he was incapable of doing. Like other desperate debtors he
15 Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York, D and C wills, 1481, Akclum; Akclum’s inventory provides the basis for chapter 21 of Stuart Wrathmell (ed.), A History of Wharram Percy and Its Neighbours, Wharram: A Study of Settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds, 13 / York University Archaeological Publications, 15 (York, 2012). This includes an explanation of the various technical and dialect terms by Peter Brears. 24 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France probably borrowed money to repay creditors who were becoming restive, but he had reached the point at which further loans would have been clearly beyond his capacity to repay. We can only guess at the despair, misery and desolation that afflicted the dying man as he faced final ruin. The story is not entirely negative, as we can see the ways in which a peasant in decline could hope to stave off the final descent into the abyss. His neighbours had been willing to take the risk of lending money, and a regular procedure provided the creditors with a proportion of their money on the basis of the value assigned to the dead man’s assets. William’s wife had the prospect of a miserable widowhood with a struggle to recover from the period of the decline in the household’s finances, but at least the probate process, rather like a modern bankruptcy, drew a line under the debts, so that she did not face the almost impossible burden of settling all of the demands. Another response to the plight of the indebted household was to generate additional sources of income, which, in the case of Akclum, came from flax working. Our knowledge of Acklum’s struggle is based on a list of goods and debts, which if it could be repeated in a large sample would yield a representative overview of poverty. Unfortunately, only a limited number of peasant inventories survive from before 1500, most of them from Yorkshire, and while at least two others from the 1450s depict a household with depleted resources similar to Akclum’s, they lack such informative details. They are, however, a useful reminder that even in a period when peasants are usually thought to have improved their conditions, they were still vulnerable to life-cycle poverty. The sample of poor people who will be subjected to analysis in this chapter is derived from those described as pauper in manorial court rolls. In these documents, the word ‘poor’ was used in specific circumstances, when the court levied an amercement (a payment for wrongdoing, or one incurred during litigation), a heriot (death duty), or when a tenant relinquished or took on land. Only the use of the word pauper (or rarely inopia) has been accepted here as grounds for inclusion in the sample. No doubt the many people who were said to be impotens (incapable) were also poor, but the connection with poverty cannot be verified, and even larger numbers whose payments were ‘condoned’ or ‘pardoned’ without further explanation may have been relieved from payment because of their lack of means, but we know that some were favoured because the lord or his officials were dispensing patronage: for example ‘condoned because he is the lord’s carter’.16 The majority of those described as poor were being released from the payment of an amercement of a few pence, implying that they had very little money.
16 F.M. Page, The Estates of Crowland Abbey (Cambridge, 1934), p. 404. The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 25
I have found 114 examples of people described as poor, spread over the period 1270–1490. Half of them (54 to be precise) occurred in the records of 1300–49, with 21 from 1270 to 1299, and only 18 from the fifteenth century. This unequal chronological distribution should not be regarded as an accurate reflection of changes in poverty, as the sources are unevenly spread over the decades. There must be some significance, however, in the concentration of 10 identifications of paupers in the years 1315–18, during which England experienced the most severe episode of famine that has ever been recorded. Similarly, no meaning can be discerned in the geographical inequalities, as the records have been selected by the accident of publication or the regions in which the present author has made transcriptions of manuscript sources. It is worth noting that the sources represent many parts of the country, from Worcestershire to Suffolk, and from Yorkshire to Oxfordshire, so the analysis reflects social and economic circumstances in a variety of landscapes and commercial environments. To keep the subject within manageable proportions, the sample is derived only from the countryside, and even the smallest urban settlements have been excluded. There is an existing study using similar evidence from the Huntingdonshire town of St Ives, the findings of which are not very different from those deriving from rural records.17 Defining the poor is a minefield for modern historians, in which some scholars attempt to apply objective criteria (such as the amount of land people held, or their exemption from taxes), and others are more content to accept the relative and comparative approach which was used by contemporaries, who, to take the most extreme example, found it possible to talk of poor merchants. To base an analysis on the category of people whose payments were ‘condoned because of poverty’ in the records of the time is to some extent a compromise between an empirical and a relative definition.18 The termpoor was not likely to be used casually in the court rolls. In a court of law, even the lowest rung of the judicial system in which the manor court belongs, a decision had to be made on the basis of agreed rules. Most courts adopted a procedure of consultation between the steward who presided over the session and local people, usually two affeerors who, having knowledge of each villager’s circumstances, were
17 Ellen Wedermeyer Moore, ‘Aspects of Poverty in a Small Medieval Town’, in Edwin Brezette De Windt (ed.), The Salt of Common Life: Individuality and Choice in the Medieval Town, Countryside, and Church (Kalamazoo, 1995), pp. 117–56. 18 A useful discussion of definitions is John Henderson and Richard Wall, ‘Introduction’, in Henderson and Wall (eds), Poor Women and Children in the European Past (London, 1994), pp. 1–4. 26 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France appointed to advise on the amount to be levied in amercements.19 No doubt they were influenced by prejudices, favouritism and other barriers to objectivity, but in the end the main reason for condoning a payment was the belief, based on personal knowledge, that the individual would have difficulty in finding the money to pay. Practice varied from one manor to another. One can search for a long time in some records and find not a single case of a payment being ‘condoned because of poverty’. This might mean that a humane tradition prevailed of not attempting to pursue poor offenders, so they were left out of the records completely. More likely, the poor were charged in the court with the same type of amercement or fine as everyone else, but no one expected that any payment would result. Instead the sum of money would be added to the reeve’s total of arrears, and that manorial official would eventually be pardoned because the amercement was ‘unlevyable’.20 Manors which adopted this policy towards their poorer tenants have not contributed a single example to the 114 cases. More difficult to handle are the records of manors at the opposite end of the spectrum, where poverty is frequently mentioned. It was not just the high number of people who were identified as ‘poor’ in the court rolls of such manors as Sevenhampton in Wiltshire and Chilbolton in Hampshire in the late thirteenth century, but also the occasional claim that tenants (at Sevenhampton in 1279, for example) were too poor to pay an amercement imposed because their oxen (at least two) had strayed into the lord’s corn.21 A court which described as poor the owner of beasts worth about 10 shillings each, who would normally have needed the animals for ploughing a substantial holding of land, had evidently agreed that the word ‘poverty’ had a very wide meaning. The population of manors of this type have been excluded from the analysis presented here, but their existence must make us suspect that occasional lapses into slackness or extreme leniency happened on manors which were normally more discriminating, which would have allowed a few ox-owners into the sample of 114.
19 P.D.A. Harvey, Manorial Records, British Records Association, Archives and the User, 5, rev. edn (London, 1999), pp. 49–50; Ralph Evans, ‘Merton College’s Control of its Tenants at Thorncroft 1270–1349’, in Zvi Razi and Richard M. Smith (eds),Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford, 1996), pp. 199–259, at pp. 209–10. 20 Christopher Dyer, ‘A Redistribution of Incomes in Fifteenth-Century England?’, in R.H. Hilton (ed.), Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social History (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 192–215, at pp. 206–207. 21 Ralph B. Pugh (ed.), Court Rolls of the Wiltshire Manors of Adam de Stratton, Wiltshire Record Society, 24 (Devizes, 1970), p. 54; J.S. Drew, ‘The Manor of Chilbolton’ (unpublished typescript, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 1945). The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 27
Occasionally the decisions of the court were influenced by self-serving claims by individuals that they were poor. A widow of Thornbury in Gloucestershire, Matilda le Bedel, brought a plea in court to claim her former husband’s holding of land in 1334, but having won the case said that she was too poor and inadequate to hold it, which allowed her son to take on the tenancy. This had been her intention throughout, we suspect.22 Her protestations of penury in open court could have been challenged if they had been fictitious, so with some misgivings this rather manipulative litigant has been included among the 114. The sample is of course institutionally biased, because manorial courts dealt primarily with tenants, with the consequence that people with land and therefore some possessions were most likely to figure in the records. Tenants, however, would include cottagers or even people with just an acre or two, so tenancy should not be equated with material prosperity. Many lords held the view of frankpledge, or court leet, that had jurisdiction over all males aged 12 and above, which brought landless wage-earners, servants and others who were not manorial tenants to the notice of the courts. The sample is slanted, but does not exclude the bottom end of society. A few beggars figure among the 114. What does the sample tell us about paupers and their routes to poverty? Males accounted for 75 of them, with 39 females. This does not imply that men were poorer than women, but simply reflects the general gender imbalance in the records, which led to men having a higher visibility because they made payments and usually took charge of the cultivation of fields and the management of land. Peasant holdings tended to be joint enterprises, in which women managed some productive activities, such as dairying and poultry keeping, but these did not usually lead to conflicts or problems of trespass which would appear in the courts. Women brewed and sold ale, which brought them into the public sphere because the courts regulated price and quality, and a high proportion of the women labelled as poor were involved in the ale trade. Husbands and wives were often joint tenants of land. In three cases in the sample we are told that a husband and wife were both judged to be poor simultaneously, and there were probably a larger number of wives hidden among the 114 examples who shared in their husband’s fortune or misfortune, but only the husband was labelled as pauper in the records. A high proportion of those identified as poor held some land. The total of 67 understates their number, as the records are incomplete, and if more were known about a number of individuals their tenancy would have been revealed. Among those with land 29 were smallholders with less than 3 acres, most often cottagers; another 29, like William Akclum, had middling or larger holdings,
22 Staffordshire Record Office, D 641/1/4C 1. 28 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France between 15 acres and 30 acres. Only two had held in excess of 30 acres. A handful of the 67 were free tenants, but most held by customary or servile tenure, and at least 6 of them were neifs, that is unfree by birth. This does not mean that people were driven into poverty by unfreedom (though it may sometimes have been a factor) but customary tenants and born serfs featured more often in the business of the courts, and therefore were more likely to be identified as poor. To underline that leading members of village society, or men who had been in the top rank, could be described as poor, six of them are known at some point of their lives to have held important offices in the government of their lord’s manor, as reeve, woodward or juror. To begin with the cottagers and smallholders, the evidence is often thin because their limited range of activities and influence gave them a low profile in the documents. Their poverty is often revealed at the end of their days, like John Roose of Kempsey in Worcestershire whose lack of a heriot when he died in 1443 was explained by the fact that he was a ‘common pauper’, ‘and has his food from alms’. A cottage was surrendered ‘because of his old age’ by Hugh Scrugh of Ombersley in Worcestershire in 1416 and no heriot was taken because he was ‘poor’. Not all paupers with cottages had always held them, but had come to smallholding late in life as their circumstances deteriorated. Joan Meyre of Chaddesley Corbett (Worcestershire) had been the wife of a yardlander, that is with about 30 acres, but in 1440 she took a cottage and curtilage, and was not expected to pay an entry fine because she was poor ‘and has nothing with which to pay’. On the other hand, acquiring a cottage marked an upwards step for Robert Schert of Elmley Castle in Worcestershire, who had been a servant, and when he gained a cottage holding in 1383 was, like Joan Meyre, forgiven a fine.23 Cottagers required an income from wages, crafts or trade, because their small patch of land would only provide them with a fraction of their needs in food. Thomas Wauncy at one stage of his career in 1344 had worked as the common herdsman of his village of Walsham le Willows. The trades of tanner and shoemaker attributed to Adam Magotson of Wooldale in Wakefield manor (Yorkshire) should have made him a good living, but he was described as poor in 1348 when he disposed of his cottage and half-rood.24
23 Worcestershire Record Office [hereafter WRO], ref. 705:4 BA 54; ref 705:56 BA 3910/24; Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, Stratford-upon-Avon [hereafter SBT], DR5/2796; Robert K. Field (ed.), Court Rolls of Elmley Castle, Worcestershire, 1347– 1564, Worcestershire Historical Society, new series, 20 (Worcester, 2004), p. 42. 24 Ray Lock (ed.), The Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows 1303–1350, Suffolk Records Society, 41 (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 275; Ray Lock (ed.), The Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows 1351–99, Suffolk Records Society, 45 (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 51; Helen M. Jewell The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 29
The money-making activities most commonly associated with cottage holding were selling ale and bread. Some of the poor cottagers were brewers and bakers, which means that they had access to appropriate buildings, and had been able to acquire the vessels for brewing and the equipment (for boulting flour and kneading dough) used by bakers. John Malynson of Kirkburton in Wakefield baked bread, and his wife was a brewster, but he (not she) was said to be poor in 1348. Some cottars made their living by selling ale brewed by others, or loaves acquired from a baker, which must have yielded limited profits. Alice Ward of Walsham le Willows had brewed in the teens of the fourteenth century, but after 1336 was trading as a mere gannocker, an ale retailer, and her contemporary George de Brockley from the same village sold bread, or regrated it in the words of the court record.25 The precariousness of the lives of smallholders is easily appreciated, as their stake in the land was on too small a scale to provide them with much of a buffer against adversity. In particular the dependence of this group on trade in low- profit commodities, and poorly rewarded employment must have kept them on the edge of poverty, and they could be tipped into a miserable state by rises in the price of foodstuffs, the loss of employment or a dip in demand for ale. They were especially vulnerable to ill health, injury or bereavement. Turning to those with middling or larger holdings, consisting of 15 acres and above, one might suppose that they were unlikely to sink into poverty because they were protected by the productive capacity and inherent value of their landed assets. Before they were reported as poor, and even after that happened, they appear in the court records in the same fashion as the other tenants, buying and selling land, and offending by allowing their animals to graze beyond limits set by bylaws, or by trespassing on the lord’s lands, becoming involved in litigation with their neighbours over trespasses and unpaid debts, failing to do labour services for the lord, and neglecting to clean ditches or repair their buildings. The various incidents that led to amercements were not criminal offences, nor could they count as antisocial behaviour, but occurred as the incidental by-products of the routines of tenancy and peasant farming. Breaking bylaws and trespasses tended to result from owning livestock in relatively large numbers, and litigation could be prompted by frictions arising from the assets of the lenders, which allowed them to advance loans, or the ambition of the borrowers who wished to pay for buildings or land purchases.
(ed.), The Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield from September 1348 to September 1350, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 2nd series, 2 (Leeds, 1981), pp. 29, 34. 25 Jewell, Wakefield … 1348 to 1350, p. 34; Lock, Walsham 1303–1350, pp. 77, 79, 104, 144, 145, 163, 174, 179, 187, 190, 198, 230, 240 (Ward); 255, 258, 265, 271, 278, 280, 297, 305, 315, 329 (Brockley). 30 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
The active life and relative prosperity of a peasant with a middling or large holding could collapse dramatically and completely. Three tenants of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire in 1481 were each of them reported to have allowed five buildings to fall into disrepair, and to have left their village to beg, wandering from village to village. None of them had goods or chattels ‘alive or dead’. They were probably yardlanders, judging from the number of specialist buildings that were listed. A similar example of a tenant of a substantial holding who faced acute problems relates to Thomas Roberts of Admington in the same county who, unable in 1452 to ‘support the burden’ of his 40-acre yardland, was moved by his lord to another village on the same estate, Sherborne in Gloucestershire, perhaps to a smaller holding or into some suitable employment.26 An explanation of these reversals in fortune for tenants with apparently valuable assets might sometimes have been the culmination of long-term fecklessness and incompetence. John Muryhill of Chaddesley Corbett in 1375 inherited a yardland from his father, and surrendered it immediately. He later took on a more easily managed half-yardland, but died in 1403. Two years later his widow in a state of poverty surrendered the holding with its buildings in ruins. The eventful career of Richard Wythundes of Wakefield between 1331 and 1349 suggests a turbulent personality. He caused uproar in the manor court in 1332 and was often involved in litigation, which ended in a feud with Robert Wolf who was said to have described Richard as false and a robber. His long- term economic difficulties are suggested by his surrender of land in 1332, and the year before his death in the Black Death of 1349 he mortgaged land to raise 16s., and was reported to owe more than four quarters of grain.27 A widespread symptom of a slide into penury was the deterioration of houses and farm buildings, which the lord was anxious to keep in a good state in order to attract future tenants. Thomas Roberts’s buildings were said to be in ruins, and at Stoneleigh in 1481 as well as hearing about the three tenants-turned- beggars, the court recorded the death of the pauper, William Reve, who had neglected six buildings that would need repairs costing 42s. In 1420, Cristina Wassell of Chaddesley Corbett lost the tenancy of her cottage because she was ‘impotent, poor and insufficient’, and the buildings were said to be ‘devastated and almost demolished to the ground’.28
26 SBT, DR 18/30/24/17; Gloucestershire Archives [hereafter GA], D678/62. 27 SBT, DR5/ 2737, 2753; Sue Sheridan Walker (ed.), The Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield from October 1331 to September 1333, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 3 (Leeds, 1982), pp. 33, 58, 83, 119, 124, 157, 160, 225; Jewell, Wakefield … 1348 to 1350, pp. 6, 13, 22, 24, 64, 73, 85, 91, 92–3, 95, 162. 28 SBT, DR5/ 2776. The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 31
A shortage of labour often precipitated the end of the otherwise successful tenure of a middling or large holding of land. William Akclum’s plight could have been resolved if he had had an active son to take over the cultivation of his two bovates. The alternative was hired labour, but that was in short supply after 1349. The decline of a Chaddesley Corbett tenant was explained by his ‘lack of servants and children’. The tenants’ crises can often be linked with life-cycle poverty, which had its most obvious effect in the decline associated with old age. As the clerk who wrote the Kempsey court roll for 1452 put it, John Baty when he surrendered his 12 acres of land was a pauper who ‘has nothing’, and was described as ‘senex et decrepitus’. 29 At least 10 other cases among the sample of 114 were also in the declining years, though we should also take into account the effects of ill health, which would not be confined to the elderly. At least seven tenants were not succeeded by a relative, and their land either lapsed into the lord’s hands, or was taken over by an apparent stranger. This suggests the effect of ‘nuclear poverty’, recognized by Laslett, which refers to the lack of relatives to look after the elderly and take over their land, as a consequence of the English family structure which was often confined to parents and children. Sometimes the decline of a tenant ended with an episode of retirement, which provided Richard Stappe of Blackwell with a comfortable old age when a relative (consanguineus) took over the holding and agreed in 1323 to find his food and clothing for life. Simon Godit of Stoke Prior in Worcestershire in 1298 was promised accommodation and the means of support by Thomas le Mey, whose name does not suggest that he was a close relative.30 Finally, widowhood was identified by every commentator and legislator as a distinct and deserving category of poverty, and widows accounted for at least three of the tenants of larger holdings included in the sample of 114. In addition to old age, disability and widowhood, poverty was also associated with the early stages of the life-cycle. Fourteen of our cases seem to have involved young people, some of whom had acquired quite large holdings of land. In 1340, William del Overhall of Sandal in Wakefield had lost both parents, and found himself in charge of a 15-acre bovate of land. He had good prospects for the long-term future, but needed help at this early stage. The lord made a gesture to assist him by reducing his mother’s heriot to 40d. Similarly the officials serving Crowland Abbey at Cottenham in Cambridgeshire did not take an entry fine in 1409 from a young heir who had acquired a holding in the region of 40 acres
29 WRO, ref 709:4 BA 54. 30 Peter Laslett, ‘Family, Kinship and Collectivity as Systems of Support in Pre- Industrial Europe: A Consideration of the “Nuclear-Hardship” Hypothesis’, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988): pp. 153–75; Worcester Cathedral Library [hereafter WCL], E3; E193. 32 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
‘because he is poor’.31 We do not know the precise age of these and other young people who were described as poor, but they may well have been in their late teens or early twenties. Households might also suffer a phase of impoverishment when young children needed to be fed and clothed, but the parents’, and particularly wives’, earning capacity was limited by the responsibilities of child care. This phase is much more difficult to detect in our sources, but one does note that two tenants at Walsham le Willows – Peter Springold and Ralph Echeman – both of whom began to appear in the court records in 1316, were rather surprisingly said to be poor in 1328 in the first case and 1336 in the second. Springold could well have been in his mid to late thirties which might have coincided with a child- rearing phase, and this is less likely for Echeman who must have reached his early forties.32 Both of them seem to have resumed a normal life in the years after the statement that they were poor. Even if tenants of middling and larger holdings could recover after a setback, or could trade their holdings (as did Stappe and Godit) for a promise of support for the remainder of their old age, the well-documented descent into poverty of so many tenants of yardlands, half-yardlands and bovates reminds us of the fragility of their position, as the success of these so-called ‘rich peasants’ often depended on the abilities and good health of the tenant. Finally we must turn to the part of the sample, 23 people in all, for whom there is no record of landholding, and many of whom could fall into the group of marginalized, insecure and property-less paupers, eking out an existence on the fringes of society. They were not, however, without names and connections with the community. They include wage-earners, such as John, servant of John de Wyk of Sandal in Yorkshire, against whom a plea of trespass was brought in 1339, though the court ruled that he could not be expected to pay even a two- penny amercement, and a harvest worker, Ella le Straunge, who in 1324 made off with sheaves from the corn field of Downham in Cambridgeshire.33 Four women were accused of having sex outside marriage or giving birth to bastards, of whom three were the daughters of settled tenants, though their immorality placed them beyond the conventional social boundaries, and their offspring would inevitably have faced difficulties in finding a niche in a world which set store by legitimate inheritance. Of the eight women who brewed or sold ale, or regrated bread, three were said to be married, though they were all judged to
31 K.M. Troup (ed.), The Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield from October 1338 to September 1340, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 12 (Leeds, 1999), p. 161; Page, p. 434. 32 Lock, Walsham 1303–1350, pp. 33, 39, 43, 115, 194. On the general problem, Henderson and Wall, pp. 4–8. 33 Troup, Wakefield … 1338–40, p. 141; M. Clare Coleman (ed.), Court Roll of the Manor of Downham 1310–27, Cambridgeshire Records Society, 11 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 76. The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 33 be responsible for paying amercements for brewing offences, and were assessed as individuals to be too poor to pay them. A number of paupers who appear once only in the records of a manor were probably transients, one of whom, John le Wayner, stayed long enough at Downham to be presented for not belonging to a tithing, an official grouping of males aged 12 and over who were responsible for maintaining good behaviour. Paupers are linked to crimes, like two men of Wakefield about whom nothing is known apart from the assaults of which they were accused on separate occasions. Margaret Stervyn at Elmley Castle, described as a beggar, offended against the village’s gleaning rules in 1385 by collecting sheaves as well as stray ears of corn. Richard and Agnes Neel of Warboys in Huntingdonshire had crossed the barriers of acceptable behaviour so often that they were said to be ‘useless and malefactors’ who were no longer worthy to live in the village.34 This last case was recorded in 1316, and 6 of the 23 appear in the documents during the Great Famine. Those living on the edge of society must have felt the effects of the food shortages acutely, but they may have appeared in the records because they were noticed and attracted resentment from their neighbours in hard times. We cannot know how many poor people escaped the notice of the authorities, and remain unrecorded. The fact, however, that a significant number of names of those without property can be extracted from the court rolls suggests that we have some knowledge of a wide range of paupers, including the most indigent. Some of them, like the Neels of Warboys, seem to have been social outcasts, and others offended against the morality and rules which bound communities together. But they were not all rootless migrants and outsiders, as we have seen that a number were members of village families. Some of them were affected by life-cycle poverty, such as the unmarried mothers and the young servants and wage-earners. Among the marginals, and to a degree among the cottagers and smallholders analysed above, structural poverty can be recognized: that is to say that this section of society could not sustain themselves because of their lack of landed resources, and their dependence on low wages. This problem was felt most profoundly in the period 1270–1349, in which most of our sample is recorded. Among both the marginals and cottagers the roots of hereditary poverty can be detected, as the children of the poor were themselves likely to lead a life deprived of security and adequate resources. Among the records of
34 On unmarried mothers, Elaine Clark, ‘Mothers at Risk of Poverty in the Medieval English Countryside’, Poor Women and Children, pp. 139–59, at pp. 150–51: Coleman, Downham, p. 62 (Wayner); Walker, Wakefield … 1331–33, p. 62; Jewell, Wakefield … 1348–50, p. 34 (assaults); Field, Elmley Castle, p. 47 (Stervyn); J. Ambrose Raftis,Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Mediaeval English Village (Toronto, 1964), p. 269 (Neels). 34 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France poverty from Walsham le Willows, we find two generations of the Wauncy family, William who died in 1349 and Thomas who was breaking the assize of ale in 1359.35
The Outlook of the Poor
One approach to discovering the paupers’ own perception of their position would be to investigate the possibility that they saw themselves as a distinct group, in other words that they developed a sense of identity. For the great majority this is extremely unlikely. There is little evidence that they formed coherent groups or acted together, though they must have known one another, notably by attending church for funerals and other occasions when money and food were distributed. They may sometimes have helped each other. Robert Grange of Blackwell in Warwickshire in 1362 married a widow who was in danger of losing tenure of her former husband’s holding after she was found not to be abstaining from sexual relations, but he paid only a low entry fine to acquire her land because of his poverty.36 We must suspect that when poor householders were accused of harbouring unwelcome strangers that their lodgers were themselves in a state of indigence. Although such small scale co-operation can be found, there is no evidence that the poor made common cause, by petitioning or staging revolts. An urban fraternity called the ‘poor men’ at Norwich might suggest a collective organization, but it is not clear that its members were in the depths of poverty.37 A strong impression, however, is that many of the poor, especially the landholders, sought to combat poverty and raise themselves into a better social position, or recover their former status. Like William Akclum they lived on credit, but unlike him they managed their affairs better by borrowing sums that they could hope to repay. Henry Bythebroke of Raistrick in the manor of Wakefield had an amercement pardoned because of his poverty in 1339; in that and the previous year he had acknowledged three debts, and made arrangements to pay them in the future. Every tenant was involved in networks of credit, in which they owed money but also had advanced money to others, which were only revealed when the money was not paid. Ralph Echeman of Walsham had contracted debts before he had been identified as too poor to pay an amercement
35 Patricia Crawford, Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2010), p. 8; Lock, Wa l s h a m 1303–1350, pp. 52, 54, 243, 323; Lock, Walsham 1351–99, pp. 51, 52, 54. 36 WCL, E20. 37 J. Toulmin Smith (ed.), English Gilds, EETS o.s. 40 (Oxford, 1870), pp. 40–41. The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 35 in 1336.38 Their most marketable asset was often their land, so we find them in East Anglia in times of trouble selling parcels, like Robert Jay of Walsham who in the months before he died in 1359 disposed separately of a half-rood and 2½ roods and a garden. In those regions where parcels of holdings could not be sold, they were sublet in contravention of the rules which said that this required the lord’s permission. The motive of Thomas ate Broke of Blackwell in 1377 was made clear: he was ‘poor and impotent’, and could not cultivate the land, so he sublet pieces of it to three different people. Some of those taking on these short-term informal leases, which were often for a champart rent of half of the crop, may well have been poor themselves, and access to land even on such unfavourable terms gave them the chance of a better living.39 In seven cases a holding of land was being acquired as a formal tenancy from the lord, and the lord waived or reduced the entry fine because of the poverty of the new tenant. In at least one case a cottage was replacing a 15- or 30-acre holding that was beyond the capacity of the tenant, but in other examples the new tenant was acquiring land for the first time and was hoping that the acquisition would improve his or her position. Many of the poor could not hope to advance themselves in the ways outlined above, but they had methods of surviving by practising the ‘cottage economy’, which made as much use as possible of the available resources. They gleaned in the corn fields after the harvest, and collected firewood. Isabella Spileman of Walsham in 1353 raided the lord’s wood for crab apples to make verjuice that could be sold. One kept a goat. As we have seen, they could brew or bake, and if they could not afford the equipment, gannocking and regrating provided at least a small income. If their houses had enough space, they could take in lodgers.40 These various devices for combatting and surviving poverty meant that some people labelled as ‘pauper’ were able to return to normal village life. John de Austhorpe of Methley in Yorkshire in 1366 sought to recover the holding of a bovate (15 acres) which previously he had surrendered because of his poverty. Afterwards he appears in the court records in various routine contexts, such as
38 Troup, Wakefield … 1338–40, pp. 13, 15, 41, 68, 73; Lock, Walsham 1303–1350, pp. 143, 155, 159, 194. 39 Lock, Walsham 1351–99, pp. 51, 53, 56; WCL, E 27. Other examples include Blackwell in 1370: WCL, E24; Oakington, Cambridgeshire in 1391: Page, p. 416; Methwold, Norfolk in 1272: George Caspar Homans, English Villagers in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1941), p. 202. 40 Lock, Walsham 1351–99, p. 41 (apples); Lock, Walsham 1303–1350, pp. 241–2 (goat); P.D.A. Harvey (ed.), Manorial Records of Cuxham, Oxfordshire, c.1200–1359, Oxfordshire Record Society, 50 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 614, 620, 622: a poor cottager is a serial receiver of strangers in the harvest. 36 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France failing to clean his ditches, until 1380. Robert Schert of Elmley Castle, having been regarded as too poor to pay a modest fine in 1383, was still being mentioned in the court in 1412. At Walsham, Ralph Echeman, after a mid-life crisis in 1336, had another 13 years of active life ahead of him. Far from being condemned to an early pauper’s grave, 17 of the 114 can be traced in the records for periods of between 18 and 43 years, implying that they lived close to the normal span.41 A significant proportion of poor people helped themselves, were hopeful and determined, and were able to live a long and relatively normal life. Were they helped by their village community as they struggled with poverty? Unfortunately there is no method of connecting individual recipients to the charitable distributions which we know were made in the parish and village. Very rarely do those making wills name those who should receive the alms that they expected their executors to distribute. In 1472, William Wyburgh of Denston in Suffolk left grain to five named people living in three neighbouring villages, but their backgrounds cannot be identified because of an absence of records.42 In addition to the gifts made by individuals, various funds were maintained in the common box or boxes by churchwardens and groups of feoffees acting on behalf of the village. The village government, managed by the village elders, was well practised in collecting money, for example in order to pay the lay subsidy (the king’s tax) and they expected to dispense funds as well. The paupers we have been investigating are very likely to have benefited from these sources of assistance.43 The role of communities and neighbours, however, should not be idealized. A study of a Suffolk village in the decades around 1300 has found little evidence that the wealthier peasants helped the poor. In the sample under investigation here quarrels between villagers have been mentioned already, but the worst case was probably that of Walter Noreys of Walsham, whose life was blighted by disputes with John Man throughout the 1330s, and these may have contributed to Noreys’s impoverished state in 1340. At Northfield in Worcestershire, Richard Playdmore was wounded in a stabbing four years after surrendering his holding because of poverty in 1443.44 But such frictions may not have been typical, as villagers supported an expectation that if old people gave up their holdings their
41 Wedemeyer Moore, pp. 145–56, shows paupers at St Ives with spans of 10–36 years. 42 Peter Northeast and Heather Falvey (eds), Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1439–74. Wills from the Register ‘Baldewyne’, II: 1461–74, Suffolk Records Society, 53 (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 478–80. 43 Christopher Dyer, ‘Poverty and its Relief in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 216 (2012). 44 Phillipp Schofield, ‘The Social Economy of the Medieval Village in the Early Fourteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008) (special issue): pp. 38–63; Lock, The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 37 successors would look after them by granting them accommodation together with some share of the income from the land. These agreements were announced in the manor court, lending them the authority of the lord, but it would be the community’s responsibility to ensure that they were enforced and observed. The same collaboration between villagers and the lord’s officials allowed paupers to be released from paying amercements and other dues which have provided the evidence on which this chapter is based. Individual wills made by fifteenth-century villagers show that some of them adopted positive attitudes towards the poor. They expected that their good works would help the progress of their souls through purgatory, and their alms would be reciprocated by the prayers of the poor. Taking a realistic view of the changing fortunes of those possessing land, husbands allowed for the possibility that their widows would have problems late in life ‘if she is reduced to need and poverty’ and anticipated that land might have to be sold. They expected that the poor could include their own families. Such a widow, Margery Trapett of Weston in Suffolk in her will of 1462, thanked her daughter Isobel and her son-in-law for caring for her in her ‘need, debility and poverty’. Even in her own plight, Margery still remembered those worse off than herself, and left money to be distributed at her funeral. Some wills expressed an unselfish sympathy for the poor, even for vagabonds, by revealing that the testators had set aside rooms and beds in their houses for such people, and arranged for their heirs to continue with these arrangements. Simon Wellys of Woolpit in Suffolk bequeathed for the use of the poor a chamber in his house in which another room would be occupied by his daughter. The same sympathy may have motivated Margery, daughter of Beatrice, of Elton in Huntingdonshire when she harboured a beggar in 1312, for which she was amerced in the manor court. Even the ‘malefactors’, Richard and Agnes Neel (mentioned above), were given ‘a second chance’ and offered the support of Warboys’ reeve as a pledge, to ensure that they were well behaved.45 In summing up this examination of attitudes among the poor, those who were or who had been landholders are most likely to have shared in the ideas predominating in society as a whole. They had belonged to communities, and played a role in them, and some hoped to regain their position. They
Walsham 1303–1350, pp. 146, 148, 167, 170, 174, 177, 242; Birmingham Archives and Heritage, Northfield court roll, 518090. 45 Northeast and Falvey, Wills of … Sudbury … II: 1461–74, pp. 159–60; Peter Northeast (ed.), Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1439–74. Wills from the Register ‘Baldewyne’, I: 1439–61, Suffolk Records Society, 44 (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 259–60; S.C. Ratcliffe (ed.),Elton Manorial Records, 1279–1351 (Cambridge, 1946), p. 197. The poor were sheltered according to miracle stories attached to saints’ lives: Metzler, pp. 209, 212. 38 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France believed in Christian duty and good works, and realized the efficacy of prayers, especially those contributed by poor people. They expected that the village community and parish, acting through the offices of the churchwardens, jurors, affeerors, tax assessors and others, had an obligation to look after the least fortunate residents. A further extension of this perceived relationship between communities and its less fortunate members may have led to the expectation that the poor were entitled to aid, as the better-off and the less fortunate were bound together in a series of implicit contracts. People who had helped the poor in their years of prosperity expected that in their declining years their successors at the top of the wheel of fortune would feel obliged to help those clinging to the bottom. A more specific social bonding could have arisen from the patron-client relations which are thought to have existed between cottagers and wealthier neighbours around 1300, for example in the well-documented Suffolk village of Redgrave.46 The attitudes of those who lay outside landed society, represented by the 23 individuals from the sample of 114, remain debatable. To the 23 should be added the undocumented paupers whose numbers cannot be known, who are represented in our sources by such anonymous individuals as the mendicus (beggar) who drew blood from a stranger at Framlingham in Suffolk in 1380. He was not treated with much sympathy, as although he depended on begging, he was amerced three pence, and this was not ‘condoned on account of his poverty’. No doubt those who influenced the decisions of the court were suspicious of beggars and expected them to have plenty of money.47 Such a lawless beggar, together with those perpetrating violent assaults, the cheating gleaner, the unmarried mothers and the ‘useless malefactors’ in our sample could be regarded as part of an underclass who were accused in national legislation of idleness, and who provoked the fears of disreputable inmates found in almshouse and hospital regulations. These were the wasters condemned as irresponsibly lazy inPiers Plowman. In the village bylaws they were to be forbidden to play illicit games and to walk at night, and they were ordered to accept employment at harvest time. We can imagine them, as depicted by their critics, as subscribing to ideas very different from the ‘respectable’ poor. They had little hope of improvement, lacking as they did landed resources, help from their families, and skills. In their ingratitude they were disrespectful of prevailing morality. They would spend alms money on drink and gambling, and would quarrel with one another and complain about their treatment. They would work when and if they pleased.
46 Richard Smith, ‘Kin and Neighbors in a Thirteenth Century Suffolk Community’, Journal of Family History, 4 (1979): pp. 219–56. 47 Pembroke College, Cambridge, Framlingham Court Rolls B. The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England 39
Conclusion
While the existence of an antisocial underclass which subscribed to subversive ideas does not lack plausibility, the evidence for its existence depends on the hostile beliefs of those in authority. Historians should not be too pessimistic about the possibility of gaining some insights into the lives of people who are ‘lost to us, save as an amorphous sub-group’.48 The type of ‘pauper-centred’ analysis attempted here tells us about the great variety of people who might fall into poverty. Even those with apparently substantial resources walked on a dangerous edge over which they could fall when their life-cycle exposed them to misfortune. The sample studied does not reflect the full numbers of those at the lower end of the spectrum of poverty, but it does show that the poor cannot simply be characterized as a rootless mass of inadequates. The bottom of the sample of 114 includes beggars and wanderers, but some of them had relatives in the village community, and some were married women who were trading in ale on their own account. Some were young people like the Sandal servant, known only as John, who could have expected at a later stage of their lives to have settled jobs or land. We have seen that respectable villagers felt sympathy for beggars and vagabonds, and were prepared to shelter them. Perhaps contemporaries, and modern historians in turn, have exaggerated the gulf between conventional society and the poor.
48 Phillipp Schofield, ‘Approaching Poverty in the Medieval Countryside’, in Cynthia Kosso and Anne Scott (eds), Poverty and Prosperity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Turnhout, forthcoming), p. 96. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 3 ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’: Survival Strategies for Single Mothers and Their Children in Late Medieval England
Philippa C. Maddern
In 1445, Walter Ramsey, brought before the episcopal consistory court at Dartford, admitted that he had fathered an illegitimate child on Margaret, servant of John White. The court ruled that he should be fined and undergo penance for the charge of fornication; but also ordered him to pay for the keeping of the ‘child produced between them’ and for ‘the sustenance of the woman, because she is foolish, and oppressed by utter poverty (omnino paupertate gravata)’.1 Mundane as it may appear, this episode raises important questions for the social historian of late medieval England. What, if any, was the systemic relationship between poverty and illegitimacy in England, during the period 1350 to 1500? If poverty and illegitimacy were related, what strategies could single mothers employ to counteract the effects of their position? Existing research on late medieval English illegitimacy is ill equipped, both by its paucity and narrow focus, to answer these questions. In the past 40 years, among a plethora of works on late medieval English social history, only 13 articles and one book have appeared on the subject of illegitimacy. Many of these concern the existence and status of bastards in the royal family, whose experiences cannot have been typical of the majority of illegitimate children.2
1 Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone [hereafter CKS], Drb/Pa 2 1444–56, fol. 31d (1445). Ramsey ‘promisit ad refocillandam prolem suscitatam inter eos & ad sustentationem mulieris eo quod fatua est & ominino paupertate gravata’. The woman’s surname is never given; her employer’s name may have been her only identity. 2 For example: Peter Hammond, ‘The Illegitimate Children of Edward IV’, The Ricardian, 13 (2003): 229–33; Danna R. Messer, ‘Filia notha or filia regis?: Kinship and the Acquiescence of Royal Illegitimate Daughters (c.1090–1440)’, Foundations: Newsletter of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy, 1(1) (2003): 51–3; Richard H. Helmholz, ‘The Sons of Edward IV: A Canonical Assessment of the Claim that They Were Illegitimate’, in 42 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Some of the remaining literature examines the legal status or definitions of bastardy, but not its social effects.3 Late medieval illegitimacy as a social phenomenon has been dealt with almost entirely as an element – though perhaps a somewhat marginal one – of demographic history. The demography of illegitimacy in late medieval England is a problem of super-Gordian complexity. Lacking the parish registration of births and marriages available to early modern scholars, researchers seeking to calculate numbers and proportions of illegitimate births have tried to use recorded prosecutions of women for leyrwite (generally fornication) or childwite (bearing an illegitimate child) in manorial court records.4 These attempts, as Judith Bennett devastatingly remarked in 1987, ‘have failed’.5 No subsequent discovery has modified that opinion. Not only is it impossible, as Lawrence Poos and Richard Smith argued, to discover how many leyrwite fines were paid simply for illicit sex, rather than actual births of bastard children; as both Bennett and E.D. Jones have even more decisively shown, records of leyrwite and childwite vary so haphazardly between regions, and appear in such a small proportion of cases in the manorial courts 1350 to 1500, as to preclude meaningful statistical analysis.6 We can no longer accept Zvi Razi’s suggestion that the fall in manorial prosecutions for fornication or bastard-bearing after 1350 necessarily reflected an actual decline in rates of illegitimate births (due, Razi proposed, to improved economic conditions after 1350).7 On the contrary, persistent references to illegitimate births in other late medieval records – such as ecclesiastic court
P.W. Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Loyalty, Lordship and Law (London, 1986), pp. 91–103; Cecil Humphrey-Smith, ‘The Armorial Bearings of the Illegitimate Issue of the Kings of England’, Coat of Arms, I, new series, 3(112) (1980): 198–203 and II, new series, 4(116) (1981): 326–9; Chris Given-Wilson and Alice Curteis, The Royal Bastards of Medieval England (London, 1984). 3 For example, R.H. Helmholz, ‘Bastardy Litigation in Medieval England’, American Journal of Legal History, 13(4) (1969): 360–83. 4 Most notably, Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish; Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 64–71. 5 Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (Oxford, 1987), p. 266, n. 62. 6 L.R. Poos, Zvi Razi and Richard M. Smith, ‘The Population History of Medieval English Villages: A Debate on the Use of Manor Court Records’, in Zvi Razi and Richard M. Smith (eds), Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford, 1996), pp. 298–368, at pp. 320–22; E.D. Jones, ‘The Medieval Leyrwite: A Historical Note on Female Fornication’, English Historical Review, 107 (1992): 945–53; Judith M. Bennett, ‘Writing Fornication: Medieval Leyrwite and Its Historians’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 13 (2003): 131–62, at 141–2, 150–54. 7 Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 64–71. ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 43 records, petitions, and inquisitions post mortem – show that significant numbers of illegitimate children continued to be born, presumably to both bond and free women.8 If, despite this phenomenon, manorial courts were not prosecuting, it is likely, as Bennett suggested, that the reasons were more to do with community economics than with actual illegitimacy rates. Before the Black Death, she argues, leading men from hard-pressed village communities tried to recoup from poorer women some of the costs of supporting their illegitimate children. In the comparatively prosperous times following the terrible population cull of the late fourteenth century, these practices fell out of use.9 Her clear-sighted, but (for demographers) discouraging judgement seems to have left studies of late medieval plebeian illegitimacy in limbo; no one wants to tackle a problem apparently so hopeless of solution. Yet the questions I have posed do not rely for an answer on demographic statistics. Knowing the numbers and proportions of illegitimate births in England 1350–1500 might help us assess the possible scale of poverty among single women and their children, but not its existence, causes or nature. To analyse these phenomena, we should turn to other sources: for instance, canon law texts for rulings on the responsibilities of parents, wills for testimony as to the kinds of provision made for some illegitimate children in particular cases, and most pertinently, records of ecclesiastical courts and Chancery petitions for what they tell us of the life-circumstances of substantial numbers of illegitimate children and their mothers.10 The most cursory survey of this material reveals that illegitimacy was by no means synonymous with poverty in late medieval England, either for the mother or the child. Well-off men of good conscience made provision – sometimes generous and long lasting – for their bastard children. In 1421, Sir Henry Noon, for example, left the issues of his manor of Multon to sustain his two
8 My own survey of ecclesiastical office and instance cases and visitations, deriving from the dioceses of York, Canterbury, Rochester, Norwich, London, Durham and Hereford 1350–1520, plus other evidence, such as Early Chancery Petitions, the printed Inquisitions Post Mortem in the period 1352–1447, and some wills, has yielded evidence of over 540 illegitimate births. This number is very far from complete. Ecclesiastical court records do not survive for all dioceses over the whole of the period (for example, there are none from London before the 1470s); even so, the surviving material is so voluminous that it is possible only to sample, rather than completely search it. 9 Bennett, ‘Writing Fornication’, pp. 150–54. 10 Bennett remarks that in fact, though ecclesiastical courts almost certainly did not prosecute all, or even the majority of cases of fornication, they did produce many more prosecutions than the manorial courts, even in the latter’s heyday – ‘Writing Fornication’, p. 136; see also n. 8 above. 44 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France illegitimate sons Edmund and Henry, further stipulating that when they came of age, they should be jointly seised of the manor, and his wife Katherine should deliver a substantial legacy of £13. 6s. 8d. to each of them. If his wife bore him no legitimate heirs, his illegitimate sons were to inherit his whole estate.11 On a hardly less generous scale, John Erlham, a Norwich merchant, made his will in 1423 leaving his illegitimate son John Cook £13. 6s. 8d. (as compared to £10 for his legitimate son, also named John), all his armour, any ‘short gown’ that he wished to choose, a pair of sheets, and other items of clothing. To John Cook’s wife, he left a gown of ‘murrey’; to Cook’s daughter Katherine £5 towards her marriage, all the hangings from his bed, a pillow, a ‘great chest’, three silver spoons and other goods; and to the ‘mother of my son John Cook’ (matri filij mei Johannis Cook – evidently not his surviving wife Margaret) a furred gown. Both his legitimate and his illegitimate son were named among his executors.12 Evidently neither Edmund and Henry Noon, nor John Cook and his family (including his mother) lived in poverty. Indeed Erlham must have paid for his bastard son to complete an apprenticeship with the cooks’ guild in Norwich, thus ensuring him a modest, but respectable and secure, means of livelihood. On a lesser scale, in the fourteenth century Philip de Somerville, lord of the manor of Alrewas in Staffordshire, found tenancies on his manor for between two and five of his illegitimate children (presumably fathered on peasant women).13 Was it simply chance, then, that the wealth gap between Walter Ramsey’s mistress and the Noon boys or John Cook, was so abysmal? I argue that it was not; that there were systemic factors predisposing many illegitimate children and their mothers to poverty. In particular, the scarcity, paucity and short duration of single mothers’ entitlements, together with the difficulty of accessing them, meant that the mother of an illegitimate child was almost entirely dependent on the father having both the capacity and the will to support her and her baby. Where either was lacking, and where the woman had insufficient resources of her own, her situation was at best frighteningly marginal, and at worst unsustainable. What rights could illegitimate children and their mothers claim? The children were not, by common law, automatically entitled to any inheritance, and legally could not have heirs themselves. (No doubt this was why John Erlham and Henry Noon had to specify with such exactness their bequests to their illegitimate children.) Canon law, however, was at first sight more generous. Late medieval
11 The ationalN Archives, London [hereafter TNA], PROB 11 Register Marche Quires 30–55, fols 186–7. 12 Norfolk and Norwich Record Office [hereafter NRO], Hyrning, fols 109v–110r. 13 Bennett, ‘Writing Fornication’, p. 138, citing Helena Graham, ‘A Social and Economic Study of the Late Medieval Peasantry: Alrewas, Staffordshire, in the Fourteenth Century’ (PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 1994). ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 45
Italian canonists such as Panormitanus and Antoninus de Butrio, according to Richard Helmholz, believed that ‘the upbringing of children is of natural law, and proceeds from natural law and the instinct of nature’. Hence a parent’s duty to support the child could not be set aside, ‘cum sit de iure naturali’.14 In practice this meant that alimentatio prolis (child maintenance) was upheld in at least two ways by ecclesiastical courts. In some office acta, as in the case of Walter Ramsey, the court took the initiative in ruling that the father should make a specified payment to his erstwhile partner for the maintenance of the child. Alternatively, the mother could, through the process of an instance cause, enlist the sanctions of the court to force the father to pay. One other possible entitlement for single mothers was available through the fact that English ecclesiastical jurisdictions could impose on repeated fornicators the sentence of abjuration sub pena nubendi. In essence this ruling meant that a couple found to be living in concubinage, or subject to repeated citations for fornication, could be ordered to forswear each other’s company, simultaneously making a contract of marriage provisional on their being found to have subsequently slept together. If they did subsequently have sex, and were discovered by the ecclesiastical authorities, they were assumed to be married, and the court could order that they solemnize the marriage in church.15 Late medieval women certainly knew of this opportunity. Some couples appealed to it to confirm a marriage, and at least one single mother – Alice Partrik of Thirsk – attempted to invoke her right to marry the father of her child, first by setting up an (alleged) sexual meeting following their abjuration sub pena nubendi, then by appealing her case to the York consistory.16 Alice and John Maryot of Sowerby had appeared before the dean of Bulmer in the chapel of Sowerby on 9 December 1393 to forswear each other’s company on pain of marriage. By that time they already had a child. Less than a month after the abjuration, Alice appeared at the window of John’s house asking for admittance, evidently intending at least to make it appear to his neighbours that she and John were still sexual partners. Despite a less than encouraging welcome (according to John’s own testimony, he greeted her with the words ‘What are you doing
14 R.H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), p. 108, n. 124. 15 Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, pp. 172–4; for a case of abjuration sub pena nubendi producing order to solemnize the marriage, see Durham Cathedral Archives [hereafter DCA], Capitula Generalia Prioris Dunelmiensis, fols 28d–29r (Joan Hansell and John Porta, 1440). 16 Canterbury Cathedral Archives [hereafter CC], Y.1.1, fol. 4d (Joan Atte Woode v. Robert Taillour, 1392); Borthwick Institute, York [hereafter BI], CP E. 211; and BI, CP F. 123 (Margaret Tapton v. John Gregory, 1438). 46 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France here?’) she managed to gain entry for long enough to rouse the suspicions of John’s neighbours (and later witnesses in the ensuing instance cause). Evidently Partrik saw the abjuration sub pena nubendi as the answer to her problem of how to achieve long-term stable maintenance for herself and her child. But how effective and accessible was such a solution to single mothers in general? In a few cases, marriage was successfully established. Roger de Coupland and Elena Comyn agreed in 1385 that they wanted to marry, and were willing to solemnize the union. Likewise John Chapman, in 1472, professed himself willing to fulfil the marriage within a few weeks of the abjuration and conditional oath.17 But there were major obstacles to the widespread injunction and enforcement of abjuration sub pena nubendi. Canonists worried lest the ruling comprised coercion, which itself would invalidate the marriage. Possibly because of such fears, the practice of imposing it may have been declining in the fifteenth century.18 If so, changing ecclesiastical court practice left fewer options for single mothers. But even where imposed, the provision was difficult to enforce on any but wholeheartedly willing partners. As Helmholz notes, it was hard to find witnesses to actual sexual congress following an oath of abjuration. In the case of Alice Partrik, the court was reduced to taking testimony from John Maryot’s curtain-twitching neighbours on how long she had stayed in his house, and whether ‘the more part of his neighbours’ (maior pars vicinorum ipsius Johannis) believed that they had had sex – neither of which observations could actually prove coition.19 Though no verdict is recorded, it seems doubtful that Alice’s case succeeded. Other evidence suggests that unwilling male partners were adept at finding canonically valid reasons to evade marriage. When in 1372 Joan Atte Woode attempted to invoke the sub pena nubendi clause against Robert Taillour, he made no attempt to deny that they had slept together after the abjuration – he merely claimed that their relationship fell within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, because a third cousin of his had in the past made a
17 York Minster Archives [hereafter YMA], M2(1)f, fol. 22r (though in this case no child is mentioned); YMA, Visitations Book 1472–1550, L2(3)c, fol. 37r. 18 Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, pp. 180–81; though his and my figures together suggest that there were at least 19 cases of its use in the period 1360–1489, from the dioceses of Norwich, York, Rochester, Canterbury, Durham, Hereford and Lichfield. Fourteen of these were from the fifteenth century, which does not suggest a steep decline in the use of the provision. 19 Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, p. 175; BI, CP E. 211. The deponents, William de Stabyll and Richard Lambe, were both willing to swear to Alice’s knocking at John’s window, but both testified that though John had admitted to them afterwards that he had let her in, he had told them that ‘se ipsam nolle carnaliter cognoscere’. It is less clear, however, that they or other neighbours believed his denial. ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 47 contract of marriage with Atte Woode.20 In 1438, John Gregory of Nottingham managed to escape marriage with Margaret Tapton under the sub pena nubendi clause by claiming that he was already married to one Margaret Passyngton.21 This case reflects the fact that an even more fundamental obstacle than legal difficulties confronted single women wanting to marry their child’s father. Put bluntly, comparatively few late medieval fathers of illegitimate children were in a position to offer marriage to their partners, even had they wished to; a fact clarified by analysis of those references to illegitimate births which give some information on the status (religious and marital) of either the mother or the father. In the records I have found, the father’s condition is given in 259 instances, and the mother’s in 232 (though not necessarily in the same cases). Table 3.1 shows the results with disturbing clarity.
Table 3.1 Marital, religious and social status of fathers and mothers of illegitimate children in England, 1350–1500
Fathers No. % Mothers No. %
Priest or monk 77 31.9 Nun 2 0.8
Lay, married 90 37.4 Lay, married 39 16.5
Lay, single 54 22.4 Lay, single or widow 84 35.4
Servant 20 8.3 Servant 81 34.2
Prostitute 31 13.1
Totals 259 100.0 Totals 232 100.0
Comparatively few fathers were in a position to offer marriage to their partners, whereas a much greater proportion of mothers of illegitimate children could have married, if they could find a partner. Of 232 identifiable mothers, 35.4 per cent were known to be single or widowed, and probably many of the
20 CC, Y.1.1, fol. 4d. 21 BI, CP F. 123: he then avoided solemnizing marriage to Margaret Passyngton by claiming previous marriage to a third woman, Alice Strelley. 48 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
81 servants (34.2 per cent), plus some of the named prostitutes, were also single.22 Even if, on a very conservative estimate, we calculate that only half the women identified as servants or prostitutes were single, nearly 60 per cent of mothers of illegitimate children were not married. By contrast, a very large majority of identifiable fathers – 69.3 per cent of 259 – were either clerics (officially celibate) or already married. The apparent differences in situation between mothers and fathers of illegitimate children may not, of course, have been as stark as these figures indicate. Possibly many of the large number of non-clerical fathers whose marital status is uncertain (a further 132 cases) were single, though it is hard to see why single men should have been less often identified than married men. Conversely, illegitimate children of married women, concealed within a legitimate family, might never come to official attention. Yet with all allowances made, it seems undeniable that a much greater proportion of mothers than of fathers of illegitimate children were free to marry, and hence that the greatest obstacle for a single woman seeking to marry her child’s father was not the willingness or otherwise of ecclesiastical courts to order marriage, nor even the man’s commitment to their relationship, but his likely marital or clerical status. It is, however, true that not all married or clerical fathers were unwilling to support their children. Some priests apparently kept their concubine and offspring in their household, or supported them elsewhere. Walter Williams, Rector of Abberton in Hereford diocese, was specifically cited for keeping his servant Agnes ‘publicly in his house’ and fathering children with her.23 In 1410, John Boteler, a Kentish chaplain, was said to have kept his mistress and probably the child she had borne him at Shotsden Hill, boarding with one Isabella Waterdych.24 In 1429–30, the almoner’s roll of Norwich priory recorded payment of 2s. 8d. for boarding the ‘little son of the rector of Tuddenham’ for four weeks. No doubt the rector paid for his son’s board (though in this case we have no evidence of any support for the mother).25
22 I have argued elsewhere that servant marriage in late medieval England was by no means as infrequent as is commonly supposed: Philippa Maddern, ‘‘In myn own house’; The Troubled Connections between Servant Marriages, Late-Medieval English Household Communities and Early Modern Historiography’, in Stephanie Tarbin and Susan Broomhall (eds), Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 45–59. It remains likely, nevertheless, that a fair proportion of female domestic servants were not married. 23 Hereford County Record Office [hereafter HCRO], HD4/1/89, 1446, fols 87 and 91, the original charge was ‘publice in domo sua & proles suscitauit de eadem’. 24 CC, X.8.1, fol. 19d; though on fol. 66d, he is also said to have kept her at ‘Molessh’. 25 NRO, DCN 1/6/59 and 1/6/61. There is no information on where and how the child was living before and after the specified four-week period. ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 49
But since clerics were officially debarred from keeping concubines and children in their own household, such arrangements must always have been subject to the threat of dissolution. Edmund Poll, vicar of Newbold in Yorkshire, had been ordered to remove his mistress Alice from his ‘house and company’ before June 1409, presumably with their child (or children). Though he was evidently reluctant to do so (the court was still pursuing the case in February 1410) his chances of keeping both his household and his benefice were slim.26 John Donace, chaplain of Driffield in 1374, had been living with his concubine Margery Badde for five years, and the couple had more than one child. But the York consistory insisted that Margery be committed to the supervision of the vicar of Wetwang, leaving no clue as to where the children were to be lodged, or who was to support them.27 It seems likely, then, that most single mothers, unable to marry, or even maintain a household with their partner, had to look to other forms of support. Among these was the alimentatio prolis to which they were entitled not only by canon law, but apparently by popular opinion. Substantial evidence suggests that ordinary English laypeople in the period 1350–1520 believed that good parents owed a duty to support their children, legitimate or not. Deponents in ecclesiastical causes, for instance, clearly thought that a man’s acknowledgement of, and support for, a child proved that it was his own, and could be grounds for presumption that he intended, or had contracted, marriage with the child’s mother. In 1348, Adam de Helay offered as convincing evidence of Constance del Brome’s and John de Rocherfeld’s marriage the observation that they treated each other ‘with marital affection … as husband and wife’ and that he himself had seen them ‘feed, care for, and acknowledge [their two children] as their own’.28 The concept was even occasionally extended to support for the mother of a known illegitimate child. In the early 1360s in Yorkshire, deponents witnessing to the alleged defamation of William de Sapperton, rector of Hemsworth, said that the supposed defamer had not only accused de Sapperton of fathering a child, but had claimed that he ‘found and
26 YMA, Register of comperta, M2(1)f, fols 42d, 44r. Cf. William Lyndwood, in his Provinciale, under the heading ‘Of the dwelling together of Clerks and Women: Canon of Stephen’, specifically ordered that ‘Clerks that have benefices or holy orders may not be bold to keep concubines openly in their houses, neither may have open haunt to them in any other place with slander … after they be once canonically monished, we will they be looked upon by subtraction of their office and benefice’:Lyndwood’s Provinciale: The Text of the Canons therein Contained, Reprinted from the Translation made in 1534, ed. J.V. Bullard and H. Chalmer Bell (London, 1929), p. 50. 27 YMA, Register of comperta, M2(1)f, fol. 14d. 28 BI, CP E.62: ‘nutrare pascere & tenere vt suos’. 50 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France sustained’ the woman when she was pregnant, providing her with clothes and all other necessities, which ‘he would not have done unless she was his concubine’.29 Fathers who attempted to shuffle off their child-maintenance responsibilities onto others roused indignation among their contemporaries. The procurator representing the unnamed woman who had borne a child to Robert Tyherst disapprovingly told the Rochester consistory court in 1446 that ‘the said Robert does not support the woman with child maintenance, so that a stranger takes on the expense’.30 Yet however widely held were notions of in-principle support, they did not, it appears, regularly translate either into court orders for alimentatio, or adequate child-maintenance payments. Table 3.2 shows the 116 cases of illegitimacy 1350–1500 from which the living circumstances of the mother and child, and their possible sources of maintenance, can be deduced with some certainty.
Table 3.2 Known circumstances of illegitimate children and their mothers: 1350–1500
Situation of Mother and Child Number Percentage
Mother said to be working (e.g. as servant or prostitute) 31 26.7
Father ordered to provide alimentatio prolis / support the mother 21 18.1
Father supporting child 17 14.7
Child died/abandoned/sold 13 11.2
Mother in hospital, or child in hospital/put to nurse 11 9.5
Mother said to have left the diocese 10 8.6
Father resists court order/refuses to support child 8 6.9
Non-parent ordered to support child 5 4.3
Total 116 100
29 BI, CP E.249: ‘inuenit & sustentauit dictam filiam postquam fuit impregnate … [quod] non fecisset nisi fuisset concubina sua’. 30 CKS, Drb/Pa 2 1444–56, fol. 58r: ‘dictus Robertus non releuat mulierem in alimentacione prolis sic quod extraneus persone cogniit ad expens’. ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 51
By far the largest single category (26.7 per cent) is that in which the mother herself was apparently working to support her child. In less than one-fifth of cases (18.1 per cent) was the outcome a court order to the father to provide alimentatio prolis (and/or support for the mother), though in a further 17 instances (14.7 per cent) the father was apparently already maintaining the child. Very occasionally, too, the father’s child-support appears as only one factor in a negotiated maintenance arrangement involving several people. In 1456, the Rochester diocese consistory court approved a scheme whereby the child of Alice Mower and Thomas Maynard (the latter formerly a servant of William Grenehill of Gillingham) would be cared for by Alice’s sister and brother-in-law. Thomas was ordered to pay 2d. per week towards its maintenance, and a further 2d. per week was to be contributed ‘in the way of charity’ by Grenehill.31 Yet even adding all instances of paternal support together does not produce a majority of cases in which the father was either maintaining his illegitimate child, or was ordered to do so. In just over half the cases (60, or 51.7 per cent), either the mother was apparently earning her own and her child’s living; or someone else (an institution or an individual) was paying for the child’s upkeep; or the child had died or been abandoned. Furthermore, though ecclesiastical courts were sometimes willing to order the payment of alimentatio prolis, the number of women who themselves brought a suit to the instance side of the courts’ business to claim payment for child maintenance was small. I have found only 12 cases in the whole period 1350–1500 where a single mother sued for alimentation for her child.32 Why were single mothers apparently so reluctant to sue for their rights? Perhaps they knew too well that the results were uncertain, often long delayed, and at best meagre. To take these problems in order: in the absence of DNA testing, paternity was exceedingly difficult to establish, especially where fathers were reluctant to be identified. One intriguing piece of evidence suggests that some men strongly resented women naming them as possible fathers of illegitimate children. In 1400, the parishioners of a Yorkshire parish made a series of complaints against their rector, William Anger, including the charge that he ‘does not wish to baptise the children of single women in the parish unless they publically announce and
31 CKS, Drb/Pa 2, fol. 282r: ‘per via elemosine’. It is possible that the fathers of some of the six children boarded out or put to nurse, paid for their maintenance; but much less likely that the partners of the 10 women whose whereabouts were unknown to the court continued to pay maintenance to them and their child. 32 The estr of the cases where alimentatio prolis was ordered came to the office side of the ecclesiastical courts, where prosecutions were initiated by the court officers (as in the Walter Ramsey case above). 52 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France proclaim who are the fathers of their children’. Anger admitted that he tried to enforce this rule; but his male parishioners were clearly determined to resist the practice. Whether they were motivated by considerations of maintaining an honourable reputation or avoiding child maintenance is unclear, but their attitude can hardly have made it easier for women to gain court orders for maintenance.33 A later and telling instance of disputed paternity arose in the cases of John Pery and Thomas Persson, both cited following the 1496 Rochester diocesan visitation for adultery with Cristina Bodull. There was no doubt that Cristina had borne a child; the problem was that she was either unable or unwilling to say whether John or Thomas had fathered it, and, as the clerk noted ‘neither of them wants to be the father of the child’. But even had Cristina been sure of her child’s paternity, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the court to extract alimentatio – both men were said to have absconded from the district.34 Indeed, absence could be a man’s best way of avoiding or deferring payment. William de Hexham of York initially refused to pay child-support to Emmota de Ripon, because, he said, he did not know ‘whether it was his child or not’ (an fuit prolis sua vel non). Asked on what grounds he doubted the paternity – that is, whether he knew Emmota to have been ‘defamed’ with any other man – he was forced to admit that he did not know, because he had ‘for a long time’ been absent ‘overseas and in other remote places’ (in partibus transmarinis & alijs locis remotis). Though the court promptly judged him to owe Emmota some child maintenance, at best she had been waiting a long time for it.35 Even fathers of illegitimate children whose identity was undisputed might prove unwilling to spend their resources on supporting either mother or child, as the sad case of Alice, servant of John de Man, a London pan-maker, reveals. John, apparently a married man, was said to have got Alice pregnant. When the pregnancy was discovered she ‘was expelled from his house’. How she supported herself subsequently is unknown, but she clearly had no long-term prospect of maintenance elsewhere, because ‘towards the time of childbirth’ she was ‘received again’ in Man’s household. There, so the court believed, ‘from lack of a midwife [she] died with the child, and it is not known where the child is buried’.36
33 YMA, Register of comperta, M2(1)f, fol. 31r: the charge was ‘non vult baptizare infants mulier. solutar. paroch. sue nisi prius denunciate publice et predicent qui sunt patris filiorum suorum’. Anger himself was accused of fathering an illegitimate child. 34 CKS, Drb/Pa 4, fol. 327r: ‘nullus eorum voluit esse pater pueri’. 35 YMA, Consistory Court Book, M2/1c 1371–75, fol. 2r (case heard 22 October 1371). 36 Corporation of London Record Office [hereafter CLRO], Guildhall MS 9064/2, fol. 115r (c. 1485): ‘quae erat expulsa a domo sua & erga tempus puerperi iterato recepta quae ob defectum mulierum moriebatur cum puero & nescitur vbi sepeliebatur’. ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 53
Thus the reluctance (or inability) of fathers to pay maintenance accounts in part for delays between the birth of the child and the father’s appearance in court, or between the order for alimentatio and its payment – which could be long enough to strain the resources of single mothers. In 1545, a case heard in the bishopric of Rochester shows that Alice Adamson, formerly servant to John Hobbye, had given birth to his child 15 weeks before the court ordered him to pay child maintenance. Most unusually, the letter written to Hobbye by the court official survives. It tells us that he was to give Alice back pay of 6s. 8d. in order to ‘fytche home the stuffe that lyethe to gage’, from which it appears that for those 15 weeks Alice had subsisted at least partly by pawning goods to support herself and her child.37 But most importantly, even where the father could be identified, traced and finally made to pay, the benefit generally allotted was meagre, and its duration short. In only 15 cases in the period 1371–1495 are the records clear on how much alimentatio was allotted, but the story they tell is consistent and depressing. The highest amount granted to a mother and child was 6d. per week (which very unusually included 2d. ‘in way of charity’ from the employer of the alleged father of the child); the lowest, the equivalent of 1. 4d. per week (8s. over a year).38 The average amount over the 15 cases was 2. 9d. per week; and in one case the amount of 3d. per week was expected to cover the needs of the mother and two children.39 In most cases the payment duration was not specified, but in five instances, the given period was dismayingly short; in four, the father was to pay child-support only until his child (or children) were aged three, while in another, alimentatio was to last only as long as the child was being breastfed.40 Both the sums granted and the period over which they were to be paid remained remarkably constant 1350–1500. Indeed, the case of Alice Adamson (cited above), though it took place in 1545, appears entirely typical of court orders over the preceding 200 years. The complete order, expressed in the court’s letter to the child’s father, 30 July 1545, ran thus:
37 CKS, DRb/Pa 24, fol. 12d. 38 CKS, Drb/Pa 2 1444–56, fol. 282r (1456); YMA, Consistory Court Book, M2/1c 1371–75, fol. 2v (1373). 39 YMA, Register of comperta, M2(1)f, fol. 20r (1376). 40 YMA, Consistory Court Book, M2/1b, fol. 9v (1371); YMA, Register of comperta, M2(1)f, fols 20r, 22d (1376 and 1389); CC, Sandwich Instance, Office and Probate Acta, Archdeacon’s Court 1487–95, Y.4.2, fol. 123d (1495); CKS, Drb/Pa 2 1444–56, fol. 282r (1456). 54 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Goodman hobby I commande mi vnto yow right so certifying you that my lords pleasure is that ye shall pay or cause to be payed vnto Alis Adamson layte your seruaunt for the tyme past sins the child was borne being about xv wekes and so fytche home the stuffe that lyethe to gage vj s viijd. And from this day being the xxxth day of July vnto May Day next if the Child do lyue so long to pay euery weke iij d and than or at suche tyme as the Child shalbe wyned holly to take the said Child to your kepyng and so clerelie be discharged from paying of any more moneye.41
Apparently Alice was to be paid 3d. per week, for a minimum of 13 months (even including the 15 weeks’ back pay), effectively to act as wet nurse to her own child. The baby would thereafter be supported in Hobbye’s house, whether as acknowledged offspring, charity child, or servant is unclear. She herself was evidently expected to move to another paid job, renouncing any claim to her child. This level of payment was meagre by any standards. It compares poorly with the salaries achievable by labouring women, and even with other forms of charity. Sandy Bardsley, for instance, found that women rural workers, especially at harvest time, could earn between 3.44 and 4.44d. per day in East Yorkshire, 1363–64. Though this amount was less than that typically paid to men (4.17– 4.55d. per day), assuming a six-day working week it was nearly seven times the average amount of alimentatio.42 One early fourteenth-century assessment of wage-earning poverty in Norwich put the danger level at 1d. a day, or at least twice the average level of alimentatio.43 Charity was less generous; but even the three poor men benefiting from a bequest of John Bedham in the London parish of St Mary at Hill in the late fifteenth century, received 4d. per week, and it is
41 CKS, DRb/Pa 24, fol. 12d; CKS, Liber Testamentorum probato et administratorum commissaris, fol. 12d. The sums I have found accord with Helmholz’s findings thatalimentatio prolis varied between 1d. and 3d. per week, per child (apparently based on six cases). 42 Sandy Bardsley, ‘Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 165 (1999): 3–29, esp. 11–16, and Tables 1 (p. 12) and 2 (p. 15). Note that John Hatcher, though he disagrees with Bardsley on the reasons for gendered wage differentials, does not dispute the figures: Hatcher, ‘Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England’,Past and Present, 173 (2001): 191–8. 43 William Hudson and John C. Tingey (eds), The Records of the City of Norwich, 2 vols (Norwich, 1906–10), 1, 189; though the city’s rulers were more concerned with the fact that such people had no goods to be distrained in cases of legal action against them, than with their living standard. ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 55 not clear that they were expected to support families on that sum.44 The average amount of alimentatio is closer to the absolute minimum charitable donation of a farthing a day commonly offered to prisoners and destitute tenants than to the penny a day more usually offered to inmates of almshouses.45 Estimates of the actual costs of comparable child care in the late medieval period are hard to find, but accounts submitted in a Chancery dispute over the settlement of the estate of Sir Ralph Verney, who died in 1478, show that his executors paid ‘for Norsyng of a maiden childe founden in the Strete for iij yeres lij s’ plus a further 24s. 8d. ‘for kepyng of the ffoundelyng’ – a total of 5.9d. per week.46 Similarly, in a 1494 bigamy case, Richard Raymond admitted that he had married, and had a child with, Elizabeth Kyrkhouse before temporarily leaving her to ‘marry’ Emma Cowper; but said that he had given her for her support, while the cause was pending, 6d. every week ‘and a measure of five gallons of the best ale’.47 It is just possible that some fathers of illegitimate children – or even uninvolved men careful of their reputations – could be persuaded or blackmailed into paying more generously than usual for the upkeep of an illegitimate child. A damaged Chancery petition from the time of Cardinal Wolsey (1518–29) was apparently brought by a male petitioner who claimed that he was being unjustly sued on a bond of obligation (allegedly signed under duress) to pay 6d. per week ‘for the fyndyng’ of an illegitimate child.48 Later in the sixteenth century, Alse Mathewe was advised by a parish official to name her master, rather than her penniless young lover, as the father of her child, both because he could afford to sustain her, and because some men, even when wrongly accused of paternity, would rather pay the price than have their morality publicly questioned.49 But there is no hard evidence for such practices before 1500, and the balance of
44 Henry Littlehales (ed.), The Medieval Records of a London City Church (St Mary at Hill) AD 1420–1559, EETS, o.s. 125 and 128 (1904, 1905; repr. Millwood, NY, 1972), pp. 89 (1477–79), 110 (1479–81), 141 (1487–88), 154 (1489–90), 167 (1490–91), 191 (1492–93), 204 (1493–94), 211 (1494–95). One of the men, William Paris, also regularly received money for work around the church: for instance, ‘for wachchyng of the sepulcre, for swepying of the church and for meate and drynke, vij d.’ (p. 131); for ‘mendyng of diuers thynges at the gardens at towrhill, 7d.’ (p. 154), for ‘swepyng of the cherch and makynd clene of the pewys, 2d.’, ‘for making of a payre of trestylles, 8d.’ (p. 185). This kind of work was apparently not available to single mothers. 45 Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 253. 46 TNA, C1/230/53. 47 CLRO, Guildhall MS 9065, Liber examinationem, fols 212r–215v, esp. fol. 214r. 48 TNA, C1/600/20; since the damage affects nearly half the petition, the details of the case are unclear, but it appears that the petitioner denied paternity of the child. 49 Essex Record Office, Quarter Sessions, A/SR 107/44 (1588). 56 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France probability suggests that settlements remained at a generally low level through the period 1350–1500. Some idea of the meagre standard of living entailed by these payments can be obtained by comparing alimentatio to contemporary food prices. The assize of bread, for instance, ensured that there would always be a farthing loaf for the poor to buy, but allowed for the weight of the loaf to decrease as the price of wheat increased, and vice versa. Since the actual grain prices on which the weight of the loaf was calculated were locally set (to account for regional fluctuations in grain supply), it is impossible to calculate completely accurately the buying capacity of single mothers.50 But a rough assessment, using the grain price indices compiled by the editors of The Agrarian History of England and Wa l e s suggests that in times of the lowest wheat prices (4.93 shillings per quarter in the decade 1440–50) a single mother receiving 3d. per week could afford to buy over 4.5 pounds of bread per day – provided she restricted herself to one of the two cheapest types of bread, treyt (whole grain, of low quality, and probably not all wheat) or ‘all common corn’ (probably a mixture of wheat, oats, barley and rye). Her survival was assured, and she might be able to afford some ale or other foodstuffs to supplement a monotonous and not particularly nutritious bread diet. But in a decade of high grain prices (such as the 8.16 shillings per quarter of wheat in 1360–70) she would have difficulty even sustaining herself and her child; less than 3 pounds of the cheapest bread per day would be her purchase limit.51 In neither case would she be able to afford much in the way of clothes, lighting or fuel; and it would seem almost impossible for her to rent an independent living space, even a cheap penny-a-week board.52 Survival for these single mothers, then, at the very least meant finding affordable accommodation without using the allowance granted through the church courts. Was the purpose of these small sums, granted for such limited duration, effectively to punish mothers of illegitimate children by condemning them to poverty? Possibly; but it is also likely that they testify to a common, though
50 James Davis, ‘Baking for the Common Good: A Reassessment of the Assize of Bread in Medieval England’, Economic History Review, 62(3) (2004): 465–502, see especially 469–72. 51 Thesecalculations are based on: (a) the weight of the farthing wastel (good quality bread) loaf in relation to the price of the quarter of wheat, according to the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources (Davis, Appendix 1, p. 496; (b) the proportional weights of loaves of various types of bread, according to the 1256 Assize of Bread and Ale (Davis, Table 1, p. 471); and (c) grain sale prices by decades, 1350–1500, in shillings per quarter, as given in Edward Miller (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 1348–1500 (Cambridge, 1991), Table 5.1, p. 444. 52 DCA, Court Book of Prior’s Official, 1487–98, fol. 89d: Joan Bower sues John Calys, a priest, for unpaid rent of a penny-a-week’s board. ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 57 tacit, assumption that the alimentatio prolis should comprise only part of the support for mothers and children; and that single mothers should be responsible for obtaining supplementary resources, either through working themselves, or through networks of family or friends. Working single mothers may in fact have been more common than those who relied simply on alimentatio. Table 3.2 (above) shows that the largest single category (31 instances, or 26.7 per cent) of known situations of illegitimate children and their mothers comprised those where women were working, presumably to support both themselves and their child. Yet finding remunerative work posed its own problems. Field work, especially at harvest time, was probably one of the best-paid jobs for non-elite women,53 but it was seasonal, and not always easy to obtain. Lawrence Poos found the daily wage labour market in late medieval Essex to be ‘highly episodic and discontinuous’: labourers might find themselves employed for only a few days each year.54 Poos also observed that the rural labourers he studied often had to be highly mobile, ranging over distances of up to 20 miles to find day-work.55 Though Goldberg finds that some women undertaking harvest work were prepared to leave home temporarily and travel such distances, the journeys cannot have been easy for women with small children.56 Even where fieldwork was available, the problem remained of finding a way to care for the child during the working day. Other less mobile forms of labour, such as laundry work, were also apparently less remunerative; the launderer at St Mary at Hill, London, in 1427–28, for instance, was paid only 2d. for ‘wasschyng of diuers clothis’.57 Domestic service, of course, was not only one of the commonest employments for non-elite young women,58 but one that could potentially meet a single
53 Bardsley, pp. 11–12; see n. 43 above. 54 L.R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 212; see also the table in n. 15, which shows that at times during 1376–1450, some manors might hire unskilled labourers, on average, for as little as 3.8 days a year. The highest average number of labourer-days hired a year was 39.8. 55 Poos, Rural Society, pp. 215–16. 56 P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England’, in P.J.P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (eds), Youth in the Middle Ages (York, 2004), pp. 85–99, at pp. 93–4. 57 Littlehales, Medieval Records, p. 67. Cf. p. 219, 1495–96, when ‘thomas austeyns [sic] wiff ’ was paid xj d. for ‘waschyng of all the towelles, auter clothis & schetes of [th]e chyirche’ – but the amount may have been for a whole year. 58 Poos found that 82 of the 269 servants listed in Essex Poll Tax returns (1381) were female, but notes that this listing may have omitted many servants: Poos, Rural Society, pp. 187–8. Beattie, analysing the 1379 Lynn Poll Tax return, in which an unusually high percentage of women were classified by occupation, found that 102 out of 114 single 58 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France mother’s desperate need for board and lodging. But as I have argued elsewhere, late medieval employers were reluctant to hire servants with dependents the charge of whom might fall on the household.59 The court injunction to the master of the single mother deserted by Robert Tyherst to retain her in his service (and to her, that she ‘obey his rule’ [obediat regimine suo]) may itself be an acknowledgement of a general unwillingness among householders to house, or trust, servants with illegitimate offspring.60 Certainly in only nine of the cases in Table 3.2 were the women involved apparently working as servants in private houses. Other – though sometimes less legal – forms of service may, however, have been more friendly to mothers of illegitimate children. In six of the cases in Table 3.2, the women were working in inns. Sometimes their very situation produced the illegitimate birth; in the early 1470s, Richard Manton, inn-keeper at the Cardinal’s Hat in London was cited for fathering a child on his servant Agnes.61 But other cases hint that the owners of some hostelries were comparatively lenient about housing single mothers and their children. ‘Le Busche’ in London, for instance, shows a suspicious cluster of citations for moral infractions among their domestics and inmates in the period 1470–87. A woman named only ‘Mawdeleyn’, living at the inn, was said to have borne a child to a city tailor; Alice, a servant at the inn, was cited for having fallen pregnant out of wedlock, apparently in Ipswich; Anthony Otyndale’s illegitimate child was said to be housed at ‘le Busch’.62 In Rochester an inn named ‘le Bole’ apparently had a similarly shady reputation. Joan Skyrowt, servant there in 1454, was thought to be unmarried and pregnant; Margaret Strange, formerly staying at the inn, was cited for sexual relations with three men (though she later underwent purgation and the case was dismissed); John Clerk, parish clerk in Rochester, was cited with an unnamed tapster at ‘le Bole’ in 1456; Joan Burne, another tapster, was cited for adultery and giving birth to three illegitimate children in 1451. She denied some charges, but admitted bearing children to one John Rede, and also women were said to be servants (89.5 per cent), as opposed to only 12 following other occupations: Cordelia Beattie, ‘The Problem of Women’s Work Identities in Post-Black Death England’, in James Bothwell, P.J.P. Goldberg and W.M. Ormrod (eds), The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England (York, 2000), pp. 1–19, at pp. 7–9 and Fig. 1.2. See also Goldberg, ‘Migration, Youth and Gender’; and Goldberg, ‘Marriage, Migration, and Servanthood: The York Cause Paper Evidence’, in hisWoman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c.1200–1500 (Stroud, 1992), pp. 1–15. 59 Maddern, esp. pp. 52–6. 60 CKS, Drb/Pa 2 1444–56, fol. 58r. 61 CLRO, Guildhall MS 9064, fol. 64r. 62 CLRO, Guildhall, MS 9064, fols 27v, 28r; Guildhall, MS 9064/2, fol. 211v. ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 59 to one of the former porters at the inn.63 It is thus possible that in these inns, ordinary hospitality was supplemented by sexual services offered to the guests by the domestic staff, who effectively worked part-time as servants, part-time as prostitutes. A possible case of such an arrangement occurred in Greenwich in 1499, where Roger and Alice Buclande, presumably the inn-keepers of the ‘Cornish Chough’, were prosecuted for acting as bawds between their servant Elizabeth and ‘diverse strangers’.64 Working as a prostitute may in fact have been one of the easiest ways for a single mother to keep some guardianship over her child and provide for its support. Over half the working mothers in Table 3.2 – 16 – were accused of prostitution or said to be working for a bawd, though the figures may reflect a possible tendency of the courts to identify some women as prostitutes simply because they had borne illegitimate children, and others as bawds because they offered shelter to single mothers. Yet there is no denying that some evidence of childcare or arrangements for boarding illegitimate children survives from these cases. In 1486, in London, Felicia Petyll was cited as being the bawd (pronuba) of ‘a certain woman who bore a child in her house’. Around 1471, Joan Stringys, likewise accused of bawdry, seems to have hosted a number of childbirths, allegedly baptizing the baby of an unnamed prostitute ‘and three others’.65 In 1488, the prosecution of Thomas Nox, chaplain of the parish church of St Sepulchre, revealed that he had allegedly impregnated Alice Miller and Elizabeth Monke, and was engaged in on-going sexual relationships with another two women (one of whom he tried to pass off as a visiting relative). Furthermore, the charge wound up, ‘a certain woman called mother Mawde is bawd to him and nurses the son of the aforesaid Sir Thomas’.66 In sum, the evidence of single mothers’ situations suggests that while work may have been the best option for many, not many secure and well-paid jobs were available to them, and some were thus forced into prostitution, or prostitution- like arrangements. Were there other strategies open to single mothers at this period? Some families were prepared to help. Alice Mower’s brother-in-law and sister offered to bring up her child – provided that the supposed father, Thomas Maynard, and his master, William Grenehill, contributed their share to its upkeep. It is less clear that they were prepared to house Alice herself.67 Other women may have hoped to marry someone other than their child’s father, and so achieve a
63 CKS, Drb/Pa 2 1444–56, fols 173r, 244r, 280d, 281d. 64 CKS, Drb/Pa 5 1499–1501, fol. 49d. 65 CLRO, Guildhall, MS 9064/2, fol. 153v; Guildhall, MS 9064/1, fol. 110v. 66 CLRO, Guildhall, MS 9064/2, fol. 226r. 67 CKS, Drb/Pa 2 1444–56, fol. 282r. 60 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France stable household. In the case of William Andrewe and Margaret Kent, cited for fornication in 1472 in Kent, the court ordered William to ‘dower the aforesaid woman to her marriage’ and to support the soon-to-be-born child at his own expense (though whether in his own household or hers was not clear).68 But it may have been difficult for a woman with an illegitimate pregnancy behind her to find a willing partner. In a parallel case, Alice Cowper, who in 1446 had made a contract of future marriage with John Godyn of Dartford, was then convicted of adultery with John Sawyer of Footscray and admitted that she was pregnant with his child. Her original fiancé claimed that his promise was conditional on her remaining innocent of adultery, and said that he ‘now does not want to have her’ (iam non affectat habere eam).69 Concubinage was one of the limited range of options for single mothers. Marjorie (surname unknown) is one of the few married mothers of illegitimate children who appear in the record. About 1426, when living in Saltfleet Haven, Lincolnshire, with her husband, she evidently fell in love (or lust) with another married man, Robert Smyth, and bore his child. He persuaded her to leave her husband and go to the household of his nephew, another Robert Smyth, in Howden, Yorkshire, whence he followed her some six months later. After a further 18 months, Robert the nephew, either genuinely troubled by his conscience or tired of housing his uncle, his uncle’s mistress, and their child, reported the couple to the local ecclesiastical court, which promptly ordered them to separate. With what appears more speed than grace, Robert the elder returned to Saltfleet Haven, leaving Marjorie in Howden without a home or support. What was she to do? Her husband, though he came enquiring after her, seemed reluctant to take her back, and she could not legally marry again. Her solution was to enter into a second concubinage relationship with the (married) Howden doctor, Thomas Tamworth, to whom she bore a second child. When he left town without her, she found a third home with Gerald Preston, with whom she was still living in 1434, and who fathered her third child. Though witnesses in the ensuing cause testified that Marjorie was ‘a woman of bad fame whom no man, single or married, should permit himself to know carnally’,70 one must wonder how else she could have supported herself and her children. Granted the grave difficulties facing single mothers, it is hardly surprising to find that one of their coping strategies was to attempt to get rid of the child,
68 CKS, Drb/Pa 4 1472–75 and 1481–1500, fol. 7r (1472). In the event she died in, or shortly after, childbirth, presumably with the child, so Andrew was never called upon to fulfil the order. 69 CKS, Drb/Pa 2 1444–56, fol. 44d. 70 BI, CP F110: ‘mulier male fame ac talis que a nonullis viris tam coniugatus quam solutus permisit carnaliter se cognosci’. ‘Oppressed by Utter Poverty’ 61 either to someone else, or by abandonment, or in the last resort, infanticide. The testimony, in both word and action, of Mariona Hopper in Kent 1451 is eloquent of her despair. Having seen the alleged father, Roland Sapurton, brought to court, she ‘put down the child on the ground before the judge, saying that she did not want to care for it any more, but that the father should receive it’. Her protest received only minimal attention; the judge ordered her to ‘receive the child to her breasts’ and to care for it until alimentatio should be negotiated with the father.71 Ten mothers among the total of 116 in Table 3.2 were marked in court records as having left the diocese, either with or without their child. In 1496, Cristina Bodull, as well as both the possible fathers of her child, had fled the Rochester jurisdiction, leaving the child behind.72 More enterprisingly, in a rare case from 1390, it was alleged that Tybota Loukyn sold her newborn illegitimate child to the wife of Ralph de Basset of Weldon ‘to the end that the same little infant should be taken to be the son of Ralph’ (ad effectum quod ipse infantulus filius … domini Radulphi putaretur).73 Finally, and ironically in terms of the word ‘survival’ in my title, there remained infanticide. Though it can hardly have been easy to detect in an era when many babies died stillborn or in infancy, the crime was alleged or suspected in at least nine of the cases in Table 3.2. In some instances, the intent was very clear; in 1484 in London, Cecilia Clyfton, Agnes Bartylmewe and Katherine Grauysende were cited for having ‘destroyed’ Katherine’s newborn child, which Cecilia then ‘carried … to the Thames’.74 Barbara Hanawalt tells us that ‘An illegitimate child was raised in its mother’s home if he or she had one’.75 On what evidence this statement is based I cannot tell. Sparse as the documents certainly are, they strongly suggest that in many cases an illegitimate child was in fact either separated from its mother at quite an early age – abandoned, boarded out while the mother was working, adopted into its father’s home – or not raised in a private household at all (as with the children lodged in inns). In many instances, this was because the mother, struggling with short-term, uncertain and scanty financial provision, lacked a stable home in which to bring up her child. Poverty and illegitimacy, though
71 CKS, Drb/Pa 2 1444–56, fol. 167r: ‘Et mulier deposuit prolem ad terra coram Iudice dicendo se nolle vlterius alere illam sed quod pater reciperet’. She was to ‘recipiat prolem ad mammillas suas’. 72 CKS, Drb/Pa 4 1472–75 and 1481–1500, fol. 327r. 73 TNA, C270 33/21: examination on the authority of Richard, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. 74 CLRO, Guildhall, MS 9064/2, fol. 99r. 75 Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986), p. 251. 62 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France not invariable concomitants, were systemically linked because the legal rights of single mothers were few, hard to access, meagre even when upheld, and often of short duration. Some single mothers certainly did their best to achieve support for their children – seeking out various kinds of work and suing for their rights in ecclesiastical church courts. But all too often they were forced to rely on the unpredictable, unaccountable and often reluctant generosity of their partners to provide for them and their children. This picture is perhaps hardly surprising, and probably not incongruent with the situation of poorer mothers of illegitimate children in later centuries.76 But it has, to date, been an untold story of late medieval England, and an aspect of its regimes of poverty, and the responses of the poor, which we have not hitherto sufficiently understood.
76 Patricia Crawford, Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 30–73. Chapter 4 Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire: A Positive Experience?
Ann Minister1
It was Joan Lane, an authority on apprenticeship in England during the period 1600–1914, who noted that ‘apprenticeship has had a bad press’.2 Although the comment referred to apprenticeship generally, it could most certainly have described pauper apprenticeship, as it is easier to find negative comments concerning its operation or its effect on the lives of the poor, than it is to find positive ones. This statement is particularly relevant for the period discussed in this chapter, 1750–1834, when growing numbers of poor and a higher dependency rate increased pressure on the parish relief system. A commonly expressed view is that parishes did not focus upon the welfare of the child, but apprenticed children with the main aim of reducing the parish rate bill by offloading their responsibility for poor children. As Katrina Honeyman notes with reference to similar views, ‘it is difficult to find a historian, or even a contemporary commentator who does not express this opinion’.3 The abuses of the pauper apprenticeship scheme are well known with the story of Robert Blincoe providing a clear example of inhuman treatment meted out to those
1 This research has been made possible through the support of The University of Western Australia and also the funding received through an Australian Postgraduate Award. 2 Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England 1600–1914 (London, 1996), p. 1. 3 Katrina Honeyman, Child Workers in England, 1780–1820 (Aldershot, 2007), p. 25, n. 64. For more positive comments see Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries and Hans-Joachim Voth, ‘Destined for Deprivation: Human Capital Formation and Intergenerational Poverty in Nineteenth-Century England’, Explorations in Economic History, 38(3) (2001): 339–65, 358–9; Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010), chapter 9, pp. 256–305; K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 284; Honeyman, chapter 7, pp. 129–49; Jane Humphries, ‘English Apprenticeship: A Neglected Factor in the First Industrial Revolution’, in P.A. David and M. Thomas (eds),The Economic Future in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003), pp. 73–102. 64 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France unfortunate enough to be its victims.4 As a foundling of the London parish of St Pancras, he was apprenticed at the age of seven years with a group of his peers to work in the cotton mills in the industrial north of the country. After a period spent in Nottinghamshire, Blincoe was transferred to Litton Mill in Derbyshire where his treatment, and that of his fellow pauper apprentices, was barbaric. He was underfed, poorly housed and regularly beaten. His story illustrates the way in which some pauper apprentices were placed in trades which would not lead to them becoming masters in their own right and also shows how children were placed in apprenticeships at an unacceptably young age and sent to far distant parishes. However, by analysing pauper apprenticeship indentures in three rural south Derbyshire parishes – Melbourne, Repton and Ticknall – in the period 1750–1837 and addressing three issues highlighted by the story of Robert Blincoe, I will suggest that pauper apprenticeship was not always a negative and unwelcome event. Focusing on the type of trade, the age of the apprentice and the distance from the home parish of pauper apprentice placements and using census records to research individual case histories, I will propose that pauper apprenticeship in certain places and periods was an important opportunity for some children of the labouring poor to improve their skills and can therefore be viewed in a more positive light. The use of apprenticeship as a training for the useful employment of poor children was an integral part of the operation of the Poor Law at parish level.5 The need to train young people to be productive members of society was, and indeed still is in the twenty-first century, viewed as of great importance.6 The enthusiastic response of Daniel Defoe to the occupation of young children – ‘scarce anything above four years old, but its hands were sufficient for its own support’7 – is frequently cited as evidence of the prevailing attitude to the importance of children being usefully employed.8 It could be argued that Defoe commented upon the youth of those employed because it was so
4 John Brown, ‘A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy’, in James R. Simmons (ed.), Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, 2007), pp. 89–179. 5 Most historians cite the classic introduction to the pauper apprenticeship scheme found in O. Dunlop and R.D. Denman, English Apprenticeship and Child Labour: A History (London, 1912), chapter 16, pp. 248–60. 6 For a useful overview of apprenticeship in history and its relationship to modern training see K.D.M. Snell, ‘The Apprenticeship System in British History: The Fragmentation of a Cultural Institution’, History of Education, 25(4) (1996): pp. 303–21. 7 Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Island of Great Britain Divided into Circuits or Journies, 9th edn (4 vols, Dublin, 1779), 3, 155. 8 Honeyman, p. 4. Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 65 uncommon a sight,9 but that does not negate the fact that his general attitude to the useful employment of children appeared to be one of approval, and one that his readership would probably endorse. In his discussion of pauper apprenticeship, Steve Hindle quotes Sir Simon Harcourt who argued in 1705 that ‘the best way of providing for the poor was to apprentice their children’.10 Certainly, apprenticeship was a common experience for children during the period: it has been estimated that as many as 56,000 children could have been serving apprenticeships at any one time.11 How many of those children were parish apprentices is not clear, although a figure of between one-quarter and one-third of all apprentices has been tentatively suggested,12 and the common survival of indentures in parish collections supports the view that many were pauper apprentices. In the three Derbyshire parishes under investigation here, indentures exist for some of the parish children but it is likely that more children from these parishes were apprenticed as some years are not included. Therefore any analysis presented here is based upon a ‘sample imposed by the vicissitudes of time’ as noted by Deborah Simonton in her research of Staffordshire and Essex.13 Historians have highlighted the financial benefit to the parish of apprenticing young pauper children in order to relieve the parish of the responsibility for their upkeep. Bridget Hill noted that the original intention of the Act of 1601 – to provide poor children with training to enable them to make a living as adults – had changed by the second half of the eighteenth century and ‘one often important motive behind parish apprenticeship was to avoid such children becoming a threat to the poor rates’.14 It was certainly cost effective for a parish to settle apprentices out of the parish as it has been calculated that it cost an average of £4 to maintain a child in the parish for a year15 but, in Ticknall, one of the parishes in this study, an apprenticeship could be had for as little as £3. 13s. 6d.
9 Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c.1680–1851’, Past and Present, 126 (1990): 115–50, at 121–2. 10 Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), p. 191. 11 Deborah Simonton, ‘Apprenticeship: Training and Gender in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Maxine Berg (ed.) Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (New York, 1991), pp. 227–58, at p. 239. 12 Cunningham, p. 133. 13 Simonton, pp. 233–4. 14 Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989), p. 87. 15 Lane, p. 84. 66 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France so providing a saving over one year.16 The idea that children were apprenticed without due regard to the ultimate benefit of the child has been commonly expressed both by contemporaries and modern historians. Deborah Simonton noted that ‘poor law officials arranged the details and paid the premium for parish apprentices, often putting out children with more regard for the rates than for the child’s benefit’.17 Simonton further commented that this emphasis on relieving the poor rates meant that ‘vocational training was less prominent, while support of the child became paramount’.18 If, as Simonton suggests, training became less important, it is logical to suppose that poor children were placed in apprenticeships that were lacking not only status but also effective training. Patricia Crawford further observed that ‘parish apprentices learnt few skills’.19 Peter Kirby stated that ‘there were distinct differences in the types of trade to which pauper and private apprentices were bound’.20 Simonton notes that the trades of tailor and cordwainer were popular amongst private apprentices and attracted few pauper apprentices. Similarly, those trades in which pauper apprentices were placed attracted few private apprentices.21 Lynn Hollen Lees also noted that, ‘parish children were unlikely to be sent into any but low-skilled, badly paid occupations’.22 Lane referred to ‘the narrow range of trades’ and ‘unacceptable occupations’ that characterized pauper apprenticeship as industrialization increased.23 Charlotte Neff noted that ‘they were seldom taught any concrete skills to help them through life’.24 The picture then emerges of few trades in common between private and parish apprentices, with parish apprentices commonly apprenticed to trades which would not enable them to become masters at the end of the training, or which would not provide sufficient training to enable them ultimately to practise a trade.
16 Derby Record Office [hereafter DRO], Ticknall apprenticeship indentures, D1396 A/PO 21/19. 17 Simonton, p. 229. 18 Ibid., pp. 231–2. 19 Patricia Crawford, ‘Civic Fathers and Children: Continuities from Elizabethan England to the Australian Colonies’, History Australia, 5(1) (2008): 04.1–04.16, at 04.7. 20 Peter Kirby, Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870 (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 38. 21 Simonton, pp. 240–43. 22 Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 55. 23 Lane, p. 83. 24 Charlotte Neff, ‘Pauper Apprenticeship in Early Nineteenth Century Ontario’, Journal of Family History, 21(2) (1996): 144–71, at 146. Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 67
The parishes used for this study are all in the rural south of the county of Derbyshire and located in close proximity to each other in an area of similar topography to the south of the River Trent.25 An analysis of trade directories has shown that all of the parishes were increasing the range and concentration of trades during the period.26 Melbourne, although it still had a strong agricultural base, was the most dependent of the three parishes upon textile manufacture, with framework knitting widespread. During the latter part of the period, the parish was the site of a factory producing silk gloves and shawls. Repton, formerly the historic capital of Mercia, was the producer of barley for the nearby breweries of Burton-upon-Trent and had more large farms than did either of the other parishes. Ticknall was still heavily dependent upon agriculture despite having lime works, a brickyard and three pot works in the parish. To address the first point raised by the life of Robert Blincoe, concerning the type of trade into which he was apprenticed, and using indentures and a list of parish apprentices, I have compiled a table of the trades into which the pauper apprentices were placed. In order to compare the trades with those of private apprentices, I have extracted details of private apprenticeships from settlement examinations taken in the area. As apprenticeship was one of the ways in which settlement could be claimed,27 it was commonly recorded and a magistrate would have been certain to enquire about any undertaken by those being examined.28 Table 4.1 records the trades of both the pauper and private apprentices in my sample.
25 On the very varied topography of Derbyshire county see David Hey, Derbyshire: A History (Lancaster, 2008). 26 This analysis is a part of my PhD thesis, ‘Family Strategies and Relationships: The Labouring Poor of Derby and South Derbyshire c.1750–1834’, from which this chapter is taken. 27 Settlement, whereby an individual was formally recognized as resident in a particular parish, entitled a person to poor relief in that parish. Other ways settlement could be claimed included annual hiring, place of birth, father’s settlement and the payment of an annual rent of £10 or more. See K.D.M. Snell, ‘Settlement, Poor Law and the Rural Historian: New Approaches and Opportunities’, Rural History, 3/2 (1992): pp. 145–72; and J.S. Taylor, ‘The Impact of Pauper Settlement’,Past and Present, 73 (1976): 42–74. 28 Keith Snell maintained that an apprenticeship needed to be completed before settlement was conferred: Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, p. 228; but cf. Honeyman, pp. 23–4. 68 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Table 4.1 Trades of pauper and private apprentices29
Melbourne Repton Ticknall Private Trade 1750–1835 1779–1837 1791–1833 apprentices Baker 0 0 0 1 Basket maker 0 8 0 1 Blacksmith 1 3 3 3 Breeches mkr/glover 1 0 0 0 Bricklayer/maker 0 1 1 1 Butcher 0 0 0 2 Carpenter 0 0 0 1 Chair maker 0 0 0 1 China manufacturer 0 0 0 1 Collar/whip maker 0 0 0 1 Cook 0 0 0 1 Cooper 0 0 0 1 Cordwainer 10 17 3 7 Cotton weaver 0 2 0 0 Cutler 0 1 0 1 Engine weaver 0 1 0 0 Factory calico weaver 0 6 8 0 Felmonger 1 0 0 1 Flaxdresser 0 1 0 0 Framesmith 0 1 0 0 Framework knitter 13 2 3 15 Gardener 1 0 0 0 Hairdresser 1 3 0 0 Hatter 0 3 0 0 Hosier 0 1 0 0 Housewifery 2 1 0 0 Ironmonger 0 0 0 1 Joiner 0 0 1 1 Nailmaker 1 0 0 0
29 Figures collated from information gathered from the following sources: DRO, Melbourne apprenticeship register, D655 A/PO 669; DRO, Melbourne apprenticeship indentures, D655 A/PO 690–744; DRO, Repton indentures, D638 A/PO 506–83; DRO, Ticknall indentures, D1396 A/PO 21/07–34; DRO, Melbourne settlement examinations, D655 A/PO 355–449; DRO, Repton settlement examinations, D638 A/PO 144–250; DRO, Ticknall settlement examinations, D1396 A/PO 12/1–96; DRO, Derby All Saints settlement examinations, D3372/99/5–97; Derby Local Studies Library [hereafter DLS], Pauper settlements Parcel 197. Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 69
Table 4.1 Continued
Melbourne Repton Ticknall Private Tr ade 1750–1835 1779–1837 1791–1833 apprentices Painter/engraver 1 0 0 0 Patten maker 0 1 0 0 Petrifactioner 1 0 0 0 Pipe maker 1 0 0 0 Plumber 0 1 0 0 Ropemaker 1 1 0 0 Stocking frame needle maker 0 1 0 0 Stocking maker 0 0 0 1 Stonemason 1 0 0 0 Straw bonnet maker 0 0 1 0 Tailor 13 10 4 3 Weaver 1 0 1 5 Wheelwright 0 3 0 1 Wood turner 0 3 0 2 Woolcomber 1 1 0 1
Although only 13 trades were in common between pauper and private apprentices, confirming Kirby’s point, those trades had the most apprentices, with a total of 147 private and pauper apprentices between them. What is particularly interesting is that the trades of cordwainer, tailor and framework knitter were favoured trades for the poor of these parishes when they were also favoured trades of the private apprentices. The apprenticeship of children as cordwainers is somewhat ambiguous as the increasing number of parish apprentices placed in the trade probably indicates its impoverishment during the period. However, Lane notes that in some counties in the early eighteenth century ‘non-poor boys were bound to shoemaking in substantial numbers’. Despite its impoverishment, the trade was a necessary one and shoemakers were ‘always in work, even if poorly paid’.30 In total, over 70 per cent of the parish apprentices in the sample were placed in the trades that were common to both private and pauper apprentices. This does seem to indicate that in these three parishes, at least, parish apprentices were not necessarily being placed in trades into which private apprentices did not enter. It is also clear from Table 4.1, that the villages had particular specialisms, with framework knitting being
30 Lane, p. 122. 70 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France particularly popular in Melbourne, a manufacturing centre recorded as having 80 frames operating in 1789.31 Also, basket making was popular in Repton where suitable reeds were found in the osier beds on the banks of the River Trent. Ticknall alone did not show any marked preferences, with the exception of the factory placements. What is also plain from this analysis is that the trades were not high-status trades, but it was unlikely that any parish child would be placed in a trade requiring a high premium, in the same way that those labouring parents who paid for their child’s premium themselves would similarly be unlikely to try to place a labouring child in a higher-class trade. In her discussion of low-status trades, Lane suggests four categories of ‘dead-end occupations’. These are firstly, labour intensive, relatively unskilled work such as agriculture or silk-winding. The second category comprised trades that mainly employed female labour. The third group were those trades ‘where small physique was essential, such as chimney sweeping or cotton manufacture’. The final low-status occupation was handloom weaving or nail making where ‘machinery was depressing the adult’s earning capacity’. Lane’s research also found that a child from these groups who completed an apprenticeship was ‘unwanted at the end of the term and could not find adult employment’.32 Using these categories as a guide, it seems that the three Derbyshire parishes did not place many of their children in ‘dead-end occupations’. What is important is that the majority of children were placed in trades in which they could themselves become masters, unlike those children placed in factories like Robert Blincoe. While Keith Snell observed that ‘large numbers were apprenticed to agriculture, particularly in the eighteenth century’,33 it is surprising that this analysis of the rural south Derbyshire parishes shows a lack of apprentices to the low-status trade of husbandry. Indeed, not one child in these parishes was apprenticed to husbandry. It was not unique in this, however. Ethel Hampson found, for agricultural Cambridgeshire, for instance, that only 36 children out of a total of 918 were apprenticed to husbandry. Hampson suggested that the reason for this lack of agricultural apprenticeships might have been a reluctance on the part of the farmers to undertake a long-term commitment like that required of an apprenticeship. In addition, the financial inducement offered may not have been enough to encourage such participation.34 It could also have been
31 James Pilkington, A View of the Present State of Derbyshire, with an Account of Its Most Remarkable Antiquities (2 vols, Derby, 1789), 2, 83. 32 Lane, p. 33. 33 Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, p. 278. 34 Ethel M. Hampson, ‘Settlement and Removal in Cambridgeshire, 1662–1834’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 2(3) (1928): 273–89, at 283; cf. Steve Hindle, ‘Waste Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 71 related to the fact that in south Derbyshire there was no shortage of labourers willing to accept short-term contracts, so that there was no need for long-term workers. In his much larger study, E.G. Thomas calculated that out of a total of 555 children at Yealmpton, Devon, only 37 boys were not apprenticed to farmers.35 Local conditions determined the extent of apprentices to husbandry in a parish: conditions in this part of south Derbyshire were not favourable for such apprenticeships. As the Derbyshire area was chosen for the site of the new textile factories from the mid eighteenth century, it may be assumed that some of the children would be apprenticed to work in them. Indeed, Katrina Honeyman’s research into the origins of factory apprentices indicates that ‘it is possible to conclude that local parish children supplied at least some of the requirements of the early textile mills’.36 The results of the analysis presented here show that some of the children were apprenticed to a nearby cotton mill. On the same day in 1792, Repton overseers apprenticed two brothers to a linen manufacturer named Thomas Hawksworth, in Tamworth, Staffordshire.37 On one day in 1814, the same parish apprenticed four young boys – two aged 10 years and two aged 11 years – to a cotton manufacturer/calico weaver, Thomas Jewsbury in Measham, Derbyshire who employed approximately 230 parish apprentices in the years 1785–1815.38 These six cases from the Repton indentures are the only children from a total of 72, to be apprenticed to the new factories. Ninety per cent then, were apprenticed to more traditional crafts despite the presence nearby of new style factories. After 1814 no children from Repton were apprenticed to the new factories. This agrees with the general pattern of factory placements shown by Honeyman.39 Ticknall indentures indicate that the overseers there took advantage of the new employment opportunities. Only 25 indentures survive for the period 1791–1833 and they show that eight of those children were apprentice calico weavers. Seven of these were apprenticed to Thomas Jewsbury’s nearby factory at Measham. As the parish with the smallest population, it may indicate a
Children? Pauper Apprenticeship under the Elizabethan Poor Laws, c.1598–1697’, in P. Lane, Neil Raven and K.D.M. Snell (eds), Women, Work and Wages in England 1600– 1850 (London, 2004), pp. 15–46, at pp. 36–7. 35 E.G. Thomas, ‘Pauper Apprenticeship’,Local Historian, 14(7) (1981): 400–406, at 403. 36 Honeyman, p. 89. 37 DRO, Repton apprenticeship indentures, D638 A/PO 510, 512. 38 DRO, Repton apprenticeship indentures, D638 A/PO 542–4, 546; see also Honeyman, Table 5.1, p. 93. 39 Ibid., Table 5.2, pp. 100–101. 72 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France lack of business contacts in other areas or it may illustrate the relative ease of arranging apprenticeships with the new factory masters whose need for workers was evident during the period.40 It may also be the result of the low cost of factory apprenticeship. In Ticknall, only 17 of the indentures record the cost of the apprenticeship but of these it is interesting to note that the lowest costs to the parish are those of the children apprenticed to Thomas Jewsbury’s new cotton factory. The premiums paid were only £3. 13s. 6d. where the average cost of the apprenticeships in Ticknall from 1808 was £8. 10s. It is likely that the placement was a prudent financial decision by the overseers and the fact that the Jewsbury factory had received a positive assessment of their treatment of pauper apprentices by the Birmingham Board of Guardians41 was merely good fortune for the children concerned. In Repton, 54 of the indentures record the cost to the parish. The average cost to Repton from 1790 to 1837 was £8 so the placements at the Thomas Jewsbury factory were good value for the parish as they paid premiums of £5. 5s. for their children in 1814. Melbourne recorded the premiums of 33 apprenticeships 1803–35 and the average premium paid was £7. 16s. Despite Melbourne being the most dependent on manufacturing of the three parishes, it apprenticed no children to the new factories. Children there were apprenticed in more traditional crafts, one of the most popular of which was that of framework knitter, not surprising given the proliferation of the craft in the East Midlands area during the period. However, the last such apprenticeship took place in 1814 which probably reflects the increasing problems of underemployment and low wages associated with the trade.42 The other favoured occupation was that of tailor with an equal number, 13, being apprenticed in that trade. Again, as Melbourne was noted for textile manufacture, it is likely that there would have been business contacts in all areas associated with textile manufacture and finished products. Female apprenticeship, limited in each of the three parishes, was unsurprising in the choice of trade. At Repton, one girl was apprenticed to an engine weaver, another to housewifery and the third to a framework knitter. At Melbourne, one girl was apprenticed to a breeches maker/ glover and two to housewifery. At Ticknall, one girl was apprenticed to a factory with her brother and the other girl apprentice went to Derby All Saints to learn the trade of straw bonnet maker.
40 In contrast to some other employers, factory masters were more than willing masters of pauper apprentices: ibid., pp. 30–31. 41 Ibid., p. 243. 42 For a detailed account of framework knitting in the East Midlands see J.D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Life and Labour under the Squirearchy (London, 1966). Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 73
Remarkably, only eight apprentices out of a total of 148 in the three parishes were girls. Was this failure to apprentice females shared by other parishes? Certainly the story of Robert Blincoe makes frequent mention of female apprentices. Furthermore, it does not appear that the London parishes studied by Alysa Levene showed a similar pattern to that of south Derbyshire. Levene’s figures show that, although boys outnumbered girls, 42 per cent of parish apprentices were girls.43 A study of parish apprentices from the southern counties found that 41.2 per cent of apprentices in the seventeenth century were female, 34 per cent were female in the eighteenth century and 31.2 per cent in the nineteenth century.44 Figures from Colyton for the period 1750–99 show that 51 per cent of apprentices were girls, while for the period 1800–37, that figure falls to 35 per cent.45 Simonton found for the eighteenth century that ‘nearly a third’ of all parish indentures in her study of Essex and Staffordshire were for girls.46 Although the percentages of female parish apprentices from both the southern counties and Devon were falling over time, it seems that these Derbyshire parishes apprenticed a far smaller number with girls representing only 5.4 per cent of the apprentices during the period 1750–1834. From the available evidence it is impossible to determine the reasons for the lack of female apprenticeships.47 Was there a greater need for girls to remain in the family home and take charge of younger siblings or help with home production? Pamela Sharpe suggested that in Colyton girls ‘could be more of a positive asset to the domestic economy than boys’.48 Snell has also noted the tendency for the eldest daughter to remain at home to help with younger siblings.49 Alternatively, was there opportunity for employment locally for girls without the need for formal apprenticeships? Did parish officials consider it inappropriate for girls to be apprenticed as they might wish to marry before the end of the term? Could the apprenticeship of females be a reflection of the popular belief about gender roles and the need for boys to be trained as
43 Alysa Levene, ‘Parish Apprenticeship and the Old Poor Law in London’, Economic History Review, 63(4) (2010): 915–41, at 921. 44 Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, p. 282. 45 Adapted from Pamela Sharpe, ‘Poor Children as Apprentices in Colyton 1598– 1830’, Continuity and Change, 6(2) (1991): 253–70, Table 3, p. 259. 46 Simonton, p. 245. 47 For the involvement of females in apprenticeships also see Ilana Krausman Ben- Amos, ‘Women Apprentices in the Trades and Crafts of Early Modern Bristol’,Continuity and Change, 6 (1991): 227–52; Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, chapter 6, pp. 270–319; and Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989), chapter 6, pp. 85–102. 48 Sharpe, p. 263. 49 Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, p. 325. 74 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France breadwinners? As Lees noted, ‘ideas about gender also shaped the treatment of males by parish authorities. The notion that men as husbands and fathers needed to earn enough to maintain their families was widely accepted in England by the eighteenth century.’50 Unfortunately, the sources give no indication of the reasons for this lack of female apprenticeship but evidence from the census of 1851 indicates that Derbyshire had the fifth highest county percentage of girls in the 10–14 age bracket at work and had slightly more working girls of that age than Lancashire (almost 34 per cent of the total number), despite that county’s proliferation of cotton mills.51 Although the earlier census of 184152 has problems associated with its use since it does not contain relationship details, accurate ages of adults or exact place of birth, it will nevertheless be helpful in highlighting the working opportunities for the children in the parishes of Melbourne, Repton and Ticknall during the later years of this study. In this census, the exact ages were not given for those above the age of 15 years. However, the ages of those less than 15 years were recorded as accurately as the householder was able. Those who were employed by the householder in family based occupations were not recorded, so there is no information about children helping parents, for instance, or wives working alongside husbands. The employment of children, then, will be under- represented in the census and the number of children recorded as employed is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg. What, then, does the 1841 census show for the parishes at that time? One rural parish stands out in the number of children finding employment there. The manufacturing centre of Melbourne records the work of children in various capacities. In Melbourne a total of 47 children aged 10–14 years were recorded as employed in some capacity. Of these, 35 were girls and 12 were boys. This represents 27 per cent of all girls aged 10–14 years inclusive in the village and 10 per cent of boys. The majority of these girls were employed as silk glove stitchers. The availability of employment of this type for girls in Melbourne in 1841 may account for the lack of apprenticeships arranged for girls by the parish. The rural parish of Repton did not have the same level of opportunity for girls with 14 girls and 15 boys in employment as recorded on the census. This represents 14 per cent of all girls aged 10–14 years and 15 per cent of boys. The majority of these children were employed as servants, frequently living on
50 Lees, p. 59. 51 Pamela Horn, Children’s Work and Welfare, 1780–1890 (Cambridge, 1994), Appendix 3, p. 74. 52 The ationalN Archives, London, Census Returns of England and Wales [hereafter TNA, Census], 1841, HO 107, Melbourne, Derbyshire. Census returns consulted at Ancestry.com, www.ancestry.co.uk, accessed: 14 August 2009. Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 75 farms. It does indicate that the tradition of live-in servants in husbandry still existed to some extent in Repton, even at the end of the period covered by this study, when it had become less evident in other areas.53 Opportunities for employment in Ticknall for both young boys and girls were particularly limited in 1841 as only eight children aged 12–14 years were recorded as employed. Four boys were recorded and four girls who were recorded as servants representing 6 per cent of girls and 5 per cent of boys in that age range. However, all three of the parishes were recorded by John Farey, a contemporary commentator who was commissioned by the government to survey Derbyshire’s agriculture, as being centres of lace making so some girls would have had the opportunity to practise a craft in their own homes which would produce income.54 Despite the lack of female apprenticeship, what is clear from these indentures is that the local boys were, in the main, apprenticed to relatively traditional trades and that they had, therefore, an opportunity to become masters themselves at the end of their terms. This is in marked contrast to Much Wenlock in Shropshire where only 8 out of 117 children were apprenticed to ‘genuine craft such as blacksmithing’.55 When considering the response of parents to their children’s apprenticeship – which Pamela Sharpe found to be ‘ambivalent’ in Colyton: some parents objected to apprenticeship of their children while others encouraged it56 – it would be interesting to know the reasons why poor parents might have objected. Patricia Crawford noted that poor parents ‘had different objectives from those of the civic fathers’, preferring to retain control over their own children, while parish officials wanted to ‘subject them to labour discipline’. As public scrutiny fell upon the apprenticeship scheme after the 1690s, Crawford suggests this added to ‘parental anxieties’.57 Is it reasonable to suggest that these anxieties may have been of different degrees? Could objections and concerns be related to the distance from the home parish that the children were to be placed, or the type of apprenticeship that was proposed, or even the age of the child? After all, apprenticeship was, as Steven
53 For a discussion of the decline of service, see Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981); Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, chapter 2, pp. 67–103. 54 John Farey, General View of the Agriculture of Derbyshire with Observations on the Means of Their Improvement: Drawn up for the Consideration of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement (3 vols, London, 1817), 3, 486. 55 Thomas, p. 404. 56 Sharpe, p. 256. 57 Patricia Crawford, Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2010), p. 158. 76 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
King and Alannah Tomkins noted, ‘an obvious coping strategy’58 of poor families and I would suggest that it may be that those parents, whose children were apprenticed locally to a recognized traditional trade at an appropriate age, as were some of the apprentices in these south Derbyshire parishes, would be inclined to accept, or even welcome, the apprenticeship as an effective way of reducing their own financial burden. The second aspect of Robert Blincoe’s story to influence this research is the young age at which he was apprenticed. Historians have found that the age at which pauper apprentices began their apprenticeships varies. A study of eighteenth-century data from Staffordshire and Essex found that, ‘most pauper children were put out between seven and nine’59 whereas for Cambridgeshire, ‘girls were frequently apprenticed at the early age of nine, boys not usually till twelve, or even fourteen or fifteen’.60 Data from Colyton showed that the most common age that pauper apprentices began their apprenticeships was 10.5 years.61 With such variation in the ages at which pauper children began their apprenticeships elsewhere it is important to determine at what age children of the labouring poor began their apprenticeships in south Derbyshire. The analysis of the parish indentures and parish lists of apprentices is shown below. The results are not gender specific. As the numbers of females recorded in each parish were so small, it seemed inappropriate to separate the genders for the purposes of the age analysis. Not all indentures included the age of the child. In order to effect a comparison with other child workers from Derbyshire, I have included Table 4.3 which shows my findings on the age of leaving home from an analysis of local settlement examinations.
58 Steven King and Alannah Tomkins (eds), The Poor in England 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester, 2003), p. 261. 59 Simonton, p. 239. 60 Hampson, p. 283. 61 Sharpe, p. 255. Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 77
Table 4.2 Ages of parish apprentices 1750–183762
Mean Modal Median Min. age Max. age Parish Number age (yrs) age (yrs) age (yrs) (yrs) (yrs)
Melbourne 12.4 12 12 9 15 37 1750–1835 Repton 12.6 12 13 9 16 69 1779–1837 Ticknall 12.3 12 12 9 15 24 1791–1833
Table 4.3 Age on leaving home 63
Mean age Modal Median Min. age Max. age Type Number (yrs) age (yrs) age (yrs) (yrs) (yrs)
Male 13.5 14 14 8 17 59 apprentices
Male hirings 13.0 14 13 8 18 93
Female hirings 14.6 14 14 9 20 20
In his study of settlement examinations, Snell found that the overall average age of children apprenticed privately during the period 1700–1860 was 14.3 years for females and 13.5 years for males.64 The above figures in Table 4.2 confirm that in these parishes pauper apprenticeships commenced at an earlier age. In her research using details of over 3,000 pauper apprentices in the period 1751– 1833 from the London area, Alysa Levene found that the average age of the pauper apprentices there was 12.3 years. When split into gender groups the
62 DRO, Melbourne, Repton and Ticknall Apprenticeship indentures; DRO, Melbourne Parish Apprenticeship Register. 63 DRO, Melbourne settlement examinations, D655 A/PO 355–449; DRO, Repton settlement examinations, D638 A/PO 144–250; DRO, Ticknall settlement examinations, D1396 A/PO 12/1–96; DRO, Derby All Saints settlement examinations, D3372/99/5–97; DLS, Pauper Settlements Parcel 197. 64 Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, Table 7.1, p. 324. 78 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France results were 12.5 years for boys and 12.0 years for girls.65 That figure is higher than that of the apprentices at Colyton but is in agreement with these results from south Derbyshire. The age analysis shows that the most common age for pauper children to be apprenticed in the south Derbyshire parishes was 12 years. This is significantly different from the data recorded at Colyton where the modal age was 10.5. It is also different from the study of factory apprentices conducted by Honeyman who analysed data from various factories, one of which was the Nottinghamshire factory of William Toplis. The analysis relates to the period 1786–1805 and shows that the modal age was 10 years.66 Honeyman also noted that the pauper apprentices were usually younger than the private apprentices and the factory apprentices were younger than both of these groups.67 From Table 4.2 and Table 4.3 it can be seen that the Derbyshire pauper apprentices were younger than both male apprentices apprenticed privately and males who were privately hired to work on an annual basis. The figures for the girls’ ages at leaving home, although based on a small number of cases, does seem to suggest that the lack of female apprenticeship may be related to the preference of local families to retain control over their daughters longer than their sons. Although the analysis indicates a younger age for parish apprentices than for other formally hired Derbyshire child workers, few very young children were apprenticed in any of the parishes. At Ticknall, only two children aged nine years were apprenticed while Repton apprenticed one aged nine years, as did Melbourne. Thus the idea of the very young pauper apprentice does not agree with the evidence from these parishes. Only 12 children under the age of 11 years were apprenticed from all three parishes and most began apprenticeships at the age of 12 years. The idea of a child starting to work at the age of 12 years may seem young when looking at the English experience in the twenty-first century, but it must be remembered that as late as 1918 the school leaving age for children in England was 12 years, so a family would not be surprised if, over a century earlier, parish officials apprenticed a child at that age. The inappropriate apprenticing of very young children like Robert Blincoe does not appear to have been a dominant feature of the parish policy in these south Derbyshire parishes. The third point raised by Robert Blincoe’s story to consider was the location of the placement, as this could have had an enormous impact upon the children and their families, where they existed. In her study of Cambridgeshire using details of 918 apprentices, Hampson found that the tendency to apprentice outside the home parish became increasingly prevalent over the period
65 Levene, p. 924. 66 Honeyman, p. 46. 67 Honeyman, p. 45. Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 79
1631–1830.68 Unfortunately, for this study the smaller number of indentures and a shorter time frame do not permit the analysis of change over time.
Table 4.4 Distance from settlement of parish apprentice placements
Parish Home parish < 5 miles 6–10 miles > 10 miles
Melbourne 4% 18% 54% 24% 1750–1835 Repton 34% 35% 17% 14% 1779–1837 Ticknall 24% 26% 29% 21% 1791–1833
The parishes, once again, differ in some regard to the placement of the children. However, the placing of apprentices outside the home parish was plainly parish policy, undoubtedly motivated by the desire to unburden the parish of its responsibility towards the children. Melbourne had a higher concentration of tradesmen than either of the other two parishes and would not, therefore, have had a shortage of craftsmen able to take on apprentices. Melbourne’s figure of only 4 per cent of home parish apprenticeships is very low and rivals London parishes in its prevention of local settlement. Mary Rose found that during 1780 the London parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields apprenticed 91 per cent of its poor children to other parishes and this figure rose to 94.3 per cent in the 1790s.69 By contrast though, Thomas found that in the Devon parish of Yealmpton only 18 per cent left the parish as apprentices in the period 1638–1840.70 Hindle cites figures for a parish in the neighbouring county of Staffordshire, Gnosall, which placed only 17.6 per cent of children out of the parish during the period 1691– 1816.71 Another Midlands parish, Doveridge in west Derbyshire, apprenticed 24.4 per cent out of the parish in the period 1699–1818.72 The evidence from
68 Hampson, pp. 282–3. 69 Mary B. Rose, ‘Social Policy and Business: Parish Apprenticeship and the Early Factory System, 1750–1834’, Business History, 31(4) (1989): 5–32, at 9. 70 Thomas, p. 403. 71 Hindle, ‘Waste Children?’, p. 39. 72 W.E. Tate, The Parish Chest: A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England (Cambridge, 1969), p. 221. 80 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France south Derbyshire seems to show that the three parishes frequently placed apprentices out of the parish, but Melbourne in particular had more in common with the highly populated London parishes than with any of the other rural parishes investigated. Hindle suggests that ‘the temptation to apprentice out of parish was greatest in heavily burdened areas such as London’73 but, by placing 96 per cent of its parish apprentices outside the parish, Melbourne, in rural Derbyshire, was clearly tempted by the possibility of reduced maintenance costs that out of parish settlement implied. Placing apprentices with masters outside the home parish does not necessarily indicate neglect or lack of care. Although historians have suggested that parish officials did not apprentice children with care nor did they provide any sort of after care for the apprentices,74 Honeyman has noted that ‘parishes rarely disregarded the welfare of their children following formal binding’.75 Melbourne’s officers certainly enquired about the suitability of the masters to whom they apprenticed children as the parish collection of documents related to apprenticeship contains statements received by the parish relating to the placement of apprentices. For example, John Mills was apprenticed to James Godber of Basford, Nottinghamshire on 1 July 1778 but on 1 April 1778 a statement confirming the suitability of James Godber was received by the parish. The note from the vicar of Basford appears to be the result of a request for information about the proposed master’s character.76 In this regard, and pre- dating legislation requiring such assurances77 therefore, it could be claimed that the parish, showed some evidence of acting responsibly when placing the pauper apprentices even if that placement was a distance away from the home parish. Nevertheless, the majority of the children were placed within walking distance of their home parish, particularly in the two parishes of Repton and Ticknall. So it seems that those aspects of the story of Robert Blincoe which can be researched in these parishes, firstly the trade into which he was apprenticed with no opportunity for advancement, secondly the extremely young age at which he was apprenticed and thirdly the distance from the home parish that he was placed, were not replicated in these parishes. Boys here were mainly placed in traditional trades that would enable them to become masters
73 Hindle, ‘Waste Children?’, p. 39. 74 Lees, pp. 55, 103; cf. Honeyman, p. 216. 75 Ibid., p. 216. 76 DRO, Melbourne apprenticeship indentures, D655 A/PO 706; DRO, Melbourne miscellaneous, D655 A/PO 748. 77 As part of the Act of 1816, 56 Geo. III c139, it was required that magistrates enquired about the suitability of masters with whom children were placed in order to minimize instances of abuse. Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 81 in their own right, even if those trades lacked high status. They began their apprenticeships at an age that was not unusual for starting work and leaving home and they were often placed near enough to the home parish to be in familiar surroundings and to hear familiar dialects. This proximity would also enable them to return to the home parish if circumstances allowed them to visit. Of the conditions of their apprenticeships I have no knowledge, but it is reasonable to suggest that those children with access to family and friends would be less likely to suffer cruel and inhuman treatment like that experienced by pauper apprentices at Litton Mill.78 A comment by Thomas in an article written almost 30 years ago aroused my interest and prompted me to extend this study to include the outcome of some of these apprenticeships. Thomas noted that ‘the subsequent lives of parish apprentices [is] difficult to follow up. No records really indicate how the system worked.’ 79 With this in mind, I have used the census to try to trace the lives of former pauper apprentices of these parishes. It is only possible to trace some of those boys apprenticed since 1800, but of those apprentices, I have located approximately one-third in the census. While not all were practising their trades, the majority were. From a total of 39 former pauper apprentices traced with birth place, age and name in agreement, six were masters of their trades, either with apprentices or recorded as masters by the enumerator. Twenty-six others were practising the trade into which they had been apprenticed. Four former pauper apprentices were recorded as labourers. Of the remainder, one was in prison, one was in the workhouse and one was recorded as being on parish relief. It is not possible to determine whether the apprentices completed their apprenticeships and it may be that many did not. Indeed, the failure of apprentices to complete their apprenticeships has been noted elsewhere. In his study of apprentices in pre-modern England Patrick Wallis noted that a range of studies had found that ‘fewer than half of apprentices became freemen’ providing an indication that incomplete apprenticeships were not uncommon.80 At the conclusion of his careful analysis Wallis comments that ‘levels of early departure among apprentices were almost as high as freedom statistics suggest’.81 Ilana Ben-Amos quoted statistics relating to London’s carpenters’ company during the late sixteenth century which showed that ‘about 45 per cent of the apprentices … failed to complete their terms and were described as having ‘gone’
78 See Brown, ‘A Memoir of Robert Blincoe’, pp. 129–157. 79 Thomas, p. 405. 80 Patrick Wallis, ‘Apprenticeship and Training in Premodern England’, Journal of Economic History, 68(3) (2008): 832–61, at 838. 81 Wallis, p. 853. 82 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France or ‘run away’.82 Hampson also suggests that in Cambridgeshire many apprentices ‘served no more than two or three years of their term’.83 Research has shown that incomplete apprenticeships became more common during the period84 and my own research has indicated that 58 per cent of those former apprentices examined for settlement in the locality failed to complete their full terms.85 I have selected the lives of three former apprentices to illustrate my assertion that from the point of view of the poor, pauper apprenticeship was not necessarily a negative event, and may often have had a positive outcome. It must be stressed, however, that this research is relevant only for boys and that the position of girls may have been far less optimistic. The first of the apprentices was a young man from Repton, William Monk. He was one of a large family of nine children, the father of which was a cordwainer. Young Monk was apprenticed in 1837 at the age of 14 to a tailor in nearby Swadlincote.86 He is recorded in the census of 185187 as living in Newton Solney, the neighbouring parish to Repton, as the head of a household comprising himself and his widowed mother, Elizabeth. He is described as a journeyman tailor. He had obviously maintained contact with his family as he was sharing his home with his widowed mother. The next census to record him is that of 186188 when he was still unmarried and sharing his home with his mother Elizabeth who was 73 years old and described as a servant, while William is now described as a tailor. The final census that recorded William was in 188189 when he was married and the father of two daughters of 14 and 15 years. The 15-year-old daughter is recorded as a dressmaker, as is her mother, but the 14-year-old is recorded as a scholar. William was still working as a tailor and was, at that time, employed at a brewery in Burton-upon-Trent. These census records show that he was able to maintain contact with his family during his apprenticeship and returned to a closer parish to support his widowed mother, or to receive support from her. He later married and continued to practise the trade into which he had been apprenticed as a pauper child. At the same age that he was
82 Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, ‘Failure to Become Freemen: Urban Apprentices in Early Modern England’, Social History, 16(2) (1991): 155–72, at 155. 83 Hampson, p. 282. 84 Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, Chapter 5, pp. 228–69. 85 The esultr cited was obtained from settlement examinations which took place in the three rural parishes and the urban parish of All Saints in Derby and the analysis forms a part of my PhD thesis. 86 DRO, Repton apprenticeship indentures, D638 A/PO 582. 87 TNA, Census 1851, HO 107, 2011/434, p. 1, accessed: 24 November 2009. 88 TNA, Census 1861, RG9, 1961/17, p. 2, accessed: 24 November 2009. 89 TNA, Census 1881, RG11, 2767/127, p. 30, accessed: 24 November 2009. Pauper Apprenticeship in South Derbyshire 83 apprenticed, that is 14, his younger daughter was recorded as a scholar and was not required to work as her father had been. His story could be considered a success as he was able to learn enough skills from his apprenticeship to practise his trade and be able to contribute to the maintenance of a family and allow his child to continue as a scholar beyond the age at which he, himself, had been required to enter the world of work. The second case history is that of two boys from Repton. The first boy is William Ordish, who was apprenticed to a hairdresser in Burton-upon-Trent in 1801.90 He is not recorded in any census records but he is heard of again when another young boy from Repton, Thomas Ordish, aged 13, was apprenticed by the parish in 1824.91 Thomas was also apprenticed to a hairdresser in Burton- upon-Trent and that hairdresser was William Ordish, whom I believe to be the former pauper apprentice. William had clearly become skilled enough to become a master in his own right and take a pauper apprentice himself. On researching the family, it appears that the second pauper apprentice is the nephew of the first thus illustrating not only the continuity of association between the former pauper apprentice and the parish, but also the continuity of one family’s association with the poor relief system.92 Although the first pauper apprentice, William Ordish, cannot be traced in the census, the second pauper apprentice, his nephew Thomas, can be. He is recorded in the census of 1841 in Ramsgate as a perfumer, an occupation commonly associated with hairdressing, who was married and had an apprentice of his own and a female servant.93 By 1851, his family had grown and he had five children.94 He was still recorded as a perfumer. In 1861, he was recorded as living in Hastings and was described as a haircutter.95 He, in the same way as his uncle, had clearly become skilled enough to continue in the trade into which he was apprenticed, and also competent enough to be able to employ an apprentice of his own. As a postscript to this life story, I researched his son, John Gillman Ordish, who was himself working as a hairdresser and wigmaker in 1881.96 It is likely that, in common with many skilled parents, Thomas Ordish taught the skill of hairdressing to his son who then continued with the trade himself. It could therefore be argued that, from the original pauper apprenticeship of
90 DRO, Repton apprenticeship indentures, D638 A/PO 524. 91 Ibid., A/PO 562. 92 Research into the family conducted through the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints’ Family Search website, www.familysearch.org, accessed: 31 January 2011. 93 TNA, Census 1841, HO107, 469/38, p. 25, accessed: 15 December 2009. 94 Ibid., 1630/337, p. 2, accessed: 15 December 2009. 95 TNA, Census 1861, RG9, 560/125, p. 18, accessed: 15 December 2009. 96 TNA, Census 1881, RG11, 988/60, p. 33, accessed: 15 December 2009. 84 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
1801, 80 years later that apprenticeship was still having a positive effect upon the family with the transference of valuable skills from one generation to the next. This research cannot reveal how well the children were treated by their masters; indeed one local child had his apprenticeship cancelled by the magistrate on account of his master’s cruelty,97 nor can it claim that the children were happy with their placements. However, it can suggest that some boys were trained to a level sufficient to provide them with employment as adults and were provided with skills that ‘insured against unemployment’.98 Surely it is reasonable to comment that without the benefit of training received by the parish apprenticeships it is likely that the children concerned would have worked either as agricultural or industrial labourers and would have had few prospects for improving their status or increasing their incomes. The elder brother of William Monk, George, was recorded as a labourer in the census of 1841 and it is likely that William too would have had little opportunity to do other work if he had not been apprenticed to a tailor by the parish. Similarly, it is likely that Thomas Ordish would have followed his father as an agricultural labourer in Repton if he had not had the opportunity to train as a hairdresser with his uncle. I do not suggest in any way that all children benefited from parish apprenticeships – there is plenty of evidence that suggests otherwise – but I would suggest that some did. Nor do I suggest that the children who benefited were the majority of those apprenticed, as this small study of a corner of Derbyshire may be the exception. However, I would propose that for some people in some places, pauper apprenticeship was not an onerous burden or a cruel imposition, but was instead a pathway to a better future for poor children and their families and can therefore be viewed in a more positive light.
97 DRO, Ticknall apprenticeship, D1396 A/PO 22/1. 98 Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour, p. 266. Chapter 5 The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich: ‘Rank Beggars, Gresse Maydes and Harlots’
Lesley Silvester
A harlott, I founde there one hore of Havergat layde in their bed, & I understand of much evel resort, & resort thether at 9 of the clok at night.1
Intriguingly, the ‘harlott’ referred to in this entry vanishes from the records and we are never to find out what became of her. The ‘hore of Havergate’ was living in a house in the parish of St Marten at Bale in Norwich, England in 1570. At that time, the authorities in Norwich were alarmed at the growing number of poor people in the town and ordered a census of the poor to be taken. The 1570 Norwich Census of the Poor (referred to hereafter as ‘the census’ for convenience) enumerated 2,348 people in 790 households.2 Following the census, the Mayor’s Orders for the Poore is full of rhetoric criticizing the behaviour of the poor: ‘And an other mischefe was that when ther bellies were filled, theie fell to lust and concupisence, and mosts shamefullie abused ther bodies and brought forth basterdes in such quantitie as it passed.’3 From this statement, one would expect that the census would list a large number of pregnant single women and women with illegitimate children, but the reality is quite different. A total of 903 women aged 15 and over were listed in the census. I have categorized the women of the census into four groups: married women, that is women living with a husband; single women, women aged between 15 and 50
1 John F. Pound, The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570, Norwich Record Society, 40 (Norwich, 1971), p. 36. Given names will be modernized throughout the chapter. 2 My figures after compiling a detailed database of the families and individuals in the census. 3 William Hudson and John C. Tingey (eds), The Records of the City of Norwich (2 vols, Norwich, 1906), 2, p. 344. 86 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France who had never been married;4 deserted wives, where it is stated that the husband had left the household; and widows. Although my focus is on the second group – the 147 single women of the census – I will make occasional reference to both widows and deserted wives as the distinction between all groups of women can be lacking in definition.5 I will also discuss the age and status of the women of the census, their family and domestic activities and their social involvement both public and private. The women of the census, although individuals, all have something in common: their poverty – as defined by the census – and the ways in which they attempted to survive it. The census provides a useful data set to examine whether my methodology can enhance the study of poor single women in an early modern urban area. I have used genealogical research methodologies to create a genealogical database, which includes each family and individual in the census. I then searched for evidence of these families and their descendants for at least two to three generations to examine their experience of poverty over time. My methodology collates genealogical and generational history records from a wide range of sources. It then analyses them in a genealogical manner to demonstrate the possibilities that these sources and methods offer in addressing major historical research questions, such as kinship and network support; relationships between the poor and the authorities and survival expedients of the poor. My study utilizes a variety of extant records, including parish records, court records, probate and occupational records. This facilitates the observation of the actions and behaviours over time of the families in the study and has expanded the technique of nominal record linkage used in other recent studies.6 By making genealogical connections through time and across geographical boundaries this research can address major historical connections in a different way. Using this method, I have pieced together 80 stories and case studies of individuals and families, some of which I will use to illustrate the analysis in this chapter.
4 This group includes all women between 15 and 50 whose status was not defined in the census. 5 Cordelia Beattie, ‘A Room of One’s Own? The Legal Evidence for the Residential Arrangements of Women Without Husbands in Late Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century York’, in N.J. Menuge (ed.), Medieval Women and the Law (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 41–56, at p. 55. 6 Susan Broomhall, ‘Understanding Household Limitation Strategies among the Sixteenth-Century Urban Poor in France’, French History, 20(2) (2006): 121–37, at 137. The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich 87
There was a place in society for married women and widows but not for single women who were considered a threat to morals and male authority.7 Women without men were looked on by male authority in different ways, dependent on whether they were unmarried and single, or widows.8 Previous studies of single women in early modern England have noted that authorities did not approve of single women living on their own.9 Amy Froide has shown that some towns, including Southampton and Coventry, actively prevented single women from independent living.10 The age of 50 seems to be the one deemed by early modern standards as the age at which women are no longer considered as being troublesome for the authorities. This is the case not only in Norwich, but also in Southampton and Coventry where urban authorities issued orders to prevent single women under the age of 50 from living on their own.11 Historians have generally concluded that this was due to the patriarchal nature of early modern England that also contributed to the lack of distinction between prostitution and non-commercial sexual activity.12 In the Norwich census, there are a large number of women either living alone, living with children or with other women who may be kinswomen or unrelated. That is, a number of women in the census were living without men and were thus, to all intents and purposes, heads of households, responsible for decision- making and governance within those households. In most cases the census-taker has noted the marital status of the women in each of the households, although whether the women themselves were entirely truthful in relating their status is not known. If the woman was not well known in Norwich then she could
7 Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005), p. 17. 8 Amy M. Froide, ‘Marital Status as a Category of Difference: Singlewomen and Widows in Early Modern England’, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 236–69, at p. 236. 9 Diane Willen, ‘Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: The Case of the Urban Working Poor’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 19 (1988): 559–75, at 561. 10 Froide, Never Married, p. 10: P.J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c.1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992), p. 212. 11 Froide, ‘Marital Status’, pp. 240–42; Froide, Never Married, p. 24; for a discussion of what constitutes ‘old age’, see Margaret Pelling, ‘Old Age, Poverty, and Disability in Early Modern Norwich’, in Margaret Pelling and Richard M. Smith (eds), Life, Death and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives (New York, 1991), pp. 74–101. 12 Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Sex and the Singlewoman’, in Bennett and Froide, Singlewomen, pp. 127–45, at p. 128. 88 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France present herself as married or widowed with no one to question the accuracy of her statement.13 The Norwich authorities did not appear to perceive that this was a problem in all these households, but I will show that the Norwich authorities attempted to control the makeup of these households where they felt they were contrary to goodly order. Maryanne Kowaleski has established that, by the sixteenth century in England, the proportion of single women in the adult female population was possibly 30–40 per cent.14 The causes underlying such large numbers of unmarried women have been discussed at length, the main consensus being that it was poverty that had the greatest effect on marriage patterns.15 It was not until the later seventeenth century that some women could choose deliberately to remain single and independent, and those women that could use this option were not poor but from the upwardly mobile, middling class.16 The single women of sixteenth-century Norwich did not have much choice about whether they would marry or remain single. Few were independent enough to have a reasonable quality of life and, importantly, they were morally suspect if not married. This meant they had the authorities to contend with, and as I will show, were subject to being ordered into what the authorities thought they should be doing. Despite the large percentage of single women in early modern England, only a small number of these were heads of households: Peter Laslett calculated that single women headed only 1.1 per cent of households,17 while Amy Froide found
13 Adrienne L. Eastwood, ‘Controversy and the Single Woman in ‘The Maid’s Tragedy’ and ‘The Roaring Girl’,Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 58(2) (2004): 7–27, at 11. 14 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective’, in Bennett and Froide, Singlewomen, pp. 38–81, at p. 64. 15 Kowaleski, ‘Singlewomen’, p. 64; Judith M. Spicksley, ‘To Be or Not to Be Married: Single Women, Money-Lending and the Question of Choice in Late Tudor and Stuart England’, in D. Kehler and L. Amtower (eds), The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation (Tempe, AZ, 2003), pp. 65–96, at p. 74. 16 Froide, Never Married, p. 10. 17 Peter Laslett, ‘Mean Household Size in England since the Sixteenth Century’, in Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, Household and Family in Past Time: Comparative Studies in the Size and Structure of the Domestic Group over the Last Three Centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and Colonial North America, with Further Materials from Western Europe (Cambridge, 1972), p. 147. The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich 89 that only 8 per cent of never-married women headed their own households in Southampton by the end of the seventeenth century.18 To determine the number of single women in the census, I used criteria similar to that of Bennett and Froide, who suggest the term ‘single women’ encompasses both those women who would eventually marry and those who never would.19 I have counted all women of the census aged 15 and over, whose marital status was single or not stated. There were 147 of these women, which is 16.2 per cent of women in the census. In total, 95 of these single women appear to be heading their own household, 14 deserted wives, 49 widows and 32 single women. This means that 12.2 per cent of the 790 households in the census were headed by women. My figures are different from Froide’s and markedly different from those of Laslett. Nevertheless, all three studies indicate that single women as heads of household were not common, whether by design or practice, but my figures suggest there was a difference if families were poor. Although women living alone were frowned on by authorities, there were 35 women in the census living entirely alone and all but one of these were aged 40 years and over. None of the women aged 50 or over who were living alone were required to change their circumstance; however, the women aged under 50 living alone were ordered into service. Elizabeth Brother, an unmarried woman aged 40, was living by herself in St Steven’s parish in a house owned by William Almons.20 She was noted as ‘hable’ and ordered to go into service or be appointed. Another unmarried woman in the same parish, 48-year-old Helen Hanworth, was appointed to work with the hat-maker Robert Condly.21 This evidence shows that it was women’s age that determined whether the authorities were concerned if they were found to be living alone. How did these single women of the census manage their poverty, and what does my methodology reveal about what happened to the women over time? One thing that most had in common was that they were working, often at more than one occupation. This included all age groups from as young as four or five to women in their nineties.22 The five-year-old child of Ann Buck was working at lace work and the elderly widow Jone Forcet was spinning white warp at the
18 ‘Introduction’, in Bennett and Froide, Singlewomen, p. 2; Froide, ‘Marital Status’, pp. 239, 241. 19 See discussion in the Introduction to Bennett and Froide, Singlewomen, p. 2. 20 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 44. 21 Norfolk Record Office [hereafter NRO], Norwich Corporation Record [NCR], Mayor’s Book of the Poor 1570–79 [hereafter Mayor’s Book], Case 20c, 1570–71, unpaginated. 22 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 99; Margaret Pelling, ‘Older Women: Household, Caring and Other Occupations in the Late Sixteenth-century Town’, in Pelling, The Common Lot: 90 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France age of 100.23 Deserted wife Agnes Daniell wove lace but also did washing and her eldest child ‘work with the nedle’ as well as weaving lace.24 I will now briefly discuss the older single women of the census and their experience and strategies for survival.
Older Single Women
Of the 147 single women in the census, 49 were aged 50 and over and 32 of these were receiving alms. The 17 women in this age group who were not receiving alms were all living with family or other people in the same house, apart from two who were living alone. The group of women receiving alms were also mostly living with family or others except for eight who were living alone, one of whom owned her own house. Women of any age might pool their resources by sharing accommodation with other women or with a family, and thus be better off. There is some evidence of this strategy in sixteenth-century Norwich. Margaret Canold was aged 79, a single woman who was described as ‘veri syk, and hav ben a gret tyme’ who was living in a house owned by John Brierton, a common councillor of Mancroft ward.25 Also in the house was a deserted wife, Avis Halydeye aged 63, a single woman described as ‘dombe Elizabeth’, the labourer Robert Bronde, his wife Chrystian and their three-year-old child, and the extended family of Walter Fuller. Walter was a labourer aged 40, and he had a wife Margery and four young children, plus his parents Robert and Elizabeth Fuller. There was a total of 14 people in the house and all were listed as poor in the census.26 We cannot know why and how people chose their living arrangements in these circumstances but like the example above, many of these houses contained a mix of older and younger women, both with and without children and either single, widowed or deserted. Some houses contained only women, others had men, usually with families as there were few single men noted in the census.27 Although the women may have occupied different rooms in the same house this does not preclude some form of communal assistance and may be an example of
Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London, 1998), pp. 155–75, at p. 169. 23 Pound, Norwich Census, pp. 43, 49. 24 Ibid., p. 49. 25 Ibid., p. 51 and Appendix VIII. 26 Ibid., p. 51. 27 I have found 32 single men aged 16 and over in the census. The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich 91 the strategy of ‘spinster clustering’ discussed by Olwen Hufton.28 I believe this cross-generational occupation within houses shows survival strategies not based on kinship but on current needs. Older women could look after young children leaving the younger women free to work and travel to procure necessities for the household. In the years following the census most of the older single women did not change their circumstances. The 65 per cent of those single women aged 50 and over who were receiving alms can be followed through the poor relief ledgers for a number of years until their names are no longer there. In the parish of St George Tombland in East Wymer Ward was ‘Chrystian Coup[er] of 86 yeris, that spyn white warpe, & have dwelt here ever. 2d. a weke. Indeferent’.29 Chrystian was on the list of poor alms receivers for St George Tombland parish in 1570–71 soon after the census.30 Her marital status was not given in the census, so it is not known whether she was a widow or had never married. Although she was stated to be 86 years of age she was the sole occupant of the tenement in which she was living. The last mention of her receiving alms is in 1574. Her death is not recorded in St George Tombland parish, but her advanced age would suggest that she had died and may have been buried in another parish. Parishes near the various hospitals show burials of inmates, and are notoriously vague on detail with entries in the burial register such as ‘Emm from the sick house’ and ‘a pore boy at the gates’.31 As well as the payment of alms there are numerous incidents in the poor relief book that list special payments to the poor. These may be for sickness or winding sheets for burials, and often to pay for petticoats and blankets. There were also large amounts of money to pay for charcoal and faggots to be delivered to the poor in winter. These cases show that the authorities were attempting to alleviate the circumstances of these older women who did not appear to have any other extended family support. Even with family support, there was no priority on keeping a family together. Often the older women of the census that were deemed ‘hable’ had their children sent off to work elsewhere. Whether this resulted in money sent home is not
28 Olwen Hufton, ‘Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth-Century’, Journal of Family History, 9 (1984): 355–76, at 361; see also Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660–1850 (New Haven, 2001), p. 179. 29 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 65. 30 George Branwhite Jay, Thomas R. Tallack and William Hudson (eds),The First Parish Register of St George of Tombland, Norwich 1538–1707 (Norwich, 1891), pp. 230–31. 31 NRO, Parish Register of St Giles’s, Norwich, PD 192, 26 July 1557 and 21 January 1568. Consulted at the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints’ FamilySearch website, www.familysearch.org, accessed: 10 January 2011. 92 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France known but poor relief records show that payments often increased in households where able young persons had been removed. In the census, Margaret Beaver aged 60 was living with her daughter Joan in Mr Steward’s house in St Peter per Mountergate parish. Margaret and Joan were both working at knitting and were classed as ‘Veri Pore’, receiving 2d. a week in alms.32 Soon after the census, the Mayor’s Book of the Poor shows that Joan was hired by Robert Catton. She was to serve him for ‘one hole year and he to give her for her wages 20s’.33 There is no suggestion that Joan should be left with her mother in order to look after her. At this time her mother’s alms payment was increased to 3d. a week and it is also noted that Margaret received a special payment of 8d. in 1571–72 ‘in her sickness’.34 The fact that Margaret was deemed to need alms indicates she was not able to work enough to keep herself yet the authorities decided to take her daughter away. However, Margaret and Joan were sharing a house with six other households. This shows that the authorities may have considered there were enough other people in the house to assist Margaret. It also suggests that her daughter Joan was deemed to be at risk of being idle and disorderly even though she was living within her mother’s authority. Another older woman in the census was sharing a house with the family of cordwainer William Storrage, his wife Emani and their 11-year-old child. The short sentence in the census that describes Katherine Bedford does not present a lot of information: ‘Katherin[e] Bedfor[d] of 66 yers, that is a taylor, & have dwelt here of long-tym. [hable] No alms. Indeferent.’35 She was elderly, working, does not appear to have needed alms and had lived in Norwich a long time. Katherine was initially categorized among the single women in my database, as it is not stated whether she was married or widowed; however, she is one of only three women in the census who was given a guild occupation, prompting an investigation of the City’s apprentice and freemen’s records. The Norwich Freemen’s records show that an apprentice of William Bedford became a freeman tailor in 1559.36 The name Bedford is not common in sixteenth- century Norwich.37 It is likely that William was Katherine’s husband and that after his death, as his widow, she was able and allowed to continue his business. Katherine died in 1574 and is one of the few women resident in the census for
32 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 30. 33 NRO, NCR, Mayor’s Book, Case 20c, 1570–71, unpaginated. 34 Ibid. 35 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 57. 36 Percy Millican (ed.), The Register of the Freemen of Norwich 1548–1713 (Norwich, 1934), p. 125. 37 A blanket search of the parishes of Norwich shows no baptisms or marriages for that name in the sixteenth century. The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich 93 whom a will can be located.38 The will confirms that she had been married as she stated she was a widow although it does not confirm that her husband was William. She left a number of possessions and money totalling 4s. 4d. to various people, none of whom were specifically stated to be family or kin. She left some of her clothes to other women friends, one of whom, Margaret Smythe, a single woman aged 40, is also listed in the census as living in St Margaret’s parish: Katherine bequeathed to Margaret her ‘holy day gown of colour blue’.39 After all the specific bequests, Katherine left the residue of her goods to John Brown, her landlord, and Stephen Davy, a dornix weaver and appointed both of these men her executors. Davy was a common councillor in Wymer Ward 1559–69 where he owned three houses rented to households in the census.40 One of the witnesses to the will was William Storrage, the cordwainer with whom Katherine shared the house, who is also listed in the census. Katherine’s will demonstrates one of the peculiarities of the census in the question of how the census enumerators classified the individuals as poor. She possessed sufficient resources to enable her to bestow a modest amount of money and goods on friends and executors so why would she be included in the census? She was noted as not receiving alms and ‘indeferent’ which suggests that she was not in dire need of assistance at that time. This term is used often in the census, usually relating to individuals who appeared to be poor but managing, or rather the authorities’ perception was that they were managing. In Katherine’s case, I suggest she was listed in the census because as a 66-year-old woman without a man or family, she was thought likely to become a charge on the parish sooner rather than later, so the authorities wanted to keep watch on her. This is true of a number of household/families in the census, so was a pre-emptory attitude from the authorities. This could also be construed as a way of being able to prepare for future poor relief problems, in effect what might be termed a sensible planning measure.
Younger Single Women
There were 99 single women between the ages of 15 and 50 in the census, 59 of which were living with parents or other kinfolk. The other 40 shared houses with other people, except two that were living alone and another who was a ward of the family with which she was living. It was these younger single
38 NRO, NCC, Will Register 1574, Fairchilde 369. 39 Ibid. 40 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 104. 94 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France women that the Norwich authorities seemed to be concerned about and they created a corrective measure specifically aimed at the ‘women and maydes that lyve ydelye or be disorderid’.41 This measure was put in place by the authorities to establish a number of what were to be known as ‘select women’ for each ward of the city. Committees from each ward were to appoint ‘so manye selecte women as shal suffyse to receyve of persons within that warde’.42 These women were to take in each day up to 12 children, women and maydes that were ordered by the deacons of the ward. The children were to be taught ‘letters’ and should be from the poorest families that were unable to pay for their learning. Notes within the census suggest that 42 women from the census were considered for the ‘select women’ appointments. Of these, the majority were married women, ten were widows and interestingly three single women were also selected. Two of the latter may have been widows or possibly deserted wives but their marital status was not given in the census. The third was Joan Abell, a surprising choice as the census describes her as ‘a gresse mayde that kepe wyves & do business’.43 However, the poor relief listings set out in the Mayor’s Book of the Poor after the census show a different story whereby only 18 of the 31 select women came from the census and Joan Abell’s name does not appear. There is no documentation listing the criteria used to choose the select women but as they were expected to teach children letters, it seems they were expected to be literate themselves. A number of those initially chosen from the census were later rejected. Surviving documentation provides no information why these women were selected or deemed unsuitable. Those women appointed to be select women had little say in the matter. If they refused, they should ‘suffer inprisonemente by the space of twentie dayes at the leaste’.44 In effect this meant that the select women were shackled to the power of the authorities as much as their charges were. It is not stated whether any of the women refused the offer to be a select woman and I have found no evidence that any were imprisoned for refusing. Those noted in the census as ‘select’ may have been the result of the census takers
41 William Hudson and John C. Tingey (eds), The Records of the City of Norwich (2 vols, Norwich, 1906), 2, p. 352. 42 Ibid., p. 352. 43 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 38. The term ‘gresse mayde’ is discussed below. It usually relates to harlot or prostitute. Margaret Pelling has discussed the terminology used by the census taker(s) in 1570 Norwich, suggesting that such terms as ‘kepe wyves’ relates to nursing employment, in Margaret Pelling ‘Nurses and Nursekeepers: Problems of Identification in the Early Modern Period’, in Pelling, Common Lot, pp. 179–202, at p. 194. 44 Hudson and Tingay, Records, 2, p. 353. The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich 95 suggesting a list of women that they considered suitable. Two of the women chosen were living in the same house. Lettis Dam, aged 50 and her husband Thomas, a 60-year-old labourer were living in their own house in St Mary’s parish.45 They were sharing their house with two other families, one of which was an older couple, Robert and Margaret Canold, both aged 68. Lettis and Margaret were both chosen as the select women of Coslany ward along with a younger woman, Margaret Cocke aged 37. Margaret was the wife of William Cocke, a worsted weaver. This family had four children under the age of nine and were also living in St Mary’s parish and purchasing their own house.46 The fact that these two houses were owned by their poor inhabitants suggests that the occupants were respected citizens, who perhaps had fallen on hard times. The authorities may have considered property owners to be good candidates to take on the select women charter. The women and maydes sent to the select women were to be made to work ‘tyll their handes be browght into such use and their bodies to such paynes as labore and learninge shall be easier to them than idleness’.47 They were expected to ‘fynde the stuffes and the woorking tooles’ and if they did so would receive the profits of their work.48 If they could not provide their own tools then the select women could provide them but would only pay them for work done and keep the profits themselves. The select women were to receive 20s. a year in payment. This may seem a reasonable sum of money for the time but the women had to work long hours in supervising the persons sent to them by the deacons. They were expected to ensure work was carried out by threat of punishment and were given leave to ‘give punnishment, six stripes with a rodde’ if necessary.49 The hours they had to supervise were from before 8 o’clock in the morning until 11 o’clock then a break for dinner and to work again from 1 o’clock until past 4 o’clock in the afternoon. In the summer months it was from 6 o’clock in the morning until 7 o’clock in the evening with a similar dinner break. Penalties for disobedience to the select women were harsh by today’s standards. In the case of children, their parents could be punished by the loss of their weekly relief. Recalcitrant youths were to be sent to Bridewell to receive punishment and a collar of iron. Who were the women that were ordered to work with the select women? Alice Hadam deserves a special mention because unusually for a relatively young woman of 40 with no children, she was receiving 3d. per week in alms at the
45 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 71. 46 Ibid., p. 70. 47 Hudson and Tingey, Records, 2, p. 352–3. 48 Ibid., p. 358. 49 Ibid., p. 357. 96 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France time of the census.50 She was living in St George Tombland parish where she was sharing a house with an older widow and a married couple with two young children. She was noted as a ‘gresswoman’ which is said to be a Norfolk dialect term relating to ‘grass-widow’, meaning a ‘forsaken fair one, whose nuptials, not celebrated in a church, were consummated in all pastoral simplicity, on the green t ur f ’. 51 This seems to have been a general term used in Norwich at that time, sometimes but not always distinct from the terms harlot or prostitute. Alice was also the only woman so noted who was receiving alms. After the census, the poor relief book for St George Tombland parish shows that Alice was appointed to go to work with the select women of the ward ‘for having a child in base with Archer’.52 There is no child in the census with Alice but the parish register of St George Tombland shows the baptism of Galfridus, illegitimate son of Alicie Adams on the 18 April 1567.53 There is no recorded burial for this child in that parish. Although appointed to the select women, Alice continued to be entered as receiving alms in the poor relief book until 1579.54 She was quite young, at 40, to be on the poor books and then to remain there for so long which suggests the parish was looking out for her, and that possibly she may have had some physical or mental disability. In St Giles parish the 76-year-old Joan Shynkwyn lived with her 40-year- old daughter Beatrice Shynkwyn and two young grandchildren. Joan was working at spinning white warp but classed as ‘veri pore’ and was in receipt of 3d. per week in alms. Beatrice and the children were also spinning. There was no mention in the census notes of any untoward behaviour by Beatrice, but nevertheless, the deacons of the ward saw fit to send Beatrice off to the select women to work for ‘harlotrie’. The poor relief book at the same time states that Joan is ‘past work’ and increases her alms payment to 4d. Looking after two young children while Beatrice was working with the select women must have taken its toll on Joan and she died in 1572. In 1575, Beatrice married Edward Clerk in St Giles Church. She was one of 19 of the single women of the census who eventually married.55
50 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 65. 51 Robert Forby, The Vocabulary of East Anglia (2 vols, London, 1830), 2, p. 140. 52 NRO, NCR, Mayor’s Book, Case 20c, 1570–71, unpaginated. 53 Historians will be familiar with the inconsistency of the spelling of names: not only from the sixteenth century, but right up until the present, names are often misspelt. 54 NRO, NCR, Mayor’s Book, Case 20c, 1570–71, unpaginated. 55 It is of course possible that a number may have entered into common law marriage, but without documentation they remain unknown. The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich 97
Harlots and Gresse Wenches
The previous two case studies lead into discussion of the judgemental way in which the authorities dealt with the sexuality of the single women in the census. The ‘hore of Havergate’ with whom this chapter began seems to have been quickly dealt with as there is no more mention of her. She was from the parish of Halvergate, 12 miles from Norwich, so was probably sent away, although there is no record in the Mayor’s Court or poor relief book concerning her. There are just three young unmarried but pregnant women, two of whom were living with their parents. All are said to have become pregnant while working away in service, and have returned home when they needed assistance, as in the following case:
Richard Keatch of 60 yers, laborer nott liable to work for lamenes, & Agnes, his wyfe, of 68 yers, that spyn white warpe; & Jone Skynner, hyr daughter, a grese mayde that lyeth in of chylde, that sayeth the child is Wa[l]ter Rogers of St Feythes, servingman with Mr Thursbyes, 2d a weke. Pore.56
The daughter Joan’s pregnancy may have been the result of either a consensual sexual encounter or rape; she was noted as a ‘grese mayde’ in the census entry but a ‘harlot’ in a note at the end of the entries for the ward in which the family were living. The Norwich authorities do not appear to have distinguished between cases of illegitimacy; they were indifferent to the circumstances and pregnant single women were almost always treated as delinquent. In this case, Joan was ordered to the select women of Fyebridge Ward. Historian Paul Griffiths has argued that the census reveals real social problems within Norwich, showing many young ‘layabouts’ and female offenders.57 He states that the census ‘turned up an uncomfortable number of harlots, sinning single women and grasse wenches pregnant with base children’.58 The numbers, however, do not support this conclusion. Altogether, 14 of the women in the census were classified as harlots or gresse maydes and none were living together, just three lived north of the river and the others all south of the river. There is no consistency in the words used to describe these women, and the words ‘harlot’ and ‘hore’ are rarely used. Many of the census entries do not initially indicate anything untoward about the women mentioned, for instance, ‘ther is a mayde called Mable a Breten, that is my ladi Wodhous servant, that
56 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 92. 57 Paul Griffiths, ‘Inhabitants’, in Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (eds),Norwich Since 1550 (London 2004), pp. 63–88, at p. 66. 58 Ibid., p. 66. 98 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France do souiorne there in my ladis absonce, She is of 23 yers’.59 Mabel was sharing a house with three other households, with mainly elderly inhabitants and on the surface seems to have been fairly innocuous, but in the notes of the census-taker at the end of the ward is noted ‘Harlotes: Mabel a Breten at Frances Morlis and Elizabeth Gask at Osborns’.60 Mabel was committed to service by the deacons of Colgate Ward but there is no further mention of Elizabeth after the census. Nine of the 14 women classified as harlots or gresse maydes either had children or were unmarried and pregnant. These appear to have been the main criteria that prompted the authorities to apply the epithets of harlot, hore or gresse mayde. There is no indication that they believed that a single woman who was pregnant may not have been a willing participant in the activity that led to conception. In John Kynge’s house within St Mary’s parish were three households, including that of John Bridge, a 60-year-old smith with his wife Grace and a 15-year-old child. The census states they had taken in ‘Margaret Cok, a wench late with child, that spyn, & is delyvered, that was begotten at Lesyngham by Thos. Gedney of North Walsham, worstead weaver, that was about to marry hyr’.61 Margaret was, with the aid of Thomas Gedney, obviously in a sorry predicament but had been taken in by the Bridge household and was contributing to the welfare of the household by working at spinning. However, as with Mabel a Breten above, the notes at the end of the Coslany ward census entries label her as a harlot.62 A search of the North Walsham parish register shows that Gedney married a Margaret Woode on 24 September 1569 and they subsequently had at least six children.63 Margaret Cok, Joan Skinner and another of the pregnant ‘harlots’, Elizabeth Ward, all named the fathers of their babies and all had been away from home in service. It is ironic that the authorities were anxious to send single women into service to prevent them being idle and disordered. Looking at later records such as the poor relief book, it becomes apparent that there were more women considered to be questionable than were noted in the census. Many adolescent young women, even if living at home and working to contribute to the family economy, were ordered into service. Those single women who had children ‘in base’ or were noted as harlots were ordered to work with the select women. But when was a harlot not a harlot? The next case importantly points out the problems associated with language and names:
59 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 76. 60 Ibid., p. 82. 61 Ibid., p. 69. 62 Ibid., p. 74. 63 NRO, Parish Register, North Walsham 1557–1675, PD 711, Baptisms pp. 6–20, Marriage p. 58. Consulted at FamilySearch, accessed: 25 January 2012. The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich 99
Thomas Cop[er] of 30 yeris, carpenter not in worke, and Magdelyn, his wyfe, of 24 yer, that weave lace, & have dwelt here 4 yer, & cam from Mvlbarton; & they have Alyce lyve by love, wedow, within there, of 40 yere, that weave lace, & is com to towne lately from Dysse,>No alms. Pore.64
Griffiths has noted that the name ‘“Lyve By Love” aroused fears about the appropriate allocation of scarce work and the “inevitably” shallow morals of women who lived without a father, husband or master’.65 It is therefore not surprising that Griffith mentions Alice in the same sentence as ‘“harlot”, sinning single women, “grasse wenches” pregnant with “base” children’ as if her name immediately pronounced not who she was, but what she was.66 Looking more closely at Alice, I found that along with two other single women, she was involved in a case of stealing, that was heard at the quarter sessions in 1566.67 One of the women was her daughter Rose and the other was named Magdalene Livebylove, whom the deposition reveals to have been Alice’s step-daughter. All three women were certainly minor larceny offenders but I have found no real evidence that they were harlots. Magdalene was mentioned again in the Mayor’s Court in 1566. For stealing corn from the mill she was whipped with rods in the council chamber and assigned as a servant to Robert Munde.68 There is no more mention of this family in the courts up to the time of the census and in 1570 Magdalene married Thomas Copar in Heigham, a parish just outside the walls on the south east side of Norwich69 and the couple had three children who were baptized in Heigham, in 1570, 1572 and 1575.70 The name ‘Live By Love’ is not common at this period and although it may have originally been a descriptive name for a harlot it can also be found as a male surname occasionally in parish registers.71 If Magdalene was Alice’s step- daughter then it was her father, Alice’s husband that gave her the name Lyve
64 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 47. 65 Griffiths, p. 66. 66 Ibid., p. 66. 67 NRO, NCR, Quarter Sessions Minute Books, Case 20a/4, 1561–69, fol. 89v. 68 NRO, NCR, Mayor’s Court Books, Case 16a/8 1562–69, fol. 435r. 69 NRO, Norfolk Parish Registers, DN/PRG 12. Marriage record of St Bartholomew’s, Heigham Norfolk, 23 April 1570 (Howell transcription) consulted on the International Genealogical Index, available at FamilySearch, accessed: 1 March 2011. 70 NRO, Norfolk Parish Registers, DN/PRG 12. Baptism records of St Bartholomew’s, Heigham Norfolk, 18 July 1571; 31 August 1572; 12 June 1575 (Howell transcription), consulted on the International Genealogical Index, FamilySearch, accessed: 1 March 2011. 71 Nicholas Lyvebylove married on 5 September 1540 in Westminster, London, extracted marriage record noted on the International Genealogical Index, FamilySearch, accessed: 1 March 2011. 100 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
By Love so it cannot be assumed that Alice received the name because of her immorality. My final case study is a more extreme example of why the authorities were concerned about women on their own: ‘Benet Gedwyis of 26 yere, that spyn white warp; & 2 children of 5, 1 yer, & hav dwelt her 7 yer & cam from Horsted. [hable] No allms. Veri pore’.72 The information given on Benet and her children in the census, like that of many other individuals, is quite sparse. However, examining other records revealed much more. At the time of the census, Benet and her two children were living in Edward Pye’s house in St Augustine’s parish. Edward Pye was a freeman worsted weaver who was to become a Sheriff of Norwich in 1571. He was also a common councillor in Ultra Aquam Ward from 1553–72. He owned four houses in St Augustine’s parish and another three in the Fyebridge area, all rented to the poor. Benet and her two children shared the house with a deserted wife, Elizabeth Kynge and her 3-year-old child, and the baker Andrew Mordew and his wife Anne. I have not found a baptism for the 5-year-old child noted in the census with Benet, but there is a baptism of Edwardus Goowyns in 1569 in St Augustine’s, with parents given as Thomas and Benet.73 I initially listed Benet as single as her marital status was not given in the census entry. No marriage has been found for Benet and Thomas but some years previously, Benet was said to be the wife of Thomas Goodwyns. It is of course possible that she was a widow but I have not found a burial record for Thomas. I therefore classified her as a deserted wife. Their son Edward was buried in 1571 in St Augustine’s, Norwich. The census entry for Benet does not give any indication that she had been in trouble with the authorities, but the Mayor’s Court tells a different story. Eight years prior to the census, in 1562, Benet was ‘taken this night last past in a garden in comytting the abhominable vice of Whoredome’.74 She was found in the garden of her master, William Mordewe the baker, with one William Tesmond the son of Vincent Tesmond, citizen and glover. The quarter sessions deposition arbitrarily set the blame for the incident onto Benet and she was punished more severely than her male counterpart, confirming Gowing’s view that ‘women’s whole relationship to standards of sexual behaviour was radically different from that of men’.75 Benet was ordered to ride in a cart with a paper on her head and a basin tinkled before her, then ‘to be tyd to the Cukingstole and
72 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 77. 73 NRO, Parish register, St Augustine’s, Norwich, PD 185, 28 August 1569, consulted at FamilySearch, accessed: 10 January 2011. 74 NRO, NCR, Mayor’s Court Book, Case 16a/8 1562–69, fol. 9v. 75 Laura Gowing, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993): 1–21, at 19. The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich 101 dukyd in the water’.76 There is an interesting aside to this event. While awaiting her ducking, Benet was approached by Mrs Aldrich, the wife of John Aldrich who was to become Mayor and order the census in 1570. Mrs Aldrich was said to have talked with Benet to ‘amende her evyll lyfe and confesse her faulte’.77 At this point, a man among the onlookers took the paper off Benet’s head and threw it into the river.78 This suggests he either knew Benet or thought her punishment wrong, especially as he did this in public view and in front of the wife of an alderman. At the time of the census, Benet was living in the same house as Andrew Mordew and his wife. Andrew was a baker (though not a freeman) aged 36 and his wife Anne aged 34 spun white warp. They had no children. William Mordew is also listed in the census, nearby in the adjoining parish. He was Benet’s master at the time of her court case in 1562 and there is a high probability that he was related to Andrew. In 1568, Andrew’s wife Anne had appeared in the Mayor’s Court for ‘keeping women of very evil behaviour and evil living and for haunting and keeping suspect houses and suspect persons’.79 The other woman living in this house was Elizabeth Kynge whose husband John Thurston was in gaol for debt.80 John had appeared in the Mayor’s Court in 1563 when he was whipped at the cart for petty larceny.81 This house seems to have held a group that had been in trouble of various kinds over a number of years but none of the inhabitants were noted as troublemakers in the census and I have found no mention of them in the Mayor’s Court or quarter sessions in the following 10 years. Either they were so well known as troublemakers that the census-taker did not think it necessary to note the fact or they mended their ways.
Conclusion
My study has produced some insights into the lives of poor single women in sixteenth-century Norwich. Few of these women were the vagrants, harlots and beggars described in the Mayor’s Book and I believe that the evidence from the census shows that the judgemental way in which the authorities dealt with the poor of the census was not warranted. Only 3.5 per cent of the 903 women in
76 NRO, NCR, Mayor’s Court Book, Case 16a/8 1562–69, fol. 9v. 77 NRO, NCR, Quarter Sessions Book, Examinations and Depositions 1561–67, Case 12A/1(c), fol. 38r. 78 Ibid. 79 NRO, NCR, Mayor’s Court Book, Case 16a/8 1562–69, fol. 583v. 80 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 77. 81 NRO, NCR, Mayor’s Court Book, Case 16a/8 1562–69, fol. 361r. 102 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France the census were not working and half of these were listed as unable to work. The rest of the women were working hard trying to manage their poverty and often at more than one occupation. Of the 78 single women aged between 15 and 40, only four were specifically stated to be unemployed yet the poor relief books in the years after the census show that many of the single women of the census were commanded to go to service or else be appointed, regardless of their situation. Presumably this gave them a choice between finding a position they could choose themselves and having a master or mistress chosen for them by the deacons of the ward. Yet the evidence shows that the three unmarried pregnant women of the census had all been away in service when they became pregnant. When reading the poor relief records in the Mayor’s Book of the Poor, it is obvious that the Norwich authorities looked at the census entries in great detail and thought about the results very seriously. There can be no doubt the authorities in Norwich after the census were attempting to control and discipline the poor, in particular the single women and young adults, for both economic and moral reasons. A number of young women were sent into service even if they were living at home and contributing to the family economy. Single women who had illegitimate children were sent to the select women. Some married women, if they were deemed to be of suspect morality, were also sent to the select women. The authorities of Norwich in the 1570s had a negative attitude to single women in the town and openly practised methods of social engineering to regulate the poor inhabitants to conform to their own ideal of ‘proper’ behaviour. Further to this, the case of Benet Goodwyn introduces a new actor into the scene. The presence of Mrs Aldrich to appeal to Benet to confess and amend her ways shows that not only the male authorities, but also their wives, were part of the Norwich moral police. It seems that the authorities had long memories. The census records one ‘Dorethe Harvi of 57 yeris, wedowe, that spyn wolle, & have dwelt here ever. No allms. Veri pore’.82 There seems to be nothing out of the ordinary about Dorothy from this description, yet the deacons of St Andrews thought it pertinent to note in the poor relief listing that ‘At John Sotherton’s tenement is Dorothie Harvie, an olde harlott that had a child long since’.83 At the same time, the authorities were obviously selective in how they treated poor women. Not all women who, on the evidence of the census document, might be expected to be sent into service or to the select women suffered that treatment. Some of these were disabled, or living with elderly parents who were disabled and they seem to have been spared. Some with children were also spared.
82 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 62. 83 NRO, NCR, Mayor’s Book, Case 20c, 1570–71, unpaginated. The Experience of Single Women in Early Modern Norwich 103
Two examples from the census show that sometimes there was an element of compassion from officialdom. Joan Robinson aged 40 had three young children and although her status was not given she may well have been a deserted wife or widow. The census-taker(s) appeared to be fairly consistent in making qualitative judgements about the people in the census: if Joan was an unmarried mother she would have been classed as such and labelled ‘gresse woman’ or ‘harlot’. Joan was sharing a house with two other families and receiving 3d. per week in alms, even though she and all three children were employed in spinning white warp or knitting.84 The authorities’ attitude towards the younger single women clearly shows their categorization as ‘undeserving poor’ and they were treated accordingly. The older single women were treated in a similar way to other older widowed or deserted women and the authorities did not specifically remark on the fact that some of these women were living by themselves. Female heads of household or women living alone seems to have been acceptable, depending upon a woman’s age and marital status. Finally, the will of Katherine Bedford has shown that the women of the census were not the faceless individuals of the document, but independent women who were able to make their own living albeit in poverty.
84 Pound, Norwich Census, p. 56. This page has been left blank intentionally Part II Forms of Poor Relief This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 6 ‘The Names of All the Poore People’: Corporate and Parish Relief in Exeter, 1560s–1570s
Nicholas D. Brodie
The fact that he wrote a description of his city suggests that John Hooker was proud to be a citizen of Exeter. After charting the city’s history, from Brutus and other characters of suitable antiquity, Hooker noted the way that rain regularly drenched the city and how this was channelled to keep the streets clean.1 This 1587 description rings true to the twentieth-century historian Wallace MacCaffrey’s account of early modern Exeter as a city of rising fortunes.2 In an earlier description of the city from the sixteenth century, the peripatetic John Leland seemed particularly impressed with the good condition of the city walls.3 Yet there was a side to the community that dwelled within and around these same walls, and perhaps on the streets washed clean by rain, that did not feature in Leland’s or Hooker’s accounts. For Hooker, a point of charitable pride for sixteenth-century Exeter was the way the poor were fed during the siege of the city in 1549.4 Swarms of Cornish malcontents may have threatened the city, but in its moment of crisis the city of Exeter was both loyal to the crown and good to its poor. Yet there was a similar charitable initiative of which Hooker made no mention. The same was neglected in the yearly accounts of notable events recorded by the seventeenth-century antiquary Richard Izacke.5 To these writers, chronicling the notable events in the
1 John Hooker, The Discription of the Cittie of Excester, Collected and Gathered by Iohn Vowel Alias Hooker, Gentelman and Chamberlain of the Same Cittie (London, 1575), p. 42v. 2 W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter, 1540–1640:The Growth of an English County Town (Cambridge, 1958), p. 173; see also W.G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder: The England of Henry VIII, 1500–1547 (London, 1976), p. 181. 3 John Chandler (ed.), John Leland’s Itinerary: Travels in Tudor England (Stroud, 1993), p. 120. 4 Hooker, Discription of the Cittie of Excester, p. 52. 5 Richard Izacke, Antiquities of the City of Exeter (London, 1677), p. 129. 108 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France history of their beloved city, the establishment of a city-wide dole for the poor in 1560 was seemingly not worth mentioning. Hooker’s claim to early modern fame is his The Order and Vsage of the Keeping of a Parlement in England, an important source for understanding the developing parliamentary system.6 Yet Hooker’s parliamentary focus, and his interest in Exeter, do not lead him into any description of what is surely one of the most long-lasting parliamentary projects of the Tudor age. As noted, Hooker did not mention either the establishment of the weekly collection for the poor,7 a system of welfare established and nurtured in the Tudor century and bequeathed to the centuries following, or the implementation of ‘the fyste dole’ in Exeter in 1560.8 Had the dole been abandoned by the time of Hooker’s account some 25 years after the establishment of the first dole, or was the fact of weekly poor relief so normal as to be undeserving of specific mention? The records of Exeter are unclear about whether the dole continued into the period of Hooker’s writing. Yet unlike in most other cities and towns in Tudor England, some scope exists for exploring the ‘normality’ of weekly poor relief during this early period. Considerable information about Exeter’s system of weekly relief during the 1560s and 1570s survives in a manuscript volume. With the innocuous title of ‘Accounts of the Poor’, this volume, consisting of lists of amounts and names, facilitates a new depth of appreciation about the way sixteenth-century poor relief developed and worked, not because Exeter led the way in terms of change, but precisely because it did not.9 These ‘Accounts’ show a sixteenth-century English urban system of poor relief from the time of its development and through several years of operation, during a time with little in the way of dramatic legislative change, and against a backdrop of general legislative conceptual stability.10 This chapter will reconstruct some of the details of the Exeter system of poor relief in general, before addressing some of the
6 John Hooker, The Order and Vsage of the Keeping of a Parlement in England, and The Description of Tholde and Ancient Cittie of Fxcester (London, 1575). Note the addendum of his description of Exeter. 7 This is commonly known as the ‘parish rate’ although it was not always necessarily a parochial collection. The town or city was the basis of much sixteenth-century collecting in statute and practice, but despite this, in the case of Exeter all collection was first undertaken in parishes. 8 Cornwall and Devonshire Record Office [hereafter CDRO], Act Book IV, fol. 11r; the quotation is from CDRO, St John’s Parish, Exeter, Churchwardens’ accounts [CWA], DD36772 8–9 Eliz. I. 9 CDRO, ‘Accounts of the Poor’, ECA Book 157. 10 Proximate dates for collection-specific parliamentary statutes are 1536, 1552, 1555, 1563 and 1572. Norwich and York had both commenced collections in the 1530s and 1540s, and were certainly operational contemporary with the establishment of Exeter’s first dole. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 109 details about the poor relieved under that system, and the contributors and the contributions that supported them. The ‘Accounts’ is 247 folios long, and unsurprisingly given the name, it mostly contains accounting details of income and expenditure associated with the corporate relief system. Most folios contain the week-by-week details of income from parishes and of sums paid for distribution and for other expenses (for example, beadles). In addition, the volume contains three lists of names of contributors to the scheme – one from 1564–65, one from 1570 – and a partial list probably from 1563.11 It also contains four lists of poor in receipt of relief – 1563, 1565, 1567 – and a partial list containing poor in the South Quarter of the city in 1564.12 It is the lists of the poor and contributors that are the focus of this chapter. These have a unique capacity to provide new insights into the operational system of weekly relief in 1560s Exeter, and to provide a model for early modern English urban relief, and therefore deserve detailed treatment in their own right.
A Model City?
Historians of Tudor poverty have tended to see Norwich as something of a model city for early English poor relief in the sense that national endeavours may have been modelled on that city.13 The residents of Norwich compiled a census of their poor (a detailed list of the city’s poor) and reformed their system of relief in the early 1570s.14 There is a consensus that parliamentary legislators partly modelled statute law upon it in 1572 and 1576, although the degree to which this legislative change was dramatic is debatable.15 Nevertheless, the census demonstrates that Norwich had a newfound focus on the construction of a detailed urban policy (a notion followed in York in 1588 for instance).16
11 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fols 1–2, 6–11v, 178–80. The next item following the undated account is the August 1563 list of poor, suggesting a 1563 or earlier date for that contributors list. 12 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fols 3–4v, 12, 42–42v, 96v–97. 13 John Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, 1988), p. 146. 14 John Pound (ed.), The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570, Norfolk Record Society, 40 (Norwich, 1971). 15 Ibid., p. 146; see also Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), pp. 124–5; Nicholas Brodie, ‘Beggary, Vagabondage, and Poor Relief: English Statutes in the Urban Context, 1495–1572’ (PhD thesis, University of Tasmania, 2010), pp. 292–304. 16 Angelo Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, vol. 8, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 119 (York, 1952), pp. 157–9. 110 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Exeter, however, provides a better model city in a different sense. Exeter’s ordinariness helps it serve as an excellent case study of early modern poor relief in English towns as a place where legislation was enacted. When the government of Exeter initiated its corporate scheme, the decision was recorded without much fanfare. In April 1560, the town government recorded an ‘order for the poore’ in the corporate Act Book.17 Under the requirements of this memorandum a centralized, weekly collection system was to be established, whereby money was collected from parishioners and redistributed to the poor designated to receive alms within the town. Each Monday, parish collectors were to deliver the sums collected within their respective parishes to a group of officials charged with administering the system, who then saw that the funds were redistributed ‘according to the book of distribution’.18 In this, the order for the poor was a model of legislative precepts of the time.19 A weekly collection, undertaken under corporate authority had been legislatively sanctioned as early as 1536,20 and certainly with great consistency since 1552. None of this is conceptually unique to Exeter, and there has been no suggestion that Exeter had any dramatic impact on national legislation. The earliest discernible date in the ‘Accounts’ is August 1563 so this ‘book of distribution’ was probably not the same as the surviving ‘Accounts’ but is likely to have been a preceding volume.21 While this has been lost, evidence for an earlier volume having existed is at least indicative of such record-keeping having taken place prior to that contained in the surviving volume, further highlighting that the ‘Accounts’ were not originally unique. The repeated appointment of new distributors recorded in corporate memoranda – in August 1560, February and then October 1561, November 1562 and October 1563 – strongly suggests that the city was actively administering such collections from first implementation into the period covered by the ‘Accounts’.22 In April 1562, the Exeter government appointed ‘kepers of the book for the generall Almes & the collectors of the same’ for a year.23 After this burst of notation, however, the corporate memoranda fall silent on the matter, so it is only thanks to the survival of the ‘Accounts of the
17 CDRO, Act Book IV, fol. 11r. 18 CDRO, Act Book IV, fol. 11r. 19 5&6 Edw.VI.2.2, Statutes of the Realm, vol. VI (London, 1819), p. 131; for a full treatment of statutory collections in this period see: Brodie, ‘Beggary, Vagabondage, and Poor Relief ’, pp. 232–91. 20 27 Hen.VIII.c.25, Statutes of the Realm, vol. III (London, 1817), pp. 558–62. 21 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fol. 3. 22 CDRO, Act Book IV, fols 13r, 51r, 99, 115r. 23 CDRO, Act Book IV, fol. 88r. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 111
Poor’ that one can confidently assert that there were consistently administered corporate collections throughout the 1560s in Exeter. One of the most perplexing aspects of the Exeter scheme concerns the city government’s rationale for the commencement of corporate collections. Unlike most towns, where the dating of collection commencement is by necessity reliant on the earliest known collections – which were not necessarily the first undertaken – in Exeter the collection following the 1560 decision was later known as ‘the fyste dole’.24 Thus we know for certain this was when the city government implemented this scheme, but there are no explicit statements as to why. Furthering the mystery, there was no new national legislation (the nearest Acts being those of 1555 and 1563), and no surviving royal instruction (and no indication of one in the relevant Exeter Act Book), nor was there any obvious local commotion or disaster. Yet for some reason Exeter implemented a corporate system of weekly collections in April 1560. The establishment of a city-wide scheme may have been a long-standing goal, which Exeter only finally attended to in 1560. It may have been at undocumented royal prompting. It may have reflected an increase in local poverty, beggary, vagabondage or simply increased local concern about any one or more of these factors. Either way, the possibility that the Exeter ‘Accounts’ help illuminate, is that this ordinance reflected a government desire to take some corporate control over collections already taking place in the city. This was not necessarily the first time collections for the poor had taken place in the city, even though it was referred to as the first dole. In Exeter, non-corporate parish collecting can be seen to have occurred in the period covered by the ‘Accounts’. Historians of early modern English urban welfare have, over the past few decades, generally noted the institution of collections, and then the transition from charitable collection to compulsory rate as key moments of structural change.25 This historiographical focus has largely been driven by an interest in policy intent and contextual and intellectual changes – particularly seeking to illuminate the role of humanism or local pressures – but it has perhaps led to an over- confidence about the degree of change in legislation, town and parish. It has also left the nuances of the actuality of mid sixteenth-century welfare implementation largely unaddressed.
24 CDRO, St John’s Exeter, CWA, DD36772, 8–9 Eliz. I. 25 Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500–1700 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 122–3; Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 107; P. Fideler, ‘Poverty, Policy and Providence: The Tudors and the Poor’, in Paul A. Fideler and T.F. Mayer (eds), Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse and Disguise (Oxford, 1992), pp. 194–222, at p. 208. 112 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
In Exeter it is quite clear that there were parish collections that fed into urban collections, yet parishes did not always participate in the corporate collection scheme. This can be seen in a number of ways throughout the ‘Accounts’. Principally, the notation that ‘this p[ar]ish doth dischardge its self & fyndeth ther own poore’ against some parishes in the list of contributors at the start of the volume serves to indicate that not all parishes always participated in the corporate scheme.26 As will be seen below, some parishes were variably participant as either givers or receivers of relief over one or more years in lists of contributors or recipients. This is revealed through their simple absence in such lists. While these points cannot prove conclusively that there were at least some parish collections being undertaken in Exeter prior to the commencement of a corporate scheme, they do strongly suggest the possibility. It is probably significant that while the initial ‘order for the poore’ of 1560 introduced the offices of city receiver and ward distributor, it did not introduce the office of parish collector.27 It seems apparent from this that the office of parish collector was already a familiar one in Exeter. Even though collections within these parishes were documented in the ‘Accounts’, no hint that they were undertaken is evident in the churchwardens’ accounts of Exeter parishes. The absence of proof is no proof, however, and we must allow for the possibility of much earlier and potentially widespread parish collecting than historians have been willing to allow. One wonders whether some parishes had been collecting since the Act of 1536,28 or even earlier. In addition to encouraging a more positive view as to the number of parishes undertaking collections generally, and earlier dating of parish collections, the concurrent operation of corporate and non-corporate parish collections in Exeter reveals an interesting relationship. Not necessarily mutually exclusive, the one could be subsumed under the other in larger towns, and the notations that parishes care for their ‘own poor’ may hint at local tensions about paying for other people’s poor.29 The corporate system required a careful balance of contributors and paupers by parish, quarter and city. The variations in parochial participation outlined above probably reflect some local dialogue and action about these and other issues. However, regardless what disputes may have arisen as to the nature or quantity of support for the poor, the simple fact remains that for at least a decade the city of Exeter provided a system of weekly relief for its poor, working
26 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fols 1v–2. 27 CDRO, Act Book IV, fol. 11r. 28 27 Hen.VIII.c.25, Statutes of the Realm, III, pp. 558–62. 29 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fols 1v–2. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 113 within the framework of contemporary national legislation. The ‘Accounts’ reveal consistently-administered weekly collections and distributions for the poor from 1563 to 1572. As it did so, the city recorded details of paupers and contributors, and this information provides the basis for the remainder of my analysis of the system of corporate relief in Exeter.
The Poor
The Exeter lists of the poor are somewhat bland. They do not contain street addresses, details of employment or income as per the more famous and highly studied Norwich census of 1570. The lists simply contain names and amounts, plus the odd annotation such as that for the St Sidwell’s resident Eleoner Marshall, who was ‘to be whipped if she beggs’.30 Such annotations are exceptional, unfortunately, yet taken as a whole these lists provide rare scope (for this period), for analysing in quantity some of the dynamics of poor relief and poverty in 1560s Exeter, simply for being describable in the plural form. Quantitative analysis largely forms the foundation of the following discussion, although qualitative considerations also lend some interesting further insights into the quantitative data. Although the lists of paupers were originally organized by city quarter, and then by parish, after transcription, the names have been rearranged by parish for the purposes of analysis. This reorganization provides scope for more meaningful discussion, especially in terms of allowing easier comparison with the contributor lists, which were originally only organized by parish. Several qualifications also need to be addressed in terms of analysing the data. The first is that these are lists of the city’s pauper population, or those parishioners supported by the corporate relief scheme. This is not a comprehensive list of all paupers (as some parishes did not always participate in the scheme), nor is it a complete list of all the poor of the city. When referring to ‘the poor’, it is shorthand for ‘the poor designated to be supported by the corporate scheme that are historically visible for a given moment’. The following analysis does not always include the partial 1564 list, principally utilizing the three full lists of 1563, 1565 and 1567. The 1564 partial list contains 47 poor for the South Quarter of the city, but as the list is not organized by parish, and does not contain the other three city Quarters,
30 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fol. 42. 114 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France the list has been omitted from the main analysis for convenience, although commentary on some salient points where this list is relevant will be addressed.31 In total, there were 17 parishes featured in these three lists, and in the last two lists of 1565 and 1567 there were two almshouses, one in each list respectively, treated separately as per parishes. Mr Hurste’s almshouse supported 12 poor in 1565, and Palmer’s almshouse supported 4 poor in 1567, and the contribution of these to the total poor per year needs to be borne in mind. Similarly, several references within parish lists to almshouses named and unnamed are of interest in demonstrating the role of almshouses as places of residence for poor supported by the corporate scheme. Two parishes featured in only one of these three lists, St Kieran’s in 1563 and St Mary Steps in 1565. Four parishes only appeared in two lists, although there does not appear to be any particular trend associated with this phenomenon of variable participation. It may be worth noting that the greatest non-participation rate was actually the last of these lists, in 1567, even if there was not a clear trend of decreasing participation evident in these lists. When quantified, it can be seen that the corporate scheme supported a minimum of 150, 177 and 130 recipients of relief in 1563, 1565 and 1567 respectively within the city of Exeter. The breakdown is presented in Table 6.1 below. These are only minima for the amount of total poor relief in Exeter in the 1560s for a number of reasons, principally because not all parishes appeared in every list, and also because some lists contain payments for almshouses. However, with a 27-persons difference between the first two lists, a 47-persons difference between the last two, and a 20-persons difference between the first and last, it might seem that there is a high degree of variation in the numbers of persons supported in what is only a five-year period. When considered as a product of variable parochial participation in the corporate scheme the variability can be reduced somewhat, especially considering the 1567 non- participation of parishes that had earlier supported large numbers of poor such as St Martin’s and St Sidwell’s.
31 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fol. 12. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 115
Table 6.1 Exeter alms recipients
Parish 1563 1565 1567 Alms Alms Alms Paupers Paupers Paupers (d.) (d.) (d.) Allhallows Goldsmith St – – 2 8 3 10 Allhallows upon the Walls 9 30 6 18 10 32 St David 17 49 18 58 23 80 St George 3 12 12 44 5 24 St John Bowe 18 72 10 36 19 66 St Kieran 2 6 – – – – St Lawrence 11 47 13 55 13 51 St Martin 26 84 10 28 – – St Mary Arches 3 12 4 16 3 12 St Mary More 19 73 25 90 21 80 St Mary Steps – – 5 18 – – St Olave 4 18 1 6 2 8 St Pancras –––––– St Paul 9 32 12 54 13 53 St Petrock – – 3 20 4 24 St Sidwell 12 55 30 132 – – St Stephen 3 12 2 8 1 2 Trin it y 14 61 12 55 9 40 Hurst’s Almshouse – – 12 46 – – Palmer’s Almshouse – – – – 4 16 Totals 150 563d. 177 692d. 130 498d.
By averaging the parochial contributions for particular parishes not listed in any given year, what is perhaps a wider urban picture can emerge that suggests less dramatic change. This is only reflective of extrapolations based on what other parishes may have been doing, as no direct evidence of parish collections for the same period exists within parish records to compare with the corporate 116 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France scheme. Where the greatest degree of continuity can be quantified, in the South Quarter of the city where another list is available (that of 1564), there is only a five-person difference in the total numbers supported across all four lists in that Quarter despite variations in the number of individual parish poor.32 Factoring in the role of almshouses in these lists also diminishes the immediate picture of dramatic change in that there were six ‘poor folks’ in St Katherine’s almshouse receiving 2d. each from St Martin’s in 1563, and also a 20d. payment to ‘Too Almeshousese’ in the same year and parish, which may mask several poor otherwise unaccounted for, both potentially raising the total. Similar notations regarding St Ann’s Chapel and St Katherine’s in 1565, mentioned with the lists of paupers for St Sidwell’s parish may further raise that year’s number. Nonetheless, these qualifications do not change the fact that in the 1567 list there are at least two larger parishes not participating, and there is no reference to three almshouses that had been listed in previous lists. The projected expenditure for the poor that these lists illustrate was considerable at just over £121 in 1563, £149 in 1565 and £107 in 1567. The numbers reflect a ratio of alms to contributions of almost exactly 1:4, indicating a very consistent relationship between contributions and distributions over time. On average most poor received 4d. weekly, although there were variable amounts ranging from 2d. to 12d. for individuals. In gross, these were higher averages than that of Norwich in 1570, where the average was only 2.5d. per week.33 In looking at the parochial breakdown, paupers in Exeter still appear to have been better off than their Norwich counterparts. The average and modal payments (see Table 6.2) clearly illustrate that the averages in most parishes in most years were in the 3d.–4d. range, with only St Martin’s in 1565 having an average similar to that in Norwich. Again this may be an almshouse distortion, as seven paupers in St Katherine’s almshouse were receiving only 2d. each and therefore drawing down the average. Six poor had been supported at 2d. each in 1563, but the negative effect on the average was minimized by it being a single payment. Modal payments reflect wider diversity, with three parishes having one or more years with a modal payment of 2d. per pauper. These parishes were supporters of larger numbers of poor than most, which may explain larger numbers receiving smaller amounts, but this is certainly not a universal rule of early modern poor relief. The parish supporting the largest number of poor for
32 The otalt poor per year for the south quarter are 1563: 42, 1564: 47, 1565: 45, and 1567: 45. 33 Pound, Norwich Census of the Poor, p. 19, Table VIII: Total disbursement of 495.5/180 recipients = 2.75d. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 117 instance – St Sidwell’s with 30 paupers in 1565 – had an average payment of over 4d.
Table 6.2 Exeter average and modal corporate alms payments
Parish 1563 1565 1567 Modal Modal Modal Ave (d.) Ave (d.) Ave (d.) (d.) (d.) (d.)
Allhallows Goldsmith St – – 4.00 4 3.33 4 Allhallows upon the Walls 3.33 4 3.00 4 3.20 4 St David 4.26 2 3.22 2 3.48 4 St George NA 4 3.67 4 4.80 4 St John Bowe 4.00 2 3.60 4 3.47 4 St Kieran 3.00 NA –––– St Laurence 4.27 4 4.23 4 3.92 4 St Martin 4.00 2 2.80 2 – – St Mary Arches 4.00 4 4.00 4 4.00 4 St Mary Major 3.84 4 3.60 4 3.81 4 St Mary Steps – – 3.60 3 – – St Olave 4.50 6 6.00 NA 4.00 NA St Paul 3.56 4 4.50 4 4.08 4 St Petrock – – 6.67 4 6.00 4 St Sidwell 4.58 4 4.40 4 – – St Stephen 4.00 NA 4.00 NA 2.00 NA Trin it y 4.36 4 4.58 4 4.44 4 Hurst’s Almshouse – – 3.83 4 – – Palmer’s Almshouse – – – – 4 4 118 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Considering their impact on the quantitative analyses, it is perhaps pertinent to address briefly the role of almshouses as revealed by the lists. In total, four almshouses are mentioned in the lists of poor. In 1563, only St Katherine’s is mentioned by name under St Martin’s parish, although as noted there was also a further mention of ‘Too Almshouses’, not necessarily meaning two almshouses (rather ‘to almshouses’), but the plural form suggests at least two anyway. In 1565, St Katherine’s was again mentioned under St Martin’s, with seven poor listed at this time. St Katherine’s also received eight pence from St Sidwell’s in 1565 as was St Ann’s Chapel, another almshouse, although neither had been mentioned in that parish for 1563. Neither St Martin’s or St Sidwell’s feature in the 1567 list, and so continuity of almshouse support, beyond St Martin’s support of poor in St Katherine’s almshouse in 1563 and 1565, cannot be clearly demonstrated. Additionally, as already noted, 1565 saw Hurst’s almshouse listed for the first and only time and the same for Palmer’s almshouse in 1567. The Exeter ‘Accounts’ provide a snapshot of an unusual period in institutional almshouse history: post-dissolution, and largely pre-‘bridewells’.34 Generally the larger ‘hospitals’, where some sort of religious rule was frequently observed, had been dissolved after the dissolution statutes of 1536 or 1540, nominally because of their religious functions, but likely for their properties. Similarly, in another wave of dissolution, many hospitals or almshouses with a chantry chapel were dissolved in 1547. Any assessment of how extensive and effective these dissolutions were remains subject to problems with sources and local conditions, but overall the dissolutions certainly resulted in a significant reduction in charity for the poor, and probably a significant reduction in available accommodation.35 Yet the survival of St Ann’s Chapel in the 1565 list highlights that these dissolutions did not necessarily mean the total destruction of all ‘religious’ almshouses and clearly a number of almshouses in Exeter survived the 1530s and 1540s dissolutions. Even if formally ‘dissolved’, an almshouse could presumably survive simply as a house where alms-people dwelled, and some almshouses mentioned in Exeter’s lists may reflect this. Clearly Exeter’s surviving almshouses played a significant role in accommodating and supporting local poor. Residents of Hurst’s and Palmer’s
34 Nicholas Orme, The English Hospital, 1070–1570 (New Haven, 1995); Elizabeth Prescott, The English Medieval Hospital, 1050–1640 (Melksham, 1992); Sheila Sweetinburgh, The Role of the Hospital in Medieval England: Gift-giving and the Spiritual Economy (Dublin, 2004). 35 Neil S. Rushton, ‘Monastic Charitable Provision in Tudor England: Quantifying and Qualifying Poor Relief in the early Sixteenth Century’, Continuity and Change, 16 (2001): 9–44; Neil S. Rushton and Wendy Sigle-Rushton, ‘Monastic Poor Relief in Sixteenth- century England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2001): 193–217. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 119 each received 4d. weekly, whilst those of St Katherine’s seem to have received 2d. If so, then St Katherine’s supported 11 poor in 1565, seven from St Martin’s, and, assuming the payment breakdown to be 2d. each, four from St Sidwell’s.36 This was only two fewer paupers than the number for which the almshouse was originally founded in 1457.37 However, the founder’s intention that his almshouse should be a house for poor women was being disregarded: poor men now outnumbered the poor women. The founder’s will was being honoured with respect to Palmer’s almshouse which was supporting four women, in perfect agreement with the 1479 foundation.38 With the additional survival of St Ann’s (founded in 1418), there was clearly still a considerable part played in the relief of Exeter’s poor by fifteenth-century almshouses, which were at least partly or occasionally supported by the corporate scheme. A similar scenario is clear for other urban centres like York.39 Neither of the two Exeter hospitals that drew John Leland’s attention earlier in the sixteenth century featured in corporate relief of the 1560s.40 In fact, no Exeter almshouse really featured in the Exeter scheme for poor relief in the sense of being an integral part of the system. Whilst other towns consciously developed ‘bridewells’ – workhouses that were modelled on the London institution after which they were named – or remodelled surviving hospitals into them, and integrated these into their poor relief schemes from the mid 1570s in particular, in the period covered by the ‘Accounts’ the Exeter almshouses do not yet seem to have been used for such purposes.41 Almshouses and their residents were periodically supported by Exeter’s corporate relief, but the amount of relief reflects a corporate interest in supporting the residents rather than fully maintaining the institutions. As with variable parochial
36 A counter interpretation could be dual support, resulting in seven poor receiving a little over 3d. each, but this seems unlikely considering the resultant fraction of the total from which these figures are being extrapolated. 37 David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wa l e s (London, 1971), p. 358. 38 Knowles and Hadcock, p. 358. 39 Nicholas Brodie, ‘Local Government, Hospitals and Poor in Sixteenth-century York’ (BA Honours thesis, Australian National University, 2004). 40 St John’s (founded 1220), and what was probably Wynyard’s (founded 1436): Chandler, John Leland’s Itinerary, p. 121; Knowles and Hadcock, p. 358. 41 Steve Hindle, ‘‘Good, Godly and Charitable uses’: Endowed Charity and the Relief of Poverty in Rural England, c.1550–1750’, in Anne Goldgar and Robert I. Frost (eds), Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Leiden, 2004), pp. 164–88; Paul Slack, ‘Hospitals, Workhouses and the Relief of the Poor in Early Modern London’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Health Care and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe 1500–1700 (London, 1997), pp. 234–51. 120 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France participation in the scheme, the variable almshouse participation highlights that the corporately administered scheme was never fully ‘total’, and serves to illustrate how corporate collections did not displace previous forms of charity and support, but in fact could facilitate their continuation. The dissolution had certainly taken a toll in terms of accommodation in Exeter42 but the numbers of poor supported by the corporate scheme in the 1560s does not simply reflect a reduction in the number of almshouse beds and displaced occupants. The city’s population had increased and the number of beds likely to have been available immediately prior to the dissolutions is probably much smaller than the numbers of poor supported decades later by the corporate system. Besides, not all poor needed a bed either pre- or post- dissolution. Where parish relief most likely did pick up on pre-dissolution charitable needs and practices was in the outdoor relief given to poor otherwise resident than in dedicated almshouses.43 It cannot be coincidence that the first poor relief Act of Parliament outlining a scheme of weekly collections was a product of the same session of Parliament that commenced the dissolution of religious houses in 1536.44 Some almshouses had certainly featured in Exeter’s corporate scheme, indeed perhaps 16 per cent of the poor supported by the system in 1565 were resident in almshouses, but it was the parochial poor that were clearly the main focus of corporate relief.45 The wider contextual information about the experience of sixteenth- century poverty in Exeter is difficult to investigate due to the relative obscurity of the individuals concerned and a dearth of source material likely to provide further details. In an unusual case, one pauper was supported by the corporate scheme and a weekly pension from the churchwarden’s funds of another parish. In the churchwarden’s accounts of St Petrock’s parish, the weekly sum of 4d. was paid ‘to Ede davye of the p[ar]ishe of Seynt powles in almes’ in the years 1562, 1563 and 1564.46 As it happens there is a ‘mother davy’ listed as receiving 4d. in St Paul’s in the corporate scheme in 1563. Assuming this to be the same person, Mother Davy was for at least three years in receipt of perhaps double the usual amount a pauper could expect. There is no Mother Davy listed in the
42 MacCaffrey, p. 102. 43 Rushton, pp. 9–44; Rushton and Sigle-Rushton, pp. 193–217. 44 27 Hen.VIII.c.25, Statutes of the Realm, III, pp. 558–62. 45 This figure is derived by assuming individual payments in St Sidwell’s to be 2d., which increases the total poor in the city by 11 paupers, and makes the proportion of almshouse- paupers to non-almshouse paupers 30/188=16 per cent. This, however , is the product of the year for which most almshouses are evident and does not necessarily reflect a constant state of affairs throughout the period under investigation. 46 CDRO, EDRO PW2, St Petrock’s Parish, CWA, fols 126, 127, 127v, 128v. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 121 corporate scheme in 1565 or 1567. In the St Petrock’s accounts, whilst there were payments to ‘two poore women’ in 1565 and 1567, Edith Davy was not explicitly mentioned, perhaps suggesting that funds were no longer required through an improvement in circumstance or by death.47 Whilst Mother Davy was not in receipt of corporate poor relief in 1565, many poor do indeed feature in two or more lists. In addition to their support of Mother Davy, the churchwardens of St Petrock’s also supported Johan (Joanne) Cornish at the same time who was, like Mother Davy, resident in St Paul’s in 1563.48 Yet unlike Mother Davy, whose name does not appear on a subsequent list, Johan Cornish clearly lived on in the parish and was supported through 1565 and 1567 with continued poor relief from the corporate scheme. Like Alice Skarborough in the parish of St Olave’s, whose name appears in all three lists, and Joan Pryor, whose name appears in St Mary Major in all three lists and in the 1564 partial list for the South Quarter where that parish was located, Johan Cornish was one of a considerable number of Exeter’s residents who were relieved in their parishes for a lengthy period. Table 6.3 provides details of the retention of parochial poor that the ‘Accounts’ can reveal for this half-decade in the mid 1560s. It indicates the number of poor per parish whose names reappear in a subsequent list for that parish. A percentage is provided showing the proportion of poor in any given parish who would still be in receipt of relief in that parish as shown in Table 6.3. On average, 42 per cent of parish poor in 1563 were still in receipt of relief in 1565, and 51 per cent of the poor of 1565 would be in receipt of relief in 1567. Taking the period as a whole, the average 1563–67 parochial retention rate was 38 per cent. What seems particularly noteworthy is the degree to which larger parishes such as St Laurence consistently supported larger numbers and proportions of the same poor. As the St Petrock’s churchwardens’ accounts illustrate, a number of these were widows. That the loss of a partner could necessitate ongoing relief is not only illustrated by the presence of these names in the lists, but as the case of Johan Cornish shows, a widow might also end up listed in a later year ‘at the almis howse’.49
47 Ibid., fols 130, 131. 48 Ibid., fols 127r, 128r, 132. 49 Ibid., fol. 132. 122 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Table 6.3 Parochial retention of Exeter Poor 1563–67
Lists compared 1563–65 1565–67 1563–67 No. % No. % No. % Allhallows Goldsmith St 0 – 1 50 0 – Allhallows upon the Walls 2 22 3 50 5 56 St David 8 47 13 72 8 47 St George 1 33 1 08 0 – St John Bowe 2 11 6 60 6 33 St Kieran 0 – 0 – 0 – St Laurence 9 82 11 85 9 82 St Martin 0 – 0 – 0 – St Mary Arches 2 67 4 100 3 100 St Mary Major 12 63 8 32 6 32 St Mary Steps 0 – 0 – 0 – St Olave 1 25 1 100 2 50 St Paul 4 44 10 83 4 44 St Petrock 0 – 2 67 0 – St Sidwell 6 50 0 – 0 – St Stephen 2 67 1 50 1 33 Trin it y 5 36 7 58 3 21 Hurst’s Almshouse 0 – 0 – 0 – Palmer’s Almshouse 0 – 0 – 0 – Total 54 36 68 38 47 31 Average 42 51 38
Notes: 0 – Zero result as no list for comparative year(s). No. – Number of individuals named in both years. % – Retention rate of individuals between two years.
When gender is examined as a factor in parochial retention, perhaps unsurprisingly 72 per cent of those from one list of poor who appeared in the subsequent list were female.50 For some, this may have been support in old age from the commencement of widowhood until death. These figures complement that strand of the historiography of poverty that has particularly addressed
50 The otalt number of women retained within parishes 1563–65 is 39, and that for 1565–67 is 49, both of which round to 72 per cent of their respective totals. Women outnumber men in all three lists of poor. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 123 female susceptibility to poverty in the later stages of life.51 Joan Pryor of St Mary Major parish, for example, was in receipt of relief from 1563 until at least 1567. She is one of several persons in that final list to have been noted as ‘deade’. Yet this is only part of the picture. Whilst Mother Davy may have improved her circumstances or died, there were a number of other Davy women who received support for longer. Agnes Davy, for instance, was a recipient of alms in St Laurence in both 1565 and 1567. Another Davy woman, Alice, was an alms recipient in Allhallows upon the Walls parish in 1563, in the South Quarter somewhere in 1564, in St Mary Steps in 1565, and again in Allhallows upon the Walls in 1567. Whilst this may be more than one individual, the fact that in the last three instances she received 3d. (4d. in the first), that all locations are in the South Quarter and that no other Alice Davy appears in any list strongly suggests this was one individual living in varying locations in the city. Similarly, an Elisabeth Davy was resident in St John Bowe as an alms recipient in 1563, and was in St Mary Major in 1565, highlighting a degree of mobility for at least two poor Davy women.
Table 6.4 Exeter pauper inter-parochial movement and adjusted corporate gross retention 1563–67
Poor moved % Total corporate poor retained % 1563–65 28 19 82 55 1565–67 26 15 94 53 1563–67 12 8 59 39
Taking such inter-parochial movement into account, as illustrated in Table 6.4, a corporate retention total for the entire half-decade 1563–67 of 31 per cent is lifted by 8 per cent to 39 per cent. More impressively however, such inter- parochial movement lifts the total city retention rates of 1563–65 and 1565– 67 to above 50 per cent in both cases. Therefore, in any given list, over half of the poor were still resident in the city and in receipt of alms somewhere in the
51 Lynn Botelho, ‘Aged and Impotent: Parish Relief of the Aged Poor in early modern Suffolk’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), Charity,Self-interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996), pp. 91–111; Margaret Pelling, ‘Old Age, Poverty, and Disability in Early Modern Norwich: Work, Remarriage, and other Expedients’, in Margaret Pelling and Richard M. Smith (eds), Life, Death, and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives (London, 1991), pp. 74–101. 124 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France following list. As this reflects only those in receipt of corporate relief, and does not factor in any parishes operating collections independently for a year or more, these figures are necessarily minima. This allows for a confident assertion that many of the poor relief recipients of the sixteenth century were at least medium-term alms recipients in receipt of alms for years, not weeks or months. This almost certainly reflects a life-cycle susceptibility to periods of poverty for individuals that Slack has described.52 The three Exeter lists illustrate how these stress periods could be potentially alleviated for a period by the corporate welfare scheme. Not only were these individuals poor for at least two years, but many were quite mobile. Nineteen per cent of the poor of the 1563 list moved sometime before 1565, and 15 per cent of those of 1565 moved before 1567. These are minima figures that hint at perhaps one in five poor moving with some regularity while on relief. While it is easy to think of the supported poor as householders, they should not be conflated with homeowners. The push and pull factors that explain pauper mobility would naturally be varied and difficult to quantify. Yet for some, moves were obviously made out of a combination of need and opportunity. Of the 12 poor listed in Hurst’s almshouse in 1565, fully half had moved there from other parishes since 1563. Joan Smale had come from Trinity parish, Margaret Down from St Stephen’s, Alice Johnson from St David’s, Elisabeth Erott from St John Bowe, Roger Walleys from St Mary Major and Joan White from St Sidwell’s. The adoption of poor from differing parishes has a ring of deliberateness about it. Yet the almshouse was not necessarily the end of the proverbial road for the pauper headed there, as Alice Johnson was back in St David’s in 1567, the only one of the six who can be clearly seen to have returned, but still poor and in receipt of relief.
The Contributors
For many of the inhabitants of Exeter, however, their experience of the city’s system of weekly charitable relief was as contributors. Whilst the charitable impulse in early modern England has received considerable attention, particularly through analyses of probate charity, the contributor’s role and experience in the system of weekly relief has often been overlooked.53
52 Slack, Poverty and Policy, pp. 74–5, 78–9. 53 I.W. Archer, ‘The Charity of Early Modern Londoners’,Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 12 (2002): 223–44; A.A. Alves, ‘The Christian Social Organism and Social Welfare: The Case of Vives, Calvin and Loyola’,Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (1989): 3–22; Judith M. Bennett, ‘Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 125
Yet willingness to contribute is an important element in the implementation, evolution and longevity of the parish rate, as, naturally, is the scale and scope of contributions. In the Exeter accounts there are three contributor lists.54 All list contributors by parish, with their name and a weekly contribution amount. The ‘Accounts’ open part-way through the recording of the first of these lists. Undated and partial, it lists 80 persons under the four parishes of St Laurence, St Pancras, St Mary Steps and St Edmund. The last two are especially interesting for not being mentioned in either of the subsequent contributor lists, and because St Edmund’s does not feature in any of the three lists of poor. Both were annotated with ‘fyndeth ther own poore’, even though contributors and their amounts were listed.55 Therefore with only a two-parish overlap with later lists, and no date, this list is excluded from the subsequent quantitative analysis. The second contributor list is for the year 1564–65. The third was compiled in ‘myd somer’ 1570. However, complicating any attempt at analysis, the 1564–65 list is heavily annotated. Clearly it was updated and modified over a period of time, unlike all of the other lists under discussion (minor
England’, Past and Present, 134 (1993): 19–41; Clive Burgess, ‘‘A fond thing vainly invented’: An Essay on Purgatory and Pious Motive in Late Medieval England’, in S.J. Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750 (London, 1988), pp. 56–84; Clive Burgess, ‘‘By quick and by dead’: Wills and Pious Provision in Late Medieval Bristol’, English Historical Review, 102 (1987): 837–58; Martin Daunton (ed.), Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996); P. Horden, ‘Small beer? The Parish and the Poor and Sick in Later Medieval England’, in Clive Burgess and Eamon Duffy (eds),The Parish in Late Medieval England (Donington, 2006), pp. 339–64; W.K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England 1480–1660 (London, 1959); W.K. Jordan, The Charities of London 1480–1660 (London, 1960); W.K. Jordan, The Charities of Rural England 1480–1660 (Westport, 1961); W.K. Jordan, ‘The Forming of the Charitable Institutions of the West of England: A Study of the Changing Pattern of Social Aspirations in Bristol and Somerset, 1480–1660’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 50 (1960): 1–99; Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Local Responses to the Poor in Late Medieval and Tudor England’, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988): 209–45; Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Poverty, Charity, and Coercion in Elizabethan England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 35 (2005): 457–79; Maria Moisa, ‘Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 154 (1997): 223–34; Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, 1987); Claire S. Schen, Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620 (Aldershot, 2002); Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999); M.H.D. van Leeuwen, ‘Logic of Charity: Poor Relief in Preindustrial Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 24 (1994): 589–613. 54 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fols 1–2, 6–11v, 178–80. 55 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fols 1v–2. 126 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France annotations or amendments to the poor lists, or to the 1570 contributor list are so small as to be statistically insignificant). Before situating the 1564–65 list in a comparative analysis with either the 1570 list or any of the paupers lists, it is revealing of the nature of early modern poor relief to examine the list in isolation as it can provide some means of examining contribution change during the lifetime of a list. This in turn provides firmer parameters of error margins for utilizing this palimpsest in comparative analyses with other less modified lists. In compiling a body of data from the 1564–65 list, many qualitative assessments needed to be made in the process of transcribing. Names on the list have been scratched out, and some appear to have been added. The contribution amounts have been variously scratched out, often replaced with another sum, itself occasionally also scratched and sometimes replaced again. Some persons have annotations beside their names or contributions noting them as variously ‘gone’ or ‘dede’. Contributors may have one or more of these variations applying. The impression given is therefore of a list initially compiled with names and sums, then subsequently modified over a period of time as contributions changed or ceased, or contributors departed by various means, or commenced contributing after the compilation of the initial list. Insofar as possible these variations were noted, although this clearly required many qualitative assessments of individual aspects of the list, allowing for some margin of error. In total, a minimum of 349 and a maximum of 499 individuals contributed to the corporately administered relief of the poor in Exeter in 1564–65. All city parishes excepting St Mary Steps and St Edmund’s were contributing to the corporate scheme. Only 21 names appear to have been added, and the difference between minimum and maximum contributors indicates that 150 individuals, or 30 per cent of all contributors, ceased contributing during the period in which the list was actively used. Of these, 42 were ‘gone’ and at least 10 died. The remainder had either their names or contributions scratched out. All parishes excepting St Paul’s lost contributors. Thus contributor attrition far outweighed the seeming contributor growth evident in this list. Whilst some rare individuals seem to have increased their contribution, such as Thomas Ratclyff of St David’s parish who doubled his 1d. contribution, the general trend was one of declining charitable income in the 1564–65 list. In terms of gross contributions, there was supposedly a weekly charitable income between 552.75d. and 850.25d., with a reduction of 297.5d. evident through amendments to the list. At 35 per cent of the maximum total, this is a slightly larger proportional income drop than for gross contributor numbers. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 127
This is the result of contributors who ceased to give, and also for those 51 individuals whose contributions were amended to a lower figure. Thus contributor attrition and contribution decline combined to diminish the contribution rate. A very high proportion of contributors gave only small amounts: 67 per cent gave less than 2d. a week. The parish with the largest number of contributors, St Mary Major, had 54 persons giving less than 2d. a week, or 97 per cent of its contributing population giving less than the smallest individual amount of weekly alms given to the poor. This seems reflective of a poorer parish, and is further suggested by St Mary Major being the parish with the largest drop in contributing population, and the fact that it supported the second-highest number of paupers in 1563, 1565 and 1567. The loss of 57 contributors was greater than the total number of contributors in any other parish, yet this was only a quarter of St Mary Major’s total contributing population. The impact of these losses must have been significant for individual parishes and for the corporate scheme. Whilst the 850.25d. maximum income will have easily covered the 692d. required for the poor listed in 1565, the 552.75d. weekly income at the end of the 1564–65 list’s period of use will have left corporate poor relief administrators 139.25d. a week short were this list still actively utilized at that time. The long-term picture of corporate income also suggests gross contribution decline. In midsummer 1570, only 280 persons are listed as contributing to the relief of the poor, a little over half of the maximum of 1564–65, although this is a statistical distortion due to absent parishes. Four parishes were absent in 1570, three of which had sizable contributor numbers a half-decade earlier. The parochial breakdown in Table 6.5 details the number of contributors and the contributions by parish across both lists. While seven parishes had fewer contributors in 1570 than the minimum figures from the 1564–65 list, five had higher numbers of contributors. Nonetheless, all parishes participating in 1570 gave less than the higher 1564–65 figures. If the 1570 list is assumed to have suffered similar attrition to a half-decade earlier, then the picture is grimmer still. 128 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Table 6.5 Exeter poor relief contributors and contributions
Contributors Contributions (d.) 1564–65 1570 1564–65 1570 (High) (Low) (High) (Low) Allhallows Goldsmith 24 18 16 44 26.5 19.5 Allhallows upon the Walls 14 10 8 12.5 7.5 6 St David 12 8 8 10 8.5 7.5 St George 37 23 21 44.75 35.75 19.75 St John Bowe 25 15 22 31 14.5 19.5 St Kieran 28 13 17 52.5 14 22 St Lawrence 27 21 20 40 25.5 24 St Martin 29 22 * 61.5 42.5 * St Mary Arches 18 17 15 61 53 44 St Mary More 76 57 52 108.5 86.5 82.5 St Mary Steps ****** St Olave 25 16 15 53 43 30 St Pancras 12 7 9 20.5 11 17 St Paul 13 10 13 23.5 23 13.5 St Petrock 45 29 30 148.5 73 89.5 St Sidwell 34 32 * 21.5 21 * St Stephen 35 17 * 70.5 31 * Trin it y 45 34 34 47 36.5 36.5 Totals 499 349 280 850.25 552.75 431.25
Note: * = none listed.
Yet remarkably, the 1570 list bears a ratio of contributors to alms almost identical to that of the low 1564–65 figures, one that is actually slightly higher. Indeed if the figures for parishes not present in the 1570 list are excluded from the comparison, then the minimum 1564–65 number of contributors almost exactly matches that of 1570 at 278 and 280 individuals respectively. Yet the average ratio of contributors to contributions is misleading, as total contributions in 1570 were still perceptibly lower than both 1564–65 figures, even with such non-participating parishes excluded from the calculation. This perhaps raises more questions than answers. Whilst there was a clear decline ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 129 in the gross corporate income between 1564–65 and 1570, this was largely a product of fewer participating parishes. But individual giving dynamics had shifted also. Not only did most parishes have fewer contributors when compared even with the lower 1564–65 figures, but in nine parishes the total parish contribution had declined as well, an effect not offset by any significant increase across other parishes. This is in direct contrast with assumptions that the poor relief of the 1560s and 1570s was becoming increasingly obligatory.56 The figures for contributors do not bear this out.57 Where figures for that earlier undated (probably 1563) account are available for comparison in St Laurence’s and St Pancras’s parishes, the lists show figures closer to the maximum 1564–65 picture in terms of contributors, but are split in terms of contributions, with St Laurence’s matching the lower scenario and St Pancras’s the higher. Thus it is difficult to assert with confidence whether there was a mid 1560s peak in charitable contribution by number and amount to the corporate scheme, or whether this reflected the levels at the commencement of the scheme. Either way, there was clearly an overall decline in the level of contribution made to the corporate scheme, with fewer contributors and lower contributions in 1570 than had been the case half a decade earlier.
The System
When all is taken into account, contributors and contributions, and paupers and alms, all point to a corporate system that saw declining income and expenditure from the mid 1560s to the 1570s. This trend is also borne out by preliminary sampling of the accounts for the years 1564–72 contained within the ‘Accounts’, shown in Figure 6.1 below, which illustrates a general downward trend for both income and expense. It also, interestingly and possibly the result of the period sampled (August-September), shows that the system ran at a deficit for all but three years. Yet figures for the numbers of poor also suggest that the mid 1560s may have been a zenith of corporate parish participation in the scheme.
56 For a discussion of compulsion in the legislative context see: E. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief (Cambridge, 1900); Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government: English Poor Law History: Part I, The Old Poor Law (London, 1927); McIntosh, ‘Poverty, Charity, and Coercion’, p. 466; McIntosh, ‘Local Responses’, pp. 229–30; for the urban context see: Clark and Slack, pp. 122–3; Slack, English Poor Law, p. 107; Fideler, p. 208. 57 For a revised view of the degree of compulsion in legislative change and urban practices see Brodie, ‘Beggary, Vagabondage, and Poor Relief ’, pp. 232–65. 130 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Figure 6.1 Exeter average weekly collection and distribution (pence), 1564–7258
These declines were clearly the result of variable parish participation in the scheme, not necessarily a failing scheme. Participation in a corporate scheme could assist parishes with more poor than contributors such as St David’s, or more easily bear the cost of the poor in generally poorer parishes that did not seem able to support their own such as Allhallows upon the Walls, St Paul’s and St Sidwell’s. Whilst some parishes ‘fyndeth’ their own poor, a number contributed heavily to a corporate scheme that did not necessarily benefit their own parish in proportion to their contribution. St Petrock’s, for instance, gave between 73 and 148.5d. weekly in 1564–65, and yet in 1565 that parish’s poor received only 20d. back. St Stephen’s, which in the same period gave between 31 and 70.5d., received only 8d. back in 1565.
58 Preliminary sample from CDRO, ‘Accounts’. ‘The Names of All the Poore People’ 131
When missing figures are averaged based on existing data, the general picture is that the total numbers of poor relieved in the 1560s in Exeter remained fairly stable, even if the numbers kept under the umbrella of the corporate scheme seem to have declined. Yet the periodic and occasional absences of parishes serve as reminders that the corporate scheme was only part of the story, and that the corporation had seemingly stepped in to oversee and administer various parish collections probably already operational in the city. Answering how well the city handled this is the basis of ongoing analysis of the actual accounts data not the subject of this paper. Yet the variability of the system, the minor fluctuations and trends detailed above, are all interesting for having occurred without any related memoranda recorded in the city Act Books. Neither was there any clear indication of parish collections in parish records in the same town and within the same timeframe. Perhaps there was not the need for active revision of the scheme as with Norwich in 1570 or York in 1588. The ‘Accounts’ are the only clear indication of ongoing corporate relief in Exeter from the mid 1560s to the early 1570s. An earlier volume seems to have existed, and while there is no reason to assume than none followed, the declining parish participation makes it seem quite plausible that the ‘Accounts’ could be the last volume. If none did follow, then in Exeter this seems to reflect parishes increasingly opting out of the corporate system, yet this does not mean weekly relief ceased, only that parishes independently administered poor relief in the city. While primarily examining details of the poor and contributors in Exeter, this survey also highlights the need to acknowledge the potential continuity of poor relief in other centres. The whole scheme was decidedly normal, possibly explaining an absence of scholarly attention, but making it all the more interesting as a potential model of urban welfare developments and against which to measure the effects of legislative enactments in the mid sixteenth century. Perhaps that ordinariness was why Hooker did not mention the corporate poor relief scheme. It was boring, not peculiar to Exeter, and it cost him 4d. a week.59
59 CDRO, ‘Accounts’, fol. 178v. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 7 The Politics of Charitable Men: Governing Poverty in Sixteenth-Century Paris
Susan Broomhall1
This chapter focuses on the sixteenth century, a time during which historians have generally claimed vast changes occurred in the provision of charity in France. Broadly speaking, the fifteenth century is envisioned as the last period of indiscriminate charity, while seventeenth-century changes are marked by the development of a typology of paupers from shame-faced and deserving to vagabonds, institutionalization of certain pauper types, and a renewal of religious administration over hospitals. The sixteenth century as a period of focus in its own right, a period that would appear to mark the transition from old to new forms, expectations and recipients of charity, has suffered some neglect. Where they exist, analyses of specific moments of sixteenth-century poverty administration in particular towns have generally concluded that relative to surrounding nations, Protestant views had less influence on welfare administration and charitable provisions in French cities.2 In France, the crown has been seen as the major protagonist of this century’s welfare reforms, through attempts to secularize hospital and charitable provisions, typically as part of an aggrandizement of royal power over Catholic institutions which were unable to defend their long-held rights and privileges to provide such care.3 Michel Foucault casts a long shadow over this topic, having famously
1 I would like to express my thanks to the editor and the anonymous readers for their insightful feedback. Research for this paper was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. 2 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Poor Relief, Humanism and Heresy’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1978), pp. 17–64; Barbara Beckerman Davis, ‘Poverty and Poor Relief in Sixteenth-Century Toulouse’, Historical Reflections, 17(3) (1991): 267–96. 3 Jean-Pierre Gutton, ‘Mutations et continuité (XVIe siècle)’, in Jean Imbert (ed.), Histoires des hôpitaux en France (Toulouse, 1982); Jean Imbert, Le Droit hospitalier de l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1993). Two more recent studies make considerable efforts to nuance 134 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France painted early modern hospitals – which remained one of the most important providers of support to the poor at this period – as disastrous, inefficient death traps that would be forever transformed through innovative secularization and medicalization in the nineteenth century.4 This view has been tempered by detailed analyses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century facilities which have highlighted the important attempts to provide quality care to their inmates.5 However, another of Foucault’s ideas which offers insights for understanding the emergence of charitable provisions at this period is his notion of governmentality.6 This term, in Foucault’s definition, encapsulates both the idea of:
an ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.7 this narrative and suggest (through analyses of different times and places) that the role of the state was often deeply resisted by local groups, if it presented much real leadership at all before the eighteenth century. See Daniel Hickey, Local Hospitals in Ancien Régime France: Rationalization, Resistance, Renewal, 1530–1789 (Montreal, 1997); Tim McHugh, Hospital Politics in Seventeenth-century France: The Crown, Urban Elites, and the Poor (Aldershot, 2007). 4 See Michel Foucault, La naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (Paris, 1963). 5 See for example the work of Colin Jones, ‘The Construction of the Hospital Patient in Early Modern France’, in N. Finzsch and R. Jütte (eds), Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500–1950 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 55–74; Hickey, Local Hospitals; Colin Jones, ‘Perspectives on Poor Relief, Health Care and the Counter-Reformation in France’, and M. Dinges, ‘Health Care and Poor Relief in Regional Southern France in the Counter-Reformation’, both in O.P. Grell, A. Cunningham with J. Arrizabalaga (eds), Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe (London, 1999), pp. 215–39 and pp. 240–79; Broomhall, Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France (Manchester, 2004), chapter 3, pp. 71–95; McHugh; Broomhall, ‘Charitable Medicine: The Provision of Health Services in the Sixteenth-Century Hôtel-Dieu de Paris’, in Magdalena Koźluk and W.K. Pietrzak (eds), Le cabinet du curieux. Culture, savoirs, religion de l’Antiquité à l’Ancien Régime. Etudes et essais en l’honneur de Jean-Paul Pittion (Paris, Classiques Garnier, forthcoming). 6 Foucault’s general ideas on this are addressed briefly in McHugh, p. 39 in the context of a wider historiographical picture of increasing royal authority over hospital management. 7 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, trans. Rosi Braidotti, rev. Colin Gordon, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991), pp. 87–104, at p. 102. The Politics of Charitable Men 135
As well as:
the tendency which over a long period … led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereign, discipline, etc.) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs.8
Major population pressures and urban increase have generally been considered critical contributing factors to experiences and policies for the poor in this century.9 Did this lead to forms of governmental apparatus of the type imagined by Foucault? Why did they develop in the ways that they did, what pressures created them and how susceptible were they to change? Foucault and Quentin Skinner have both highlighted the development of new political ideas among sixteenth-century French intellectuals such as Guillaume Budé and Guillaume de La Perrière who, in different ways, both shifted emphasis from the centrality of the prince himself to his responsibility towards the foundation of the public state or of a set of practices of government.10 This led to what Michael Deans describes as a concept of ‘an autonomous rationality of government that is not reducible to a particular prince’.11 Others have discussed Budé as a leading proponent of the ideals of civic humanism, making a virtue of his own life of public service to the monarch.12 Foucault did not address sixteenth-century hospital and charity provision directly in developing his concept of governmentality but this chapter gives some opportunity to assess the nature of the evidence for these trends towards new secular institutions of government, the social control of bodies, and particularly those men of the civic elite who developed a collective identity of public service through their work in administering such organizations. This chapter focuses on Paris, the capital and largest city in the realm, and home of the Paris Parlement, which held the right to register crown edicts, as
8 Ibid., pp. 102–103. 9 Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (Oxford, 1994); Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994) are two important examples. 10 Michael Deans summarizes their argument and shared ideas in Deans, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, 1999), pp. 102–105. 11 Ibid., p. 102. 12 J.H.M. Salmon, ‘Cicero and Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France’, American Historical Review, 84 (1980): 307–31; Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance ([New York], 1970), pp. 58–9. 136 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France well as jurisdiction over a sizeable number of French urban environments in its own right. The Parlement as a body, and the individual men who comprised it, were to become critical protagonists in debates about charity during this period.13 As such, Paris forms an important focus for analysis, one neglected to date. This can be explained by the absence of vital records, not least the entire archive of the city’s Grand Bureau des Pauvres, as well as the sheer complexity of overlapping administrative structures that contributed to charity provisions in the city. This study examines the accounts and deliberations of the Hôtel-Dieu, the deliberations of the city council, edicts of the crown, parliamentary papers as well as eyewitness accounts and chronicles of the period. The men who created these sources and formed these civic bodies were powerful; their apparatus had more reach than others across the country; analysis of their motivations and practices is therefore critical to a wider understanding of French governance of poverty and charitable endeavours at this period. They were men with shared values, networks and, often, common interests, but a focus on these elite civic men as men is also important. To date, the practices of governing bodies involved in welfare have been studied largely as fairly anonymous entities rather than as particular social cohorts with shared mentalités or individuals with personal beliefs, fears and particular motivations.14 Some recent work has shifted attention to women as important interlocutors and agents of charity provision in early modern France.15 While women were
13 For major studies of the Parlement during the sixteenth century, see Roger Doucet, Etude sur le gouvernement de François Ier dans ses rapports avec le Parlement de Paris, Part II (Paris, 1926); Christopher W. Stocker, ‘The Politics of the Parlement of Paris in 1525’, French Historical Studies, 8(2) (1973): 191–212; J.H. Shennan, The Parlement of Paris, 2nd edn (Stroud, 1998); Michel de Waele, Les relations entre le Parlement de Paris et Henri IV (Paris, 2000); Sylvie Daubresse, Le parlement de Paris ou ‘La Voix de la Raison’ (1559–89) (Geneva, 2005). 14 While much attention has been devoted to subordinate men in analyses of early modern masculinities, the normative discourses and lived experiences of governing men, those expected to embody and wield power, have only recently begun to be studied. See Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent (eds), Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others (Farnham, 2011); David G. Barrie and Broomhall (eds), A History of Police and Masculinities, 1700–2010 (London, 2012). 15 See Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France (London, 1989); Colin Jones, ‘Sisters of Charity and the Ailing Po o r ’, Social History of Medicine, 2 (1989): 339–48; Marie-Claude Dinet-Lecomte, ‘Les soeurs hospitalières au service des pauvres malades aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Annales de Démographie Historique, (1994): 277–92; Barbara D. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (New York and Oxford, 2004); Broomhall, Women’s Medical Work, esp. chapters 3 and 6; Susan E. Dinan, Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Aldershot, The Politics of Charitable Men 137 indeed critical, an analysis that considers civic men’s motivations for enacting charitable organization in the ways that they did, that considers their possibilities for action, and for social, spiritual and professional benefit from their activities, is also vital. The management of poverty gave men of wealth and influence a means to exercise new forms of civic power. Was its organization open to the introduction of new professional men, or did the same closed cohort control these as well as older political instruments in the city? How did these governing men of the city understand themselves and their charitable work in relation to poor women and men? In the sections to follow, I trace the history of charitable provision chronologically through the sixteenth century. These chart the changing relationships of religious institutions, faith, political ideologies and cultural politics, to the practices of civic men as well as to the care that would be provided to the needy over the century.
The Emergence of Secular Influence in Parisian Poverty Management
The second half of the fifteenth century was marked by an active policy of hospital reform by urban authorities across France. This regrouped and consolidated small hospitals and created large specialized establishments. The Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, providing relief for passers-by, paupers, the sick, aged, children, the elderly and mentally ill, as well as the first line of response in epidemics, participated in these changes. It was run on a daily basis by the prioress and the less powerful prior, with a staff of male and female religious, as well as lay domestics. In the 1490s, conflicts in the Hôtel-Dieu arose between its religious governors from the Chapter of Nôtre-Dame and the day-to-day management provided by its active religious staff over resources and spiritual supervision. These conflicts over the limits of spiritual and secular governance by the Chapter became visible to
2006). This recent research also includes analysis of female paupers articulating their own notions of poverty and charity, through their words and actions, see Broomhall, ‘Identity and Life Narratives of the Poor in Late Sixteenth-Century Tours’, Renaissance Quarterly, 57(2) (2004): 439–65; Broomhall, ‘Poverty, Gender and Incarceration in Sixteenth-Century Paris’, French History, 18 (2004): 1–24; Broomhall, ‘‘Burdened with Small Children’: Women Defining Poverty in Sixteenth-Century Tours’, in Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (eds), Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 223–37; Broomhall, ‘Family and Household Limitation Strategies among the Sixteenth- Century Urban Poor’, French History, 20(2) (2006): 121–37; Broomhall, ‘Le prix de l’amour: négociations après des relations sexuelles et des grossesses illégitimes à Paris au début du XVIe siècle’, in Cathy McClive and Nicole Pellegrin (eds), Femmes en fleurs, femmes en corps: Sang, santé, sexualités du Moyen Âge aux Lumières (Saint-Etienne, 2010), pp. 223–47. 138 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France the wider secular community when the Chapter asked the Parlement to arbitrate their dispute. In a complaint made in 1498, the personnel protested that they could no longer care for the poor as they saw fit since the Chapter heads had altered the arrangements for the services of the kitchens.16 Furthermore, they complained that it was not the role of the governors to punish the staff of the Hôtel-Dieu themselves, ‘but rather the master for the monks and the prioress for the sisters’.17 Having heard complaints from both sides, Parlement produced an arrêt in which the master and prioress were to ‘look carefully into faults … and … punish without any concealment’ and which insisted that ‘all the brothers, sisters and novices of the hospital obey from now on … according to the regulations of the house’. The court equally enjoined the Chapter to provide such good order and provision to the Hôtel-Dieu, as to treatment, food for the staff and for the poor ‘that from now on no complaints or grievances come to the Court’.18 This did little to clarify lines of religious governance over the spiritual and practical matters that were at the heart of these disputes, but it initiated a relationship between hospitalier facilities like the Hôtel-Dieu and secular officials, such as the Parlement, that was to strengthen over the century. Ongoing conflict between the Chapter and Hôtel-Dieu staff led to further interventions from the Parlement. In the deliberations of May 1505, the Chapter governors despaired of the staff behaviour:
for more than twenty-five years, the governors have continually supported numerous complaints about the lack of piety, harshness and insolence of the monks and nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu; that they applied all their care to correct and eradicate these bad habits against the obstinate resistance and inveterate malice of the monks and nuns, who were supported by various influential people in the Parisian city, they can do no more.19
By then, the Chapter had encountered so many difficulties in controlling the personnel of the Hôtel-Dieu that it requested Parlement lead reforms that would see control assumed by the municipal and legal elite of the city. The first accounts of 1505–1506 under the new governors recorded the altered
16 Ernest Coyecque, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Paris au Moyen Age, vol. 1 (Paris, 1891), p. 312. Despite their titles, some material on the sixteenth-century operations of the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris is covered in this work, as well as that of Marcel Fosseyeux, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Paris au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1912). A comprehensive study remains to be written, however. 17 Ibid., p. 311. 18 Ibid., p. 323. 19 A. Chevalier, L’Hôtel-Dieu de Paris et les sœurs augustines (Paris, 1901), p. 168. The Politics of Charitable Men 139 administrative structure as necessary because it had come to the knowledge of the court that there was and is ‘at present disorder, as much spiritual as temporal and even as to what concerns the poor sick’.20 By arrêt of the Parlement, the temporal administration of the Hôtel-Dieu was placed under the control of a secular Bureau comprised of eight bourgeois of Paris.21 Bourgeois in this case meant an elite dominated by legal professionals. Judges from sovereign courts, for example, numbered among those individuals who volunteered for service on such hospital boards (although it came with perks such as ceremonial dinners). In practice, as Tim McHugh has observed, the Hôtel-Dieu’s board remained limited to men of the parliamentary elite, including the Premier Président of the Parlement and the Premier Président of the Cour des Aides at its head, from its inception until 1690.22 Indeed, magistrates of the Parlement were to prove influential participants in developments within the Hôtel-Dieu and in defining its place in the city’s networks of charitable relief. When in 1519, after major contagion episodes tested the institution’s capacity to handle major disease events and François Ier proposed the creation of a designated plague hospital, Hostel de la Charité, near to the Porte Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the first stone of the new complex was laid in 1520 by the Abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet.23 His brother, Jean Briçonnet, was President of the Chambre des Comptes and a governor of the Hôtel-Dieu. At the same period, Guillaume was deeply engaged in reforms to the Hôtel-Dieu of Meaux.24 Guillaume had not, however, garnered support for this expansion of the Paris Hôtel-Dieu with the monks of Saint-Germain: internal fighting between the reforming abbot and
20 Léon Brièle (ed.), commenced by Michel Möring, continued by Charles Quentin and E. Peyron, Collections de documents pour servir à l’histoire des hôpitaux de Paris (4 vols, Paris, 1883), 3, Part I: Collection des Comptes de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, p. 93. 21 Coyecque, p. 181. 22 McHugh, p. 58. 23 As the Journal of the anonymous Bourgeois of Paris recorded: ‘L’an 1520, le samedy deuxiesme juing, veille de Pentebouste, fut mise la première pierre pour faire l’Hostel-Dieu de Paris, sur la rivière de Seyne, près l’abaye Sainct-Germain-des-Prez; et fut la dicte pierre mise par l’abbé de Sainct-Germain, nommé Briçonnet’: Ludovic Lalanne (ed.), Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous le règne de François Premier (1515–36) (Paris, 1854), p. 84. On Briçonnet, see Michel Veissière, ‘Guillaume Briçonnet, abbé rénovateur de Saint-Germain- des-Prés, 1507–1534’, Revue d’histoire de l’église de France, 60 (1974): 65–84; Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘Guillaume Briçonnet, évêque de Meaux, et la haute administration du royaume’, Journal des savants, 1(1–2) (1987): 79–88. 24 See Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister–Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492– 1549) and her Evangelical Network, vol. 1 (Leiden, 2009), chapter 5, pp. 151–80. 140 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France monks saw the latter obtain an arrêt to prevent the building from proceeding.25 Financially compromised by the defeat and capture of François Ier at Pavia in 1525, the subsequent need to pay ransom for him, and later his sons, caused first suspension and then ultimately in December 1527 cancellation of this building programme.26 The Briçonnets were as yet undaunted in their ambition to reform welfare in the capital, however. In 1525, Jean approached the Parlement with a petition to create distinct hospitals in Paris catering to particular illnesses. To support his case, he described a dramatic vision of the Hôtel-Dieu where ‘the disorder is so great that they put twelve and fifteen to a bed’.27 He cited the great cities of Italy as the model of differentiated care provision through specific institutions to which he aspired for France’s capital. Although unsuccessful on this occasion, Jean Briçonnet was a forceful advocate for the Hôtel-Dieu’s needs to the Parlement, although his petition probably acted to increase the public impression of disarray within the facility.28 Later still, it would be to Briçonnet’s own family that the Hôtel-Dieu governors would turn in financial crisis. In 1532 the Hôtel-Dieu accounts reveal that the governors had been forced to borrow 1,000 livres tournois from Loyse Raguier, the wife of Jean Briçonnet, ‘to provide for its urgent needs’.29 The example of the Briçonnet family demonstrates how deeply intertwined personal and administrative practices of charity could be for the civic elite. In the early 1520s a series of famine and harsh winters caused crisis-level poverty across the city and a renewed vigour among civic men to look for solutions to the city’s perceived problems. The year 1521 was noted as one of much famine in the city, with chroniclers recording widespread rumours of a conspiracy among bakers to keep bread prices high.30 The Hôtel-Dieu accounts record heavy plague deaths in 1520, 1521 and 1522. This led the king to make
25 Lalanne, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, p. 84; and Dom Bouillard, Histoire de l’abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, p. 181 cited in ibid., p. 467. 26 Brièle, Collections de documents, 3, Part I, p. 170. 27 Coyecque, p. 334. 28 Yet this voice of charity on behalf of the anonymous poor of the city could be unsympathetic in his dealings with those who served them on a daily basis. The sub-prioress Johanne de Costes reported in a complaint on the Hôtel-Dieu’s resources ‘that one day the president Briçonnet arrived at the office of the room Saint-Denis, where she was complaining that the poor had only a little herring for the day, and he said to her these words: “When I’m served herrings, I choose from among smallest ones”’: Coyecque, p. 357. 29 Brièle, Collections de documents, 3, Part I, p. 196. 30 Georges Guiffrey (ed.),Cronique du Roy Françoys Premier de ce nom (Paris, 1860), pp. 29–30; Philippe Joutard (ed.), Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous François 1er (St Amand, 1963), pp. 32–3, 147. The Politics of Charitable Men 141 an exceptional donation of linen and other necessities to the Hôtel-Dieu during the famine in the winter of 1522.31 At the same period, diarists reported renewed fears of vagabonds on the city streets, especially after 1524, when rumours spread quickly that the great fire of Troyes (in which a substantial proportion of the town had been burnt to the ground) had been lit by firestarters – enemies of the realm sent by the Emperor. This prompted ordinances to be issued against vagabonds by the Parisian échevinage, or town council.32 In these, the aldermen attributed the perceived vagabond problem to the large number of adventurers and troops about the country, who were ordered to leave Paris within 24 hours or find legitimate work. Journals and ordinances alike reflected fears that the Emperor’s troops, the Lutherans, or simply the city’s juvenile delinquents, planned to set Paris alight.33 Chronicles and diaries, written by these same elite men who also populated civic institutions, expressed concerns in seemingly apocalyptic tones that the natural order of the world was awry.34 When plague broke out in August 1531 and remained prevalent until September 1533,35 the scale of mortality appeared unprecedented:
It is to be noted that during this time, in the city of Paris, reigned a marvellous and dangerous plague, such that it was said that more than twelve hundred people died at the Hôtel-Dieu in three days … In short, this year can be called that of ‘the
31 Léon Brièle (ed.), Collections de documents (Second fascicule, 1884), 3, Part II: Collection des Comptes de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Paris (1536–), p. viii. 32 Joutard, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, pp. 60, 161–2; Fernand Bournon, ‘Chronique parisienne de Pierre Driart, chambrier de Saint-Victor (1522–35)’, Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France, 22 (Paris, 1895), p. 94; Lalanne, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, pp. 197, 200. 33 See for example, Joutard, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, pp. 66–7: ‘En ce temps estoit estimé le royaulme de France avoir esté et estre persécuté de toutes les plaies et persécutions que Dieu a acoustumé d’envoyer sur le peuple sur lequel il a l’indignation: il est assez noté par cy devant, lesquelles furent commencés environ l’an V cent XX et ont duré tousjours depuys, puis famine, pestilance, mesmesment en années V cent XIX et XXII, puis grans eaux, vens et tramblemans de terres en plusieurs pays, puis sedicions intestines, c’est ascavoir prince contre prince, comme le Roy de France contre Monsieur de Bourbon et aultres grans personaiges. Oultre, et qui pys est, survient l’erreur et venimeuse et dangereuse doctrine de Luter avec commotions, pilleries et mengeries du peuple, foullé de tous costé de tailles et larcins de gens d’armes. … de ce temps chacun pensoit seulement à son profict particulier, mesmement les personaiges qui de leur estat et office, devoit penser au régime, estat et prosperité de la chose publicque et des pauvres.’ 34 On the networks of these aldermanic cohorts, see Barbara D. Diefendorf, Paris City Councillors in the Sixteenth Century: The Politics of Patrimony (Princeton, 1983). 35 Achille Chereau, Les ordonnances faictes et publiées à son de trompe par les carrefours de ceste ville de Paris, pour eviter le danger de peste (1531) (Paris, 1873). 142 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
great mortality’, not only in Paris, but in all the realm of France … God the creator have pity on their souls!36
This same highly charged dramatic tone was evident in the records of the magistrates who assembled in December 1531 in Parlement’s Conseil to determine the management of plague in the city, with the Hôtel-Dieu reportedly overwhelmed by numbers as high as 800 and 900 victims. Here they reported worrisome tales that some had been forced to leave ‘even before their wounds were healed’ and ‘obliged to beg among the able-bodied at churches’.37 In August 1533, a new parliamentary assembly noted a severe shortage of donations to the Hôtel-Dieu, and singled out the religious institutions of Paris and its environs for neither having provided their contribution nor indeed sheltered the poor.38 These magistrates who were debating welfare policy came from the same professional milieu as contemporary chroniclers and shared a common emotional language, an interest in creating social order, and perhaps also the tendency to interpret events in the eschatological terms popular with educated Catholics of their day. Parlement had long played a role in the policing and administration of Paris, including such aspects as street cleaning and maintenance of roadways and bridges. Its involvement in matters of poverty and contagion was thus a not unexpected extension of their oversight of urban hygiene and public order.39 Significantly, however, during this period, city officials were beginning to gather more data about the population, in ways which would sharpen the definitions of worthy alms recipients, and have profound effects as the welfare system became increasingly perceived as overburdened in the years to come. The August 1533 assembly had recommended that an external site be found for the pestiferous and declared that households in every district were to be visited to distribute alms to the needy. Any able-bodied paupers found begging in the streets would be struck from the rolls and taken prisoner.40 In April 1534, Parlement ordered that able-bodied poor be put to work on official projects for the city or be struck from the alms roll, and that those who were not from Paris be ejected within 24 hours. No new name was to be added to the list of sick poor without a
36 Joutard, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, p. 39. 37 François Bonnardot, Alexandre Tuetey, Paul Guérin and Léon Le Grand (eds), Registres des délibérations de Bureau de la Ville de Paris (20 vols, Paris, 1883–), 2: 1527–39, ed. Alexandre Tuetey (1886), p. 135. 38 Ibid., 2, p. 169. 39 Shennan, p. 87. 40 Registres des délibérations, 2, Tuetey, p. 169. The Politics of Charitable Men 143 surgeon’s certificate.41 In October 1535, Parlement required district captains to ‘visit each quarter and find out the manner in which the inhabitants of Paris l i ve d’. 42 They were to go into each house in their quarters, determine who lodged there, the number of households, how long they had lived in the city and in what state they had worked. Those who lived on alms were to be ‘interrogated more carefully than the others, asking the neighbours if they can and have means to earn their living other than by alms’.43 In the 30 years since the chapter heads of the Hôtel-Dieu had asked secular professionals to intervene in their affairs, welfare provision had thus undergone profound changes. Indiscriminate and undocumented acts of charity within hospitals were being progressively supplemented by mechanisms of secular social control through detailed data gathering, qualitative judgements about health and poverty and surveillance of neighbourly compliance with organized charitable support. The men who were leading these changes were educated Catholics of the professional elite; men fearful of the disorder they saw around them in the natural and social environment and concerned to effect change through instruments that were familiar to their milieu. The measures they advocated are highly suggestive of the ways that Foucault proposed governmentality emerged over the early modern period.
New Mechanisms of Secular Influence
Scholars have long debated the degree to which Parlement forged an independent or oppositional role to the crown during the sixteenth century.44 Crucially for welfare reform in Paris (and the nation at large), the Paris Parlement had both a responsibility to the king as a moderator (or claimed moderator) of royal legislation and was also a deeply integrated participant in the municipal order of the city. What was needed in Paris became extrapolated across the entire nation. It has been argued that the sixteenth century witnessed a move by the crown towards lay administration, principally, it is claimed, in response to corruption of hospital management and the misappropriation of resources destined for the poor.45 Such concerns had been aired in Paris by the 1540s. In December 1543, a royal edict required bailiffs, seneschals and judges to supervise the administration of hospitals, with the power to replace their administrators on the basis of the
41 Ibid., p. 208. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., pp. 208–209. 44 See literature cited in n. 13 above. 45 See literature cited in n. 3 above. 144 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France reported ‘great disorder’ in maladeries and leproseries (which had most probably outlived their original function). For the time being at least, the poor were not themselves deemed at fault. Increasingly, the pressure on charitable resources was the fault of poor administration by avaricious clergy. A further edict in 1545 complained of the abuses of hospital revenues: ‘as we have duly been informed that the hospitals are badly administered and are worse and worse governed by their administrators and prelates’. It ordered judges to have hospitals’ governors show them the accounts.46 The Hôtel-Dieu records show governors responding to these orders in the same year, when they paid André Rousset ‘for making 600 tickets to distribute to the poor leaving cured from the Hôtel-Dieu’.47 Moreover, in October, they resolved to send leaflets to the parishes and faubourgs of the town informing inhabitants of the true revenues of the Hôtel-Dieu, which they felt had been grossly exaggerated and had caused inhabitants not to contribute alms.48 In practice, Parlement devolved responsibility for implementation of policies to the Prévôt and aldermen of the city, as was made clear in the legislation of the 1540s. The Prévôt des marchands and the aldermen, captured at prayer in all their magnificent finery in 1611 by the artist, Georges Lallement, formed part of the same tight-knit community of the city’s elite men, in the service of the city and the crown, as the Parlement. Indeed many of them operated in both organizations.49 Christophe du Thou, Prévôt from 1552 to 1554, then became a Président of the Parlement. His father Augustin had likewise been a Prévôt from 1538 to 1540.50 In November 1544, the Paris aldermen met to discuss how to handle the new expectations that had been placed upon them by order of the king and ordinance of the Parlement to resolve the matter of an influx of sick and able-bodied paupers to the town.51 This formalized the care of able- bodied poor Parisians to the Prévôt and aldermen, a responsibility that had hitherto come under the direction of Parlement and largely the Hôtel-Dieu in practice. The aldermen recorded the event in their deliberations, noting that they
46 Isambert, Decrusy and Armet, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l’an 420, jusqu’à la révolution de 1789, vol. 12, Part II, 1514–46 (Paris, 1828), p. 897. 47 Brièle, Collections de documents, 3, Part II, p. 281. 48 Brièle, Collections de documents, 1: Délibérations de l’ancien bureau de l’Hôtel-Dieu (1881), p. 4. 49 Georges Lallemant, Le Prévôt des marchands et les échevins de la ville de Paris, 1611 (Musée Carnavalet). 50 A list of the Prévôt is found in MM. Berthelot, Hartwig Derenbourg Ferdinand- Camille Dreyfus and A. Giry (eds), La Grande Encyclopédie: inventaire raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts, vol. 25 (Paris, 1899). 51 Registres des délibérations, 3: 1539–52, ed. Paul Guérin (1886), pp. 45–6. The Politics of Charitable Men 145
‘had concluded that following the edict of the king, the town must humbly accept the charge to the poor, thanking God that he had inspired the king to have care for the poor of this town’.52 Interestingly, ‘the town’, personified by its elite male citizenry, cast their civic responsibility to govern poverty as a spiritual duty. This would result in the establishment of the Grand Bureau des Pauvres, which would now be responsible for aged people and infants of all the Paris districts and faubourgs who were unable to earn a living, as well as for putting the able-bodied poor to work.53 Such work schemes were a first step in the measures developed by Paris’s Grand Bureau. In January 1545, the aldermen issued a declaration which validated their ability to take control of policing and provisioning of the poor in which they declared that all able-bodied paupers, male and female, were to present themselves to be employed. They would be whipped if they were found begging once work had been commenced.54 Their meagre salaries were to be financed by a specific collection levied on Parisian households, which would supplement whatever incidental alms might be collected across the city for the Grand Bureau. The aldermen’s expectation that incidental gifts would be offered by Parisian inhabitants, in addition to a new household levy placed upon them, blurred lines of charitable donation between the new secular and the many religious hospital-like institutions operating in the city, including the Hôtel-Dieu. Furthermore, crossing the lines of medical provision for the needy in the city was the Grand Bureau’s added responsibility for two hospitals, La Trinité for children and the Hospice des Petites Maisons for those who were insane or suffering from venereal disease. By 1546, a further edict from the crown ordered judges to establish a commission of administrators in each hospital in their district, requested hospital titles be presented to judges within two months of the edict’s publication, and expected judges visiting the places to ‘inquire about their revenues, the state of the place, the number of beds and the poor that they find there’. These directives concerning administrative procedures continued to be expressed by Parlement and king in religious terms:
we desire with all our heart, for our conscience, as a very holy and agreeable thing to God the creator, that the deniers for the poor be delivered to them and
52 Registres des délibérations, 3, Guérin, p. 47. 53 This was not the first time that an organized collection had been undertaken for the poor, see Fosseyeux, ‘Les Premiers Budgets municipaux d’assistance’, Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 20(88) (1934): 407–32, at 419. 54 Isambert, Decrusy and Armet, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 12, Part II, pp. 900–902. 146 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
distributed according to the true intentions of the founders: a thing very difficult, almost impossible to implement, given that those so-called administrators who enjoy the revenues dissimulate from showing the titles and foundations.55
Now it was secular government who interpreted divine desire for social order and care of the weak, with policies and administrative models derived from its familiar structures and administered by lay professional men. In 1547, specific commissioners were created whose role was to oversee hospital management and accounts.56 These positions added to the growing apparatus of welfare governance across the country. François Ier died in 1547 but the trajectory of his hospital legislation was largely maintained by his son Henri II. In 1553, the new king justified an edict which regulated the expenditure of hospital revenues, declaring that his actions stemmed from both natural and religious sentiment, and would:
establish reforms to the abuses committed each day in the administration of hospitals in our realm and even in our city of Paris, where poor abound, so that the poor can be lodged and supported according to what our predecessors and the founders, as well as reason and Christian charity demand of us.57
Importantly, the key elements of this edict were to clarify that local authorities would not be paid to supervise the hospitals, and that such reforms would begin with Paris because ‘the first and principal reformation must commence by the head, by which we mean Paris, before extending to the other limbs, and our hope is that the reform will carry great relief and comfort to the poor of this town, in which the poor gather from all parts of our kingdom’.58 Paris, it seems, was critical in royal legislation that was enacted through Parlement. It became both test case and exemplar to the rest of the nation in hospital reform. The problems it faced, especially its Hôtel-Dieu, were amplified, projected and assumed (perhaps wilfully) to reflect the situation of the entire country. Within a decade, the Grand Bureau was beginning to exert overt discipline over not only able-bodied paupers, but also the wider community of Paris. By 1551, an arrêt from Parlement on the policing of the poor in Paris noted that since the creation of the Grand Bureau, the number of paupers had tripled, and that the relevant commissioner from the Bureau, as well as the beadle and five or
55 Ibid., p. 922. 56 Imbert, Le Droit hospitalier de l’ancien régime, p. 19. 57 Isambert, Decrusy and Armet, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, vol. 13: 1546–59 (Paris, 1828), p. 355. 58 Ibid., pp. 356–7. The Politics of Charitable Men 147 six bourgeois from each parish would visit the poor in their homes to identify any foreign or feigning paupers who could be struck from the alms rolls.59 The arrêt stipulated that more public works projects should be established and that beggars were to be chained two by two, kept under lock and key at night, and returned each morning under escort of a sergeant to the worksite.60 Later regulations give insights into the experience of such workshops. In 1570, the council issued regulations ordering that the paupers should present for work at 6 or 7 a.m. during winter, and at 5 or 6 a.m. during summer, or they would be expelled from the workshop.61 They were forbidden to leave, or take the Lord’s or saints’ names in vain, also on pain of being expelled from the workshop. Speaking badly of the locals passing by the workshop would result in a whipping.62 They were reminded that they were not permitted to beg in the city ‘nor to tell people that they only earned 1 sol a day, which was not true’.63 (At the period, men earned 2 sols 6 deniers, and women 2 sols for their labour in such workshops.) However, just as important as the development of more and more rigorous forms of control over paupers were the 1551 arrêt’s stipulations for the Paris citizenry. Parishioners were forbidden to give alms from their door, as this was deemed to attract paupers to the streets. Moreover, inhabitants were explicitly forbidden to murmur or go against the police of the poor in word or deed.64 The Grand Bureau offered thus a new form of control in Paris, one that extended over both paupers and those who financially supported them. Further edicts in 1560 under Henri’s son François II largely reiterate those of his father and grandfather.65 What had commenced as a suspicion of poor governance of hospitalier organizations began to develop its own narrative truth over time. When François’s brother, Charles IX, who succeeded in December 1560, under the regency of Catherine de Médicis, produced further edicts to clarify the governance of hospitals under the new administrative system,66 these claimed that hospitals were:
so badly administered … applying for their profit the greater part of the revenues, and had almost abolished the name of hospital or hospitality … defrauding the
59 Registres des délibérations, 3, Guérin, p. 245. 60 Ibid., pp. 244–5. 61 Ibid., pp. 246–7. 62 Registres des délibérations, 6: 1568–72, ed. Paul Guérin (1892), p. 198. 63 Ibid., p. 198. 64 Registres des délibérations, 3, Guérin, pp. 245. 65 Jourdan, Decrusy and Isambert, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, vol. 14: 1559–89 (Paris, [n.d.]), p. 41. 66 Ibid., p. 105. 148 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
poor of their rightful nourishment and contravening the holy commandments of God and the intention of the founders.67
Hospitalier institutions were now to be administered by elected men of the local civic elite, ‘good people, sensible and solvent’, for a three-year period.68 Then, in 1561, the crown decreed that all governance of all hospitals, not just those with known problems, would be confined to two lay administrators, elected every three years. The Ordinance of Moulins of 1566, article 73, re-stated the need to make sure that hospital revenues were used for their clients but now the purpose of such institutions was clearly re-focused not for the poor per se, but for the sick, and those local communities were confirmed as responsible for them, something that had occurred in Paris some 20 years earlier.69 Over the middle of the century, the transition towards secular oversight and then governance of what had been religious institutions for welfare provision was expanded beyond Paris to the nation at large. While the adoption of these changes was deeply complex, localized and often resisted, communications in the name of successive monarchs progressively made the problems as well as the principles which governed the shift accepted as realities. New personnel and their practices thus broadened both the network and instruments of power in welfare provision, developing its mechanisms of secular governance.
Civic Men of Charity
Already earlier in the sixteenth century, civic men such as Jean Briçonnet had taken a personal role in the development of Paris’s welfare management. The later years of the century were also marked by a series of personal attempts to enact or encourage charity. A new cohort of civic men used existing mechanisms or created new ones to participate in the management of poverty and to express their faith. Some, however, would create unintentional competition and increase pressure on the city’s other charity apparatus. In 1580, one Jean Martin published a treatise on the policing and regulation of paupers in which he hoped to inspire charitable donations from his readers and to promote the work of the Grand Bureau. Martin was a prosecutor for the Parlement of Paris and a commissioner and ‘patron’ for some 15 or 16 years of the Grand Bureau. He praised the Grand Bureau’s administrative efficiencies
67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., pp. 105–106. 69 Ibid., p. 209. The Politics of Charitable Men 149 and argued for its capacity to manage poverty in a combination of secular and organizational rhetoric. However, to inspire a sense of religious and civic responsibility in his readers, he notably drew on popular biblical examples of charitable Christian governing men. Martin was particularly critical of noblemen who neglected their duties to their social inferiors and complained bitterly of those who actively thwarted the Bureau’s efforts to control and help the city’s poor.70 A secular administrative official, Jean Martin nonetheless embedded his conceptualization of the charitable man clearly within a religious framework: donating to and supporting the Grand Bureau was both a Christian duty and a form of civic humanism. Martin was an example of the kind of professional man who could personally benefit from voluntary efforts for the Bureau, and his target readership was of the same non-noble, professional milieu. The Bureau comprised two levels – a first group of socially elite secular and religious men from the Parlement, the Chambre des Comptes, and three curates or members holding a Bachelor of Theology, and a second group of 16 unpaid commissioners comprised of royal officers and bourgeois, with two allocated to direct oversight of each of the city’s parishes.71 For men like Jean Martin, the Grand Bureau had opened up possibilities for a new type of urban man to play a role in the governance of the city at large, men who were not those senior leaders like Jean Briçonnet who controlled the board of the Hôtel-Dieu. In a different guise, another personalized response to charity also rendered visible the desire of a new cohort of educated men to engage with the challenge of governing poverty. In October 1576, the apothecary Nicolas Houel successfully petitioned Charles IX to establish the utopian Charité chrétienne.72 Houel wanted to cater for all poor but especially orphans and the aged. His outline proposed providing teachers for trades, Greek, Hebrew and letters generally, music, domestic sciences for girls, along with housing for poor widows, girls and boys, blind and crippled children, old people, crippled soldiers, and a medicinal garden to supply a free pharmacy for the poor. Houel was an eclectic author and possibly also illustrator, who produced a series of plans for tapestries for Catherine de Médicis as well as two books depicting processions of Henri III and Louise de Lorraine. In one, he depicted the king processing with penitents
70 Jean Martin, La Police et Règlement du Grand Bureau des Pauvres de la ville et fauxbourgs de Paris (Paris, 1580); see also Lisa Keane Elliott, ‘Jean Martin, Governor of the Grand Bureau des Pauvres, on Charity and the Civic Duty of Governing Men in Paris, circa 1580’, in Broomhall and Van Gent, Governing Masculinities, pp. 65–83. 71 Fosseyeux, ‘Les Premiers Budgets municipaux d’assistance’, p. 421. 72 Jules Guiffrey, ‘Nicolas Houel, apothicaire parisien, fondateur de la Maison de la Charité chrétienne et premier auteur de la tenture d’Artémise’, Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris, 25 (Paris, 1898), pp. 179–270. 150 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France past a series of Parisian landmarks, including the Hôtel-Dieu, on his way to the institution Houel had created.73 In the second, Louise de Lorraine was shown laying the foundation stone of the building, commenced in 1584.74 In the meantime, the actual Charité chrétienne was established in the Hôtel de Lourcine where Houel instructed children in piety, letters and pharmacy, while he wrote books dedicated to the royal family and his fellow citizens to inspire bequests. Clearly this was an organization that would require extensive support. Houel himself provided an important sum of 2,000 écus towards his charitable project but he died in 1587 before the institution had solidified and by the 1620s it had been merged with other charitable endeavours.75 Such acts of individual welfare provision by civic men not only showed the continuation of strong interconnections between individual and community motivations, they enacted and encouraged charitable labour of the administrative and deeply personal kind as normative actions for civic men. Charity was the practice and personal responsibility of civic men. As Martin’s treatise suggested and the Houel experiment demonstrated in its ultimate failure, sustaining a flow of donations to the varied charitable apparatus of the city was a challenge. The development of the Grand Bureau as an overarching administrative body for paupers in the city potentially diverted donations that might once have been dedicated to the Hôtel-Dieu. In 1584, the latter’s governors complained to Parlement that ‘if the Hôtel-Dieu is not aided by the good bourgeois of Paris’, those good civic men that the welfare organizations had helped to create, ‘then they will be obliged to shut its doors’.76 In 1584, the king permitted a specific collection on the streets to be conducted for the Hôtel-Dieu. Everyone was to be ‘exhorted to apply charity in this great need’.77 In that year, the governors who presented the accounts to the town council offered their resignation with it.78 In response, the aldermen issued an ordinance to the bourgeois of Paris to:
beg them to give alms, either in goods or money, to the Hospital of the Hôtel- Dieu of Paris, at present burdened with a great number of sick people both French
73 Ibid., p. 228. 74 Ibid., p. 230. 75 Ibid., pp. 258–60. 76 Brièle, Collections de documents, 1, p. 16. 77 Registres des délibérations, 8: 1576–86, ed. Paul Guérin (1896), p. 419. 78 Ibid., pp. 419–20, n. 1. The Politics of Charitable Men 151
and foreign, and having no means to support the expenses with which it is charged … for which reason they are exhorted to enlarge their alms liberally.79
This wording was precisely that used by paupers themselves applying to relief bureaux. Now it seemed that the governors of the Hôtel-Dieu were the ones begging for assistance. By January 1590, a general assembly was called to address the urgent needs of the poor of the Hôtel-Dieu in response to the governors’ reports on the ruins of its farms and other independent revenues and resources.80 This assembly praised the governors’ due diligence in paying the debts of the hospital (sometimes with their own funds, maintaining a long tradition of real, personal commitment to these voluntary responsibilities as governors) and devised a plan to recover some 13,000 écus for their assistance. This involved exacting unpaid loans, asking preachers to preach on the virtue of charity, introducing a tax on street cleaning, placing more poor boxes across the city, and having each parish identify several honourable women to door-knock ‘gently and from individual to individual’ for sheets and linen for the poor and dead of the Hôtel-Dieu.81 The Grand Bureau too was feeling the strain. They also ordered that more boxes for spontaneous donations were to be put up across the city in June 1586. Then in July, a great pot was installed at the gate of the Grand Bureau where the inhabitants were encouraged to throw the remains of their soups, stews and meats to be distributed to the able-bodied in the workshops.82 By 1587, the leaders of the Grand Bureau and the aldermen were both trying to shift to each other the responsibility for feeding those paupers working for the city, and the workshops were threatened with closure because of the lack of donations to support them.83 By September 1587, able-bodied paupers were compelled to be licensed to work in the workshops, because there were now so many applicants that places could not be found for them all.84 Once chained, now there were queues. There was evidently no straightforward boundary or transition from religious to secular welfare institutions for governors, donors or paupers. Both the city’s two major providers of charitable support – the Hôtel-Dieu and the Grand Bureau – employed a combination of organizational and religious rhetoric to inspire support, used male and female staff who assisted because of their spiritual
79 Registres des délibérations, 9: 1586–90, ed. François Bonnardot (1902), p. 432. 80 Ibid., p. 562. 81 Ibid., p. 563. 82 Registres des délibérations, 8, Guérin, pp. 583–4, n. 2; p. 587. 83 Registres des délibérations, 9, Bonnardot, p. 23. 84 Ibid., pp. 76–7. 152 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France beliefs, yet fought to divest themselves of the responsibilities of certain needy by redefining their target clientele. In 1590 Paris, staunchly Catholic, was subjected to a four-month siege by Henri IV and his Huguenot forces. Surrounding towns had been cleared by Henri’s troops, pushing up the population of Paris with few resources to sustain them. In April, there was an instruction to raise a pauper levy in each district, then in May an assembly required the payment to be continued another month; those who had not paid the first time round would pay both in 24 hours or be charged quadruple.85 By June, while the siege was underway, orders to expel ‘useless mouths’ proposed to eject all men, women and children not on the alms rolls, and to help with this the Bailiff and sergeant were to ‘seize and shave the beard and heads of all men and boys, and mark the women and girls so that they would be recognized’ and then put them out of the town.86 Already, in Paris, paupers who received alms from the Grand Bureau were ordered to wear a yellow cross.87 As Denise Turrel has argued, the towns which imposed such visual marks upon their paupers tended to be those with the strongest support for the ultra-Catholic faction in the conflicts of the Wars of Religion. In these towns, she argues, the paupers’ mark played a role as a rallying sign for Catholics. During the tense religious politics of the siege, new mechanisms of control over the bodies of paupers were likewise being imagined. However, in the end this last act of cruelty was rejected, as one chronicler wrote:
it seemed unjust and cruel to chase out poor labourers … and beggars, it would be sending them to their deaths outside Paris, in the countryside where they could not find anything to live on and where they would be exposed to the ill treatment of the enemy.88
Instead, the military governor of the siege, together with the Prévôt, ordered support for the poor who were employed at the city’s fortifications.89 In an order from the Grand Bureau to curates, the latter were instructed to encourage the city’s inhabitants to contribute to poor boxes, ‘warning them that the écus raised in each district would suffice only for half the great number of able-bodied poor
85 Registres des délibérations, 10: 1590–94, ed. Paul Guérin (1902), pp. 8, 12–13. 86 Ibid., p. 19. 87 Denise Turrel, ‘Une identité imposée: les marques des pauvres dans les villes des XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 66 (2003), pp. 93–105. 88 A. Dufour, ‘Relation du siège de Paris par Henri IV, traduite de l’italien de Filippo Pigafetta’, Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris, 2 (Paris, 1876), p. 52. 89 Registres des délibérations, 10, Guérin, pp. 4–5. The Politics of Charitable Men 153 in the town’.90 The aldermen even had instructions for confessors too: that ‘in confession, we beg them to admonish the confessors, indeed press all those who come to their confessions, to give their goods to help feed the poor workers and to put it in the boxes, especially pressing the wealthy elite and women’.91 Particular charity was not just a ‘natural’ disposition of women, it could also be deemed the hallmark of a certain civic status for men. Filippo Pigafetta, a zealous Catholic in the employ of the papal legate, and eyewitness to the siege, recorded a great deal about the work of preachers who kept the population focused on the Huguenot enemy outside and not on the famine and inflation inside. His work suggests that the governors of the city were well aware of the possibility of sedition among the lower orders in desperation. Pigafetta remarked that the alms were sufficient for recipients to purchase oat-strained water and wine ‘which sufficed for them to be patient, and this patience was such that with all those who were animated by the same spirit, they wanted to die of misery rather than accept the tyranny of a heretic’.92 On the two occasions where popular movements broke out, crying out for bread or peace, both were able to be put down with words alone.93 Religious processions were maintained to keep up spirits. Pigafetta estimated that 5,000 had died of the siege, not counting infants;94 other sources quote between 12,000 and 30,000.95 Henri IV allowed 3,000 at harvest time to leave the city on compassionate grounds, without which Pigafetta conceded they ‘would have certainly all died from hunger’ but which probably had the effect of prolonging the siege by allowing the Parisians to hold out longer against him.96 After the siege, the Hôtel-Dieu’s apparently diminishing finances continued to be widespread public knowledge, but the city was conflicted about how best to exhort (or require) Parisians to contribute support. Towards the end of July 1595, the governing director was obliged to declare that there was no longer enough to cover food for the poor and offered to borrow 400 écus from among his friends. Once again, the notion of personal financial responsibility for these welfare institutions appears as a hallmark of the civic elite’s mentalité, reminding us of the difficulties in distinguishing between such men’s civic and religious practices and beliefs in these endeavours.
90 Ibid., p. 7. 91 Ibid. 92 Dufour, p. 70. 93 Ibid., p. 71. 94 Ibid., p. 77. 95 Ibid., p. 80. 96 Ibid., p. 81. 154 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
After floods in spring 1595, an extraordinary meeting called by Parlement concluded that there would be another collection based on the size of the fortifications of each house.97 In June 1595, district officials were told to recover the Grand Bureau’s subvention of the poor from inhabitants by warning them ‘that within a day there would not be funds to pay for the poor, the workshops would be broken up, and there would be no means to contain them’.98 At the same time, civic officials were still struggling with the concept of what might be defined as compulsory charity towards the poor, with orders requiring officers to ‘receive the offers that each of the bourgeois wants to pay in alms’.99 Yet, in February, officers were instructed to present lists to the Court des Aides ‘of those who they considered had not offered enough and of what they could and should contribute instead’.100 By March 1596, an ordinance for collection of ‘offers’ for the poor also included punishments for those who refused. They would be obliged to pay by seizure of their goods and charged 1 écu for each day they delayed, in addition to having ten paupers billeted to their own home.101 In both conceptualizing and implementing ‘enforced’, ‘spontaneous’ alms donations, officials evidently struggled with the blending of long-held religious practices of charity with desperate circumstances and secular organizational structures. At the same period, paupers and maimed soldiers were becoming an object of attention for the newly Catholic king, Henri IV. Already in 1585, Henri III had established that injured soldiers could take up places in hospitals originally intended for religious personnel.102 In the preamble to this edict, he argued that to compensate the poor captains or old soldiers mutilated by war and now incapable of service, they could be given places in each abbey and priory of the realm. Such support was not merely in the interests of the monarch. In November 1589, the aldermen of Paris had sent orders to each district to exhort inhabitants to extend their charity to the foreign soldiers who were injured in the city and would have no support if
they did not receive some good works and charity from Catholics and supporters of the League, for whose help they had left their homelands, their wives and children, which should move each to do their best to aid them … and to encourage noble ladies to visit them in person as often as possible.103
97 Registres des délibérations, 11: 1594–98, ed. Alexandre Tuetey (1902), p. 132, n. 1. 98 Ibid., p. 141. 99 Ibid., p. 218. 100 Ibid., p. 225. 101 Ibid., pp. 229–30. 102 Jourdan, Decrusy and Isambert, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 14, p. 594. 103 Registres des délibérations, 11, Bonnardot, p. 526. The Politics of Charitable Men 155
Here, the city could invoke Catholic sympathy to encourage its inhabitants to support foreigners, including soldiers, where they made a valued contribution to the city’s well-being. Then in edicts of 1597 and 1604 Henri IV placed officers and soldiers, injured in his service, in possession of the Hôtel Lourcine (the former Charité chrétienne of Nicolas Houel) to be ‘lodged, fed and treated’.104 It would not be until 1602 that another series of intense legislative acts occupied the Parisian and royal administration. In that year, an arrêt confirmed a tax for three years’ care for the poor and another the same month confirmed the supplies provided to the poor working on public works for the city.105 A royal edict under Henri IV permitted the construction of a separate hospital to receive the pestiferous in 1607.106 This edict gave the Hôtel-Dieu rights for 15 years on the totality of the tax of salt sold in Paris, and five sous for the new construction in perpetuity. It incorporated the military hospital, Lourcine, into the Hôtel-Dieu complex as an external treatment facility, something the Hôtel- Dieu governors had sought for almost the whole century.
Conclusions
The sixteenth century is perhaps most marked not by an attempt at secularization in the aims and underpinnings of poor relief, but most of all in its bureaucracy, administration and accountability. The call late in the century for each city to administer bureaux for the poor proposed a secular arm to the existing hospital facilities in many places. The Hôtel-Dieu’s governors had to respond to claims of financial mismanagement first generated internally, then by Parlement and crown, but also later to protect itself in the public eye, in order to generate support from the populace. The Grand Bureau, designed to signal a new type of organization and focus for charity, faced many of the same challenges by the century’s end. It would, however, play a significant role in allowing new professional men access to governance of the city, and a particularly strong part in developing measures of social discipline for both paupers and inhabitants alike. In governing poverty, these professional men who formed a new network of secular administration across the city managed the bodies and activities of
104 Isambert, Tallandier and Decrusy, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 15: 1589–1610 (Paris, 1829), pp. 291, 303; see also Daniel Hickey, ‘Sixteenth-Century Hospital Reform: Henri IV and the Chamber of Christian Charity’, Renaissance and Reformation, 17 (1993): 5–15. 105 Registres des délibérations, 12: 1598–1602, ed. Paul Guérin (1909), pp. 559, 561. 106 Isambert, Tallandier and Decrusy, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, XV, p. 327. 156 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France others, presented as a set of charitable, Christian responsibilities to support those perceived as weaker or subordinate to them, both male and female. They assumed the right (couched as a responsibility) to regulate the behaviour of others, peering into the households of fellow citizens and relying on neighbours to participate in a system of social control over the city. The complicity of institutional personnel, neighbours, parishes and community, in the upholding of these values was of critical importance. This analysis has revealed that some of the themes Foucault proposed concerning governmentality were already in development through sixteenth- century practices of welfare. Ideas that saw realization in the seventeenth century, such as the incarceration of paupers and the Hôpital Général, stemmed from notions largely developed and expressed in the sixteenth century. But it was a set of practices and apparatus that was neither yet firmly established nor autonomous and in the following century, the Catholic Church would regain (or visibly reinstate) significant participation in welfare administration. Certainly in many cities of the realm, secular management was by no means assured in practice; its overlay was able to be quickly dismantled as contexts changed in the following century. The sixteenth was a century where secular politics were setting the pace, but as has been shown here, charity was always deeply imbued with religious motivations, even when practised by secular men. Religion underpinned parliamentary moves and descriptions of eschatological anxieties – so that the city’s elite saw in the various disasters that they encountered something apocalyptic where charity was needed more than ever to prove one’s faith. The city’s civic elite were continually determining what it meant to be charitable men, Catholic men, in secular organizations, and how their professional skills could be put to the service of religion in new ways. It was their Christian duty as much as perceived social benefits that impelled them to serve, and particularly to give their own funds and time to these endeavours. This was as much a part of theiresprit de corps as their more debatable allegiance to king. And when the Catholic Church began to renew its energies for welfare administration in the following century, there was still an unbroken connection between charity and the Church, for secular officials as much as spiritual leaders had relied on religious rhetoric to enact these duties and to encourage donations. The Hôtel-Dieu had started the century as a major provider of poor relief, for the poor, the sick, the elderly and the marginal. By the end of the century, in theory if not always in practice, a number of organizations shared these responsibilities. Competing policy actors confused the direction, not so much between church and state, as between different secular officials and a populace who were not sure which of the abundant alms collections, poor boxes or The Politics of Charitable Men 157 individual paupers in the street they could or should support. By mid-century, war, then famine, siege and contagion threw welfare providers into a crisis management mode that crippled their ability to do much more than respond to each new challenge as it arose. What about the poor themselves? Conceptually, the poor were not perceived to be evil; there were always people, many people, whose support the inhabitants of Paris and their governors accepted as their responsibility. But that group was becoming increasingly distinct both conceptually and in real terms as pressure on resources was perceived to grow. Vagabonds and strangers, as distinct from the sick, elderly, juvenile or able-bodied poor of the town, were the main targets of repressive legislation, which also saw new populations identified as deserving of support, most notably soldiers. But all forms of support required pauper subordination. Perhaps fear of violence among these masterless men gave some small form of power to paupers in the city’s framework. It certainly sparked efforts to control them in various ways. Civic governance was enacted visually on and through their bodies, in the way paupers were clothed, marked, chained together, shorn of hair and deprived of self-determination. Life as a deserving pauper might be conceptually noble and deserving of charity, but few were trading places for a life of voluntary poverty as they had done at the beginning of the century. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 8 Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France: The Nevers Foundation and Single Poor Catholic Girls
Lisa Keane Elliott
On Thursday 13 November 1573, the Duke and Duchess of Nevers established a charitable foundation to provide annual allotments of dowries for 60 poor girls within their territories of Nevers and Rethel. This ‘good and holy’ foundation was created to enable these 60 poor girls to make a ‘good match’ thereby guarding against a slide into vice, corruption and moral ruination, conditions into which poverty was perceived inevitably to lead. Within a decade of the foundation’s establishment, the duke and duchess called for a reform of their foundation as a result of fraudulent behaviour by those entrusted to administer it. The results of this reform are extant in the form of a document published in 1605 and titled ‘The Foundation made by Lord and Lady, the Duke and Duchess of Nevers and Rethel: Princes of Mantua, and Peers of France: For the marriage from now on in each year in perpetuity in their territories and domains, up to the number of 60 poor girls, destitute of all faculties and means. Happy are those who listen to the poor and destitute: for God will deliver him in these perilous days.’1 Other than the foundation of charitable institutions for disabled, ill or vulnerable poor women, evidence for expressions of charity toward women on such a scale as the Nevers Foundation is rare for the sixteenth century. Most of the
1 Archives de l’Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris [hereafter AP–HP], Hôtel- Dieu, liasse 1397–1411, côté 6349, La Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame, les Duc, et Duchesse de Nivernois et de Rethelois: Princes de Manthouë, &c., Pairs de France. Pour marier d’orsenavant par chacun an à perpetuité, en leurs terres et Seigneuries, jusques au nombre de soixante pauvres filles, destituées de toutes facultez et moyen. Bien heureux est celui qui entend au pauvre et indigent: car Dieu le delivrera en la perilleuse journée. Pseaume 40. L’An MDCV (1605) [hereafterLa Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame]. 160 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France evidence extant in regard to individual acts of charity comes from testamentary evidence and generally relates to one-off bequests towards the poor in general. The work of Sharon Farmer on thirteenth-century Paris and Wilma Pugh on seventeenth-century France has demonstrated how useful such evidence is for understanding the role of charity and the nature of the charitable act in France.2 However, the uniqueness of the Nevers Foundation is that it demonstrates an act of charity by an individual that was designed to go beyond the one-off testamentary bequests examined by Farmer and Pugh. Through this document we can follow the development of a charitable foundation from its inception to its public presentation. The other fascinating element of this foundation is that the beneficiaries of the charity are poor, unmarried girls, which the extant evidence suggests was rare. In his work on the ‘charitable imperative’ in Counter-Reformation France, Colin Jones writes: ‘the concept and practices of charity were enmeshed within a matrix of moral obligation, religious dutifulness and social exigency and expectation’.3 Raymond Mentzer and Barbara B. Diefendorf have used the term ‘charitable impulse’ in relation to their studies on the charity act in late sixteenth-century Protestant Nïmes and seventeenth-century Catholic Paris. While the ideas of moral and social obligation and religious dutifulness can be seen at work in the Nevers Foundation, the terms ‘charitable imperative’ and ‘charitable impulse’ really apply to more immediate responses to pressing situations, such as coping with effects of plague, harvest failures or the need for a charitable institution to accommodate a perceived at-risk group of poor, as Jones, Diefendorf, Mentzer and Susan Dinan, amongst others, have demonstrated in their studies.4 With their foundation, the Duke and Duchess of Nevers intended to create a charity with a more long-term aim: to assist Catholic poor girls into the security of marriage ensuring their husbands were in a position to provide for
2 On the role of charity, and the nature of the charitable act in France, see Sharon Farmer, ‘Down and Out and Female in Thirteenth-Century Paris’,American Historical Review, 103(2) (1998): 345–72; Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca, 2002); Wilma Pugh, ‘Catholics, Protestants and Testamentary Charity in Seventeenth-Century Lyon and Nîmes’, French Historical Studies, 11(4) (1980): 479–504. 3 Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France (London, 1989), p. 1. 4 Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (New York, 2004); Susan E. Dinan, ‘Public Charity and Public Piety: The Missionary Vocation of the Daughters of Charity’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 27 (1999): 200–209; Susan E. Dinan, Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Aldershot, 2006); Jones, Charitable Imperative, pp. 1–20, 35–40. Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 161 their new family. The written expression of their charitable endeavour suggests more of an intent than an imperative or impulse. Indeed, they use the term ‘good and Holy intent’ throughout their document. However, what is common across all three ‘types’ of charity were the concepts that Jones identifies – the sense of moral obligation, religious dutifulness and social expectation – at work within the charitable act. With these concepts in mind, this chapter will explore the charitable act of the Duke and Duchess of Nevers, the possible influences upon the establishment of their charitable foundation, and how it was executed in late sixteenth-century France. Historians of poverty and charity in medieval and early modern Europe have identified a change of attitude toward the poor, poverty and the charitable act that began to occur in the late medieval period. Historian Bronislaw Geremek refers to a ‘crisis of charity’, which was ‘not only … bound up with the problems of a secularized culture or the disintegration of religious values; it was also connected with the more and more pronounced changes in social attitudes towards the problems of begging and work’.5 By the sixteenth century, there was an increased focus on the negative attributes of the poor and the condition of poverty with more poor people being categorized as ‘undeserving’. Those with the means to do so were reluctant to bestow charity upon those they deemed ‘undeserving’ as it was believed to jeopardize the social and religious returns the benefactors expected from their charity, that is, their public image as philanthropic Christians and the heavenly rewards earned for their after-life. The recipients of charity were obliged to offer prayers for their benefactors and the immoral, idle and ‘undeserving’ poor, who were perceived to squander their alms on sinful pleasures, were not deemed to hold much weight with God; that was if they could be trusted to offer prayers for their benefactors – which was unlikely.6 By and large, charity was no longer an indiscriminate act. Recipients of charity were increasingly required to demonstrate their worthiness of charitable aid and municipal authorities actively discouraged and regulated against indiscriminate almsgiving. The secular takeover of charitable and poor-relief institutions from the Church in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries led to an increasing focus on the ‘deserving’ factor in the rhetoric and performance
5 Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1991), p. 191. See also Daniel Hickey, ‘Changing Expressions of Charity in Early Modern France: Some Hypotheses for a Rural Model’, Renaissance et Réforme, 2 (1978): 12–22. 6 Geremek, Margins of Society, pp. 167, 169, 178; Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (Oxford, 1994); Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, 1986). 162 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France of charity.7 In addition, what we can see occurring in charity and poor relief, as religious division devastated France during the last half of the sixteenth century, is the caveat that the poor must be loyal adherents of the Catholic faith (or the Protestant faith in the case of Protestant benefactors, as Mentzer illustrates in his studies).8 In the case of Catholic charity during the religious wars, as well as encouraging Catholicism amongst the poor, benefactors used the opportunity their charitable actions afforded them to publicly demonstrate their own loyalty to the Catholic faith. Religion was an integral part of French life and this feeling was intensified during the Wars of Religion in the latter part of the sixteenth century. As historian Barbara B. Diefendorf observes: ‘We cannot understand the French Catholic reaction to religious schism unless we can comprehend that … religious unity – personally felt and publicly displayed – was not just an ideal, but a vital condition for individual and collective salvation.’9 For many French Catholics in the late sixteenth century, the charitable act was, once again, imbued with religious significance as they sought peaceful means to battle the encroachment of the ‘heretical’ Protestants. Prior to the outbreak of the religious wars in 1562, Michel de L’Hôpital, chancellor of France, addressed the Estates General of Orléans, imploring that tolerance should be shown to the Protestant ‘heretics’ in order to save the country from war. ‘We must henceforth’, he pleaded, ‘assail our enemies with charity, prayer, persuasion and the word of God, which are the proper weapons for such a conflict’. He further entreated that they ‘banish all those devilish names – “Lutheran”, “Huguenot”, “papist” – which breed only faction and sedition: let us retain only one name: “Christian”’.10 As history shows, L’Hôpital’s plea for tolerance and peace went unheeded, however, this did not stop other French Catholics calling for peaceful means to subvert the spread of Protestantism. Jean Martin, parliamentary lawyer and one of the governors of Paris’s Grand Bureau des Pauvres (established in 1544 to manage Parisian poor relief centrally), published a treatise in 1580 in which he suggested to his fellow Catholics that their faith was best served by making charity their ‘lance’
7 Farmer, Surviving Poverty, pp. 40–42; Geremek, Poverty, pp. 10, 17 and 25; Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994), p. 158; Mollat, pp. 290–93. 8 Raymond A. Mentzer, ‘Organizational Endeavour and Charitable Impulse in Sixteenth-Century France: The Case of Protestant Nîmes’,French History, 5 (1991): 1–29. 9 Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth- Century Paris (Oxford, 1991), p. 38 (emphasis added). 10 Michel de L’Hôpital, speech to the Estates General of Orléans, December 1560 quoted in Rudolph W. Heinz, Reform and Conflict: From the Medieval World to the Wars of Religion, AD 1350–1648 (Oxford, 2006), p. 353 (emphasis added). Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 163 against heresy instead of violence. ‘Simple, miserable people’, he implored his fellow Christians, ‘change your hearts, become charitable’.11 There was now an added intent behind the Catholic charitable act in this period, one that went beyond attaining heavenly salvation for the benefactor. The Nevers Foundation document also illustrates this idea of the charitable act being wielded as a ‘weapon’ in the battle to preserve the Catholic faith by demonstrating one’s own allegiance to the true faith and attempting to promote, encourage and maintain Catholic loyalty amongst its recipients.
France in the Late Sixteenth Century
When civil war broke out in the spring of 1562 following the Massacre of Vassy, the first of eight civil wars over a 30-year period, it was the beginning of ever-present conflict and violence for the inhabitants of France. Shortly after the massacre, Parisian lawyer and historian Etienne Pasquier wrote: ‘If it was permitted to me to assess these events, I would tell you that it was the beginning of a tragedy.’12 The atmosphere created by the religious conflict was volatile, where the merest suspicion of heresy or a misplaced word could lead to violent attacks by the Catholics upon the Protestants and vice versa. Efforts on the part of the Crown and leading Catholics to promote a tolerant approach to the new religion met with violent objection from the ultra-Catholic supporters such as the Guise family, who would form the Catholic Holy League in 1576 in response to what they felt was a soft approach to the ‘heretics’ by King Henri III. In the May 1576 ‘Edict of Beaulieu’, Henri III stated that his ‘wise and chief purpose is to reunite our subjects within a single religion, and we hope that God will gradually bring this about by means of a free and holy general council’.13 However, such hopes for a peaceful resolution to the religious conflict was not on the cards for France,
11 Jean Martin, ‘Charité Malade aux Riches Terriens’, in his La Police et Règlement du Grand Bureau des Pauvres de la ville et fauxbourgs de Paris. Avec un petit traicte de l’Aumône tiré des Saintes escritures, tant du vieil que du nouveau Testament, et authoritez des Saints Docteurs. Aux citoyens de Paris (Paris, 1580). (Pagination within Jean Martin’s treatise is irregular and error-ridden, therefore, in this case I direct you to the poem itself.) See also Lisa Keane Elliott, ‘Jean Martin, Governor of the Grand Bureau des Pauvres, on Charity and the Civic Duty of Governing Men in Paris, c.1580’, in Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent (eds), Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Self and Others (Farnham, 2011), pp. 65–84. 12 Etienne Pasquier, quoted in Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 50. 13 Henri III (1574–89), Edict of Beaulieu, May 1576, quoted in Heinz, p. 364. 164 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France as demonstrated in this placard posted by Catholic supporters around Paris in September 1566 and recorded in the memoirs of Claude Haton.
Kill them without a qualm … Hang and strangle them, So that death can strap them in, And dissolve them into the earth, Because they haven’t wanted to live According to the church of Saint Peter. … The enemies of the cross Are ready to cut your throat … Think of yourself, Paris, For if their turbid and thick blood, Isn’t spilled by your sanction, We will never have peace in France.14
Religious processions were a common feature of French life long before the religious troubles. Such events could involve the religious, noble and governing elite of the city, and on occasion, members of the royal family. Diefendorf discusses the importance of religious procession and how Catholic Paris would unite in procession to defend the Gallic tradition of ‘one king, one law, one faith’.15 French Protestants used the processions as an opportunity to demonstrate their opposition to the Catholic faith. As Natalie Zemon Davis illustrated in her work on Lyon, during a Corpus Christi Day procession in Lyon during the religious wars, Lyonnaise Protestants would not put rugs in front of their doors and Protestant women sat in their windows spinning in protest against the procession.16 The religious procession became infused with a militant fervour. Soldiers and priests marched armed with weapons that were brandished in a threatening manner, using coercion and threats to persuade others to join.17
14 Claude Haton, Mémoires de Claude Haton contenant le Récit des Evénements Accomplis de 1553 à 1582 Principalement dans la Champagne et la Brie, ed. M. Félix Bourquelot, vol. 2 (Paris, 1857), pp. 1134–6. 15 Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, see chapter 2, ‘The Most Catholic Capital’. 16 Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1987), p. 171. 17 Scenes of violence and coercion have been depicted by sixteenth-century artists with two such examples to be found in Paris’s Musée Carnavalet: artist unknown, Procession de la Ligue (1590) and François II Bunel (1522–99), Procession de la Ligue dans l’Ile de Cité (date unknown). Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 165
On Sunday 24 August 1572, the Saint Bartholomew Massacre began in Paris. The massacre quickly spread throughout the country and left over 10,000 people dead in the space of four days. The intensity and excessive violence of the massacre shocked many Catholics out of their religious fervour.18 Historian Philip Benedict writes that many French people, Catholic and Protestant, were left in a state of ‘revulsion against the sheer scale and horror of the events of that year’ and of ‘a growing, if begrudging, acceptance of the argument that religious toleration was less of an evil than endless warfare’.19 Many moderate Catholics publicly advocated the use of peaceful measures to end the religious conflict. On 28 February 1577, Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Montpensier addressed his fellow Catholics about his concerns.
I consider the evils which the recent wars have brought us, and how much this division is leading to the ruin and desolation of this poor kingdom … of poor people immersed in poverty without hope of ever being able to raise themselves from that state except by means of peace.20
Pierre de Blanchefort, a noble deputy from Nivernois, wrote a letter ostensibly addressed to the king in which he states that although true Catholics ‘by no means approve of the so-called reformed religion … [however] we beseech you very humbly … to believe that anyone who favours civil war is ungodly’.21 The Duke of Nevers was patron to Louis Musset, a bailiff of Saint-Verain in the Nièvre region belonging to the duke and his wife, who published a treatise in 1582 in which he suggested a reform of France would only be achieved once reform had occurred in people’s hearts.22 Grand Bureau governor, Jean Martin, wrote that one way to win the war against heresy was through charity; charitable Christians, he wrote, ‘never lose battles because charity holds like a strong lance against our enemy’.23
18 Philip Benedict, ‘The Wars of Religion, 1562–98’, in Mack P. Holt (ed.),Renaissance and Reformation France, 1500–1648 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 147–75; Roger Price, A Concise History of France (Cambridge, 2005), p. 61. 19 Benedict, pp. 161, 163. 20 Duke of Montpensier, speech to his deputies, 28 February 1577, quoted in Holt, French Wars of Religion, p. 108. 21 Pierre de Blanchefort quoted in Holt, French Wars of Religion, p. 108. 22 Mark Greengrass, Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–85 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 1–4. 23 Martin, ‘Traicte de L’Aumosne’, La Police et Règlement du Grand Bureau des Pauvres, p. 47v. 166 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
However, sentiments such as these were not enough to quell the Catholic populace’s penchant for violent reprisals against all those of, and perceived to be of, the reformed religion. During this period, particularly in Paris, public demonstrations of one’s Catholicism played an important part in the battle against the ‘heretics’. While the Duke of Nevers battled alongside his fellow Catholics and the Duchess of Nevers may have taken part in Catholic religious processions, they also chose their foundation as a means publicly to declare their allegiance to the Catholic faith and actively encourage support for it through the more peaceful avenue of their charity.
Charitable ‘Intent’: Social Expectation and Moral Obligation
In 1505, the management of the Paris Hôtel-Dieu, Europe’s largest and oldest, Catholic charity hospital, shifted from religious to secular control, by order of Parlement, after internal disputes concerning financial irregularities and management responsibilities.24 This was the first step in a gradual move towards the secularization of charitable and poor-relief organizations by the French crown and municipal authorities. As a result of the new secular management of the hospitals and poor-relief services, the new governors, who came from the royal courts, parliaments and local government rather than the Catholic Church, brought a more accountable and business-like approach to the administration of these organizations.25 While the administrative controls of the charity and poor-relief systems might have changed, the expectation that the elite would fulfil their social obligations as benefactors of the poor had not. As Henri III informed the Paris Parlement in 1586 when it requested that royal funds be used for poor relief, it was ‘a matter which depends on the charity and piety that good citizens ought, as good Christians, to show their brethren’.26 Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century, the act of charity was often utilized by the elite to display one’s benevolence and true (read Catholic) Christianity.27 Parisian diarist Pierre
24 AP–HP, Hôtel-Dieu, liasse 864, côté 4111, Arrêt du Parlement, portant nomination d’Administrateurs Laïcs Règlement pour l’administration du Temporel de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, 2 May 1505. 25 Elliott, pp. 65–7, 74–8; Jean Imbert, Les Hôpitaux en Droit Canonique: du décret de Gratien à la sécularization de l’administration de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Paris en 1505 (Paris, 1947), pp. 303–304; Jean Imbert, Le droit hospitalier de l’ancien régime (Paris, 1993), pp. 29–35; Timothy J. McHugh, Hospital Politics in Seventeenth-Century France: The Crown, Urban Elites and the Poor (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 57–8; Mentzer, p. 1. 26 King Henri III quoted in Geremek, Poverty, p. 147. 27 Geremek, Margins of Society, p. 167. Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 167 de l’Estoile wrote of the death in 1574 of the Duchess of Savoy who, in life, had been ‘a true Christian … who had almost given all [her] inheritance to the Po o r ’. 28 So while French priest François Le Picart preached that ‘it is unworthy for a person in a public position, placed in charge of others, to look for his own profit’,29 for the French elite, the charitable act provided them the opportunity to improve their social standing by obtaining reputations for their devoutness and Catholic (or Protestant) charity. Charitable benefactors were concerned that the poor to whom they bestowed their charity should be the honest and shame-faced poor. These ‘deserving’ poor were those considered economically and socially vulnerable: the aged, disabled, children, women and hardworking journeymen and their families, for whom infirmity, helplessness and periods of unemployment, war, famine and disease could result in starvation and homelessness.30 The ‘deserving’ poor had their own obligations to society: to undertake honest labours, to avoid begging and vagrancy, to be appreciative of their alms by offering prayers to God on behalf of their benefactors, and to continue in their ‘deserving’ manner even once they had received their alms. There was also a concern that the distasteful elements of poverty should not infect the rest of society. The charitable act intended to prevent the degenerate and immoral behaviour of the unruly poor filtering throughout society and so they were to be excluded from assistance. Barbara Beckerman Davis, in her studies on poverty and poor relief in Toulouse, finds that the charitable benefactors of Toulouse had a vested interest in assisting their poor. She writes, ‘as charity became less directly associated with the sacred and as religious sensibility was suffused with a greater optimism over salvation, the donor was free to dwell more on the long-term well being of the impoverished’.31 The moral and social concepts were closely intertwined with a fear of personal degradation, which in turn posed a potential threat to all members and classes of society. For the poor themselves, the very nature of their poverty rendered them morally suspect in the eyes of society. Michel Mollat highlights the early modern
28 Pierre de L’Estoile, Registre-Journal du Regne de Henri III, vol. 1 (1574–75), ed. Madeleine Lazard and Gilbert Schrenck (Geneva, 1992), pp. 79–80. 29 François Le Picart, Carême 2, fol. 60 quoted in Larissa Taylor, Heresy and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Paris: Francois Le Picart and the Beginnings of the Catholic Reformation (Leiden, 1999), p. 158. 30 Léon Cahen, Grand Bureau des Pauvres de Paris au Milieu du XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1904), pp. 3–5; Jean Imbert, Histoire des Hôpitaux en France (Toulouse, 1982), p. 149; Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (London, 2006), p. 132; McHugh, p. 84. 31 Barbara Beckerman Davis, ‘Reconstructing the Poor in Early Sixteenth-Century Toulouse’, French History, 7(3) (1993), 249–85. 168 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France perception of the moral corruption and degradation associated with the state of poverty and highlights the dangers that this state posed for poor women:
The vagrant was regarded as a parasite … The same might be said of the prostitutes, whose openly acknowledged role brought them into close contact with men of every rank. Their poverty was moral as well as material. The low wages paid to laundresses, seamstresses and the like encouraged the development of prostitution, as the Bourgeois of Paris observed in 1419: ‘good maids and good proud women … of necessity have become wicked’.32
Charity and poor relief were seen as a way of protecting the poor against moral corruption and, as a result, protecting the rest of society from becoming tainted by this corruption. Charity and poor-relief programmes were concerned with protecting those poor deemed ‘deserving’ from their poverty, assisting them into honest labour, or, in the case of the Nevers Foundation, marriage. From the early sixteenth century, the French town councils (Bureaux de la Ville) were concerned with bringing the poor, particularly the ‘undeserving’ and idle poor, into order. To this end a public works programme was implemented in which the poor were put to work digging ditches or cleaning the streets. The fact these people were ‘chained up by the body and feet’ and under constant guard illustrates the suspicion society felt toward the poor and the measures they were prepared to resort to in order to prevent these undeserving ‘persons of sadness’ from having an anti-social effect upon the city and its inhabitants.33 However, such desperate measures were not part of the conditions under the Nevers Foundation. The duke and duchess were specific in the reasons why their foundation was established: protecting the moral wellbeing of the 60 poor girls was just one of their charitable intentions. Their foundation illustrates a social and religious ‘intent’ within its mission. Not only were the duke and duchess endeavouring to protect the ‘perpetuity’ of the foundation for their enduring reputation
32 Mollat, p. 245. 33 ‘Ordonnance faite par Messrs de la Ville sur le gouvernement desd. vaccabons après qu’ils seront livrez à la ville’, 26 February 1516 in François Bonnardot, Registres des délibérations du Bureau de la Ville de Paris, 1499–1526, vol. 1 (Paris, 1883), p. 228. The vagrants ‘are to be fed and housed, but also chained up by the body and feet … to be housed close to the site of the public works so as not to waste time getting there … They are normally put to ditch digging, but as the waters are still high they are to be put to cleaning rubbish from the streets instead … They ought to be lodged for the profit of the city as close as we can to locations where they will be needed, at the end let them be more easily led and they will lose less time. [Their Gaoler or keeper was responsible for providing them with] reasonable bread, wine and food, according to the quality of the state of such persons of sadness.’ Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 169
(and that of their successors) as good Catholics; they wished also to provide a means of obtaining lifetime marital security for the 60 poor Catholic girls by ensuring they could remain in their ‘good match’, off the parish poor-relief rolls and safe from the vice and immorality into which the poor were perceived inevitably to fall, choosing the Catholic Church as the natural medium through which to implement such an endeavour.
Introducing the Duke and Duchess of Nevers and Rethel
Henriette of Cleves was the daughter of François II, the Duke of Nivernois, and governor of Champagne. Henriette was well known in court circles and, for a time, served as lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, Catherine de Médici. Her father died in 1562 leaving a heavily indebted estate to her brother Jacques. This state of affairs meant Henriette, as the eldest daughter, was left with a considerably reduced dowry and with no provision remaining for her younger sisters, Catherine and Marie. Their position was further jeopardized when Jacques died two years later with the estate still in financial straits and no male heir to inherit the title, estates and debts. In return for agreeing to marriage to a royal favourite, the Italian Prince Ludovico Gonzague of Manthouë, King Charles IX issued extraordinary permission allowing Henriette to inherit her family estates and titles. Despite having arrived in France at 10 years of age to claim his inheritance from his grandmother, Anne d’Alençon, Ludovico’s dowry was no better than Henriette’s. His position within the royal court as a soldier meant Ludovico’s own finances were as dire as those of the Nevers family. Ludovico’s frequent absences from home attending to his courtly and military obligations left Henriette in charge of the administration of the family estates. She proved to be a deft manager and the estates recovered to such an extent that not only were her sisters provided with substantial dowries, but the Nevers family became one of France’s leading creditors.34 Rumours and gossip would colour the reputations of the duke and duchess. A staunch loyalist to the crown, Ludovico’s prominent position in the court lent some credence to whispers following the Saint Bartholomew Massacre that he had been one of the primary instigators of the event. Henriette was also the subject of rumour, one of which features in Alexandre Dumas’ novel, La Reine Margot, in which Henriette, due to her ‘conveniently absent husband’, indulged in an affair with Annibale Coconna who was executed in 1574 for
34 Guida M. Jackson, Women Rulers Throughout the Ages: An Illustrated Guide (Santa Barbara, 2003); Mark Strage, Women of Power: The Life and Times of Catherine de Médici (United States, 1976). 170 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France his part in the failed assassination of King Charles IX, a plot rumoured to have been supported by the king’s own brother, the Duke of Alençon.35 In the wake of such rumours, perhaps part of the motivation behind their charitable intent was to re-cast and restore their reputations as devout, peaceable Catholics. As mentioned earlier, the duke was patron to Louis Musset whose treatise on the religious conflict suggested ways in which a disordered society could be righted with strong, peaceful governance and regulation and, as historian Mark Greengrass summarizes, ‘bring disordered passions into greater conformity with right reason and the precepts of a godly kingdom’.36 His patronage of such a treatise may have been an attempt to align himself with the less militant Catholics and counter the rumours associating him as one of the ringleaders of the disturbing events of the Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre. As for Henriette, she would wish to counter such salacious gossip through a public portrayal of herself as a devout Catholic benefactress assisting young poor girls into the sacred state of marriage. However, one cannot discount that the foundation may also have arisen from the financial woes experienced by Henriette herself and her unmarried sisters after the death of their male relatives. It is a reasonable assumption that Henriette alone may have been the instigator behind the Nevers Foundation given her experience with potential loss of marital security, and the managerial expertise she gained as the head of her family’s estates and finances following her instalment as the Nevers heir.
The Nevers Foundation, 1573–1605
The Nevers Foundation document under examination in this chapter was published in 1605. The foundation itself was established on Thursday 13 November 1573 with the first dowries to 60 poor girls issued in the following year.37 The document was compiled by a notary at the Hôtel Gonzaga, the Paris home of the duke and duchess located across the river from the Louvre, on Sunday 14 February 1588, to outline the reform of the foundation undertaken that year due to the fraud that had plagued it since its inception fifteen years earlier. The duke and duchess decried the ‘little charity’ shown thus far by those responsible for executing the foundation and expressed their concern that these abuses were ‘to the prejudice of the poor girls’:38
35 Alexandre Dumas, La Reine Margot (Oxford, 1999), p. 479. 36 Greengrass, Governing Passions, p. 4. 37 La Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame, p. vi. 38 Ibid., p. xv. Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 171
Before our eyes in the fear of God and the instability of human affairs … it [has] happened by ill will and intention that the Electors of any parish committed some abuses and embezzlements … favouring a girl … unworthy of these alms.39
In their defence, the electors complained, ‘that the charge was too burdensome and difficult’, so the reformers deemed it ‘necessary to the effectiveness of the foundation, to sever several formalities in order to make enforcement easier’. The process was presented in ‘an easy style … to make retelling easier for them [and] intelligible to everyone’ as it was ‘to be executed in the most simple villages’.40 The reformed process was outlined over 78 pages and consisted of 110 articles, almost all of which came with caveats or exceptions.41 The document began with the reasons behind the composition and publication of the articles. The number of girls from each area within the Nevers and Rethel domains to take place in the elections was indicated, generally one or two girls, although in large provinces three dowries were available. Following this were three prayers, which those involved in the foundation were to use at the times indicated in the document. The Catholic nature of the foundation was clearly demonstrated by the inclusion of the papal bull from Sixtus V dated 10 November 1586 confirming the foundation and offering pardons and indulgences ‘to all those who assist devoutly and with good heart’ to implement it for the benefit of the ‘sixty poor girls each year, destitute of all other aid and resources’.42 Next was an abbreviated outline of the procedure with spaces provided for the insertion of dates, names of parishes/villages and those involved with the foundation. The document begins:
[The] following is the form of minutes that must be made in each parish, according to and in the ensuing order of this foundation … [and] if there is a change in the Election of those girls, other than what is contained in this form, [they] specify it in detail in their records.43
The reports were to be delivered to the duke and duchess in Paris by 25 June and forwarded the following month to the governors of the Paris Hôtel-Dieu, who had been appointed to manage the foundation on behalf of the duke
39 Ibid., p. xix. 40 AP-HP, Hôtel-Dieu, La Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame, (1605), p. vi. 41 For a detailed outline of the Nevers Foundation, see Trevor Peach, ‘Une oeuvre charitable de Louis de Gonzague et d’Henriette de Clèves: la Fondation dotale de 1588’, Revue Historique de Droit Français et Etranger, 73 (1995): 41–58. 42 La Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame, p. lxxxv. 43 Ibid., p. lxxxix. 172 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France and duchess. The choice of the Hôtel-Dieu governors as trustees may have been due to the knowledge and experience they had in the field of charitable administration. As the governors of the Hôtel-Dieu were elected from the ranks of the royal court, Parlement, the Chambre des Comptes and the local municipal authorities of Paris, this would have recommended them as suitable trustees for such a foundation. Finally, there is a complete listing of the Nevers and Rethel territories and a statement detailing legitimate expenses that could be incurred each year in the implementation of the foundation, to be approved and managed by the governors of the Paris Hôtel-Dieu. Already we can see the duke and duchess’s concern for preserving the integrity and honour of their ‘good and holy intent’ and protecting the ‘worthy and needy girls’ from future abuses that hurt their chances of making a ‘good [marriage] match’. They were concerned those responsible for administering their fund were not demonstrating a true sense of their religious obligation, which they attempted to resolve with a promise, from the highest Catholic authority in Europe, of heavenly and earthly rewards for their ‘devoutness’ and ‘goodness of heart’, although threats of monetary punishment and social disgrace were made should a more immediate, earthly deterrent against continued displays of ‘little charity’ be required.44
Secularization of the Charitable ‘Intent’
The nature of the Nevers Foundation document suggests that the original 1588 composition was reprinted each year for distribution amongst those responsible for carrying out the foundation. (As mentioned above, a formula for the administrators to report on the election process had been included within the document, complete with spaces allowing for the formula to serve as the basis of the report.) The Nevers Foundation document is presented in a secular and legal format and is imbued with Catholic sensibility and intent. The secularization of French poor-relief institutions at the beginning of the sixteenth century filtered through to the field of charity with some benefactors choosing to express their religious sensibilities with more secular formality to protect their religious, social and moral ‘investment’ in the poor.45 The Nevers Foundation is a rare example of an individual expression of charitable intent inspired by religious devotion, but presented in a secular format. The duke and duchess wished it to be very clear how their foundation was to function, right down to issuing instructions
44 Ibid., pp. xv, xix. 45 Hickey, pp. 12–13. Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 173 to possible new owners of the lands listed in this document to remain within the remit of the foundation. If property was sold by them or their successors, the new owners were informed that the duke and duchess intended that the foundation could not be changed or innovated by the purchasers as it would ‘defraud their [the duke and duchess’s] good and holy purpose’.46 The governors of the Paris Hôtel-Dieu were chosen as executors of the foundation and to decide on ‘blame and correction [of ] officers who deserve it, and ultimately provide what will be necessary for the maintenance of this foundation … the said Lord and Lady urge their Council so to act that the foundation may be better guarded and maintained’.47 In addition, the Parlement of Paris and the Chambre des Comptes, France’s highest secular authorities, were chosen as trustees, being ‘personages of high quality and authority … and filled with charity toward the poor’.48 At the local level, the duke and duchess sent their personal lawyer who, along with his appointed representatives, attended the elections in each parish to ‘fully observe, there is no fraud, [and] there is no abuse’.49 With these secular authorities in place to watch over this ‘good and holy intent’, the execution of the foundation was left in the hands of the local Catholic parish priests. In summary, the procedure for the election of the 60 poor girls was as follows. Situating the Catholic Church at the heart of the execution of the foundation, the parish priests led a meeting in the church 15 days before Easter during which three men and three women ‘esteemed to be charitable and the most notable of that parish’ were chosen to select the poor girls eligible to participate in the election. During vespers these ‘said three men and three women all being assembled [were] to pray to God [who] … wills to inspire them to vote for the poorest and most needy girl of quality’. Before the parish priest and a representative of the duke and duchess, the chosen electors signed a document testifying to their good intentions and to ensure their compliance with the formalities of their office.50 The electors then decided which poor girls were eligible to stand for election. In the event of divided opinion, the male electors were to ‘elect those they consider in their conscience … the neediest and of quality’.51 The decision was notarized and signed by all. On Palm Sunday, the chosen girls assembled at the parish church for the election. A young child of four or five, of no relationship to the girls, was chosen to carry a linen-covered pot from which tickets were drawn. The child displayed his or her hand each
46 La Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame, p. viii. 47 Ibid., pp. lii, lx, lxvii, lxix. 48 Ibid., p. lxviii. 49 Ibid., p. xv. 50 Ibid., p. xxi. 51 Ibid., pp. xxiii–xxiiii (emphasis added). 174 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France time, opening their fingers to the crowd to demonstrate no wrongdoing was taking place. The child then drew three tickets from the pot, presented them to a girl, repeating the process until all tickets were distributed. The unlucky girls were those holding tickets reading ‘God consoles you’ and the one, two or three winners would be in possession of the highest number of tickets that read, ‘God elects you’.52 An example of the form the tickets should take was included in the document. The election results were announced to the congregation after vespers on the Tuesday following Easter. Formalities were concluded with the electors being made to understand they would be held accountable should they have elected ‘in bad faith’, girls who were not worthy of the alms. The priest signed a document to certify, ‘that the girl has been good and duly elected’, which the electors duly countersigned.53 On the first Monday of Pentecost, the elected girls were to present themselves, in the company of a parent or guardian, or send a representative in their place, to the parish where their marriage contract was prepared. Once signed and certified, the girls, or their representatives, were required to make an oath to marry within the year. Their dowry of 16 écus 40 sols and a silver ring to the value of 5 sols, ‘which will serve for the wedding’ was then presented to them.54 At the conclusion of the elections and presentations, the reports were to be delivered to the duke and duchess in Paris by 25 June, then forwarded to the governors of the Paris Hôtel-Dieu on 22 July for finalizing the financial administration and preparing an overall report to present to the duke and duchess on 25 August at a meeting convened at the Hôtel Gonzaga. What is interesting about the Nevers Foundation document is how the duke and duchess express their religious sensibilities and charitable intent within this distinctly secular and legal format. The execution of the election process took place within the local Catholic churches under the guidance of the parish priest and all steps of the process, including the administration undertaken by the Hôtel-Dieu, were to be held in the context of prayers or a Mass. There were
52 Ibid., pp. xxxii–xxxiii. 53 Ibid., pp. xxvii, xl. 54 Ibid., p. xli. The accounts of the Paris Hôtel-Dieu provide some idea as to the significance of this amount. Looking at the years after the currency reform of September 1577 when the écu soleil replaced the monetary unit livres tournois, 1 écu 39 sols per head of sheep and 2 écus 10 sols for a septier of grain. A muyd/muid was a measurement used for grain, coal, land and wine. According to Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French–English dictionary, a muid of grain ‘containes twelve Septiers’. See Mark Greengrass, ‘Money, Majesty and Virtue: The Rhetoric of Monetary Reform in Later Sixteenth-Century France’,French History, 21(2) (2007): 165–86; AP–HP, Hôtel-Dieu, Comptes, 1581, liasse 1452, no. 6685, fols 66, 68. Grain cost: AP–HP, Hôtel-Dieu, Comptes, 1584, liasse 1452, no. 6691, fol. 114r; Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) (Columbia, 1968). Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 175 repeated assertions of their allegiance to the Catholic faith, as well as expressing their desire for all those involved in their ‘good and holy intent’, particularly the 60 poor girls, to be of ‘the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion’.55 Given the desire on the part of some Catholics to find peaceful solutions to the religious conflict, this document suggests the duke and duchess were positioning themselves in the role of peaceful defenders of the true religion, using their charitable foundation to further the cause of Catholicism. In his treatise, Jean Martin expressed a desire for just such an approach to the religious conflict. ‘Great [and] honest charity is very necessary,’ he wrote, ‘for the honour of God, for the good of the poor, and for the public health of the aforesaid city [of Paris]’.56 Using the same technique and style as Martin, the duke and duchess presented their Catholic sensibilities and Christian charity within a distinctly secular legislative style.57 Their reason for doing so, they state, was to safeguard against further administrative abuses by outlining their ‘good and holy intent’ within a format that made the process ‘intelligible to everyone’, protecting their ‘pious and charitable enterprise’ for the benefit of the poor girls and the perpetual honour of the Nevers family:
For these reasons and considerations thereof, Lord and Lady, the Duke and Duchess, after devoutly imploring the assistance of the gentle Holy Spirit, begging him to attend such a pious and charitable enterprise, and bless this holy and happy thanksgiving, have moderated the forms of execution of the said foundation … Said Lord and Lady desire and intend to continue it and make it perpetual in their lands and lordships.58
The duke and duchess were concerned to make it clear that those involved should demonstrate their ‘good will and intention’ towards the foundation and comply with their desire for certain religious rituals and ceremonies to be performed. They ‘beg’ their administrators, the governors of the Paris Hôtel-Dieu, ‘to take the trouble to attend the high Mass, [prior to presenting the report of the foundation], which will be said precisely without delay … at eight o’clock in the morning, [on] the feast day of Saint Louis, 25 August each year in the Chapel founded by them in their Hôtel Gonzaga of Nevers seated in this city of Paris’.59 It is interesting to note that 25 August had a religious association being the feast day
55 La Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame, pp. xix, xxii, xxiv, lxix. 56 Martin, ‘La Police des Pauvres de la ville et fauxbourgs de Paris’, La Police et Règlement du Grand Bureau des Pauvres, p. 23v. 57 Elliott, pp. 75–8. 58 La Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame, p. vi. 59 Ibid., p. lxix. 176 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France of France’s own Saint Louis, who was renowned for his charitableness. The other dates set for the administrative and financial accounting of the foundation also had religious associations. 25 June is the feast day of Saint Prosper of Aquitaine and 22 July the feast day of Mary Magdalene. Are these dates coincidental or, given that the election process takes place on specific days within the Easter period, a deliberate attempt to enhance the religious tone of the foundation? The electors were to swear an oath to God of their honourable intention devoutly and zealously to fulfil their moral and religious duty in the execution of the foundation by choosing the most needy and Catholic of the applicants. As an added measure to assure their compliance, a notary was on hand with an attestation in which they certified to their good intentions within a secular protocol:
We swear and promise to God the Creator, on the part of Paradise, what is expected of us, and on our honour and in good faith, to choose without … any favour whatsoever, [and with] no particular interest, the girl of this parish that we esteem without any means, … aged sixteen years and above, born a subject of the Lord and Lady, be deemed born in true wedlock, with our knowledge of the Father and Mother, baptized in this parish, [and be] good living, a good girl, and that she be of the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion.60
After the election of the poor girls, the electors were required to make another oath, which was taken before their parish priest that they ‘will always be accountable to God, and on their honour and conscience, should they have certified by malice, if she [the poor girl] proves to be other’.61 (And again, this was notarized and certified.) As well as serving to highlight the duke and duchess’s allegiance to the Catholic faith, the inclusion of the papal bull conveyed to all involved that their honest participation in this ‘perfection of Christian charity’ could gain them heavenly rewards, as evidenced by Catholicism’s highest earthly authority, the pope.62 Throughout the document all parties are reminded of their accountability to act honestly and for the good of the foundation, the honour of God, the duke and duchess, and for the benefit of the 60 poor girls. Every point of the foundation was certified by a notary, witnessed by the parish priest and signed by all electors, and sanctified by prayers and oaths to God. The duke and duchess were not only insisting on financial accountability, but also on a personal and religious accountability. Reiterated throughout is their desire not
60 Ibid., pp. xxi–xxii (emphasis added). 61 Ibid., p. xxvii. 62 Ibid., p. lxxxv. Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 177 only that their ‘perfection of Christian charity be mainly in effect in our lifetime’, but that it ‘be in place for perpetuity’ for their successors and ‘for their good and holy purpose’.63 Those involved were reminded continually of their religious and social obligations, the religious and social intent of the duke and duchess, and the importance of conducting themselves honourably and honestly.64 Given that this document was composed during a period of religious division – ‘in these times so turbulent and full of heresies, divisions and impiety’65 – the duke and duchess’s attempt to remind people of their religious obligations may also be read as a call to demonstrate their loyalty to the true faith, Catholicism, by executing this ‘charity, most perfect and pleasing to God’.66 As the three prayers they have supplied indicate, this ‘Prince and Princess, smitten with an ardour of charity, holiness and endowed with a devout heart’ wish only that their ‘humble charity’, ‘achieve immortal glory, which is the only reason for them’.67 Should those entrusted to administer the foundation acquit their duties with ‘ill will or malice’ not befitting a true Catholic, it would taint this holy charity, robbing the duke and duchess of their heavenly reward, threatening the moral, social and religious wellbeing of the potential recipients and diminishing the reputation of this charitable act in the eyes of God and society.
The Nevers Foundation and the Sixty Poor Girls
What of the girls themselves? What oaths were they to swear? What obligations did they have toward their benefactors? Charity toward women was not uncommon at this time; however, it generally took the form of donations to charitable institutions for women and one-off testamentary bequests or almsgiving.68 In Paris at the end of the sixteenth century there were several such institutions for women in the city. The Quinze-Vingts was established in 1260
63 Ibid., pp. v, lxix. 64 Ibid., pp. xxvii, xl. 65 Ibid., p. v. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., pp. lxxxiii–lxxxiiii. 68 Susan Broomhall, ‘Identity and Life Narratives of the Poor in Later Sixteenth- Century Tours’, Renaissance Quarterly, 57 (2004): 439–65; Susan Broomhall, ‘“Burdened with Small Children”: Women’s Narratives of Poverty in Sixteenth-Century Tours’, in Ann Crabb and Jane Couchman (eds), Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 223–37; Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums Since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (Oxford, 1992); Farmer, Surviving Poverty, pp. 147–51, 164–6; Hickey, pp. 12–22. 178 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France to accommodate 300 blind men and women.69 The Filles-Dieu was established in the early thirteenth century as a refuge for reformed prostitutes.70 The Sainte Avoye and the Haudriettes were established in 1283 and 1306 respectively to provide accommodation for widows.71 The twelfth-century Hospital Sainte Anastase offered board and instruction to les petites filles.72 The capacity of these few establishments was not large and collectively could assist only 120 to 180 women. Susan Broomhall’s studies of Tours’s poor-relief rolls illustrate the plight of poor women and the scarcity of options they had to assist them in times of trouble.73 The Nevers Foundation is so intriguing because of the apparent uniqueness of its endeavour to create a charity with a long-term intent to provide assistance for poor single Catholic girls. Moral and social obligations combine with religious sensibilities in the attitudes and concerns expressed by the duke and duchess toward the 60 poor girls. Their intention was to provide for ‘the poor girls, without any means, who could be forgotten and abandoned to vice’, that is, to protect the poor girls from falling into prostitution and crime in order to survive their poverty. There was a concern within early modern society for the moral threat unmarried poor women posed to the social order. The duke and duchess intended to prevent this from happening to single girls in their provinces. ‘Marriage’, they explained, ‘restrains their soul and spirit … and guards [against] falling into sin’.74 Their consideration for the poor girls extended beyond the provision of the dowry of 16 écus 40 sols. To ensure the girls would ‘find a good match to have decent repose for the remainder of their lives’, assistance was also available to place the girls’ spouses in employment that would enable them to provide for a wife and children.75 To this end, the duke and duchess:
deliberated and resolved, if those who are to marry [the girls] are found capable, [they will] … confer upon them the position of Notaries, Sergeants, Jailors,
69 Farmer, Surviving Poverty, pp. 88–9; Imbert, Histoire des Hôpitaux, pp. 156–7. 70 Farmer, ‘Down and Out and Female’, p. 359. 71 Sharon Farmer, ‘“It Is Not Good That [Wo]man Should Be Alone”: Elite Responses to Singlewomen in High Medieval Paris’, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, 1999), p. 92; Geremek, Margins of Society, p. 176. 72 Mollat, pp. 100–101; M. Brièle, Inventaire-Sommaire des Archives Hospitalières Antérieures à 1790, 3 (Paris, 1886), pp. 359, 363. 73 Broomhall, ‘“Burdened with small children”’, pp. 223–37; Broomhall, ‘Identity and Life Narratives’, 439–65. 74 La Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame, pp. v–vi. 75 Ibid., p. xxxviiii. Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 179
Concierges, Forrest Wardens, Messengers and other similar offices of such quality … [with the intention] to help benefit those marriages.76
Within the declaration made by the electors at the commencement of the foundation lay the criteria the 60 poor girls were to meet in order to be eligible for election. They were to be ‘of this parish’ and whom the electors esteemed worthy, as per the criteria outlined previously.77 Throughout the document, the expectation that the chosen poor girls actually be ‘poor’ girls and good Catholics was reiterated. A notary prepared certification for the electors and the priest to sign that confirmed, ‘the girl is the age of sixteen years or more, and the most destitute of resources and needs, remains Catholic and is well renowned ’. 78 The duke and duchess held the belief that to assist the poor was ‘to honour God’, therefore phrases such as – ‘without any means’, ‘the poorest and most needy girl of quality’, ‘girls worthy and needy’ – appear often to remind the executors of the desirable qualities sought in the elected girls.79 Upon their election and the drawing up of their marriage contracts, the parish priest would lead the girls and their families, or representatives in prayer:
By this contract [the girls] will pray and … in memory of the Benefice of [their] election, [and] pray to God … for the said Lord and Lady, and their successors … in gratitude of the property that they have received.80
Remembering the time in which this foundation was established, this repeated desire for the recipients of their foundation to be ‘good girls, who live Catholic lives’, suggests the duke and duchess were utilizing their charity in the battle against ‘these times so turbulent and full of heresies, divisions and impiety’ by insisting the recipients of their Catholic charity be also of that faith. The election process took place within a Catholic church overseen by the parish priest and during Easter, a significant period in the Catholic calendar. The girls were required to swear an oath that ‘they will always live a Catholic according to the Catholic Church, Apostolic and Roman, and be a good girl’ and demonstrate their gratitude to their benefactors by offering prayers to God each Sunday.81 Specifically, the girls and their families would be led:
76 Ibid., p. xxxviii. 77 Ibid., pp. xxi–xxii. 78 Ibid., p. xix (emphasis added). 79 Ibid., pp. v, vi, xviii, xix, xxv, xxviii, li, liii. 80 Ibid., pp. xli–xlii. 81 Ibid., p. xxiv. 180 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
by the parson, vicar or chaplain making the sermon, and the people there attending, a Pater Noster, and Ave Maria, for the said Lord and Lady founders, and their successors, and admonish each, as they there be obliged being their subjects, to pray to God to watch over them …, increase their good intentions, and pardon them their faults and sins, giving them after their death eternal life’.82
A silver ring was given to the elected girls and was intended to serve as a perpetual reminder of their obligation as recipients of the Nevers Foundation. The duke and duchess desired that the ring be known as ‘the ring of remembrance of their marriage and prayers’ and that it be worn and ‘carefully kept’ as a symbol of their marriage and of their faith.83 The girls were also required to swear an oath before God and the congregation not to use their dowries for a wedding banquet in celebration of their nuptials. It was acceptable for people to attend their marriage and celebrate with them, even acceptable that they bring the newlyweds a gift; however, the only mouths to benefit from the dowry were that of the bride and her groom. The money was intended to give them a start in married life and prevent their fall into poverty; therefore it was not to be frivolously squandered in celebrating their nuptials.84 In the year following their election, the chosen girls were required to attend the election of the new candidates, another condition in which church attendance was required. This provided the notaries and parish priest with an opportunity to interview the girls to ensure they had fulfilled their religious and social obligations as recipients of the Nevers Foundation. As with the fines given to the electors and executors of the foundation, the removal of the dowry from one poor girl would be to the benefit of another. If it was reported that a girl had failed in any of her obligations, she was stripped of her dowry and it would be used the following year to benefit another girl. The duke and duchess intended the dowries to support the bride in her new life, prevent the possibility of future impoverishment and encourage her continuation in the Catholic faith. They had no wish to see the security they were bestowing ‘converted to luxury and bad usage’,85 however, if the girl had not married within the year, but had regularly attended church and not spent her dowry, the priest was empowered to extend her certificate of entitlement ‘until she has found a suitable match’.86 In addition,
82 Ibid., p. xxxix. 83 Ibid., p. xli. 84 Ibid., pp. xlv–xlvi. 85 Ibid., p. xlvi. 86 Ibid., pp. xxvi, xlii. Article LVIII, which falls among the outlines for the election process of the new girls, is about the follow-up to be done on the girls from the previous year. They were requested to attend the new election during which she would be interviewed as Charitable ‘Intent’ in Late Sixteenth-Century France 181 the bestowal of the foundation was seen not just as an honour for the elected girl, but also conferred honour on her family. If the elected girl died before her marriage had taken place, the duke and duchess wished her ticket to pass to a sister, if she had any, on the proviso her sister also satisfied the requirements and lived a good Catholic life and was ready for marriage. As stated in article 59, it was seen as the intention of God that this honour should happen to the family, not just the original chosen girl: ‘God will want these alms to remain in this house.’87 Conversely, as it was an honour to be elected, equally there was a sense of shame if one was not chosen. Girls chosen to take part in the election process did not want to return if they had been involved previously and not been chosen, ‘for they were ashamed that they had returned for many years without being elected to these alms, and fearing thus they be esteemed by people as unworthy of the same’.88
Conclusion
What makes the Nevers Foundation document so interesting? The fact that the Duke and Duchess of Nevers had established a foundation with the long-term intention of enabling poor girls to marry, hoping to keep them off the poor-relief rolls and away from vice? The fact they intended for their foundation to continue beyond their lifetime for the benefit of 60 poor Catholic girls? How about the unusually secular way they chose to express their religious sensibilities and charitable intent? The Nevers Foundation document is important for all these reasons and more. Studies in the areas of poverty and charity seek to explore and understand the religious sensibilities of elite benefactors and their sense of social and moral obligation to God’s poor, as well as the role of the poor themselves within the charitable act. In this document the personal religiosity of the Duke and Duchess of Nevers was recorded in great detail and couched in a distinctly secular style in order to facilitate the proper administration of their charity and protect it for the benefit of future generations of their family and recipients.89 to her current marital status. As stated in the text above, it was necessary that ‘if she is still of that quality, to say, a good girl and Catholic’, her certificate of entitlement could be extended ‘until she has found a suitable match’. 87 La Fondation faicte par Mes-seigneur et Dame, p. xlii. 88 Ibid., p. xxxi. 89 AP–HP, Hôtel-Dieu, liasse 1411, côté 6349, Arrest de la Cour de Parlement au Sujet de la Fondation de Nevers, 16 May 1640. Henriette died 24 June 1601 surviving her husband who died in October 1595. An arrêt of the Paris Parlement dated 18 May 1640 concerning the Nevers Foundation verifies it was still active 39 years after the death of the duchess. 182 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
The document reveals the social conscience of a patroness who was inspired by her personal experiences to establish a foundation to assist other women into a secure marriage. It is also a fascinating example of a public expression of religious loyalty and active, peaceful support of the Catholic faith at a time in history when religious conflict threatened the very heart of France, the Gallic tradition of ‘one king, one faith, one law’. When Jean Martin published his treatise on the Grand Bureau des Pauvres, his call for his fellow Catholics to demonstrate their allegiance to the true Christian faith through charity instead of war echoed the sentiments of many French Catholics and Protestants. Charity became a ‘field of battle’ on which Catholics and Protestants sought to compete for the souls of the poor.90 The duke and duchess’s insistence on the 60 poor girls being of and remaining in the Catholic faith, the admonishment of the electors for their display of ‘little charity’ and election of ‘unworthy girls’, the setting out of the specific forms of prayer and religious ceremony to be observed, and when they were to be observed, can be seen in this light. Their charity echoes the desires of men such as Michel de L’Hôpital who, 28 years earlier, had called for his fellow Catholics to ‘assail our enemies with charity, prayer, persuasion and the word of God’, rather than violent coercion. The Duke and Duchess of Nevers attempted to use their ‘good and holy intent’ in an effort to demonstrate their own devotion to the true faith, to encourage and promote the Catholic faith amongst those who administered their foundation and the poor girls of their provinces who hoped to benefit from the ‘good and holy intent’ of this true Christian and distinctly Catholic charity.
90 Colin Jones, ‘Perspectives on Poor Relief, Health Care and the Counter-Reformation in France’, in O.P. Grell, Andrew Cunningham and Jon Arrizabalaga (eds), Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe (New York, 1999), p. 218; McHugh, pp. 41–2, 53. Chapter 9 Reckliss Endangerment?: Feeding the Poor Prisoners of London in the Early Eighteenth Century
Margaret Dorey
On 16 May 1710, the poor debtors at Newgate Prison lodged a complaint with the Lord Mayor of London stating that Thomas Reckliss, the baker employed by the City government to provision poor debtors confined in Newgate and Ludgate prisons and in the Wood Street and Poultry Compters from at least 1700, had ‘furnished them of late with very unwholesome Bread not fit to be eaten’.1 They included a sample of his wares as proof of his perfidy. Their evidence was apparently accepted, as the Court of Aldermen instructed the Sheriffs to replace Reckliss as baker to the London gaols. This petition was not an isolated incident. The records of London’s courts for the first two decades of the eighteenth century contain recurrent complaints from poor debtor prisoners held in the City’s compters and gaols against both the quantity and the quality of the food and water supplied – or more frequently not supplied – and about prison conditions more generally.2 These records, together with the aldermanic responses, reports and orders they generated, allow a glimpse into the experiences of one group of the London poor: the poor debtors, without funds or friends to feed them, held in the jails overseen by London’s aldermanic court. While Clive Emsley’s 1996 assessment that ‘the debtor has been generally ignored’ in studies of the English justice system is no longer true, the lives of poor debtors in the early eighteenth century, prior
1 London Metropolitan Archives [hereafter LMA], The Repertories of the Court of Aldermen, COL/CA/01/01/118, fol. 225. That Reckliss (also known as Reckless or Ricklass) had been the City’s baker from 1700 onwards is evident in a bill presented by Reckliss to the Court of Aldermen in 1712 in which he claimed to have been unpaid for his wares for the period 2 July 1700 – 26 May 1712: LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/121, fol. 58. 2 See, for example, LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/104, fols 32–3; /116, fols 364, 430; /117, fol. 54; /120, fol. 114; /121, fol. 211; /122, fol. 337; /126, fols 286, 431; /133, fol. 147; /136, fols 34, 412–14; /150, fols 105–106; /156, fol. 345. 184 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France to 1740s, have received much less attention than has the situation of debtors in the later part of the century.3 The descriptions of prison conditions and the prisoners’ petitions to be found in London’s aldermanic records provide not only an insight into what food was actually supplied for poor prisoners through charitable arrangements and the adequacy of such supplies, but also a glimpse of how charity recipients felt about food provided for their consumption. While previous studies have acknowledged that poor debtors had a more restricted range of dietary options than did those residing on the masters’ side of prisons, the emphasis placed upon prisoner agency in studies highlighting the permeability of eighteenth-century prisons – such as those by Joanna Innes and Margot Finn and to a lesser degree W.J. Sheehan – has overstressed the ability of debtors to access even luxury food and drink while in jail and distorted the plight of those debtor prisoners who could not afford such supplies.4 Even those historians like R.B. Pugh who provide a more detailed discussion of possible sources of supply to the poor, have painted an overly rosy picture and ignored contemporary questions and concerns about the food supplied to the poorer debtors.5 Pugh’s study of Newgate in the early eighteenth century outlined the rates magistrates were authorized to levy under the Vagabonds Act and charitable bequests to be distributed for the subsistence of poor prisoners, and discussed the inadequacy of this supply. Despite having detailed the problems with the supply of beef to poor debtors and gross inequities with distribution, he nevertheless stated that ‘even the poorest and most friendless prisoner, had, de facto, access to meat, and it was said in 1724 that debtors received beef once a week!’6
3 Clive Emsley, ‘Albion’s Felonious Attractions: Reflections upon the History of Crime in England’, in Clive Emsley and Louis A. Knafla (eds),Crime History and Histories of Crime: Studies in the Historiography of Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern History (Westport, 1996), pp. 67–81, at pp. 227–78 as the sole exception, overlooked earlier studies of Newgate: W.J. Sheehan, ‘Finding Solace in Eighteenth-Century Newgate’, in J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England 1550–1800 (London, 1977), pp. 229–45; R.B. Pugh, ‘Newgate between Two Fires: Part I’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 3(3) (1978): 137–63; R.B. Pugh, ‘Newgate between the Two Fires: Part II’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 3(4) (1979): 199–222; see also Randall McGowen, ‘The Well-Ordered Prison in England, 1780–1865’, in Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford, 1995), pp. 71–99; Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003); and Jerry White, ‘Pain and Degradation in Georgian London: Life in the Marshalsea Prison’, History Workshop Journal, 68 (2009): 69–98. 4 Philip Woodfine, ‘Debtors, Prisons, and Petitions in Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 30(2) (2006): 1–31, at 1–2. 5 Pugh, ‘Newgate: Part II’, pp. 205–10. 6 Ibid., pp. 205–206. Reckliss Endangerment? 185
This chapter focuses on the documents surrounding a series of petitions to the Court of Aldermen in London made in the first two decades of the eighteenth- century by the poor debtors held in the Wood Street and Poultry compters and Newgate and Ludgate prisons. It examines not only the dietary conditions revealed by these records, but also the way in which prisoners claimed their right to the basic necessities for survival, and how they perceived the food supplied. It also questions the extent to which prisoners could exercise agency and the possible conflict that existed between prisoner expectations of relief based on customary practice and their legal position at a time when only convicted felons awaiting execution or transportation had an absolute right to be fed at the public’s expense.7 While the Vagabond Act of 1572 authorized Justices of the Peace to levy taxes from parishes within their area of jurisdiction, up to a maximum of 8d. a week, to provide food for poor prisoners, this power was discretionary not mandatory.8 It was the discretionary nature of the Act that resulted in the wide variety of practice noted by the reformer John Howard (1726–90) in his later eighteenth-century reports on the state of English prisons.9 Complaints lodged by the poor debtor prisoners held in the Wood Street and Poultry compters between 1708 and 1709, which were corroborated in reports from both the physicians and aldermanic committee appointed to investigate them, provide an illuminating picture of how prisoners relying on charity supplies fared. This picture, as we shall see, did not match either the assumptions that theoretical rights to charity were necessarily converted into actual supplies,10 or the experiences of wealthier debtors like Daniel Defoe, who when he entered Newgate had brandy supplied him from Gutter Lane and a flask of the best claret and a bottle of French white wine with his dinner.11 Debtor prisoners’ petitions recorded in the minutes of the Court of Aldermen in July and December 1708 outlined two problems.12 Firstly, they complained of a lack of fresh water resulting from the pipes running water from the Thames to a cistern within the prison being broken. They secondly complained that the bread allowance had been curtailed. This complaint was referred to the Sheriffs (who were elected from the aldermen of the City of London) and, when they
7 Ibid., p. 204. 8 Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, English Prisons under Local Government (London, 1922), pp. 9–11. 9 John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons (Warrington, 1777). See Webb and Webb, p. 11 for a summary of these descriptions. 10 Pugh, ‘Newgate: Part II’, pp. 206–208; Finn, pp. 121–7; Innes, pp. 260–63. 11 Pugh, ‘Newgate: Part II’, pp. 214–15. 12 LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/116, fols 364, 430; /117, fol. 54. 186 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France did not resolve the problem, to a committee of other nominated aldermen for investigation. The committee’s instructions were to determine what had happened to the supply of water into the compter, what gifts and legacies existed for the provision of bread in the City, and how they were supposed to be paid. They were also to determine whether there were any charity amounts in arrears, who owed the money, why it was outstanding and finally how the money from any such charity was being disbursed.13 The committee’s findings, presented to the court in February 1709, are illuminating.14 The most pressing issue, in terms of supplies most needed for survival, was the lack of fresh water. The committee found that the usual supply of water had, as the prisoners had claimed, previously come from a pipe bringing water from the Thames (itself a questionable source by this period).15 However, as that supply was a problem when the river froze or other obstructions occurred, the pipe was to be replaced by one to bring New River water into a cistern. While the pipe from the Thames had been cut off for 10 weeks, the new pipe connecting the cistern to the new supply had not yet been laid, leaving the prisoners without water other than that which could be brought in using pails.16 This was a costly exercise, and one that limited the amount of water available for either cooking any meat they might receive or for washing their clothing. The committee also noted that even if the water supply had been plentiful enough, the prisoners in any case lacked any coppers, or kettles in which to boil their meat, and did not have pails with which to carry water from the cistern into their rooms to boil food or wash clothes.17 This of course assumed that there was any meat to boil in the first place. The prisoners’ second complaint about the lack of bread was also confirmed.18 The committee found that the bequests of food relating to the poor prisoners in Wood Street amounted to £50. 2s. 6d. per annum, but that the number of prisoners on the common side had grown, and that there were usually 70 prisoners (and in some years more). This allowed 15s. per week for bread for all of the prisoners – enough to purchase 60 penny loaves on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Consequently, not only was there not enough bread for every prisoner on the days when bread was supplied, but on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursday and Saturdays none of the prisoners got any food unless they were able to access it privately from friends or family.
13 Ibid., fol. 54. 14 Ibid., fols 86–91. 15 Ibid., fol. 87. 16 Ibid., fols 87–8. 17 Ibid., fol. 88. 18 Ibid. Reckliss Endangerment? 187
The report provided a detailed breakdown of the standing expenses of the Wood Street Compter for the welfare of poor debtors (see Table 9.1 below).19 According to the committee the total standing expenses amounted to £57. 12s. per year. As the monies available from bequests amounted to only £50. 2s. 6d. per annum, they found that the steward was already out of pocket for more than £15 for the previous two years. Later complaints made by the poor debtors in Newgate, however, raise some questions as to whether the deficit had actually been incurred.20 It should be noted here that while in later investigations, such as those into the activities of the keeper and turnkeys of Ludgate in the 1720s, it was the equitable disbursal of food that came under increasing scrutiny and suspicion of corruption, this concern was not evident in the earlier committee’s report.21
Table 9.1 Standing expenses for the welfare of poor debtors in Wood Street Compter
Charge Cost per week Cost per year £ s. £ s. Bread – 15 39 – Firing (heating) for 2 rooms – 5 13 – Candles – 1 2 12 Burying the dead – – 3 – To t a l 57 12
The committee also found that the prisoners’ food situation had been further exacerbated by the loss of their water supply.22 Prior to shutting off the cistern, the compter had served as a conduit for water to its neighbours. Whereas the prison’s neighbours had previously exchanged food with the poor prisoners in return for water that was supplied as needed, with the water supply disconnected this meant a supplementary supply of food had disappeared. To resolve the problem, the committee advised that a weekly allowance be made for the supply
19 Ibid., fols 88–9. 20 Ibid., fol. 89; see p. XXX below regarding payments for foods at Newgate. 21 Ibid., fols 412–14. See LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/126, fols 281–2; /127, fol. 509; /148, fol. 28; /150, fols 105–106 regarding similar complaints for Newgate and the Compters. 22 LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/117, fols 89–90. 188 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France of the poor prisoners.23 This was agreed upon by the aldermanic court, which then ordered the committee to see these actions carried out. The installation of a new leaden cistern to ensure the prisoners had a constant supply of fresh water was supposed to be one part of these measures.24 It is clear, however, that despite aldermanic orders, the situation was not immediately rectified. A letter in May 1709 from the physicians appointed to treat sick prisoners in Wood Street Compter, Dr Cade and Dr Levett, reported that they had visited the compter and prescribed treatment for 40 of the poor prisoners who were sickly and weak as a result of ‘Poverty and Want of Necessaries and the Nastiness of the Prison’.25 Part of this ‘nastiness’ was a lack of clean water resulting from the fact that the cistern previously ordered to be installed for the use of the prisoners had not yet been cast. In addition to the lack of fresh water and adequate food, the doctors complained that because the prisoners were kept locked up in wards, they could not access the privies or houses of office for the prison and instead had to make use of ‘tubs’ which led to a great nastiness that ‘may breed infection’.26 The need for correction had become urgent as several of the prisoners had died and many more were very sick. The Court of Aldermen ordered an urgent enquiry into the delay on the cistern, and in the meantime ordered that all men and women in the compters were to have access to the privies at all times of day.27 In addition, the committee were instructed to employ a person to buy provisions for the sick prisoners to ensure that they received one penny loaf each per day. An entry on the assize recorded on 24 May 1709 indicated that at this time a penny loaf a day amounted to a daily allowance of 7½ ounces of bread per prisoner.28 The chamberlain was instructed to provide the funds for this expense. While the issue of bread seemed to have been resolved with this order, the issue of water was ongoing. The City’s plumber was called before the court to explain himself following another petition from the poor prisoners six weeks later.29 When this complaint was followed by a further corroborating letter from the doctors Cade and Levitt on continuing problems with the conditions in the compters, the membership of the committee was enlarged and their enquiry
23 Ibid., fol. 90. 24 Ibid., fol. 202. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., fol. 203. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., fol. 248. In 1711, the aldermen were supporting a case that the amount set by the 1708 Assize was injurious to the well-being of the poor: LMA, Repertories, COL/ CA/01/01/119, fol. 225. 29 LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/117, fol. 247. Reckliss Endangerment? 189 expanded to include also listening to prisoner complaints on other aspects of their treatment.30 The aim was to allow prisoners to air their grievances directly to the members of the committee so that problems could be more rapidly rectified and the keepers could not screen out complainants. The situation in Wood Street was not isolated. When the committee followed up another petition of complaint in October 1709, this time from the poor prisoners in the Poultry Compter, they found a similar state of affairs.31 Their report stated that the Poultry Compter now housed over one hundred poor prisoners and that the allowances from annual gifts and charities only covered enough bread for 50 per cent of them on five days of the week.32 This meant that on the other two days of the week everyone either drew supplies from other sources or starved. On the grounds that the then current dearness of bread made the situation even worse, the court ordered that the City government was to relieve the prisoners and ordered that the committee ensure the prisoners in the Poultry Compter received the same amount of bread as those held in Wood Street: one penny loaf a day.33 On this occasion the committee was authorized to order any other subsistence supplies needed, without requiring them to refer the matter back to the court. Despite these theoretically improved conditions, when in 1710 disease again broke out in both of the compters, the physician’s report presented by Dr Cade again identified the inadequate supply of food as a major problem.34 His treatment focused on ‘the dyeting of the prisoners’, though what this diet consisted of was left unspecified. When a further outbreak occurred in both compters in 1713, Dr Levitt was called in and again the committee was ordered to provide extra food ‘as needed for the recovery and preservation of health’.35 That this diet included meat is evident by butchers’ bills presented to the court for payment36 and another complaint made by the poor prisoners in 1718 when the supply of meat ceased.37 It appears from this later complaint that while the emergency measures were in force, four stone of beef had been supplied weekly. As a stone of beef in London weighed eight pounds at this time, if this supply were doled out equally to all 100 prisoners in the compter, this would have
30 Ibid., fols 256–7. 31 Ibid., fols 430–31. 32 Ibid., fol. 430. 33 Ibid., fol. 431. 34 Ibid., COL/CA/01/01/118, fol. 282. 35 Ibid., COL/CA/01/01/121, fols 242–3. 36 Ibid., COL/CA/01/01/118, fol. 257; /119, fol. 103. 37 Ibid., COL/CA/01/01/126, fol. 286. 190 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France allowed just under six ounces of meat for each prisoner a week.38 If this order for extra supply of food was only applied to sick prisoners, the amount received by such prisoners may have been larger. However, if, as in 1709, more than 40 per cent of the poor prisoners were ill, this would only have increased the ration to around 12 ounces per prisoner per week. This of course is assuming that no skimming of food supplies by the stewards took place. As consideration of the prisoner’s petition was at this time deferred from one sitting of the court to another as questions were raised about the butchers’ bills, as well as over possible fraudulent behaviour on the part of the constable to the charity ward at Wood Street, this assumption cannot be made with any surety.39 The cessation of supply once the threat of disease had ended fits with the aldermanic court’s instruction to the committee that the provision was for the recovery of health only. It was not an ongoing right, though clearly the prisoners did not concur with the committee’s ideas about the duration of necessity. The picture of prisoner conditions presented in these records hardly fits Margot Finn’s image of the multiple sources of charity, from direct receipt of money or food from begging, to the organized distribution of generous bequests from individuals and donations from trade corporations to the poor debtors in London’s gaols.40 The charities which she describes as financing annual deliveries of meat to metropolitan debtors from 1576 to 1866, which in the early nineteenth century on occasion enabled 400 debtors to receive a pound of beef each, were in the aldermanic accounts of one hundred years earlier barely able to allow 50 per cent of the prisoners in the compters a small ration of bread.41 Nor do they support Innes’s assessment that prisoners could and did pay for ‘their food and lodging with no more resentment than they would have felt at paying for them in outside life’, with organized begging and
38 The eightw of a stone in this period was a variable measure and depended not only on the commodity referred to but also to the location of sale. In 1755, for instance, a stone of wool was defined as weighing 14 pounds. A stone of beef in London weighed 8 pounds, while in Hertfordshire a stone of beef weighed 12 pounds: see Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 16th edn (London, 1755), ‘ST’ under the heading ‘Stone of wool’. John Houghton similarly noted that a stone of beef in London weighed only half the Scottish equivalent: Julian Hoppit, ‘Reforming Britain’s Weights and Measures, 1660–1824’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993): 82–104, at 83. 39 LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/126, fols 281–2, 302. That this concern also applied to bread was evident in an order made in 1719 for the committee to investigate how best to distribute bread rations to prevent any continuation of abuses: ibid., COL/ CA/01/01/127, fol. 509. 40 Finn, pp. 126–7. 41 Ibid., pp. 126. Reckliss Endangerment? 191 outside finance from charities enabling those with no funds to survive.42 Not only were charity monies inadequate to supply an adequate diet, but when the officers for Ludgate and the two compters allowed poor debtors to beg for sustenance outside the prisons in 1724, they were admonished for causing ‘Great Dishonour to the Good Government of this City’ and ordered to cease such activities.43 Without friends to supply extra food, the diet of poor debtor prisoners was inadequate for sustaining health, particularly for prolonged periods of time or in the face of repeated outbreaks of infectious disease.44 If a lack of access to an adequate quantity of food was not bad enough, the Newgate debtors’ complaints against Thomas Reckliss, the baker to the City compters and prisons, which opened this chapter, highlight another factor often ignored by modern accounts of the diet of poor debtors in early modern prisons: the issue of food quality. When food was short and disease was rife, provision of substandard wares became of even greater concern than it was normally. While the May 1710 entry in the Repertories of the Court of Aldermen did not provide any explanation of just what made Reckliss’s bread so bad, later petitions made more specific complaints. In another petition, lodged eight years later in 9 September 1718, the prisoners again objected that the bread supplied was unwholesome, but this time also stated that Reckliss had used flour that had been adulterated with large amounts of ‘pollard’ or bran.45 However, as the 1718 complaint listed both pollarded bread and unwholesome bread separately, it is likely that this was not the only problem. It was possible that Reckliss had adulterated at least some of the bread with much worse substances than bran. The use of alum (a bleaching agent), chalk dust or sawdust, pease flour and flours made from root crops all appear in contemporary complaints and concerns about the quality of flour.46 By the middle of the century, the building public debate about these concerns would lead to the formulation of a legal definition of both flour types and the ingredients permitted in commercially prepared breads.47
42 Innes, pp. 249, 259–63. 43 LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/132, fols 341–2. 44 Woodfine, pp. 4–5, indicates that debtor prisoners could spend months, even years in jail, before reaching agreement with their creditors and obtaining release. 45 LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/126, fol. 430. 46 Margaret Dorey, ‘Unwholesome for Man’s Body?: Concerns about Food Quality and Regulation in London c.1600 – c.1740’ (PhD thesis, The University of Western Australia, 2011), Chapter 2, pp. 57–61. 47 An Act for the due making of Bread; and to regulate the Price and Assize thereof; and to punish Persons who shall Adulterate Meal, Flour and Bread’, 31 George II c. 29, 192 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
These two petitions were not the only complaints made against Reckliss or his bread over the period. The poor debtors of Newgate also petitioned the aldermanic court against his ‘selling very unwholesome bread’ in February 1711 and December 1712 and – after a brief hiatus when a different baker’s name appears in the records as being paid to supply bread to Newgate – for providing short-weight bread to the compters in 1713.48 Each complaint lodged against Reckliss resulted in orders from the Court of Aldermen to the Sheriffs – who according to orders made in 1695 were responsible for employing the City baker and providing bread to the prisons administered by the London Corporation – to discharge Reckliss and replace him as baker to Newgate and the compters.49 Yet, despite repeated direct orders from the aldermanic court, a baker named Reckliss, usually identified as Thomas, is named as baker to the prisons from 1700 to well into the 1740s, with only one entry in September 1712 indicating that the Sheriffs ever exacted the ordered punishment and temporarily stood him down.50 The court minutes provide no direct explanations of the Sheriffs’ inaction in the face of repeated orders from their aldermanic fraternity. Nor do they record Reckliss’s defence of his actions. In these reports, the voice of the victims was louder than that of the perpetrator. However, one possible motivation for not only Reckliss but also London’s aldermen and Sheriffs was financial. The victim of Reckliss’s actions was multi-faced, consisting not only of the prisoners who had to eat the bread he provided, but also of the Corporation of London who in theory paid for it. In providing substandard bread, Reckliss potentially deprived the prisoners of nourishment, but also defrauded London’s civic body and the men of substance who governed it. While Reckliss’s monetary motivation might seem obvious, an entry in the Repertories in December 1712, in which the court ordered Reckliss be paid for services provided between the 2 July 1700 and 26 May 1712, raises further issues.51 The Corporation owed over £50, and was 12 years in arrears in payments for bread supplied to the prisons. It is likely that Reckliss would have debated the victim status of the aldermanic court. It was possibly this debt that led him to pad the bread with bran or other flour additives, and when this was judged unacceptable to give short weight instead. If the Sheriffs were unable to pay the baker, or extract the funds from the governing
The Statutes at Large, from Magna Charta, to the Twenty-Fifth Year of the Reign of King George the Third, Inclusive, ed. Charles Runnington (10 vols, London, 1786), 7, pp. 217–35. 48 LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/120, fols 114, 316; /121, fols 58, 211. 49 Ibid., COL/CA/01/01/104, fol. 33. 50 Ibid., COL/CA/01/01/120, fol. 316. 51 Ibid., COL/CA/01/01/121, fol. 58. Reckliss Endangerment? 193 court to cover the outstanding amounts owed, then removing him from office might not have been a practical consideration. A less benign financially based, possible explanation of the Sheriffs’ inaction is that they were actively colluding with the baker in the fraud. Prisoners’ complaints from all debtor prisons from the 1720s onwards indicate that the fraudulent withholding of charity supplies from poor prisoners and skimming of food for profit was an increasing concern.52 However, such complaints focused on the activities of the keepers, under-keepers, stewards and turnkeys and not London’s Sheriffs.53 The failure of the Sheriffs to act and remove Reckliss could equally be indicative of a disparity between the Sheriffs’ ideas of what quality of food was appropriate for poor debtors to consume and the ideas of the prisoners. Contemporary medical writers’ discussions on diet and food placed food in a hierarchy of healthfulness dependent upon the social standing of the consumer.54 Within this framework, the higher the bran content or proportion of flours from substances other than refined wheat flour in a bread, the less suitable it was deemed for those of a higher social status, and conversely the greater its suitability for the poor. Reforming writers in the seventeenth century encouraged the use of additives, including potatoes or turnips, in bread, in order to stretch the flour used and increase the amount of food available.55 That the use of such additives was intended for food stuffs provided to the poor and not to
52 While Pugh, ‘Newgate: Part II’, pp. 208–209, argues that such complaints disappear from the records for the first two decades of the eighteenth century, when they resume in the 1720s they are again directed against the same culprits. See also Woodfine, pp. 8, 19–22. 53 The Repertories record complaints in 1708 against the steward of the Wood Street Compter for retrenching poor debtors’ bread allowance and in 1718 against the constable of the charity ward of the Compter for fraud relating to the provision of bread. Complaints by the prisoners in Southwark Compter in 1724 led to the examination of the Bailiff, and complaints by Ludgate’s prisoners focused on the under-keeper. Less specific complaints were also made periodically against the Turnkeys: LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/116, fol. 364; /117, f. 54; /126, fols 281–2; /132, fol. 418; /133, fols 147,165; /134, fol. 49; /135, fols 334, 375; /136, fols 34, 151, 189, 412–14, 447–8; /148, fol. 28. Complaints from prisoners at Newgate focused on the depredations of the keeper and his assistants in withholding charity monies and food or extorting illegal fees for its provision: Pugh, ‘Newgate: Part II’, pp. 208–209. 54 Dorey, chapter 1, especially pp. 43–6. 55 John Forster, Englands Happiness Increased, or, a Sure and Easie Remedy against All Succeeding Dear Years by a Plantation of the Roots Called Potatoes (London, 1664), p. 17; Samuel Dale, ‘An Abstract of a Letter Sent from Mr. Samuel Dale to Mr. John Houghton, S.R.S. Concerning the Making of Turnep-Bread in Essex’, Philosophical Transactions (1683– 1775), 17 (1693): p. 970; John Houghton, A Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (3 vols, London, 1728), 1, p. 243. 194 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France all consumers was clearly spelt out in such discussions. For example, when John Forster argued in 1664 for the use of the potato as a flour extender for bread production in times of dearth, he gave a socially stratified hierarchy of use with an increasing percentage of potato recommended as he moved down the social scale.56 In Forster’s scheme, the bread for ‘the better sort’ was to have little (not more than 25 per cent), servants’ bread would contain more (33 per cent), while the largest proportion was to be put into the bread of the poor (50 per cent).57 Official orders regarding bread to be supplied reflected similar beliefs, even if they did not go so far as to approve these less conventional additives. In the 1690s, the aldermanic court investigated and approved the Bakers’ Company’s petitions for the abatement of the Assize of Bread on the grounds that it would allow the production of coarser (and therefore cheaper) grades of bread and thus make larger amounts of bread affordable to the City’s poor.58 Similarly, earlier aldermanic orders in the 1670s and 1680s directed that ‘during the present scarcity’ prisoners’ bread was to be of the coarser household (wholemeal) bread only.59 However, it should be noted here that while all of these discussions assigned coarser foods to the poor, the measures they suggested were clearly identified as temporary methods of extending supply to alleviate dearth and not as a permanent state of affairs. The suitability of such breads for the poor was the view expounded by the governing elite and reformers writing for an elite audience. It was a view that was not necessarily shared by the people expected to consume such food. Attempts by Parliament to alleviate dearth in the eighteenth century included orders for the sale of ‘standard bread’ (bread containing a higher proportion of bran).60 This action proved unpopular, and, despite the cheaper price set on standard bread, the bakers reported that they could not sell it as their customers considered it unhealthy and demanded white bread instead.61 That the Sheriffs did not dismiss Reckliss as instructed could therefore indicate that they concurred that the type of bread he provided was appropriate, no matter what the rest of the aldermanic court found. Like many of the general public, who rejected standard bread in the
56 Forster, p. 17. 57 Ibid., p. 17. 58 LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/101, fols 123–4; /102, fols 273–5. 59 Ibid., COL/CA/01/01/083, fol. 137v; /090, fol. 180v; /095, fol. 78. 60 J.C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet, 3rd edn (London, 1939), p. 222. 61 Ibid., p. 222. ‘The Brown Bread Act’ at the end of the century met with a similar rejection: Susan E. Brown, ‘“A Just and Profitable Commerce”: Moral Economy and the Middle Classes in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies, 32(4) (1993): 305–32, at 308. Reckliss Endangerment? 195 middle of the century as unhealthy, the poor held in London’s debtor prisons did not agree that such fare was suitable for their consumption. Unless they had friends or family who could and would bring them provisions, poor debtor prisoners in the compters or in Newgate in the first two decades of the eighteenth century would have survived on a diet consisting of a small ration of bread per day and water. Though prior to the orders made by the aldermen for this allowance to be guaranteed, this would actually have meant 7½ to 8 ounces of bread on perhaps two and a half days a week, assuming the stewards distributed the bread allowance available for 50 per cent of the prisoners on any one day equitably. In times when disease broke out this might be supplemented with meat in very small quantities, which the prisoners were unlikely to have the means to cook. Water was also in variable supply, and given the state of the Thames at this time, could, even when it was available, endanger health. Any other drink had to be bought, something many of the poor debtors, who had not the money to pay garnish, could not afford. While prisoners on the masters’ side of prisons might have been able to order claret, brandy and roasted meats to alleviate their lot, those on the common side did not enjoy the same conditions. The poor prisoners were not the only charity recipients to voice their dissatisfaction over the food supplied in London’s institutions. Comparison of the diet outlined in reports on the prisons with that outlined in accounts of London’s workhouses in the same period is illuminating and further emphasizes the inadequacy of prison provisioning. In 1713, the inmates of the Quaker Workhouse in Clerkenwell had also complained about the ‘smallness of their allowance in diet’.62 The justificatory account offered by Richard Hutton, the steward of the Quaker Workhouse in Clerkenwell, to the committee overseeing his administration in May 1713, showed that the diet complained of consisted of 7 ounces of butter, 14 of cheese and 13 ounces of bread per week, 6 ounces of flesh per meal, 9 ounces of pudding per meal and ‘frumenty of a sufficient quantity’.63 In response to the complaint, Hutton increased the allowance, but even in its original form the inmates’ diet was significantly more substantial than that of the poor prisoners.64 Tim Hitchcock has described the workhouse
62 Tim Hitchcock (ed.), Richard Hutton’s Complaints Book: The Notebook of the Steward of the Quaker Workhouse at Clerkenwell 1711–37 ([London], 1987), pp. 2, 4. 63 Hitchcock, Richard Hutton’s Complaints Book, p. 4. An earlier entry (p. 2) provides a detailed description of the quantities and ingredients of the pudding and frumenty supplied, comparing it to the fare provided when Hutton took over the administration of the workhouse. 64 Ibid., p. 4. The increased fare included ‘8 oz. of butter and 16 oz. of cheese per week, about 14 oz. of bread (it not being weighed except Daniel Rosier’s, who has 18 oz.) per day, 196 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France at Clerkenwell as coming out of ‘a long tradition of English humanitarian and cooperative poor relief, which was extreme in its belief in the necessity and virtue of treating the poor with kindness and humanity’ and it could be argued that it was particularly generous in its treatment of poor.65 However, a contemporary description of conditions in the workhouse at St Dunstan’s in the West in the 1720s stated that inmates ‘have roast or boiled Beef 4 Days in the Week for Dinner, vix. Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and other Days, Rice-Milk, or Dumplins. Breakfasts of Broth, or Milk-Porridge, and Suppers of Bread and Butter, or Cheese’.66 The Bill of Fare for St Giles in the Fields (see Figure 9.1) was less generous with meat, but added ‘Herbs and Roots when in Season’ to the Sunday dinner meal.
Lastly, That the Weekly Bill of Fare be as follows:
Breakfast Dinner Supper Sunday Bread and Beer Beef or Mutton, with Broth and Bread and Cheese Herbs and Roots when in Season Monday Milk Porridge Pease-Porridge Ditto Tuesday Milk Porridge As Sunday Ditto Wednesday Beef-Broth Rice-Milk Ditto Thursday Milk Porridge As Sunday Ditto Friday Beef-Broth Rice-Milk or Hasty-Pudding Ditto Saturday Milk Porridge Plumb-Pudding Ditto Note. Such of the Poor as have the Misfortune to be Sick, or have weak Stomachs, are not confined to this Diet, but are allowed such Victuals and Drink as their cases may respectively require, and which are prescribed by the Doctor.
Figure 9.1 Transcription of bill of fare for the workhouse at St Giles in the Fields Source: Anon., An Account of Several Workhouses for Employing and Maintaining the Poor, 2nd edn (London, 1732), p. 43.
8 oz. of flesh per meal & if not enough they are desired to send for more, 19 oz. of pudding per meal, and more if they can eat it (which is 10 oz. per meal more than the former allowance), furmenty, milk &c a sufficient quantity, to some a quart’. 65 Ibid., Introduction, p. xiv. 66 Anon., An Account of Several Workhouses for Employing and Maintaining the Poor, 2nd edn (London, 1732), p. 25. Reckliss Endangerment? 197
The proposed diet for inmates in Bishopsgate in the West included beef and broth on two days of the week and similarly noted that ‘Pease, Beans, Greens and Roots’ dependent on the season were also to be supplied in addition to the staple diet of bread, gruel and cheese.67 Drummond and Wilbraham describe similar diets for children housed in both the Foundling and Christ’s Hospitals.68 While these descriptions do not usually identify the quantity of such food to be allotted per person, the diets described are consistent, and, although limited and monotonous, nevertheless provided a considerably more generous allotment of food than that supplied to the poor in London’s prisons. Debtor complaints over the first few decades of the eighteenth century indicate that poor prisoners did not passively accept what was provided, but actively sought to influence and control their situation. This appears, on the surface, to support ideas of prisoner agency emphasized by Finn and Innes in their studies of eighteenth-century English prisons.69 However, the repetitive nature of many of the prisoners’ complaints and the graphic descriptions of the living conditions of prisoners held on the common side of London’s gaols and compters contained in aldermanic investigatory reports, paint a less positive picture. A detailed investigation of these documents presents an image of prison conditions for poor debtors that is consistent with the more negative findings of Woodfine and White in their recent studies of the prisons of York and of the Marshalsea and King’s Bench Prisons in London.70 The evidence presented in the records of London’s aldermanic court problematizes ideas of prisoner agency presented in earlier studies, as while prisoners did not passively accept their situation without complaint, whether such complaints led to action, and how fast such action was implemented was highly contingent on the willingness and ability of London’s aldermen to act. Aldermanic support was discretionary, and while the aldermen may have been at times sympathetic, and often decided in favour of the prisoners, this could not be guaranteed. In the ongoing problem with the bread supplied by the baker Thomas Reckliss, that his actions defrauded not only the prisoners of sustenance but also (in theory) the aldermen of funds, as well as flouting their authority, ensured the Court of Aldermen continued to find in the prisoners’ favour. The complaints from the prisoners in the Poultry and Woodstreet compters in 1709 and 1710 and again in 1713 were given greater credence and acceptance when supported by reports from medical officers. The prisoners’
67 Anon., An Account of Several Workhouses, p. 4. 68 Drummond and Wilbraham, pp. 225–8. 69 Finn, chapter 3; Innes. 70 Woodfine; White, ‘Pain and Degradation’, pp. 69–98. 198 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France petitions were lent further urgency by outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, even where such corroboration existed it could take multiple petitions from prisoners before the court acted. Furthermore, as the case of Thomas Reckliss so clearly showed, theoretical support being granted in court orders for action, did not necessarily equate with an actual remediation of prisoners’ conditions. Such remediation could take months or years, where it happened at all. Where no such corroborating circumstances existed, prisoner petitions could be ignored or dismissed as vexatious. This could in turn lead to the basis upon which prisoners could claim bread itself being called into question.71 There were thus limits upon the extent to which prisoner agency could realistically be exercised.
71 LMA, Repertories, COL/CA/01/01/126, fol. 286; /127, fols 427, 430, 472, 487; /133, fol. 165. Chapter 10 Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England
Michael Bennett1
In eighteenth-century England almost all people had smallpox during their lives. Though its essential nature was not understood at the time, smallpox was a viral infection. After an incubation of 10 to 12 days, it brought high fever, severe headaches and lassitude and then the distinctive rash and spots. By this stage, the patient was very ill and often in excruciating pain, especially around the mouth and eyes. The spots became suppurating pustules that made loved ones shudder at the sight and the smell. In the more severe cases, the pocks were numerous and confluent, and in rare cases the disease became haemorrhagic, in which case there was no real hope of survival. Though case mortality rates were highly variable, an average as high as one in six cases was assumed to be the norm in England in the 1740s.2 A smallpox death was never easeful. Many of the survivors, scarred and sometimes permanently disabled, were more to be consoled than congratulated. Smallpox was no respecter of rank. Members of the elite, who were less exposed to the disease as children, lived with the fear of infection until they were felled later in life. Still, the plight of the labouring classes and the indigent was truly pitiable. The lack of amenities and nursing care added greatly to the misery and the chance of complications. For a working family, smallpox could prove economically ruinous: even if it did not kill or maim breadwinners, it could take them, whether as patients or care-givers, from paid work for long periods of time.3 In the face of this terrible scourge, there was only one consolation: once people had gone through the disease they were thenceforth immune to it. This observation led to a range of practices around the world that involved
1 The uthora gratefully acknowledges the assistance of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant in the research and writing of this paper. 2 Thomas Frewen, The Practice and Theory of Inoculation with an Account of its Success in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1749), p. 53. 3 In general see Ian and Jenifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox(London, 2004); and Gareth Williams, Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox (Basingstoke, 2010). 200 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France the deliberate exposure of children to the disease at a favourable time and in a manner that had proved relatively safe in the past. In the 1720s there was interest in England in the Turkish practice of grafting or inoculating smallpox. Actively promoted by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had arranged the inoculation of her son in Constantinople in 1717, it involved the introduction of a small amount of smallpox matter into an incision on the arm or leg. The inoculation of her daughter in London in 1721 and members of the royal family in 1722, the support of leading physicians and surgeons, and statistical evidence showing its relative safety, set the scene for its acceptance in many aristocratic houses and professional families.4 Nevertheless, the risk involved, and the high cost of the procedure, limited its appeal and its social range. Always controversial, the practice lost ground in the 1730s. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, however, there was a revival in England, prompted by a severe smallpox epidemic in 1751–53 and sustained by a transformation of the practice in the 1760s, which improved outcomes while reducing costs. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, smallpox inoculation (variolation) became a mass phenomenon in England. It prepared the ground for Jenner’s cowpox inoculation (vaccination), which began to supersede the old practice in 1800, and very much held its own for a decade or so more.5 This chapter is concerned with the inoculation of the poor – largely the children of the poor – against smallpox. It looks at three overlapping groups, namely charity children, the recipients of poor relief, and the working poor and their children.6 The general context is the development of a simpler and safer form of smallpox inoculation that made the practice more acceptable and affordable for a broad section of the population. By 1800, hundreds of thousands of people in Britain had gained immunity from the procedure. Even though it is not generally now believed that inoculation was a major factor in the remarkable growth in population increasingly evident from the middle of the eighteenth century, this chapter supports Peter Razzell’s assessment of the scale of the
4 Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia, 1957), esp. chapters 3 and 4, pp. 45–99. 5 In general see Peter Razzell, The Conquest of Smallpox: The Impact of Inoculation on Smallpox Mortality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 2nd edn (Firle, Sussex, 2003); J.R. Smith, The Speckled Monster: Smallpox in England, 1670–1970, with Particular Reference to Essex (Chelmsford, 1987); Deborah Christian Brunton, ‘Pox Britannica: Smallpox Inoculation in Britain, 1721–1830’ (PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1990). 6 In this chapter the term ‘poor’ is used broadly, as Patricia Crawford used it, to include ‘those who laboured for meagre wages as well as those who received poor relief at different stages of their life-cycle’: Patricia Crawford, Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2010), p. 7. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 201 practice and its impact on life chances.7 Still, the inoculation of the poor has a broader interest and significance. Charity children were among the earliest to be inoculated, often in decidedly experimental contexts. The poor in parishes were often herded into accepting a procedure that was always unpleasant and sometimes dangerous. There was a broad commitment to making inoculation available to the population at large and the promotion of the practice involved an address to issues of social medicine. Conversely, the labouring classes often lacked the means and opportunity to avail themselves of the prophylactic. Given the circumstances in which they lived, the inoculation of the poor could serve to spread rather than control smallpox. The social history of inoculation has an odd circularity. Beginning as a practice among members of the elite, it was often imposed on the poor who were dependent on their charity. As the value of inoculation became well accepted and more affordable, and as popular recourse to it increased, the focus of concern became the need to regulate the practice. By the early nineteenth century it was the right to be inoculated in the old way – variolated as opposed to vaccinated – that was the issue.
Early Experiments and Charitable Foundations
There is some evidence that prior to the late sixteenth century smallpox was a relatively mild disease in Europe. The disease seemed not to interest physicians and, until ‘the discovery of the germ’ in the late nineteenth century, its essential nature and mode of transmission were poorly understood. One assumption that survived into the eighteenth century was that it was in some sense innate, coming out in particular circumstances, sometimes epidemical. Since people seemed only to take the disease once, it was natural to consider the advantages of bringing out the disease at a favourable time. In many parts of Europe there were folk practices, often called ‘buying the smallpox’, in which children were brought into contact with smallpox in a controlled and rather ritualized fashion. Though documented in Britain, this sort of practice may have declined in response to the increasing virulence of the disease. There were still mothers, including aristocratic ladies, who were willing to risk bringing a healthy child into contact with a benign case. Inoculation was a more developed form of this basic strategy. In the early eighteenth century, Europeans became interested in reports of this procedure in China, the Ottoman empire and among some of the African peoples
7 Peter Razzell, ‘Population Change in Eighteenth-Century England: A Reinterpretation’, Economic History Review, new series, 18 (1965): 312–32; Razzell, Conquest of Smallpox, introduction to the new edition. 202 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France taken as slaves to the Americas. They assembled information about the practice that indicated that it was a much better risk than taking the disease naturally. Following her return to England with her son, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu organized the inoculation of her daughter in London in 1721. A celebrated wit and socialite, she resolved to bring the practice into fashion. Caroline, Princess of Wales, took note. One of her children had recently had smallpox. The medical men associated with the Royal Society were likewise on the case. Sir Hans Sloane and his colleagues successfully petitioned King George I to pardon six condemned felons on condition of their undergoing the procedure. The experiment at Newgate attracted interest and controversy, but served to demonstrate and advertise the safety and utility of inoculation. Prior to having her young family inoculated, the Princess of Wales was keen to see some trials on children. She asked for a list of orphans in St James’s parish, Westminster, so that those who had not had smallpox could be inoculated at her expense. In March 1722 the newspapers announced the inoculation of five parish children and informed its readers where they could be inspected. Following the inoculation of two princesses in May, the nobility gave countenance to the practice. During the 1720s there were several hundred inoculations. Though there were mishaps, the data collected and publicized by the Royal Society showed it to be a rational undertaking.8 The medicalization of inoculation, which added to the severity and expense of the operation, along with misgivings about its safety and propriety, necessarily limited its appeal and popularity. Interestingly, it was in British America that the practice gained the momentum that assured its survival through the 1730s. During an epidemic in Boston in 1721, Cotton Mather encouraged Zabdiel Boylston to offer inoculation in the town. Though he met with fierce opposition, Boylston was able to inoculate more people across a broader social range than the practitioners in Britain and to produce a larger body of data demonstrating its safety and effectiveness. Slave-traders and plantation-owners in the Caribbean and British America rapidly recognized its value in preserving the lives of slaves and their medical men gained experience in inoculating large groups cheaply and efficiently.9 Inoculation again showed its value during an epidemic in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1738. Dr James Kirkpatrick participated in and wrote an account of the proceedings. On his
8 Andrea Alice Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge, 2002), chapter 2, pp. 43–70. 9 Larry Stewart, ‘The Edge of Utility: Slaves and Smallpox in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Medical History, 29 (1985): 54–70, at 62–70. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 203 return to Britain in 1743, he found few British colleagues who could rival his expertise.10 Though well accepted in elite and professional circles, including among leading churchmen, inoculation languished in England in the 1730s. Parents found the decision to have a child infected with smallpox an agonizing one and preferred not to tempt Providence. The periodic reappearance of epidemic smallpox nonetheless regularly stoked interest in the practice. According to a letter to The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1737, the fact that hardly anyone escaped the disease entirely in their lives made it sensible to embrace prophylaxis at an opportune time and relieve the anxieties that limited people’s opportunities.11 Still, the practice was only available to the relatively wealthy people who could afford the medical fees and who had the means to allow their children to go through the disease with nursing care, in a salubrious situation, and at a safe distance from people who were still susceptible to the disease. There was a growing consciousness in the late 1730s that the salutary practice needed to be more generally available. Among the people who embraced inoculation, there was a natural tendency to extend the benefit to dependents and to reflect on the benefits of large-scale inoculation. The costs of smallpox to the community at large – in lives lost, in charitable support for afflicted families, and in the disruption of business – were all too evident. The letter of 1737 concluded by suggesting the value of conducting a ‘general inoculation’, a surprisingly early use of this term, in a town when smallpox first appeared. In the 1740s two charitable initiatives made inoculation available to poor people in London. In 1746 the Smallpox Hospital was founded ‘for the relief of poor distress’d housekeepers, labourers, servants, and strangers, seized with this unhappy distemper’, providing them with free medical care and isolating them from the broader community.12 From the outset the founders seem to have intended that it be used for inoculation. In June 1747 it was announced that:
Such as live under the constant terror of this loathsome and fatal disease, or cannot be admitted into family service for not having had it, will be receiv’d by this charity in a distinct house, for inoculation, if freely so disposed, there
10 James Kirkpatrick, An Essay on Inoculation: Occasioned by the Small-pox Being Brought into South Carolina in the Year 1738 (London, 1743). His later work, The Analysis of Inoculation, first published in 1754, was very influential: James Kirkpatrick,The Analysis of Inoculation: Comprizing the History, Theory and Practice of It (London, 1754; 2nd edn, London, 1761). 11 Anon., ‘Of Inoculating the Small-Pox; Occasioned by Its Now Raging in Several Large Towns’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 7 (1737), pp. 561–2. 12 Smith, p. 38. 204 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
by avoiding both these inconveniencies, and also the great danger which often attends the infection in the common way.13
In 1752 the hospital moved to larger premises near St Pancras and its inoculation activity began to grow markedly. The inoculations took place in a house in Islington and the patients were moved to St Pancras as they became infective. Even before this time, another new metropolitan institution made a commitment to inoculation. Established in 1741, the Foundling Hospital had to contend with appallingly high mortality rates, not least from infectious diseases. In June 1743 it authorized the first set of inoculations and soon made it routine practice to inoculate the children admitted to its care.14 The Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital played an important role in establishing the practice in London and extending it more broadly. The board of governors and the hundreds of subscribers, including aristocrats, prominent churchmen and merchants, made a public commitment to the safety and value of the prophylactic. The board organized anniversary services and fundraising dinners that gave profile to the practice. In 1752 Bishop Isaac Maddox of Worcester delivered an anniversary sermon that sought to address religious scruples about the practice and concerns about its safety, and champion it as a charitable intervention. The sermon was widely reported, put into print and translated into a number of languages. As the inoculation programme expanded in the 1750s, the medical staff at the Hospital gained valuable expertise with the procedure. The institution itself served as a showcase of inoculation and provided informal training for practitioners from Europe as well as Britain.15 Its annual reports provided reassuring data on hundreds of patients each year. By 1768 there had been 6,581 inoculations, with only 1 in 250 proving fatal.16 By 1800 the total number of inoculations had risen to over 40,000. One of the
13 Anon., ‘Of the County Hospital for the Small-Pox’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 17 (1747), pp. 270–71, at p. 271. 14 Alysa Levene, Childcare, Health and Mortality at the London Foundling Hospital 1741–1800: ‘Left to the Mercy of the World’ (Manchester, 2007), p. 164; Ruth K. McClure, Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1981), p. 206. 15 In spring 1755 Dr Ambrose Hosty arrived from Paris to report on the practice for the Faculté de Médicine and the Swedish government funded a more extensive study trip for Dr David Schultz: Miller, pp. 211–12; Peter Sköld, The Two Faces of Smallpox: A Disease and its Prevention in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Sweden (Umeå, 1996), p. 260. 16 William Woodville, The History of the Inoculation of the Small-Pox in Great Britain (2 vols, London, 1796), 1, p. 234. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 205 charity’s fundraising lines was the supply of variolous matter on threads for inoculation.17 The Foundling Hospital likewise played a part in establishing and refining the practice. Almost all its children, admitted by lot, were first put to nurse in the countryside. Inoculation tended to take place on their return to the metropolis. Many of the foundlings, of course, were exposed to smallpox in their foster homes and over time the governors encouraged their inoculation in the countryside. In this manner, with its network of nurses and subsidiary houses across England, the institution made a contribution to the spread of inoculation through the provinces. In the meantime, the practitioners in the hospital in London were gaining valuable experience in inoculating groups of children. In her demographic study of the hospital, Alysa Levene rightly played down the extent to which the children were treated as guinea pigs. Nonetheless the hospital’s medical men were well placed to make trials of new approaches and rival therapies. After reading about the successful infection of a child by rubbing smallpox on the skin, Dr Richard Conyers, the hospital’s physician, in 1753 made an ointment containing the virus and applied it, though without effect, under the arms of some of his charges.18 In 1767 Dr William Watson, his successor, conducted an elaborate experiment to assess the value of various preparatory regimens, including the use of mercury. He conducted three trials with inoculum in different states and in each trial split the children into three groups, one of which, seemingly for the first time in a clinical trial, served as a control.19
Inoculation and the Parish Poor
A major smallpox epidemic in 1751–53 led to a broader acceptance of inoculation, especially among the middling ranks of society. It was reported that the lower orders, too, were seeking it out in greater numbers.20 The problem
17 Summoned from Dresden to introduce inoculation in Berlin in 1775, Dr Baylies sought and obtained threads from the hospital by post: William Baylies, Facts and Observations Relative to Inoculation in Berlin, and to the Possibility of Having Smallpox a Second Time (Edinburgh, 1781), p. 137. 18 Dr Richard Brooke to Editor, no date, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 23 (1753), p. 113. 19 William Watson, An Account of a Series of Experiments, Instituted with a View of Ascertaining the Most Successful Method of Inoculating the Small-pox (London, 1768); A.W. Boylston, ‘Clinical Investigation of Smallpox in 1767’, New England Journal of Medicine, 346 (2002): 1326–8. 20 In 1753 a Chelmsford doctor wrote that, happily for the kingdom, inoculation ‘gains ground daily; the lower class of people coming into it very fast in these parts’: Dr Benjamin Pugh to Editor, 6 April 1753, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 23 (1753), pp. 216–18, at p. 216. 206 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France remained the high cost of the procedure when conducted professionally. As one writer observed in 1752, the cost of inoculation, ‘as it is now managed, must necessarily exclude … the greatest part of mankind, from the benefit of it … not only the very poor people, but multitudes of others, many farmers and tradesmen, cannot be at expence of so much a head for the whole family’. Since it was a simple procedure, he saw that before long it would be taken up by rustic operators, nurses and indeed ‘every notable housewife, who has the courage to take up the lancet’. His main point was that medical practitioners, if they have ‘a proper regard to the general good’ and wished to prevent the practice ‘falling into the lowest hands’, needed to ‘perform it out of charity to the poor, on moderate terms to others, in proportion to their circumstances’.21 According to Dr Kirkpatrick in 1754, the common people, previously prejudiced against the practice, were already ‘rushing into the contrary Extreme; and go promiscuously to little Market Towns, where without any medical Advice, and very little Consideration, they procure Inoculation from some Operator, too often as crude and thoughtless as themselves’.22 There were certainly people who were seeking to extend the practice responsibly. In the 1740s a nobleman living near Guildford, seeing how terrified the country folk were of smallpox, paid a surgeon 40s. for each person who was willing to be inoculated.23 Some practitioners were very flexible in their charges and only too ready to encourage package deals. As early as 1744 two enterprising inoculators in Birmingham were advertising a package in which if more than 10 ratepayers agreed to pay their fees they would inoculate gratis the poor of the parish. In 1751 they further reduced their rates so that ‘all people may reap the benefit’.24 In and around the market towns there were practitioners offering inoculation with varying degrees of professionalism. During an epidemic in Northamptonshire in 1750, Philip Doddridge, the Puritan divine, observed that through inoculation ‘whole towns’ had ‘passed safely through’ the epidemic. In the summer of 1752 the practitioners in Salisbury inoculated very extensively, and probably in some measure pro bono, in the face of a serious outbreak.25 The parishes themselves, which often had to spend large sums to relieve distress
21 Anon., ‘Further Hints about Inoculation’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 22 (1752), pp. 511–13. 22 Kirkpatrick, Analysis of Inoculation (1754), p. 267. 23 N.W. to Editor, 21 December 1750, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 20 (1750), p. 532. 24 J.M. Martin, The Rise of Population in Eighteenth-Century Warwickshire (Oxford, 1976), p. 41, n. 41. 25 Thomas Tatum to Editor, 2 December 1752, Salisbury Journal, 4 December 1752. Historians have tended to draw the wrong conclusions from the evidence of towns regulating inoculation. The discussion in regard to Salisbury in Rachel E. Waterhouse, ‘Public Health Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 207 arising from smallpox, were seeing the value of pre-emptive action.26 In the first documented initiative of this sort in 1756, the ratepayers at Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, paid a local surgeon to inoculate 336 of the poorer residents at 2s. per head.27 From the late 1750s a new style of inoculation further popularized the practice. For some time various medical men had reported good results with lighter incisions and simpler regimens that they probably adopted to cut costs. Robert Sutton of Kenton, Suffolk, and his sons transformed the new style of inoculation into a highly successful business.28 In addition to the lighter inoculation, they administered their own medicine, whose composition they kept a close secret, and provided accommodation in which patients could gain plenty of fresh air during recovery. In a remarkable business model, they sold franchises of the Suttonian method to scores of practitioners across Britain and Europe. They charged rates for the procedure, usually between three and six guineas a head, inclusive of board and lodging, that were beyond the reach of most people. But they were always ready to cut deals for groups and charity cases. In 1766 Robert Sutton, who had been asked by a gentleman of Ewell in Surrey to inoculate his family, proposed that if he were able to find some neighbours to pay as well, he would inoculate the parish poor for free. A meeting of the vestry was called and it was agreed to accept the plan. One hundred and fifty- six of the poorer villagers were safely treated and a month afterwards attended a thanksgiving service in the church.29 Daniel Sutton, Robert’s second son, was even more entrepreneurial. Setting up a large inoculation centre at Ingatestone, and the Medical Services’, in Elizabeth Critall (ed.), A History of the County of Wiltshire, vol. 5 (Oxford, 1957), p. 322, is very misleading in this respect. 26 Brunton, ‘Pox Britannica’, pp. 138–9. It is possible that some of the pest houses were used for inoculation activity. In 1741, for example, a parish in Kent leased a pest house from a medical practitioner: Elizabeth Melling (ed.), Kentish Sources. 6: The Poor (Maidstone, 1964), p. 139. 27 The pisodee is especially well documented because one of the ratepayers challenged the expenditure: Gloucestershire Record Office, Gloucester, Quarter Sessions, Order Books, Q/SO/8, fol. 145v. 28 David Van Zwanenberg, ‘The Suttons and the Business of Inoculation’,Medical History, 22 (1978): 71–82; Smith, chapter 4, pp. 68–91. 29 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 4 September 1766. This newspaper item, identifying the inoculator as Robert Sutton, is longer and more circumstantial than the account in The Gentleman’s Magazine which does not give a Christian name: James Hallifax et al., ‘An Authentic Account of the State of Inoculation at Ewell, in Surry [sic]’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 36 (1766), pp. 413–14. There seem to be no grounds for the assumption in Razzell and Smith that the inoculator was Daniel Sutton: Razzell, Conquest of Smallpox, p. 33; Smith, p. 79. 208 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Essex, he built up his practice by charity work. In 1766 he won acclaim by inoculating some four hundred villagers in a single day to stifle an epidemic at Maldon and gained further publicity by successfully defending himself at the assizes against an indictment that his practice had caused a smallpox outbreak in Chelmsford.30 He attracted the interest of Jonas Hanway, one of the governors of the Foundling Hospital, who visited him at Ingatestone. Aware of ‘how closely our poor children tread on the heals of each other’, Hanway was exploring the option of having the children billeted in Essex inoculated at Ingatestone. In July 1766 Sutton offered to inoculate them, as charity cases, at one guinea a head.31 The Suttons drew their profits from the overall package. The need for preparation, isolation and care during the infection, and convalescence in a salubrious setting were key elements in the Suttonian system. People who were able to arrange their own accommodation and care could be inoculated more cheaply. For the lower orders, inoculation ‘at home’ was only safe when the entire neighbourhood went through the disease at the one time. This sort of consideration led some of the better off people, when considering the inoculation of their children, to get together a smallpox party or even to propose using parish funds for a ‘general inoculation’. The initiative at Wotton-under- Edge in 1756, in which the vestry paid for the inoculation of the labouring poor as well as the paupers, was probably not the first of its kind. The Suttons were prominent among the practitioners providing this service and advertising their success. They and their associates, however, were in stiff competition from other inoculators who were adopting, independently or imitatively, a similar approach. Early in 1767, with smallpox threatening the small parish of Glynde in Sussex, Thomas Davies sought to persuade the community to protect itself by inoculation and ‘be clear of it in about a fortnight or three weeks’. In a letter to London, he observed that ‘there were at least a Score of Inoculating Doctors advertising every week in the Lewes Journal, all in the newest Fashion’ and
30 Robert Houlton, The Practice of Inoculation Justified: A Sermon … in Defence of Inoculation, to Which is Added, an Appendix on the Present State of Inoculation (Chelmsford, 1767), pp. 44, 56–60; Smith, pp. 77–9. His celebrity was subsequently satirized in a pamphlet entitled Tryal of Mr. Daniel Sutton, for the High Crime of the Preserving the Lives of His Majesty’s Liege Subjects, by Means of Inoculation. 31 London Metropolitan Archives, Foundling Hospital, A/FH/M/01/005/007–008, Daniel Sutton to Jonas Hanway, 15 July 1766. In October 1767, a Mr Sutton, probably Joseph Sutton, Daniel’s younger brother, was offering to inoculate the foundlings billeted in Berkshire at two guineas a head. The local inspector reported that the ‘lowest terms to inoculate twenty poor children and find them in every thing necessary will be twenty guineas, if charitably bestowed’: Gillian Clark (ed.), Correspondence of the Foundling Hospital Inspectors in Berkshire, 1757–68 (Reading, 1994), pp. 228–9. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 209 recorded an agreement with a Mr Watson who agreed to treat ‘as many as would be inoculated’ for 20 guineas, and less if the number was less than 40. Davies believed him ‘to be as good as any of them, Sutton & Co not excepted’.32 From the mid 1760s general inoculations became increasingly common, at least in southern England. In 1766 Dr Thomas Dimsdale conducted a general inoculation of Hertford and repeated the exercise at regular intervals. In 1767 the parish of Glynde was merely following in the wake of a number of Sussex towns and villages, including Tunbridge Wells and Rye.33 At Rye, Dr Thomas Frewen was paid 2s. 6d. per head for the inoculation of 329 poor persons, but the parish paid additionally for associated costs that ran to over £100, a fifth of the parish’s entire expenditure for the year.34 The poor parishioners were not badly served. Dimsdale and Dr Jan Ingenhousz who inoculated the inhabitants of Little Berkhamstead in the early months of 1768 had, by late autumn, performed the operation on Catherine the Great in St Petersburg and the Austrian imperial family in Vienna.35 The initiative for parish inoculations most often came from the freeholders who served on the vestry and took their turns as overseers of the poor. The involvement of the lord of the manor was important in parts of England where the parish was not so cohesive. The formidable Lady Ridley made a point of organizing and paying for the inoculation of the poor in her part of Northumberland.36 In respect of the general inoculation of a Yorkshire village early in 1788, a local nobleman ‘in the most polite manner, requested that he might be at the sole expence of executing a scheme which every family to whom he had applied, not many years before, had refused’.37 The parishioners of Shute in Devon pointedly declined to take up a similar offer by Sir John William de la Pole and preferred, for some
32 Razzell, Conquest of Smallpox, pp. 82–3. 33 Ibid., p. 82. 34 William Holloway, The History and Antiquities of the Ancient Town and Port of Rye, in the County of Sussex. With Incidental Notices of the Cinque Ports (London, 1847), p. 447. 35 Philip H. Clendinning, ‘Dr Thomas Dimsdale and Smallpox Inoculation in Russia’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 28(2) (1973): 109–25, at 115; Geerdt Magiels, From Sunlight to Insight: Jan IngenHousz, the Discovery of Photosynthesis and Science in the Light of Ecology (Brussels, 2010), p. 19–28. 36 Northumberland Archives, Ashington, Ridley [Blagdon] MSS. Collection description. 37 Review of James Lucas, ‘Remarks on Febrile Contagion’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 60 (1790), pp. 731–3, 835–7, at p. 732; John Haygarth, A Sketch of a Plan to Exterminate the Casual Small-Pox from Great Britain: and to Introduce General Inoculation (2 vols, London, 1793), 1, 17–18. 210 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France reason, to use their own funds to pay for the inoculation of 90 people.38 Elite leadership sometimes brought publicity to the benefits of the practice. When smallpox threatened Luton in 1788, David Stuart, the largely absentee vicar, hired a surgeon to begin inoculating the poor. The brother of Lord Bute, a former prime minister, he was a grandson of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He wrote up an account of the intervention that was widely read, making clear the economic sense of inoculation. He declared his intention to organize future inoculations at regular intervals.39
Inoculation and the Urban Poor
It is tempting to assume that the rural poor had greater access to inoculation than the urban poor. It was manifestly harder to organize large-scale inoculation in towns. That the inoculation of individuals and groups could prove hazardous to the non-immune population, was well recognized. Still, it should not be assumed that inoculation was not available to town-dwellers. There were many operators advertising their businesses to townspeople and doubtless opportunities for cut-price inoculation on market days. The steps taken by authorities against inoculation tended to be regulatory rather than prohibitive. The more responsible practitioners themselves refrained from inoculating during the warmer months, unless smallpox was already present. Even then, it was not so much an issue of the inoculation itself, as whether the patient was properly isolated during the infectious stage: it was for this reason that the authorities in Oxford threatened with legal action anyone found to be harbouring a smallpox patient.40 For the more substantial residents of the larger towns and cities there were usually inoculation houses conveniently sited on the outskirts. There were two such establishments just outside Bristol.41 It is likely that inoculation was offered to charity patients at the house run by practitioners associated with Bristol Infirmary. Though the hospitals established in the late eighteenth century excluded, for obvious reasons, smallpox cases, the philanthropists and medical men involved in them were interested in public health and in
38 Devon Record Office, Exeter, Shute Parish, Minute Book, 1236A/PV/1, items 1–2; Pamela Sharpe, Population and Society in an East Devon Parish: Reproducing Colyton 1540– 1840 (Exeter, 2002), p. 215. 39 Sir William Fordyce to the Editor, 12 April 1788, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (1788), pp. 283–4. 40 Jessie Parfit,The Health of a City: Oxford 1770–1974 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 3–5. 41 Mary Elizabeth Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 66–7. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 211 promoting inoculation. The new dispensaries, established to provide off-site medical assistance to the poor, generally offered institutional support. Dr John Haygarth, the physician at Chester Infirmary, proved to be one of the most energetic and enlightened campaigners against smallpox. In 1778 he founded a Small-Pox Society to gather epidemiological information and to develop and implement a scheme to combat smallpox through the inoculation of the poor and the strict reportage and isolation of cases, inoculated as well as natural.42 Though his scheme was not fully implemented, it achieved some success and was highly influential. A number of other northern towns – notably Carlisle, Leeds, York and Newcastle – were able to offer inoculation on a significant scale. The dispensaries provided the medical support and operational focus for this activity, offering free inoculation to the poor at specified times and under set conditions.43 It is hard to be clear about the availability of inoculation in London. The Smallpox Hospital was the public face of inoculation in the metropolis. Though several hundred people from the lower orders continued to be inoculated annually, the institution could not have made more than a relatively small contribution to meeting the needs of the children born in the city and the large number of migrants. Smallpox was endemic and natural infection probably ensured that most native Londoners who survived childhood had acquired immunity. It is likely, too, that most purposeful migrants had themselves inoculated before arrival. Of course, inoculation for more prosperous Londoners was available in a range of commodious houses in the suburbs, including a number of establishments set up by the Suttons in Kensington and Chelsea. There was certainly an awareness of the limited capacity of the Smallpox Hospital and the need to make more ample provision for the labouring poor. Early in 1770 the Suttons floated schemes that offered inoculation to the poor in their homes. Daniel Sutton advertised for subscribers who would be able to recommend, for each guinea subscribed, three people for inoculation.44
42 John Haygarth, An Inquiry How to Prevent the Small-Pox and Proceedings of a Society for Promoting General Inoculation at Stated Periods, and Preventing the Natural Small-Pox, in Chester (Chester, 1784). 43 Henry Lonsdale, The Life of John Heysham, M.D. and his Correspondence with Mr. Joshua Milne Relative to the Carlisle Bills of Mortality (London, 1870), pp. 39–40, 45, 47, 51; Review of James Lucas, ‘Remarks on Febrile Contagion’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 60 (1790), pp. 835–7; Katherine A. Webb, One of the Most Useful Charities in the City: York Dispensary, 1788–1988 (York, 1988), pp. 2, 13; Brunton, ‘Pox Britannica’, p. 166. 44 Similar schemes were floated by Daniel Sutton and William Sutton. William’s scheme was advertised in Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 27 January 1770. Daniel’s ‘Plan for Universal Inoculation, at the Patients own Habitations’ was advertised in Public 212 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
The patients would make two short visits to one of Sutton’s houses, to pick up the preparatory medicine and then to be inoculated, and would then be expected to go through the disease in their homes, during which time they would be visited, as needed, by Sutton’s assistants.45 The advertisement created some alarm in the city and there were threats of legal action.46 Given his mercenary reputation, Sutton may not in any case have found it easy to enlist charitable support. Nonetheless the basic modus operandi gained traction. In 1775 Dr John Coakley Lettsom, the Quaker philanthropist, took the lead in establishing the Society for the Inoculation of the Poor in their own Homes and, in 1777, in establishing the Dispensary for General Inoculation to make prophylaxis available. This initiative, too, created controversy. In 1776, the redoubtable Dr Dimsdale, distinguishing between ‘general inoculations’ in villages and ‘partial inoculations’ in larger towns and cities, condemned the scheme as ‘fraught with very dangerous consequences for the community’. He wrote pointedly of the danger of inoculated patients bringing the infection to their crowded homes ‘in close alleys, courts, and lanes’.47 His solution in relation to London was a remodelling and expansion of facilities at the Smallpox Hospital at St Pancras. Though reportedly ‘flourishing’ in 1779, Lettsom’s Dispensary seems not to have prospered.48 Nonetheless it cannot be assumed that the poor in London remained dependent for inoculation on the limited facilities at St Pancras. From the late 1760s, there was concern that the bills of mortality were showing that the number of smallpox deaths in London was on the rise, not only numerically but also as a proportion of deaths from other causes.49 It seemed at least ironic that this rise matched the increasing profile of inoculation in England, and the possible contribution of inoculation in London to the spread of the disease was a matter of some debate in the wake of Dimsdale’s attack on Lettsom’s scheme.50 Dr John Watkinson, the physician at the dispensary, reassessed the statistical evidence, challenged the construction placed on it, and argued that inoculated smallpox was not especially infectious, though he did
Advertiser, 9 February 1770. A fuller announcement of the plan, dated at Sutton House, 20 January 1770, was published in Lloyd’s Evening Post, 12–14 February 1770. 45 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 12–14 February 1770. 46 The Oxford Magazine: or University Museum, 4 (1770), pp. 43–6. 47 Thomas Dimsdale, Thoughts on General and Partial Inoculations (London, 1776), pp. vi–vii, 36–7. 48 Brunton, ‘Pox Britannica’, p. 162. 49 Jonas Hanway, Letters on the Importance of the Rising Generation of the Laboring Part of our Fellow-Subjects (2 vols, London, 1767), 1, 42. 50 Rusnock, Vital Accounts, chapter 4. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 213 conclude, somewhat dispiritedly, by saying that he did not expect his refutation to ‘convert opposition into patronage’.51 Dimsdale’s description of the manner in which many of the rich families in London organized their inoculations certainly suggests that the practice must have contributed, however modestly, to the spread of disease.52 Furthermore, there was almost certainly more casual inoculation among the lower orders than has been traditionally assumed. Since the 1750s physicians had raised concerns about cut-price inoculation in market towns and countryside, and nurses and even parents performing the operation on their children. It is hard to imagine that the London poor did not consider such means as were available to protect their children, especially as the natural infection was never far away. In seeking to explain the larger number of smallpox deaths in London, where inoculation was widely practised, compared to Paris, where it was severely restricted, Jonas Hanway pointed in 1766 to ‘indiscretion, with regard to the contagion, and the communication arising from inoculation’.53 In 1777 he pressed for measures ‘to encourage the practice of [inoculation] among the labouring part of our fellow-subjects’, especially the urban poor. Though he attributed the mortality to the neglect of inoculation, he still assumed that smallpox was ‘communicated to numbers by carelessness in practice’ and stressed that the ‘poor in the metropolis are very thoughtless’. 54 The indictment of Sophia Vantandillo in 1815 for injuriously exposing her infectious child in a public thoroughfare provides rare insights into prophylactic practices among the labouring poor. Gilbert Burnet, the inoculator, was an apothecary in Marylebone who appears to have inoculated large numbers of children in the back of his shop and sent them home with patent medicines and a printed note advising them to take the children out ‘to the fields for pure air’ but to avoid exposing them on the streets as much as possible ‘by putting an handkerchief over each child’s face’.55
51 John Watkinson, An Examination of a Charge Brought against Inoculation by De Haen, Rast, Dimsdale and Other Writers (London, 1777), p. 46. 52 Dimsdale, pp. 23–4. 53 Hanway, Laboring Part of our Fellow-Subjects, p. 42. 54 Hanway, Virtue in Humble Life: Containing Reflections on the Reciprocal Duties of the Wealthy and Indigent, the Master and the Servant (2 vols, London, 1774), 1, n. on p. xxiv, emphasis in original. 55 The ationalN Archives, London, KB 1 39/1, Bundle 1, items 34–5; Bundle 3, items 32–3. 214 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
The Plight of the Poor, Plebeian Agency and Public Health
In the history of inoculation the poor have played a variety of roles as both actors and acted upon. In the early years of the practice it is not surprising that the bodies of the poor were put into service to establish the safety and effectiveness of the procedure. The convicted felons at Newgate and the poor children of St James’s Westminster, though, shared the stage with the daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the children of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The physicians were often enough prepared to experiment on themselves and their own children. Nonetheless there can be little doubt that the poor bore the greatest share of the indignity and risk. When Dr Kirkpatrick found six- year-old smallpox matter on a thread – ‘in no ways mouldy’ – he sent it to a colleague who had the care of a workhouse to see if it could still communicate the infection.56 The clinical detachment of some physicians is quite astonishing. A discourse on the issue of whether a foetus in the womb could be infected with smallpox discloses an experiment in 1793, during a general inoculation, in which Dr Pearson oversaw the inoculation of a labourer’s wife in an advanced stage of pregnancy. After subsequently learning of her miscarriage and that the foetus bore signs of smallpox, he secured permission for its exhumation. The experiment proceeded with the lancing of the pustules of the corpse and the inoculation of a 9-year-old girl in London with the pus. The experiment concluded with notes on the progress of the disease on the hapless child.57 In seeking to establish and extend the practice of inoculation, medical practitioners and lay promoters of the practice nevertheless showed themselves sympathetic to the plight of the poor. Smallpox could spell disaster for families on the margins of subsistence. For individuals, it was not merely a matter that a severe case of smallpox could be very disfiguring and blight a person’s chances of marriage. It might result in the loss of sight and other crippling infirmities. Conversely, passing safely through the disease, whether naturally or by infection, set someone up for life. In choosing servants, employers were more likely to employ someone who, having already had the disease, would not at some future date be putting them to expense or anxiety on that score. This point was very much in the minds of the founders of the Smallpox Hospital and other promoters of inoculation of the poor. As a gentleman from Surrey observed, if inoculation were offered at low cost or charitably, it ‘would be readily accepted, especially by the lower ranks, as the not having had the small-pox often occasions their losing a good place; that generally being the first question asked of a servant
56 Kirkpatrick, Analysis of Inoculation (1761), pp. 212–13. 57 George Pearson, Observations on the Effects of Variolous Infection on Pregnant Women (London, 1794). Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 215 offering himself ’.58 The agents of the Foundling Hospital were certainly well aware that by inoculating their children they were better able to place them in apprenticeships and service.59 The provision of inoculation was not unalloyed philanthropy. Ratepayers were all too aware of the cost of supporting families in which the breadwinner fell victim to smallpox or lost work through illness.60 In relation to the inoculations at Luton in 1788, the Rev. David Stuart pointed out that during his time as vicar there had been an average of 25 smallpox patients each year, each costing the parish at a minimum of two guineas each, not including medical assistance. In comparison, the cost of inoculation was modest.61 The gentry and businessmen in England did not have quite the vested interest that slave-owners across the Atlantic had in the health of their labour-force. If a servant had not had smallpox or been inoculated, they sometimes reserved the right to dismiss him or her if they caught the disease.62 There were many occasions, however, when employers bore some of the costs of inoculation. The owners of factories with residential workforces may have seen the value of paying for the inoculation of their young workers.63 At a national level, it was axiomatic, as the Rev. Houlton, Daniel Sutton’s chaplain and publicist, put it, that the kingdom’s ‘strength, happiness, and security consist principally in the number of its inhabitants’.64 Political arithmetic figured prominently in the early controversy over inoculation. The statistical evidence that proved that inoculated smallpox was less often fatal than natural smallpox impressed most pundits. A contributor to The Gentleman’s Magazine clearly believed that saving a thousand lives must be ‘beneficial to society, and highly promotive of the publick welfare’, even if ‘at the same time a few are suffer’d to sink into the grave as a sacrifice to universal good’.65 The poor were often reported as indifferent if not hostile to inoculation. A degree of fatalism would have been natural among people who generally had
58 The Gentleman’s Magazine, 20 (1750), pp. 531–2, at p. 532. 59 Clark, Foundling Hospital … Berkshire, pp. 194, 229–30. 60 Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Social and Administrative History (London, 1926), p. 117. 61 The Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (1788), pp. 283–4. 62 Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996), p. 96. 63 Jean Lindsay, ‘An Early Industrial Community: The Evans’ Cotton Mill at Darley Abbey Derbyshire, 1783–1810’, Business History Review, 34 (1960): 277–301, at 300. 64 Houlton, p. 31. 65 Anon., ‘Remarks, on the Remarks of ***, or Inoculation Justified’,The Gentleman’s Magazine, 22 (1752), pp. 313–14, at p. 314. 216 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France so little control over their lives. Dr Haygarth remarked that, while people in the countryside lived in great fear of the disease, town-dwellers were not especially solicitous, and indeed seemed to allow their children to be exposed to the disease.66 It was never claimed, however, as it was sometimes alleged with respect to European peasants, that the English poor were content to let smallpox reduce the number of mouths they had to feed.67 The real difference between town and country was presumably that many town-dwellers had immunity to smallpox whereas some villages, by exercising caution, were able to escape infection for long periods of time. Fear of smallpox in the countryside did not then necessarily translate into a readiness to embrace inoculation. Many villagers saw inoculation as a source of infection rather than a means of protection and viewed with hostility the activities of inoculators in their neighbourhood. They may have agreed with Dr Haygarth who wrote that partial inoculation, ‘though eminently useful to the rich’ was ‘injurious to the poor’.68 In April 1768 rioters torched and levelled to the ground a house established by Sutton and a colleague at Yaxley, near Peterborough.69 For children there can have been little choice about inoculation. Some parents seem to have been happy to leave the decision for their children when they were able to make it for themselves. People felt increasingly under pressure, however, to make the decision rather earlier. There were very real dilemmas. As a gentleman of Kent wrote in 1752 in regard to the inoculation of his daughters, even if a parent ‘submits his own person to be inoculated, yet, I think, he may exceed the bounds of paternal authority over the person of his child, because a parent’s authority over the person of his child, is not equal to the authority a parent has over his own person’.70 Interestingly, he noted that his wife was among the people urging him to allow inoculation. Differences of opinion between parents may have been quite common, resulting in no action being taken, but on some occasions at least mothers took matters in their own hands.71
66 Haygarth, Sketch of a Plan, 1, 186. 67 For example, Erich Donnert, Johann Georg Eisen (1717–79): Ein Vorkampfer der Bauernbefreiung in Rußland (Leipzig, 1978), pp. 120–21. 68 Haygarth, Sketch of a Plan, 1, 36. 69 Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, 42 (1768), pp. 220. 70 ‘A Country Gentleman’ to the Editor, 9 March 1752, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 22 (1752), pp. 126–7 at p. 126. 71 It was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – not her husband – who decided to have her children inoculated. According to Arthur Young, since his father would not consent to his being inoculated, his mother organized it during his absence in 1753: Matilda Betham- Edwards (ed.), The Autobiography of Arthur Young (London, 1898), pp. 8–9. See also Michael Bennett, ‘Jenner’s Ladies: Women and Vaccination against Smallpox in Early Nineteenth- Century Britain’, History: Journal of the Historical Association, 93 (2008): 497–513. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 217
In relation to the children of the working poor, it seems likely that it was mothers who took the initiative to immunize their children. It was Sophia Vantandillo, not her husband, who was prosecuted for spreading smallpox through the inoculation of her child in 1815. If older children had some capacity to tug at the heartstrings of their parents, the charity children had none. The boards of governors and the overseers of the poor, who acted as their legal guardians, made categorical decisions to inoculate or not to inoculate the children in their care. Robert Blincoe, an orphan in London in the 1790s, left a graphic account of the ordeal of inoculation. He had been brought up as a child of the parish of St Pancras, which arranged his inoculation at the Smallpox Hospital prior to sending him to Derbyshire to be an apprentice in a textile mill. He recalled the awful medicine and the nurse’s insistence that he should lick his lips and be grateful for ‘the care that was taken to save him from an untimely death by catching the small-pox the natural way’. In regard to inoculation, his regret was that he had ‘lost a chance of escaping by an early death, the horrible destiny for which he was preserved’.72 As regards the village poor, it was sometimes hard to avoid inoculation. Of course, the parish had no right to force people to be inoculated. Even in the workhouse, inoculation could be refused. In relation to the high mortality at Barham, Suffolk, in 1791, it was explained that because ‘the poor in general were very averse to inoculation’ there was no way of preventing the disease raging through the workhouse.73 Needless to say, there were overseers of the poor who used a mixture of hustle and threats to secure compliance. Observing a general inoculation at Weston Underwood, Buckinghamshire, in 1788, William Cowper asked rhetorically: ‘Can man or woman be said to be free, who is commanded to take a distemper, sometimes at least mortal, and in circumstances most likely to make it so?’ He then continued: ‘No circumstance whatsoever was permitted to exempt the inhabitants of Weston. The old as well as the young, and the pregnant as well as they who had only themselves within them, have been inoculated.’74 The parish of Great Campford, Essex, likewise seems to have felt the need to rein in an overseer of the poor who had been encouraging the poor to be inoculated.75 The concern here, though, seems to be the parish’s reluctance
72 John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe (Firle, Sussex, 1977), p. 16. 73 [Arthur Young], General View of the Agriculture of the County of Suffolk: Drawn Up for the Consideration of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement (London, 1797), p. 222. 74 Robert Southey (ed.), The Works of William Cowper, Esq. Comprising His Poems, Correspondence, and Translations (London, 1836), 6, pp. 103–104. 75 A.F.J. Brown, Prosperity and Poverty: Rural Essex, 1700–1815 (Chelmsford, 1996), p. 142. 218 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France to bear the cost. There was certainly criticism of some parishes for not being zealous enough in inoculating their poor. Conversely, many poor people were exercising their own agency in seeking out inoculation. There were reports of them inoculating themselves and in some cases seeking to take the practice up as a moneymaking line. From the 1750s there was growing anxiety about promiscuous recourse to smallpox prophylaxis that was posing a threat to the peace of mind and physical safety of the broader community. In 1768 it was alleged that Mary Tabor of Tollesbury, ‘an idle and disorderly person, and of bad behaviour’, threatened to inoculate her children ‘in order to spread the Distemper’.76 The more general concern was that the poor lacked the means or the prudence to isolate themselves properly during infection. As early as 1754, Kirkpatrick had written about country folk undergoing cheap inoculation on market day and then ‘congratulating each other after it over strong Liquor, and returning immediately to their ordinary Labour and Way of Living’.77 In 1767 Arthur Young pointed to the ebullient way in which young men embraced inoculation: ‘In a year or two there will not be a lout in the country, that has not been inoculated; from which moment all bars are removed, and whip he flies to make his fortune atLondon .’ 78 For mothers in the back lanes of London, many of whom were engaged in casual employment, there was little real prospect of keeping inoculated infants indoors. In relation to London, the concerns about the dangers of inoculation may have inhibited the more responsible businesses and schemes without really impeding more irregular forms of plebeian inoculation. Dr Robert Willan reported a case in spring 1798 in which an inoculated child had communicated the infection to several others in the neighbourhood.79 In first decade of the nineteenth century there was growing alarm about the number of inoculators plying their trade in the metropolis. The inoculation of the poor served as a focus for thinking and acting in relation to community medicine and public health. The idea that smallpox prophylaxis should be available to all was articulated surprisingly early and consistently. The key premise, as in all matters relating to the poor, was that the parish had a responsibility for its own. Although they tended to inoculate the poor only when smallpox was threatening, some of the parishes were becoming more proactive in relation to prophylaxis. It was generally assumed that medical
76 Smith, p. 45. 77 Kirkpatrick, Analysis of Inoculation (1754), pp. 267–8. 78 The Farmer’s Letters to the People of England: Containing the Sentiments of a Practical Husbandman, on Various Subjects of Great Importance, 2nd edn (London, 1768), p. 341. 79 Robert Willan, Reports on the Diseases in London: Particularly during the Years 1796, 97, 98, 99, and 1800 (London, 1801), p. 18. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 219 practitioners themselves would moderate their charges for the labouring poor as well as taking charity cases. Private philanthropy played its part, especially in parts of England where the parish system was ineffective and in cities where it was under great strain. The economies of scale and the advantages of groups undergoing inoculation together pushed the practice in the direction of community medicine. In ‘general inoculations’, there was some levelling of distinctions between the children of paupers and the working poor. This social mixing prompted a legal ruling that being inoculated at the parish’s expense did not mean that the person should be regarded as in receipt of relief and forfeit the right to vote.80 The obvious need to regulate inoculation likewise pushed in the direction of larger frameworks. On the positive side, it was recognized that inducements and compensation would be necessary to encourage the poor to have their children inoculated and take time to keep them indoors during the infection. The payment of sums of money to the poor, conditional on their compliance with the quarantine rules, was a central feature of Dr Haygarth’s scheme in Chester. In Newcastle upon Tyne, the dispensary likewise paid mothers, on a sliding scale of 5s. for one child through to 10s. for three or more, to nurse their children through the disease. Between 1786 and 1801 over 3,000 children were inoculated. This sort of scheme required public support. From the late 1770s there were a number of appeals for parliamentary support and sponsorship of schemes to broaden the social range of inoculation but in a regulated way.81 In 1776 Dr Dimsdale called on the British Parliament to support his scheme for inoculation ‘so that as we are the first European nation who received and encouraged Inoculation, we may also have the honour of being the first who have generously diffused the benefit of it to the community at large, and transmitted it to posterity’.82 As early as 1770, Daniel Sutton had dangled the prospect of eradicating smallpox in Britain in advertising his scheme for inoculating the poor in their homes.83 Dr John Haygarth applied himself most thoroughly to epidemiological and organizational issues. His plan for suppressing smallpox
80 Alexander Luders, Reports of the Proceedings in Committees of the House of Commons, upon Controverted Elections, Heard and Determined during the Present Parliament. 81 As early as 1776 Dr Dimsdale called for incentives for the poor to seek inoculation: Dimsdale, pp. 58–61. In 1775 Jonas Hanway called on Parliament to intervene to make orderly provision for inoculation and in 1779 Dr Pugh looked for a law to oblige churchwardens to inoculate poor children at a set age: Jonas Hanway, The Defects of Police: The Cause of Immorality and the Continual Robberies Committed, Particularly in and about the Metropolis (London, 1775), pp. 89–90; The Gentleman’s Magazine, 49 (1779), pp. 192–3. 82 Dimsdale, p. 68. 83 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 12–14 February 1770. 220 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France in Chester proved influential and British newspapers proudly reported how it had been taken up with some success in the republic of Geneva.84 In 1793 he put forward an ambitious plan for the systematic containment and progressive eradication of smallpox throughout Britain.85 Sadly, there was no interest among the political classes – especially in the shadow of the French Revolution – for visionary schemes that required public outlays. It must always have been felt, too, that smallpox inoculation was a double-edged weapon in the war against the disease. By 1800 the hopes of control, if not eradication of smallpox were rapidly becoming associated with the new form of inoculation using Jenner’s cowpox or vaccine.
Variolation and Vaccination
By the end of the eighteenth century, smallpox inoculation (variolation) was a mass phenomenon. Though the upper and middle classes had the most access to prophylaxis, the lower orders were not wholly cut off from its benefits. It is possible that a quarter of the population protected themselves in this way. Many people continued to have misgivings about the procedure or simply delayed seeking inoculation until it was too late. Smallpox remained a killer, but it was becoming even more exclusively a child killer. The endemicization of the disease ensured that most adults were smallpox survivors. A recent analysis of London parish registers that record the cause of death has shown that the overall increase in smallpox deaths in the last third of the eighteenth century actually masked a decline in adult deaths from this cause, indicating that more young migrants to London already had immunity, either naturally or through inoculation, and underlining the appalling toll taken of London’s children.86 Some of this child mortality may in fact be explained by recourse to inoculation in the poorer parts of the city. Though there was some hope in the 1780s and 1790s that the adoption of schemes of orderly inoculation could control and even eradicate smallpox, it is not clear that the practice was on the increase in England. Even villages and towns that had successfully conducted ‘general inoculations’ in the past
84 Whitehall Evening Post, 22–24 April 1788. 85 Haygarth, Sketch of a Plan. 86 Romola Davenport, Leonard Schwarz and Jeremy Boulton, ‘The Decline of Adult Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century London’, Economic History Review, 64 (2011): 1289– 1314; Peter Razzell, ‘The Decline of Adult Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century London: A Commentary’, Economic History Review, 64 (2011): 1315–35. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 221 seem not to have implemented them routinely.87 For most people, inoculation could never be more than a last ditch defence against smallpox. The trend of scholarship has moderated Peter Razzell’s bold claim that inoculation was a key factor in the rapid growth of population in the late eighteenth century.88 Inoculation, however, was playing some part at least in sustaining population growth and improving life prospects. The fact that prophylaxis was sought by people as and when they perceived themselves to be at risk, must complicate a purely quantitative assessment. Smallpox prophylaxis enabled a key section of the population to be more mobile and productive. The significance of smallpox inoculation is most evident in its crucial role in the rapid spread of cowpox inoculation (vaccination) after 1800. It was in the course of inoculating large groups of people with smallpox that Edward Jenner, a Gloucestershire surgeon and physician, found first-hand evidence that people who had been infected by the cattle disease resisted smallpox. He used the technique in his experiments in 1796 to transfer cowpox from person to person and then to test their immunity with smallpox. It was broad familiarity with smallpox inoculation, and the technology and organization that had developed around the practice that helps to explain the speed with which, after the publication of his findings in 1798, he was able to establish vaccination as a mass practice. In 1799 William Woodville, physician at the Smallpox Hospital, used cowpox on large numbers of patients and then tested their immunity by smallpox inoculation.89 By 1800 many practitioners were reporting positive results with cowpox or, as it was increasingly termed, vaccine. Thomas Kelson made a trial of cowpox in the workhouse at Sevenoaks, devising crude experiments in which the vaccinated children shared beds ‘with a wretched family, just recovered from very bad small-pox, their dirty clothes unchanged’.90 The transition from the old to the new style of inoculation was by no means seamless. The general mildness of cowpox was beguiling. It was hard for the practitioner and even harder for their patients to be sure that the
87 Brighton conducted a successful ‘general inoculation’ in 1786 and another in 1794: Razzell, Conquest of Smallpox, pp. 119–21. Even in this case, however, there was some considerable difficulty and delay in organizing the inoculation in 1794:Lloyd’s Evening Post, 23–25 December 1793; Lloyd’s Evening Post, 6–8 January 1794. 88 Razzell, Conquest of Smallpox, p. xxvii. But see now Peter Razzell, Population and Disease: Transforming English Society, 1550–1850 (London, 2007). 89 William Woodville, Reports of a Series of Inoculations for the Variolæ Vaccinæ, or Cow- Pox: With Remarks and Observations on the Disease, Considered as a Substitute for the Small- Pox (London, 1799). 90 Thomas Kelson to the Editor, 19 May 1800, Medical and Physical Journal, 4 (1800): 21–4, at 22–3. 222 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France inoculation had succeeded. At the same time the fact that practitioners were often using both smallpox and cowpox meant that there were dangers of cross- contamination, confusion in relation to observations, and some unfortunate outcomes. For all its debts to smallpox inoculation, cowpox inoculation was a game- changer, not least in relation to the poor. In so far as it could be established that cowpox (vaccine) provided equivalent security to smallpox, it offered major advantages. Since it was a milder disease, there was less need of medical attention and no danger of cross-infection, and consequently it could be done cheaply and without too much disruption to working lives. ‘Humanity now calls aloud on us to substitute a disease that brings security to those who seek it, and spreads danger to none’, Dr Cappe of York wrote, adding, ‘The poor need no inducement to adopt the cow-pox; the choice is now theirs.’91 The lower orders were nonetheless wary. There proved to be significant difficulties in assuring the quality of the lymph and the effectiveness of the procedure. The new and old forms of inoculation were competitors in the medical marketplace. By 1805, seemingly in the wake of some cowpox failures, there was growing alarm that in the capital especially many people were returning to inoculation and, more generally, that there was a marked increase in the number of smallpox deaths. There was a strongly supported campaign for legislation to bring inoculation in the city under strict control.92 A series of bills between 1808 and 1814 failed to gain adequate support in Parliament, with many parliamentarians reluctant to infringe the rights of parents to make their own choice between the more risky but tried and tested form of inoculation and the new alternative. It was acknowledged, however, that the common law made provision for the prosecution of a person whose careless behaviour caused infection. The idea that there was a national interest in containing smallpox, and seemingly the means to do so, did not rapidly translate into government support for cowpox in England. Though some European states moved quite rapidly to embrace vaccination and suppress variolation, the British political establishment was disinclined to take on broader responsibilities or impinge on the rights of individuals to make their own calls with respect to the health of their families. One feature of cowpox inoculation, however, made public support and infrastructure even more necessary than for the older form of prophylaxis. Unlike smallpox matter, cowpox lymph was hard to obtain, and the quality of the lymph was hard to assess and maintain. The main supply of the lymph for vaccination was previously vaccinated children, with the lymph often
91 Robert Cappe to the Editor, 13 October 1800, ibid.: 429–40, at 438. 92 Deborah Brunton, The Politics of Vaccination: Practice and Policy in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, 1800–1874 (Rochester, 2008), pp. 16–19. Inoculation of the Poor against Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century England 223 transferred from the arm of one child to the arm of another. The expansion of the practice required a continuous stream of new patients and some centralization of activity. In the early years of vaccination several private charities – notably the London Cow-Pock Institute and then the Royal Jennerian Society – took on the responsibility of collecting and circulating information about the practice and, more crucially, maintaining a supply of fresh lymph for distribution across England and, for a time, around the world. The sheer scale of the vaccination activity, institutional and private, was remarkable. In a largely unheralded move, the British Parliament established the National Vaccine Establishment in 1809. Though it had a modest budget, it represented the first publicly funded body that directly provided healthcare. It operated a series of depots around London in which vaccination was freely available and within a few years was distributing tens of thousands of packets of vaccine annually.93 It also took on the task of finding suitable cases of reckless inoculation to prosecute, including Sophia Vantandillo in 1815. Acknowledging popular prejudice against the practice in London, a supporter of vaccination thought that the ‘cause is not aided by the ill-timed zeal of those of its advocates who go about, lancet in hand, almost compelling poor ignorant women to have their infants inoculated with cow pock matter’.94 The continuing recourse to smallpox inoculation by the lower orders in London and elsewhere until its outright prohibition in 1840 is evidence of the strong roots that it had put down in plebeian culture in the late eighteenth century.
93 Brunton, Politics of Vaccination, pp. 15–16. 94 Anon., ‘Report of Diseases’, Medical and Physical Journal, 33 (1815): 166–7, at 167. This page has been left blank intentionally Part III Textual and Visual Representations This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 11 Poverty as a Mobile Signifier: Waldensians, Lollards, Dives and Pauper Mark Amsler
In 1936, during what used to be called the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange took a series of photographs in a migrant camp in Nipomo, California. Working for the Farm Security Administration, she was documenting the effects of economic decline, drought and social turmoil on everyday people, especially in small town and rural America. At one point, she came upon a mother and her children in a makeshift shelter by the roadside. In Lange’s photo, the mother, 32-year-old Florence Owen Thompson, is circled by her ragamuffin children, her face creased and careworn, her anxious eyes looking off into some not very promising future. As we know, Lange’s photo, one of a series, was subsequently cropped and bleached to serve social and aesthetic purposes.1 Her teenage daughter was deleted from the frame, and the image was generically titled ‘Migrant Mother’. When the photo was published in the San Francisco News,2 Florence Thompson became the face of poverty, uprootedness and need in the Depression-era United States. Lange’s photograph helped marshall national support to address the growing plight of families displaced in the 1930s by drought, unemployment and foreclosures, and it mobilized federal and state agencies and private charities to intervene more directly to assist people disadvantaged and displaced by unemployment and drought. As an image of poverty, Lange’s photo helped recuperate people in need into a community of caring.
1 See the entire series of Lange’s photographs of Thompson at The Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Reading Room at www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm. html, accessed: 2 January 2011. 2 ‘What Does the “New Deal” Mean to This Mother and Her Children?’, 11 March 1936. 228 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Poverty as a Mobile Signifier
Sometimes, the face of poverty in the high and later Middle Ages was not so different from Florence Thompson’s. Clergy and lay people circulated images of poor agrarian men and women, artisans barely scraping by, the lame and the homeless, to motivate Christians’ care and generosity toward their neighbours and the indigent. However, medieval constructions of poverty as a discourse and a harsh condition differed from modern constructions of poverty discourse in two important ways: the involuntary poor were re-read in relation to those clergy and lay people who voluntarily adopted a neo-apostolic poverty as part of their spiritual discipline; and new groups of readers and writers, often lay people, deployed their scriptural interpretation and preaching in support of their voluntary poverty as a new form of religious and social agency. Poverty and literacy were closely linked but contested practices in the later Middle Ages. The dominant medieval image of a poor person was an illiterate peasant, an agrarian labourer with limited social power or economic freedom. However, in the Middle Ages involuntary poverty was not necessarily regarded as a social deficit to be eradicated, nor was illiteracy always understood as something to be overcome. Different social groups occupied different relations to poverty and impoverishment. Wealth and power inequalities were unevenly distributed across Europe and within social estates.3 Aristocratic moral and religious codes identified ‘nobility’ and piety with being generous and considerate to the poor, with almsgiving and protecting the vulnerable. Some evidence from local courts suggests that what Marjorie McIntosh calls ‘the poverty cluster’ – vandalism, vagrancy and subtenanting – was more tolerated or at least more often overlooked by officials, jurors and neighbours at the local level than by social commentators and parliamentary lawmakers. At the same time, involuntary poverty and hardship caused by economic and climate change prompted some to rethink the criteria for sin and criminality in the name of human survival. After 1100, many theologians and canonists argued that absolute need, a condition more destitute than involuntary poverty, could
3 F.R.H. Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition: English Society in the Late Middle Ages (New York, 1970), pp. 31–60; Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, 1986), pp. 110–12, 246–7; Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 81–96. On various, sometimes competing images of poverty in later medieval English literature, see Kate Crassons, The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN, 2010). Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 229
‘justify’ theft. According to the narrator of William Langland’sPiers Plowman: ‘And nede ne haþ no lawe’.4 Voluntary poverty constituted a re-enactment of the life of Christ or a re-enactment of the Apostles’ self-dispossession, collective ownership of property, preaching and missionary mobility, all ideally in service to others and/ or in pursuit of Christian perfection or evangelical salvation.5 But Jesus’s and the Apostles’ itinerancy was sometimes a troubling model for medieval clergy and pious lay people. Voluntary poverty, living as pauperes Christi, was a founding principle of the new fraternal orders, authorizing the friars’ missions to preach, gloss and interpret God’s word among the people and to renew the faith and authority of the Church. In their foundation, the friars were also authorized to beg and receive alms from Christians to support themselves and continue their spiritual work. But increasingly the mobile friars came into conflict with secular and parish clergy who regarded the friars as siphoning away essential resources from local Christian communities in order to sustain their own separate communities. Beginning with the Waldensians in the second half of the twelfth century, a counter voluntary poverty emerged which was articulated and performed by lay groups or by collaborations between lay people and clerics, especially lay people from different social ranks wanting to read scripture for themselves. Sometimes, lay engagement with scripture led people to try and live out for themselves a version of apostolic Christianity or to challenge the Church’s claim that clergy and friars should be recipients of lay gifts and that the clergy should be the principal distributers of charity and aid to the poor. Some lay readers, taking up the spiritual call to downsize materially, moved through the countryside and towns preaching their interpretation of ‘Christ’s law’ based on their reading and study of the Gospels, Psalms and other texts. Changing ideas and practices of literacy produced new readers and kinds of texts which sometimes undermined the dominant medieval discourse of poverty. After 1200, as Michael Clanchy and others have shown, literacies in the vernaculars and to a lesser degree Latin were becoming more widespread and an expected competence or prerequisite for social action across medieval
4 William Langland, Piers Plowman, B.20.10. Subsequent references to the B- and C-texts of Piers Plowman are cited in the text from the following editions: Piers Plowman [B-text], ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H.A. Shepherd (New York, 2006); Piers Plowman: An edition of the C-text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Berkeley, 1978). Cf. Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its Application in England (Berkeley, 1959), p. 38. 5 Gordon Leff,Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent, c.1250 – c.1450 (2 vols, Manchester, 1967), 1, pp. 15, 51–4. 230 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France society as well as a prompt for lay religious activity.6 Lay people’s access to textual knowledge was increasing across Latin and the vernaculars, but lay literacy was still a highly contested and contesting practice. In this chapter, I argue that medieval social contests over the role, meanings and responses to poverty were linked to different constructions of involuntary and voluntary poverty, new forms of lay literacy and struggles for textual power between lay and clerical groups. Religious literacies and contesting readings were embedded within voluntary poverty as enacted by both clergy and lay people. Particular kinds of literacy and textual practices authorized voluntary poverty and challenged the Church’s and social elites’ attitudes and behaviours toward the involuntary poor. Rather than signifying a stable concept or category or connotation, ‘Poverty’ was a mobile signifier within late medieval society. The principal way in which voluntary poverty and literacies were entwined begins with clerical and lay scriptural reading. Jesus’s life and teachings were the positive figure of voluntary poverty and the ideal of care for the poor. The Gospels and Paul’s letters were regularly cited to show Christians’ obligations toward the poor and the spiritual advantages of living humbly or as a poor person. Jesus stressed that the humble, the poor in spirit, are first in the kingdom of heaven and that people should not be overly solicitous about personal material possessions: ‘Ne soliciti sitis’.7 Mary of Magdala was read as an example of the contemplative life, and her poverty, lack of material possessions and forsaking of dominion were promoted as the material condition for productive contemplation and piety.8 When the rich young man (dives) asks how he can attain heaven, Jesus tells him to give away all he possesses and follow him.9 The young man leaves dejected, but the passage was a touchstone for voluntary poverty movements among both clergy and laity. Both strands of voluntary poverty, the fraternal orders and the mostly lay, scripturally energized neo-apostles, focused on Church reform and evangelization, and both groups referred to scripture as their principal authority, but the two groups did not inhabit the same beliefs, goals, practices or discursive subjectivities. By the mid fourteenth century, the friars or mendicants were no longer credible purveyors of the ideal of voluntary poverty but were frequently criticized for having abandoned the apostolic ideal and become more worldly,
6 Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1993), pp. 224–52; Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, 2002); Mark Amsler, Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Later Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2012). 7 Matt. 6:25–6. 8 Luke 10:38–42. 9 Matt. 19:21; cf. Matt. 10:9. Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 231 materialist, wealthy and self-serving.10 Also, in the market economy of the later Middle Ages, theologians, pious lay people and social critics such as Richard FitzRalph (d. 1360), in his De pauperie salvatoris, qualified the practice of absolute voluntary poverty and called for religious and lay people, the prosperous and the barely scraping by, to become more socially and materially responsible for the involuntary poor and indigent. Rather than abstaining from wealth, people should work and accumulate wealth which then they could use to provide for or enhance the lives of those less fortunate or in need. Reflecting a wider audience for religious literacy and reading, these critics and writers, including Langland and anonymous Lollard writers, encouraged people to sympathize more with the poor as human beings, to support them, and where possible, to walk along with them and share their conditions. They urged those with means to be more active in the community, distributing charity and alms to the poor and helping the needy and working poor in both body and spirit. New lay readers and new texts, especially in the vernacular, proposed different controversial ways in which the apostolic Christian ideal of voluntary poverty and evangelism could have wider social benefits. The Waldensians adopted voluntary poverty and itinerant preaching as a consequence of their often literal interpretations of selected scripture passages, which they deployed as a kind of religious bio-politics. In the late fourteenth century, some lay and clerical writers and readers (for example, the writers of Piers Plowman, Pierce the Ploughman’s Creed, and Dives and Pauper) interpreted scripture less rigorously on the subject of voluntary poverty than did the Waldensians or Wyclif. They assimilated poverty discourse to a ‘middle way’ which acknowledged the needs of the poor but also accepted that honestly earned wealth did not in itself lead one to damnation. In this accommodating discourse about poverty and the ‘poor’, these writers read ‘need’ and ‘charity’ differently. They stressed the spiritual connections rather than the material and social distances between haves and have-nots and advocated pious reading among the literate and the distribution of wealth for poor relief. Some Lollard writers also represented the dignity and spiritual example of the poor and voluntary poor as a model for all members of society, a text to be lived out, performed. At the same time, they chastised lying beggars and idlers and satirized contemporary friars, whose hypocritical behaviours mocked their vows of poverty and their claims to literate authority. These late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century controversialists, such as the writer of Dives and Pauper, continued the Waldensian challenge to clerical literacy and authority by using poverty discourse, scriptural reading
10 Cf. Du Boulay, pp. 77–9; Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, 1986). 232 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France and controversial writing to argue for a different social order and greater social Christian responsibility.
Poverty, Literacy and Waldensians
In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, fraternal as well as non-fraternal voluntary poverty movements functioned within the mainstream Church. By 1200, however, the mainstream Church had become increasingly intolerant of lay preaching. Rather than serving to deter heresy, lay preaching and religious literacy were more suspect as fomenters of heresy. In the fourteenth century, the situation shifted again as criticism of the hypocrisy and materialism of the powerful friars became more widespread, especially among non-fraternal voluntary poverty groups. The orders of friars or mendicants (Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites and Austins) professed voluntary poverty, chastity and obedience, but they were differentiated from parish clergy by their licences to travel and preach among the people and receive alms as part of the Church’s efforts to renew the faith, improve devotion, encourage penitential discipline and disseminate doctrine. In the eyes of the official Church at the time, preaching and its alliance with official literacy privileged fraternal over non-fraternal voluntary poverty. The Dominicans in particular were formed in 1221 to preach against persistent ‘heretical’ groups in France and Italy, some of whom also professed voluntary poverty. Friars increasingly clashed not only with secular clergy but also with non- fraternal groups professing both voluntary poverty and wider scriptural literacy. As a result, the Dominicans became important archivists and interrogators of religious dissent and doctrinal conflict in the later Middle Ages. By the mid fourteenth century, anti-fraternal sentiment had achieved ‘symbolic’ discursive status as the orders of friars were perceived to have abandoned their original allegiance to voluntary poverty and humility and to have become false beggars and luxurious freeloaders. William of St Amour’s exegesis identified the friars with the pseudo-apostles and the Antichrist of the Last Days, while Wyclif and Lollards criticized the friars as hypocrites and bad readers. Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale exemplifies the anti-fraternal sentiment among the laity with the Summoner’s portrayal of a solicitous, flattering, greedy friar trying to get money out of the gentry. Chaucer’s pilgrim Friar Hubert – Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 233 handsomely dressed and not looking very much like ‘a povre scolar’ – studiously avoids the poor because ‘it may nat avaunce’.11 In an intriguing chronological fold within social history, organized voluntary poverty among spiritual lay people actually preceded the founding of the Friars Minor or Franciscans (c.1209). In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Waldensians, also known as the Poor of Lyons, Poor of Lombardy and Humiliati, were mostly lay people who adopted voluntary poverty and neo-apostolic practices, and flourished as preachers and community builders throughout central and southern France and northern Italy. Other lay and clerical dissenters followed the Waldensians in France, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries and England. Deploying their active scripture reading, writing, teaching, preaching and example, these socio-religious groups put into question, if not under erasure, the filiations of discursive power embedded in terms such as paupertas, pauper, poor, need, alms, caritas (love, charity), giving and use (usus). In 1173, according to the Anonymous of Laon’s Chronicon universale (thirteenth century), Waldes, a prosperous merchant and moneylender from Lyon, was deeply moved in the marketplace by a minstrel reciting the conversion and life of St Alexis, presumably in the vernacular. The chronicler pointedly mentions that Waldes’s conversion experience occurred during a time of local famine, starvation and increased poverty. Waldes sought out scholars to ask them the best way to attain God and salvation. One theology teacher quoted Matt 19:21 to him: ‘If you will be perfect, go and sell all that you have’. Unlike the dives in the Gospel of Matthew, the wealthy Waldes promptly offered his wife the real estate or the moveable goods. With sorrow, she chose the real estate. Waldes proceeded to give away some of his stuff to people he had profited from ‘unjustly’ and to his young daughters as an endowment when he entered them in the convent at Fontevrault, but he gave most to the poor.12 Thereafter, Waldes continued to display publicly (in manifesto) his newly chosen poverty and renunciation of his wealth.13
11 Cf. Szittya; Margaret Deansley, A History of the Medieval Church 590–1500, 9th edn (London, 1969), pp. 150–61; Ralph Hanna III, ‘“Vae octoplux”, Lollard Socio-Textual Ideology, and Ricardian–Lancastrian Prose Translation’, in Rita Copeland (ed.), Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 244–63; Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2008), p. 27 (Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, lines 246, 260). 12 Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans (eds and trans.),Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York, 1991), pp. 200–201. 13 Euan Cameron, Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2000), pp. 12–15. 234 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Stephen of Bourbon (Dominican, d. 1261) gives a similar account of the origins of Waldes’s conversion and the beginnings of Waldensianism in his Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilis (after 1249), but he includes important details not found in the Anonymous of Laon’s account. Stephen’s narrative of the ‘Poor of Lyon’, considered generally accurate by modern historians, foregrounds poverty discourse and Waldes’s literacy and collaboration with local clergy. This probably reflects Dominicans’ concern with unruly literacies among the laity. Stephen also shows how the terms of poverty discourse were themselves part of the debate. He criticizes the Poor of Lyon by turning their own words against them and punning on the semantics of pauper. The group founded by Waldes, he says, ‘are called the Poor of Lyon … [and] entered upon their life of poverty … because of what the Lord said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Verily they are poor (pauper, that is, lacking) in spirit – in spiritual blessings and in the Holy Spirit.’14 Stephen’s pun unintentionally calls into question the signification ofpauper – a person, a status, a deficit? Stephen also describes Waldes as rich but ‘not well educated’ [illiteratus].15 In the eyes of the official Church, Waldes and his followers were not clergy, not authorized to preach and illiterati because they could not read Latin, although by Stephen’s time the ideological association of laici with illiterati was already unstable. Stephen of Bourbon’s account of Waldes’s response to scripture and use of texts reveals, not entirely intentionally, important links between lay apostolic poverty and lay literacy. According to Stephen’s narrative, when Waldes heard saints’ lives recited in the marketplace, he wanted to know more about what the saints read and what the Gospels said, so he found two priests who translated portions of the Latin text into the local French vernacular. Stephen actually names the priests, Bernard Ydros and Stephen of Anse, because he cites them as eyewitnesses for the account he gives. Stephen then adds, ‘This they did, not only for many books of the Bible but also for many passages from the Fathers, grouped by topics, which are called Sentences’. After reading and studying the vernacular scriptural texts, Waldes decided to ‘devote himself to evangelical perfection, just as the Apostles had pursued it. Selling all his possessions, in contempt of the world he broadcast his money to the poor and presumptuously arrogated to himself the office of the apostles’.16 In the narrative, Waldes’s conversion to apostolic poverty and evangelism results from his initial response to oral vernacular recitation followed by his collaboration with priests to produce written vernacular versions of scriptural study aids. Stephen represents
14 Wakefield and Evans, p. 209. 15 Ibid., p. 209. 16 Ibid. Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 235
Waldes’s as arrogant and prideful when he uses his reading to become a neo- apostle. In the eyes of the Dominican inquisitor Stephen, Waldes the merchant is unruly in that he uses scripture and scripture aids in the vernacular rather than in Latin, interprets scripture for himself, adopts apostolic poverty outside any clerical rank and publicly professes his voluntary poverty and renunciation of worldly wealth.17 However, Stephen’s narrative remains silent on a crucial aspect of the power relations between textual interpretation and medieval poverty discourse. When Waldes and his followers interpreted scripture on biblical and apostolic poverty, they often emphasized thesensus literalis, especially the original historical contexts and semantic denotations of words such as pauper, sandalia and perfectio. The words of David and Jesus recorded in scripture were especially important among lay voluntary poverty groups. Claiming they are pauperes before God, David, Jesus and the early Waldensians, presented lay readers and listeners with alternative models of perfection, different from those of celibacy, monastic renunciation or clerical ordination. Traditionally, lay people were shown the imperfect path to salvation, faithful marriage and honest work, but that path was always lesser than and categorically different from the paths available to clerici. Resisting this lesser status for lay literates, Waldes and other lay people read Latin or vernacular scripture for themselves, interpreted moral passages with the help of exegetical and preaching texts and used their reading to articulate ‘Christ’s law’, which they argued entitled them to preach in public, read and study together in groups and re-enact apostolic Christianity in the community. In doing so, the Waldensians’ selective reading of scripture carved out a new pathway to Christian salvation and religious agency. Performatively embedded in voluntary poverty, this new pathway threatened the traditional social and religious order immensely and prompted re-imaginings of the functions of poverty, wealth and textualities across the social spectrum. Waldensians became one of the most widespread and persistent dissenting groups in medieval Europe. Dominated by lay people, the movement was never centrally organized, but it did include some like- and reform-minded clergy and, as Stephen’s Tractatus indicates, clergy who collaborated with lay people to produce vernacular texts for wider religious study. After 1173, the Waldensians became the new itinerant face of voluntary apostolic poverty. Performatively, they foregrounded certain signifiers as part of their public image. One signifier, their mobility and itinerancy, was part of their preaching mission as well as part of their voluntary profession of poverty and therefore their need to seek
17 Cf. Cameron, pp. 11–17; Alexander Patschovsky, ‘The Literacy of Waldensianism from Valdes to c.1400’, in Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (eds), Heresy and Literacy, 1000– 1530 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 112–36. 236 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France alms.18 Another was clothing, in particular the way many travelled around in ‘sandalia’, literally following Gospel commands (Mark 6:8–9). Waldensians either cut away the upper parts of their leather shoes to imitate the apostles’ Mediterranean footwear or had sandals woven in the Mediterranean style. What signified voluntary poverty here was the cutting away and the refusal of a certain kind of bodily protection. The controversy over sandals led some to refer to the Waldensians as Insabbatati [sandal weavers]. When the followers of Durand of Osca reconciled with the Church, they agreed to alter their form of cut-away shoes to distinguish themselves from other, still ‘heretic’ Waldensians. But when the announced style changes seemed to make little difference or were not evident enough, Pope Innocent III forbade all groups from displaying any kind of distinctive footwear.19 The sandal controversy was heated through the mid thirteenth century, but seems to have subsided after 1300. Like the conflicts over public preaching and literal interpretation, contested styles of footwear suggest how the public performance of paupertas was bound up with doctrinal questions of virtuous voluntary poverty and literate subjectivity.20 Waldensians publicly performed voluntary poverty in other ways, too. When some people adopted Waldensian apostolic poverty, they announced their conversion to their neighbours by giving away their possessions, becoming itinerant and collecting and disseminating alms and material aid throughout the communities with which they were associated. In addition to providing aid to the sick and destitute, early Waldensians played hide-and-seek with the image of the itinerant ‘beggar’. They relied on alms and handouts from sympathetic people and followers for their food and shelter. Relying on memorized scripture read aloud and vernacular translations of commentaries and handbooks similar to the texts used by more mainstream, orthodox preachers, early Waldensians preached their version of apostolic poverty and spirituality in public [in manifesto], thereby broadcasting their interpretations of scripture as both authoritative and as models for spiritual behaviour. Initially, Pope Alexander III (d. 1181) tolerated the lay-dominated movement, mostly because they were doctrinally orthodox and a helpful popular antidote to the more feared Cathar dualism in central and southern
18 Caterina Bruschi, The Wandering Heretics of Languedoc (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 121–3. 19 See Innocent III’s letters and bulls in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (221 vols, Paris: Garnier, 1844–55), 215, cols 1510–13; 216, cols 75–7, 648–50; Cameron, p. 32. 20 Cf. Peter Biller, ‘Fingerprinting a Description of the Waldensians’, in Caterina Bruschi and Peter Biller (eds), Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy (York, 2003), pp. 163–208, at pp. 168, 196–7. Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 237
France. But increasingly, the Waldensians’ performative apostolic poverty, scripture reading and public preaching were understood as signifying dissent from the organized Church. Eventually the Pope forbade the Waldensians to preach or perform sacraments because in doing so they overtly usurped the ordained clergy’s institutional authority. However, Waldes and his followers continued to preach and travel throughout the countryside.21 Despite their ambivalence about owning property, because it usually entailed individual labour, a few Waldensian groups drifted away from the strict re-enactment of the apostolic life of itinerant poverty and established more permanent living areas with dormitories and schools. Some communities engaged in farming and other labour to support themselves, much like the subsistence farming and production in large monasteries.22 Early critics of the Waldensians focused on their disobedience to papal authority and their public preaching and use of scripture and scriptural aids traditionally reserved for the clergy. Over time, the Waldensians’ growing anticlericalism became the focus of criticism, surveillance and interrogation. So where does poverty fit in? Based on their discontinuous reading and selective literal interpretations of scripture, Waldes and his followers professed apostolic poverty, begged for food and shelter and preached the importance of giving alms and material assistance to the poor and those in most need. What seemed especially to irk the established Church and community leaders was the fact that Waldes and his followers, many of whom came from successful, literate, prosperous backgrounds (otherwise, how could they give their possessions away?), simply did not act poor enough. They made public displays of their renunciations of material goods. They used clerical textual culture, public preaching and overt signifiers within poverty discourse to attract followers and advocate Church reform in the image of apostolic Christianity. Even though early Waldensians shed many of the physical and material trappings of commercial or mercantile prosperity, they did not behave as poor people were supposed to behave – abject, humble, illiterate, non-demonstrative, weak [impotens]. Although later Waldensians did try not to draw attention to themselves because of the threat of the Church’s inquisitorial gaze, early Waldensians were anything but voiceless in public. As reading (aloud), writing and preaching lay men and sometimes lay women, they were perceived to be disobedient, proud, socially disruptive and overtly demonstrative. Lay apostolic poverty in effect de-territorialized socially powerful textual practices and public discourse and the authority they carried away from the traditional clergy and relocated them with the bodies, voices
21 Wakefield and Evans, p. 203; Cameron, pp. 23–35. 22 Ibid., pp. 42–3, 107–108. 238 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France and lives of itinerant lay people. The early Waldensians stressed more literal interpretations of selected scriptural passages and articulated and re-enacted an apostolic alternative, thereby exposing the contemporary Church’s difference from the original ideals of Christianity founded on scripture. The Waldensian discourse of voluntarypaupertas was constructed with material, textual and performative signifiers such as sandals, renunciation of wealth, selective literal interpretation and lay preaching. The Waldensians remixed the dominant medieval discourse of poverty and opened up a counter discourse which challenged the criteria for religious perfection, piety and public caring and enacted a new form of Christian agency within the trope of paupertas.
Piers Plowman and Multiple Voices of Poverty
After 1300, the terms of poverty discourse were again more openly disputed. And again, Jesus’s words and deeds recorded in the Gospels became the centre of debate as to whether contemporary religious institutions and practices were consistent with apostolic Christianity. David’s reference to himself as pauper before God23 was read as a foreshadowing of Jesus’s humility. In the Gospels, Jesus is referred to as pauper and mendicus, as dominus of the world yet the world’s servus humilis. However, in mid fourteenth-century England and France, the debate over whether rich and poor had the right to possess private wealth or whether all goods were given by God and therefore should be held in common and used in charity and justice, enlarged poverty discourse to include the obligations and responsibilities of the propertied and wealthy to aid the poor and needy.24 This was a critical turning point in medieval poverty discourse. Theologians, preachers and lay people began asking new questions: did paupertas and mendicitas signify the same reality, or, as some medieval theologians claimed, did they signify different social and religious subjectivities? Who could have dominium over the earth and material goods? When Jesus took on human form and being and became a pauper and lived by alms [eleemosyna], was he performing the essence of being human and living in a state of grace rather than deprivation? Does a pauper more accurately represent ‘human-ness’ than a well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed and well-educated person? Langland’s Piers Plowman addresses these questions in terms of the virtue and necessity of productive labour for the benefit of all. Early in the poem, Will praises honest workers while castigating idle beggars, mendicants and corrupt
23 Psalm 39:18. 24 See Lester Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 1983), p. 176; Anne M. Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin, 2004), p. 154. Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 239 officials. In the B-text, Passus 6, for example, Piers lambastes wasters and idle folk who only pretend to re-enact apostolic Christianity: ‘Ac Robert Renneaboute shal [righte] noughte have of myne, | Ne ‘Posteles’ but they preche conne and have powere of the bisschop’ (B.6.148–9). Piers does not explicitly restrict the Posteles reference to friars, but his sentence implies that preaching legitimated by Church licence is good, honest labour, the kind of spiritual activity worthy of alms and charity offerings. In practice, bishops seldom authorized lay men or women to preach in their dioceses, and they certainly did not approve lay men and women such as Waldensians and Lollards who were publicly re-enacting apostolic Christianity. Later in Passus 6, Piers calls in Hunger as vengeance upon Wastoure, who stands for mendicants as well as idlers:
‘I was nought wont to worche’, quod Wastour, ‘now wil I nought bigynne!’ … ‘Now by the peril of my soule!’ quod Pieres, ‘I shal apeyre yow alle’. And houped after Hunger that herd hum ate firste. ‘Awreke me of thise wastoures’, quod he, ‘that this worlde schendeth’. Hunger in haste tho hent Wastour bi the mawe And wronge hym so bi about the chekes That he loked like a lantern al his lyf after. (B.6.167, 171–7)
Here, Piers the Avenger manoeuvres Hunger to attack and punish those who refuse to work. The narrative’s agrarian logic argues that those who do not contribute worthwhile work, producing food for the body or food for the soul, should be visited with the pain of physical lack. Hunger stands in as a metonym for Poverty, a condition to be remedied but also a punishment for idleness. In this early section, the poetic subtext is not Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan but the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. Those who can contribute to the social good and material welfare but who choose not to do so or who do so only for their own profit, whether clergy or lay, deserve to be punished by harsh physical deprivation, in effect to experience the condition of lack their idleness or lack of socially productive work inflicts on others. However, Piers Plowman as a narrative poem does not represent a single, coherent discourse of poverty. Author-oriented readers may coll(oc)ate the various speeches and narration into a functional author signed as ‘William Langland’, but the several versions of Piers Plowman are multi-voiced, dialogic in Bakhtin’s terms, and perhaps not even as chronologically distinct as the designated A, B, C and Z versions imply. Different speakers and different versions express or represent different positions within poverty discourse at different points in the poem. In the B-text and more so in C, Piers, Anima, 240 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Need and other speakers dramatize the plight of the poor, the disadvantaged, the politically powerless, the voiceless, the have-nots. In the C text, for example, Will, the narrator, arrestingly describes those who have little, are weighed down by rent payments and live in great need:
Woet no man, as y wene, who is worthy to have; Ac þat most neden aren oure neyhebores, and we nyme gode hede, As prisones in puttes and pore folk in cotes, Charged with children and chief lords rente; þat they with spynnyng may spare, spenen hit on hous-huyre, Bothe in mylke and in mele, to make with papelotes To aglotye with here gurles that greden aftur fode. And hemsulue also soffre muche hunger, And wo in winter-tymes, and wakynge on nythes To rise to þe reule to rokke þe cradle, Bothe to carde and to kembe, to cloute and to wasche, And to rybbe and to rele, rusches to pylie, That reuthe is to rede or in ryme shewe The wo of this wommenþat wonyeth in cotes; And of monye other men þat moche wo soffren, Bothe afyngred and afurste, to turne þe fayre outward, And ben abasched for to begge and wollen nat be aknowe What hem nedeth at here neyhebores at noon and at eue. (C.9.70–87)
This passage is framed by Will’s concern for giving to the truly needy (‘Bote ther he wiste were wel grete nede | And most merytorie to men þat ȝeueth fore. | Catoun acordeth therwith: Cui des, videto’; C.9.67–9) and his scepticism about moral arbiters (‘Woet no man’). Nonetheless, this is a moving, even tender narrative of a woman working for meagre wages in the cloth trade and caring for children without a male breadwinner. Like Lange’s portrait of Florence Owen Thompson in a migrant camp, Will’s description moves metonymically, from a woman to ‘this [these] wommen þat wonyeth in cotes’ to ‘monye other men’, all working alongside their neighbours but living in need, suffering from hunger, and ‘abasched’ [hesitant] to beg or ask for assistance. Derek Pearsall reads this passage as Langland’s ‘contemplation of the needs of the real poor’, but in context the description occurs as a narrative detour from the speaker Will’s argument that begging, especially by fakers and friars, is offensive.25
25 Derek Pearsall, ‘Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman’, in Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron and Joseph S. Wittig (eds), Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 167–85 at p. 178. Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 241
The speaker’s description focuses on the weaving woman’s need for basic sustenance and rent relief as well as on her humility, voicelessness and lack of public agency within her community. She embodies the image of abject poverty. Although the speaker is pained by the representations of such needy women and their families in poetic texts (C.9.82), it is precisely through such representations in Piers Plowman and other texts that poverty discourse challenges the status quo and encourages the haves to use their wealth and goods to care for the truly needy who are their ‘neyhebores’. The woman’s aloneness, her invisibility to her neighbours, makes her situation poignant. Will’s speech imaginatively affiliates the poor woman with a community of others who choose to live as meagrely as she has to or who sympathize with her and who, through preaching, reading, public mobility, begging and charity, challenge the inequity of the ‘chief lords’ whose rents extract the poor’s meagre funds. These poets, preachers and Christian social activists can speak for her and, more importantly, persuade her ‘neyhebores’ of the need for social action. Elsewhere in the B and C texts, involuntary and voluntary poverty are aligned with appeals to Christian patience and moderation. Some speakers embed poverty discourse within scholastic exposition and justificatory homiletics. When Haukyn asks what poverty means, Patience first replies with a collection of Latin aphorisms and maxims (B.14.275–9) and then, at Haukyn’s request, gives an exposition in English (B.14.280–323). Patience’s assemblage of maxims is drawn mostly from Secundus’ Gnomae, reproduced in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale. The statement ‘Paupertas est … donum Dei’ comes from the opening of Augustine’s De patientia.26 From Patience’s point of view, poverty is a remedy for Pride (B.14.280). Repeating to some extent Jesus’ play with literal and metaphorical language, Patience metaphorizes with multilingual alliteration the discourse of poverty, stating that ‘Pacyence is payn for Poverté hymselve’ (B.14.318). A proper spiritual and psychological attitude substitutes for bread [payn] itself. A radically simplified life becomes a life without care. Patience draws this lesson from scriptural reading, although late Roman Stoicism would have provided similar arguments. The point is, material conditions which might otherwise signify one’s impoverishment are redeployed in Patience’s speech as conditions for heightened virtue. In Patience’s speech, the condition of the poor is metaphorized as a higher spiritual or moral state. Patience’s image of poverty stands in sharp contrast to Will’s representation of the needing woman in her cottage.
26 Cf. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-text based on Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt, 2nd edn (London, 1995), p. 343 (n. to B.14.275). 242 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Elsewhere in the texts of Piers Plowman, representations of poverty point in different directions but still focus on social action and Christian virtue, that is, lay almsgiving, charity and wealth redistribution. This more social-activist emphasis addresses the question of dominium which sparked many late medieval debates about private vs collective ownership and the promise of apostolic Christianity to reform the socioeconomic order along religious lines. In the early Middle Ages, more centralized, top-down policies for caring for the poor and needy were laid out. In the Carolingian era, the king was acknowledged as the protector and caretaker of pauperes.27 Beginning in the tenth century, the Peace of God movement shifted responsibility for the poor and needy from kings to bishops as part of a wider re-establishment of ecclesiastical authority.28 Then, in the fourteenth century, lay people of means, prosperous mercantile families and aristocrats, began to assume some roles for poor relief traditionally delegated to monks, nuns and friars. This growing secular involvement with poor relief was aligned with other social changes, such as expanding lay literacy and access to vernacular exegesis and devotional reading. Such literate practices and social interventions strengthened wealthier lay people’s religious sensibilities and self- presentations, stimulated and supported by devotional reading and writing and the desire to display wealth, productivity and land holding. Toward the end of the B-text of Piers Plowman, Anima [Soul] cites Latin scripture to chastise rich men and women who ‘amortesed to monkes or [monyales] her rentes’ rather than follow the command in Psalm 111:9–10, ‘Dispersit, dedit pauperibus’ (B.15.317–27). Unlike monks, says Anima, the ‘pore freres’ ‘perfourme that texte’ (B.15.328). The key words in lines 327–8 are pauperibus and pore. Langland’s adjective distinguishes one kind of friar from another: ‘pore freres’ are good, humble friars, not those who beg alms and charity to benefit their order but those who truly re-enact Jesus’ model and apostolic Christianity by ministering to the poor: ‘And on hem that habbeth thei taken and yyve hem that ne habbeth’ (B.15.331). The phrase ‘pore freres’ ignites the semantic and functional ambiguity of the terms pauper and pore in dominant poverty discourse. Ideally, good friars are ‘pore’, without many material possessions, but they are also ‘pore’, that is, humble and charitable Christians who live up to their vows. According to Anima, these ‘pore freres’ are the contemporary model for all Christians:
27 R. le J. Hennebique, ‘Pauperes et paupertas dans l’occident carolingienne aux IXe et Xe siècles’, Revue du Nord, 50 (1968): 169–87. 28 Thomas Head, ‘Peace and Power in France around the Year 1000’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 23 (2006): 1–17; James Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London, 1995), pp. 84–5. Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 243
Forthi I conseille alle Cristene to confourmen hem to Charité, For Charité without chalengynge unchargeth the soule, And many a prisone fram purgatorie thorw his preyeres delyvreth. (B.15.344–6)
Anima uses Latin scripture to revise the perceived social relations between the wealthy and the poor, lay people and religious. Charity, aid to people less fortunate or in distress, is no longer the sole responsibility of the clergy or friars or monks. Practising charity and poor relief are social and religious virtues for ‘alle Cristene to confourmen’ themselves to. Early Waldensian experiences and the multi-voiced text of Piers Plowman construct poverty not only as a physical and social condition but also as a regulating idea and a religious virtue exceeding institutional status. Regulating ideas and dominant discourses generate cognitive, affective and material social practices, but they also open spaces for and spark alternative interventions and subversions, new pathways and social roles. Medieval poverty discourse mobilized signifiers of simplicity, humility, itinerancy, reading and meagre material means to create new voices of agency and critical analyses of social injustice, social nonconformity and Christian virtue. By locating these descriptions and dissenting voices within different frames for representing the idea of poverty, poverty discourse constructed meanings and rationalizations for people’s lived experiences. In an age of consumption, the condition of the poor became the condition for salvation and social justice, but not through sublimation. Within different semantic ideologies, the ‘poor’ are needful fellow human beings or outcasts and dregs or people only pretending to be ‘poor’ or people trying to live out Jesus’ example to the fullest. Poverty discourse was one of the late medieval strategies for making people up (as Ian Hacking puts it),29 but it could not be entirely controlled.
Poverty Discourse and Polyvalent Dialogues
Around 1400, a number of Middle English texts mobilized poverty discourse to expand the discursive categories and strategies for deploying and subverting regulating ideas and for making people up in a period of change in dynastic politics and the crackdown on Lollard dissent. I will focus here on the prose dialogues Jack Upland (c.1390–1400) and Dives and Pauper (probably 1405). These texts illustrate important links between poverty discourse, literacy and dissent at the turn of the fifteenth century. They address and perform lay people’s
29 London Review of Books, 28(16) (2006): 23–6. 244 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France public agency and religious reading and scriptural interpretation as counters to ecclesiastical control of poverty discourse. The two Middle English prose texts are from the period just before Archbishop Arundel shut down the complex and vigorous public debate among clergy and lay people regarding Church reform and lay religious agency. Jack Upland is a Wycliffite prose treatise criticizing the friars, probably written between 1385 and 1395 but surviving in two later manuscripts.30 The text’s speaker, ‘Jack from the Sticks’, first attacks the friars as hypocrites, without biblical legitimacy and part of the Antichrist’s army. Then, in a gesture of public literate dialogism, he asks for a reply. The anti-Wycliffite text known Friaras Daw’s Reply (1388–99) was most likely the reply the Jack Upland speaker asked for, but the Franciscan William Woodford, one of Wyclif ’s strongest critics, also wrote a Latin academic and disputatious reply, Responsiones Contra Wiclevum et Lollardos.31 Then, cascading within a chain of voices and textual signifiers,Friar Daw’s Reply received a further response, Upland’s Rejoinder, written shortly after 1402. Both Friar Daw’s Reply and Upland’s Rejoinder were written in alliterative verse, the latter copied into the margins of a manuscript of Friar Daw’s Reply. All three English texts quote scripture in Latin. The speaker ofJack Upland, the most widely read of the three texts, discusses whether Christ begged and also locates poverty as a social problem of human need and uneven wealth distribution. Jack, however, does not rely on an empirical claim, that there were many poor people in rural and urban early fifteenth-century England. Rather, he says, poverty as a mobile signifier is being abused and misused by friars as well as lay people. The problem and the solution, according to Jack, reside in how to mobilize poverty more ethically and justly as a regulating idea. Worldliness undermines spiritual virtue, writes Jack. More so than in any of the Piers Plowman versions, the speaker of Jack Upland debates the meanings of key terms in poverty discourse, expressed in Middle English as nede, pauper, pore, charity, giving. For example, friars neglect the ‘trewe poor’ when they ‘pillage’ both ‘pore men and lordis almes, for more almes it were to help men at her nede thanne to leve that and make gay houses’.32 Also, the writer states that because the fraternal orders were created late in the Church’s history, they cannot speak for or model apostolic faith and behaviours because they do not have the explicit
30 For the dating of Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply and Upland’s Rejoinder, see Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 216–19. 31 Ibid., p. 137. 32 James M. Dean (ed.), Six Ecclesiastical Satires (Kalamazoo, MI, 1991), p. 124, lines 136–8. Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 245 sanction of scripture and Jesus’s words to justify their formation.33 Here, Jack the ‘lewid’ man is reading scripture literally with historical textual criteria against the friars as an institution. Critiquing the semantic and discursive usage of the category nede, the speaker says that the purpose of alms is:
to refreische nedi helples men with thi gifte. But what ordre is that that wole nede be. And therfor, frere, if thin ordre and thi rulis ben groundid in Goddis lawe, telle thou now Jacke Uponlond that I axe thee, and if thou be or thenkist to be on Cristis side, kepe thi pacience.34
If the orders of friars are not needed, they should not accept any alms from lay people. The text ofJack Upland repeatedly qualifies and validates noun phrases with the adjective ‘trewe’: trewe nede, Cristis trewe law, trewe pore. This Wycliffite and Lollard adjectival usage, equivalent to parfit, functions as a dividing practice, distinguishing proper or really needy or poor people from the falsifiers, fakers and illegitimate friars who only claim to be needy or poor. In the text, the trewe pore are always lay people, never religious folk. The text’s semantic implication is that religious beggars, mendicants and professed poor are untrewe. The status and authority of the friars are subverted in the poverty discourse of Jack Upland by a dividing practice at the syntax-semantics intersection. At the same time, the decidedly lay, but religiously interested speaker/writer adopts the spiritual and scriptural authority to determine what is and is not proper ‘need’, ‘poor’ or ‘lawful’ in Jesus’ eyes, based on his reading, argumentation and spiritual understanding. The speaker ofJack Upland contrasts the friars’ hypocrisy and their luxurious, greedy lifestyles with the ideal of honest labour and literate lay piety. As in Piers Plowman, the speaker declares ‘trewe laboure’ to be the pathway to salvation for ordinary lay people.35 Jack’s polemic deploys a moral pragmatics which supersedes lay or religious status. He accuses the friars of violating their vows, stealing money from the people and living less than productive lives: they are hypocrites, possibly criminals and lollygaggers. Similarly, Jack divides lay people into those who engage in honest labour and those ‘idil men ful of disceitis to bigile eche othere’ along with ‘summe [who] bicome men of crafte and marchauntis professed to falsnes, and summe men of lawe to distroye Goddis law and love amoung neighboris, and summe crepen into feyned ordris
33 Ibid., p. 122, lines 82–7. 34 Ibid., lines 77–81. 35 Ibid., p. 120 lines 33ff. 246 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France and clepen hem religious, to lyve idilli by ipocrisie and disceive alle the statis ordeyned bi God’.36 The list of pluses and minuses becomes unwieldy here, but the point is that Jack’s moral critique includes both laity and clergy who violate their vows or social obligations. Those whose work profits themselves and not others destroy the social and moral fabric; those who labour honestly improve the moral and material strength of the community. The speaker/writer identifies these honest people as everyday lay folk, not professionals, middle class merchants or friars who ‘sell’. Power and social capital, Jack argues, are corrupting. A modest but sufficient working life, coupled with honest living, neighbourly care and pious devotions and reading, are the best way to live out Christian moral virtue and achieve salvation. Jack uses the traditional Christian admonition to live modestly not as an extension of the ideal of patient poverty but as an antidote to greed, excessive material luxury and community-splitting competition. Along the way, he writes, the whole social collective – lords and commons, lay and religious – are obliged by ‘cristis lawe’ to help those in most (‘trewe’) need with basic shelter, food, clothing and community care. Jack’s view of social responsibility for the poor and needy dramatically shifts away from earlier ideologies whereby the king or bishop is responsible for caring for the poor and needy. At the same time Jack also criticizes the friars for abandoning their moral responsibility for the poor. In effect, Jack Upland welds apostolic Christian charity and social care to a broad definition of the responsible social collective. He embeds that critical programme within a public textual network of reading and writing which does not align directly with distinctions between lay and clerical status. ‘Perfourm[ing] that texte’, to rewrite the passage from Piers Plowman (B.15.328), is a responsibility of all Christians in society, not just friars. Jack inscribes a pragmatics of poverty which is ambidextrous, identifying both the subject and object of social care. Jack Upland and some related Middle English texts assume that all members of Christendom should adhere to scriptural teaching, care for the poor and needy and remedy suffering. In doing so,Jack Upland validates an active, growing and increasingly lay literate community who can and should use their resources, wealth, knowledge and skills to discursively and materially intervene in the unequal, unjust status quo. Jack outlines how many manifestations or consequences of poverty – begging, poaching, robbery, illness, alienation, envy, despair, underdeveloped knowledge of scripture – are part of a public, not just ‘official’, poverty discourse. Scriptural interpretation may be contested and variable over time, but according to the writer of Jack Upland, all readers have
36 Ibid., lines 34–8. Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 247 a social responsibility to make the ‘trewe’ authority of scripture available to all members of the literate community, readers and those read to. The poor are not only an object of social discourses, the poor are also discursive models and their addressees. The Middle English prose text known asDives and Pauper, probably composed around 1405, survives wholly in several manuscripts and also in partial versions in a few others.37 The text purports to be a dialogue between a rich, literate, educated lay man, Dives, and a generic friar, Pauper. The hypotext, the representational matrix and intertext, for the Middle English text is Matt. 19:21, when Jesus encounters the questioning rich man [dives]. Initially, the Middle English writer of Dives and Pauper seems to maintain the traditional view of voluntary poverty when he locates the figure of poverty within the institutionally sanctioned but culturally controversial mendicants, the learned, preaching, begging friars. However, the text challenges traditional assumptions about literacy, social capital and textual power by letting poverty and literacy as tropes, themes and theological doctrine float between the two speakers. Poverty discourse becomes de-territorialized in the dialogue. The Prologue on Holy Poverty is followed by individual chapters on each of the commandments, discussed and expounded upon mostly by the friar. The Prologue presents more of a debate between the lay man and the friar, in terms familiar to us from Jack Upland. Often, the debate focuses on the meanings of key terms in poverty discourse, nede, charity, pore, pauper and use, in both Latin and English. Dives and Pauper are relatively evenly matched in the Prologue in that neither presumes spiritual superiority or moral authority over the other.38 Dives and Pauper quote scripture, patristic commentary and glosses in Latin and Middle English, often translating the Latin into Middle English for one another. Dives argues that if ideal or greater perfection is out of his reach, he still should have a chance at lesser perfection in order to attain salvation and not be penalized for being well off. In effect, Dives argues for a ‘middle way’ which acknowledges that goods and prosperity are necessary to sustaining the poor and needy in society and should be used properly by both the friar and Dives to that end. On the one hand, Dives critiques the conservative alignment of devout poverty with the mendicants. He criticizes friars for their luxuriousness, unscrupulous tactics to extract money and selfishness in not providing more material and spiritual sustenance to those most in need. But eventually the question in the text becomes not whether one is or should be permitted to adopt poverty voluntarily, as had been the case with the Waldensians and the
37 Priscilla Heath Barnum (ed.), Dives and Pauper, EETS o.s. 275, pt. I (London, 1976), pp. ix–xiv. 38 For example, ibid., p. 53. 248 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France early friars, but how one treats those who are impoverished, needy, imprisoned, destitute, oppressed or poor, most of whom are lay Christians. Both Dives and Pauper argue that the true meaning of pauper, as Jesus used the word, is ‘spiritual poverty’, that is, humility and charity. The position Dives outlines and the tenor of the debate as a whole, begin to sound peculiarly modern. Dives’s position as an educated, prosperous layman gives him agency and cultural capital. He presumes to debate with Pauper as an equal participant in what is treated as a social problem that entails more than just anti-fraternalism or anticlericalism. Jack Upland and Dives and Pauper thus differ from more regulatory programmes for almsgiving, care for the needy and gentry charity, the kind of fifteenth-century programmes which came with strings attached and maintained the gentry’s privilege within a money economy. For example, Margaret, Lady Hungerford, established an almshouse for the poor which also served as a vehicle for displaying the monied classes’ charitable giving and work in the community. The statutes for the almshouse specified that those taken in should be ‘meke in spirite, chaste of body and of good conversation’. Lady Margaret installed a strict spiritual regimen to ‘improve’ the poor:
ye saide … poremen and women that bith nowe and shalbe in tyme to come, to haue togeder conynuell cherite to our Lorde God, Christe Jhs … and so lyve and be conversaunte togeder in ye foresaide hous, that they may after this lyff transsetory come to ye hous of ye kingdome of heven. The wich our Lorde God by his mouthe to poremen hath promised.39
Unruly speech, a not-so-humble demeanour and pushy or dissenting behaviour were not the proper face of the virtuous, involuntary poor Lady Hungerford considered worthy of her charity. Jack Upland, Dives and Pauper and Piers Plowman bend and re-version earlier Waldensian challenges to the dominant social and doctrinal order. Dives’s speech recalls the Waldensians as a lay literate movement of voluntary poverty with an apostolic mission. He says that ‘poor preachers’ will save the world, but he pointedly does not identify those preachers as clergy or friars nor as itinerant.40 Dives excludes his dialogue partner Pauper from his social vision. Jack Upland and Dives and Pauper also narrow the debate about poverty and piety by ambiguously embodying voluntary poverty in the figure of a Friar, a figure increasingly without scriptural authority or moral legitimacy among the wider lay public. They grafted poverty discourse onto wider debates about
39 J.E. Jackson, ‘Ancient Statutes of Heytesbury Almshouse’, Wiltshire Archaeology and Natural History Magazine, 11 (1869): 289–302 at 298, 308. 40 Barnum, p. 54. Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 249 lay literacy and anxieties about the disintegrating social order and coming Apocalypse. In doing so, texts like Jack Upland, Dives and Pauper and Piers Plowman created a new discursive space in which poverty and social need could be redescribed and inscribed. As dissenting vernacular texts, they framed a detailed critique of the terms of poverty discourse and performed a positive lay literacy in both Latin and the vernacular which proposed new solutions to religious, moral and ultimately theological questions. Although Dives and Pauper vaguely hints at Church corruption and Church reform – in the ‘greedy beggars’ who turn out to be friars – the text emphasizes the exchange model of social reciprocity, community care and poor relief. Remedying the condition of the poor, needy and disenfranchised depends on a strong social community which identifies those in ‘trewe’ need and gets those with material and spiritual resources to help those in need belong more fully to the communities in which they live. The well-off have a moral duty and a social, even self-interested, responsibility to assist the poor and relieve the suffering of others, to use their material resources to benefit those less fortunate who are not faking it. In a more critical medieval poverty discourse, the excesses of the well- off were re-versioned as possibilities for relieving the suffering of others and sites for enacting justice and charity on behalf of a collective good. Need is re-signified as the condition for empathizing with the abject other, with the pain the lack inflicts and which material fortune and social power maintain as the necessary condition for privilege.41 This alternative medieval sense of socio- religious responsibility embraced not only productive and sustaining work but also a shared responsibility for remedying or at least alleviating hurtful need. Such a collective ethic of belonging and care is still important as a general social theory. As I write this paragraph in 2011, the new British Coalition government is cutting public funding for homeless shelters and soup kitchens in the name of fiscal austerity and a balanced national budget. Some members of Parliament are telling local councils that those who would give food, clothing and shelter to the homeless are ‘encouraging’ the indigent in their unacceptable behaviour. In the United States, some state legislatures are passing laws restricting the number of weeks a person can claim unemployment benefits, regardless of whether the person has been actively seeking work or not. We cannot separate the question, who are those in need, the ‘poor poor’? from the question, who will help those in need? Nor from the question, why are people in need?
41 Cf. Crassons, pp. 1–5. 250 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Conclusion: True Poverty?
In the later Middle Ages, various groups of dissenters, itinerant preachers, reformist priests, Waldensians, Lollards and others forced a public, often contentious re-examination of the meanings of terms within the discourses of voluntary, involuntary and virtuous poverty. These mostly lay groups of men and women embraced some form of apostolic voluntary poverty and organized themselves as oral, often itinerant communities. In doing so, they relied on key scriptural texts in the vernacular and sometimes Latin, which they memorized, read aloud in groups and recited or cited in public sermons and debates. Both Waldensians (French, Italian) and Lollards (English) buttressed their interpretations of the Gospels and Psalms with commentaries, glosses and sermons, from which they derived a version of what they referred to as ‘Christ’s law’. Both Waldensians and Lollards declared that ‘trewe’ (‘pure’, ‘perfect’) salvation was attainable if a person lived the apostolic life, preached God’s word, lived penitentially (perhaps celibately) and did not own property or possessions more than were needed to sustain life and the religious mission. These groups differed from the so-called ‘Cathars’, whose focus on asceticism, sexual abstinence and hierarchies of ‘perfection’ were out of synch with reformist tendencies or efforts to recover Christianity’s apostolic past.42 Dissent makes new subjectivities with an archive of mobile terms and signifiers. In the later Middle Ages, the pressure of a lay critique of poverty and charity re-signifiedneed as a more polyvalent category, including not only the indigent and poor but also those who need to help them. Distinctions between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor or ‘working poor’ and ‘idle’ revolved around a set of mobile signifiers. The poor or needy were no longer a single identifiable social group but divided and distinguished according to true and false need, social class, spiritual motives, legitimated religious vocation and other dividing practices of ideological discourse. Like Lange’s photo of Florence Thompson, medieval images and representations of the involuntary and voluntary poor were bleached, cropped and remixed to make up different social visions. The ‘trewe’ meaning ofcaritas , as Piers might say, is love your neighbour as yourself and actively reach out to help others in need. Whereas Lady Margaret’s almshouse admonished the poor with conservative provisions for patient humility, the world of charity and re-empowerment inscribed in Jack Upland and especially Dives and Pauper depended necessarily on a different social
42 See Cathar texts in Wakefield and Evans, pp. 465–591. Cf. Malcolm D. Lambert, The Cathars (Oxford, 1998) and Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2002), pp. 114–57; Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–46 (Princeton, 2001). Poverty as a Mobile Signifier 251 and material dialectic, namely, the growing prosperity, literacy and power of some segments of society whose very material and social advantages led to the increasing impoverishment of others. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 12 Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse and a Luxury Book, Widener 1, Free Library of Philadelphia
Anne M. Scott
In the Free Library of Philadelphia (FLP) is a small book measuring 210 cm × 145 cm, containing a single poem: Le levre du Chastel de Labour de povrete et de richesse [The Book of the Castle of Work of Poverty and of Wealth] Widener 1.1 It is magnificently illuminated (see Frontispiece, Plate 1), with 46 of the 73 folios containing miniatures, eight of which can be viewed in full colour online via the Digital Scriptorium2 and the Rare Books department of the FLP.3 For those unable to visit the holding library, the rest can be viewed in the black and white facsimile containing the illuminations, a commentary and synopsis produced privately in 1909,4 or, more lavishly, in the full colour facsimile of König and Bartz published in 2005.5 The manuscript itself was presented to the Free Library of Philadelphia by the Widener family in 1944. There are 11 known manuscripts containing the same poem, but only this one is illuminated. It appears in volumes containing other didactic and moralizing texts such as Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine,6 and, in three manuscripts, is
1 Free Library of Philadelphia, Widener 1. 2 Columbia University Libraries, Digital Scriptorium, available at http://scriptorium. columbia.edu, accessed: 3 January 2012. 3 FLP, Medieval Manuscripts, http://libwww.library.phila.gov/medievalman/index. cfm, accessed: 3 January 2012. 4 This can be downloaded as a pdf file from Archive.org, www.archive.org/details/ lelivreduchastel00bruyrich, accessed: 15 August 2011. 5 Eberhard König and Gabriele Bartz, Das Buch vom erfüllten Leben, Jacques Bruyant: le livre du Chastel de labour (2 vols, Lucerne, 2005). 6 Chartres, MS0408 (anc. 423), Catalogue général des manuscrits français. This manuscript was described by Långfors in his article, ‘Jacques Bruyant et son poèmeLa voie 254 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France found embedded in the text of the late fourteenth-century French didactic text, Le mesnagier de Paris, a work written for the instruction of a young wife by her older husband.7 It is associated in one manuscript with the Roman de la Rose and other poems of Jean de Meung;8 three manuscripts place it with a miscellany of poems.9 The original poem has been dated as written in 1342, and the illuminations of the Widener manuscript are attributed to the Bedford school, between 1430 and 1440.10 The poem is intrinsically interesting in the context of this essay collection which explores the experience of poverty, since it represents Poverty as the mother of all kinds of misery and misfortune, personified in allegorical figures who torment the protagonist, a newly married man (Plate 2).11 The poem suggests that poverty is a shameful state to be avoided by pursuing the path of hard work and virtue – a virtue founded upon traditional Christian teaching. The allegorical framework of the poem suggests that poverty is not a socio-economic state over which a person has no control, but a condition that is reached by a process – in allegorical terms by taking a journey down a deliberately chosen road, the road of Paresse (Sloth) – rather than the road of Diligence (Hard Work). My interest in this poem lies in three areas: first, in the representation of Poverty as a hateful and subversive woman; secondly, in the strong work ethic which the poem promotes as an antidote to poverty, two centuries in advance of what is often supposed to be the sixteenth-century
de povreté et de richesse’, Romania, 45 (1918–19): 49–83, at 62. In 1944 the bibliothèque municipale de Chartres was destroyed by aerial bombardment and all that remains of this manuscript is around 100 fragments, each of which has been digitized. I am grateful to Michèle Neveu of the Médiathèque L’Apostrophe, Chartres, for this information. 7 Bruxelles, KBR 10310–11; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris [hereafter BNF], 12477; BNF, nouv. acq. franc. 6739. 8 BNF, 1563. 9 BNF, 808; Geneva, Bibliothèque de l’université 179 bis; Chantilly Musée Condé 1576. 10 While Sandra Hindman attributes the illuminations to the Fastolf Master, or one of his school, König and Bartz attribute them to a follower of the Bedford Master. See further discussion below, p. 275 of this chapter. See also Martha Driver and Michael Orr, ‘Decorating and Illustrating the Page’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (eds), The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 104–28, at pp. 114–15, n. 24. 11 The extt used for this study is that published as the appendix to an edition of Georgina E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier (eds), Le mesnagier de Paris, Lettres gothiques (Paris, 1994), pp. 814–37. Translations are my own. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 255 origin of the ‘work ethic’;12 and finally, in the illuminated manuscript which is an artefact produced with labour for a wealthy patron. I shall argue that, while the poem shows considerable understanding of the lives and experiences of the non-poor, it does not, at any point, relate the condition of poverty to the socio- economic poor, whose lives and experiences are, in this context, invisible. The path of virtue which is outlined during the course of the poem, while based on Christian principles outlined in the teachings emanating from the Fourth Lateran Council,13 has no sense of Christian compassion for those who are poor, or development of the virtue of Christian charity.14 It is largely a secular blueprint for a life based on self-help and aspirations to upward mobility and, as such, looks forward to an age when work, not charity, will become the measure of a person’s moral worth.15 The poem’s title varies somewhat among the manuscripts. The wordsvoie and adresce which denote a path or a way occur eight times in the titles: l’adresce de povreté et de richesce;16 la voie et l’adresce de
12 See, for example, Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, New Approaches to European History (Cambridge, 1994), p. 11, where the author alludes to the fact that ‘from the sixteenth century onwards governments and magistrates directed public attention to the danger of the third category, the idle poor’, whereas this type of language was already being used in legislation in the fourteenth century. See also Christopher Dyer, ‘Work Ethics in the Fourteenth Century’, in James Bothwell, P.J.P. Goldberg and W.M. Ormrod (eds), The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England (York, 2000), pp. 21–41, at p. 21, where the author references ‘a strong body of opinion [that] holds it emerged in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’. 13 Studies of the manuals of instruction for the clergy in the thirteenth century upon which later didactic writings such as this were based include Thomas N. Tentler,Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, 1977); Leonard E. Boyle, Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law, 1200–1400 (London, 1981); F.M. Powicke and C.R. Cheney (eds), Councils and Synods: With Other Documents Relating to the English Church, 2: AD 1205–1313 (Oxford, 1964). 14 In the context of the deadly sin of Avarice, the dreamer is urged to practise charity and to give alms to the needy (p. 818, cols 1 and 2), but this is en passant, and is not given any further emphasis in the text. 15 In England, this attitude developed strongly in the fifteenth century, as discussed by Rosemary Horrox, ‘Introduction’, in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 1–12. Michel Mollat discusses the hardening of attitude towards the poor in the wake of an increasingly positive attitude towards the acquisition and accumulation of wealth in fifteenth-century Europe:The Poor in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, 1986), pp. 255–6. 16 BNF, nouv. acq. franc. 6222. 256 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France povreté et de richesse;17 la voie de pauvreté et de richesse.18 Four name it Le livre de povreté et de richesse;19 and two give a slightly different emphasis,le livre du Chastel de labour de povreté et de richesse.20 Pierre Gringore, who rewrote the poem c.1499, does his own retelling, entitling it: le Chasteau de Labour auquel est contenu l’adresse de richesse et chemin de Pauvreté, and this is the text from which Alexander Barclay derived his Castell of Laboure [London] [1505].21 I shall refer to the poem throughout this chapter as La voie de povreté et de richesse. Path [adresse, voie], poverty [povreté] and wealth [richesse] are the underlying concepts expounded in this poem about the paths to poverty or to riches, and the dreamer’s negotiation of those paths. While the idea of a castle is visually evocative and belongs to a long-standing tradition of allegorical buildings – castle, abbey, cloister22 – the poem itself does not mention a castle until towards the end, when a trio of personified virtues arrives to help the dreamer find the ‘noble chastel de Richesse | Qui tant parest plein de noblesse’23 (p. 832, col. 1). This castle is a goal, unattainable without spending time engaging in the toil prescribed within the Castle of Labour. In the exquisitely illuminated book, Widener 1, however, the castle itself is prominent and recognizable, obviously representing the attainment of wealth for the family whose motto, arms and chateau appear repeatedly throughout the 46 miniatures and additional marginal illuminations (Plate 4).
17 Chantilly Musée Condé 1576. 18 Chartres 408 (anc. 423). It is similarly designated in three manuscripts where it appears with the Menagier de Paris, ‘la voie et l’adresse de povreté et de richesse’. 19 BNF, 808 and 1563, plus two lost manuscripts noted in the inventory of c.1467, nos 960 and 966 of the library of the Dukes of Bourgogne. 20 Philadelphia, Widener 1 and Stockholm, Bibl. Royale, fr. LV. 21 The Castell of Labour, translated from the French of Pierre Gringore by Alexander Barclay. Reprinted in facsimile from Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of 1506 with the French text of 31 March 1501 and an introduction by Alfred W. Pollard (Edinburgh, 1905). The Castell of Laboure by Alexander Barclay, English Poetry Database, accessed: 6 January 2012. Also available from Early English Books Online, Pierre Gringore, c.1475–1538? The Castell of Laboure 1506 STC (2nd ed.) / 12381, accessed: 6 January 2012. 22 Christiania Whitehead, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cardiff, 2003); David Cowling,Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (Oxford, 1998); Roberta D. Cornelius, ‘The Figurative Castle: A Study in the Mediaeval Allegory of the Edifice with Especial Reference to Religious Writings’ (PhD thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 1930). 23 [The noble castle of Wealth who herself shines out as the epitome of nobility]. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 257
The Experience of Poverty
The poem and the illuminated manuscript merit discussion in a volume about the experience of poverty because they capture contemporary attitudes to the poor, to work, and to ideas of self-improvement. As an allegorical poem, it draws on tropes which are time-honoured, such as dream vision, debate between the dreamer and allegorical characters, assault by the seven deadly sins, architectural allegory,24 yet invests them with an immediacy that brings to the fore the thoughts and feelings of the non-poor towards the condition of poverty which is allegorized as a female figure whose state is at once loathsome and morally corrupt. This is a quite shocking portrayal when considered in the context of other contemporary views that poverty is the state adopted by Christ, and voluntarily chosen by many of his most devout followers, discussed in some detail by Mark Amsler in this volume,25 but it fits with the tradition developed in the Roman de la Rose where Poverty is allied to the vices, and with contemporary views of the non-labouring poor as ‘objects of scorn, distrust and hostility’.26 Poverty, so La voie de povreté et de richesse declares, is not a misfortune, nor is it the lot of the majority of humankind. It is not a state to excite compassion, and it is certainly not the state that brings a person close to God. Poverty is an avoidable state into which a person will fall through sloth. The attendant miseries of physical deprivation are matched by the implication that it is vice which has brought the sufferer into the state of poverty, and that poverty is therefore the victim’s own fault. The state of poverty is allegorized by the figure of the hag, Povreté, who is seen to be the mother of all affliction, and, after a long debate has been won by Reason over Fraud, the dreamer – the Nouvel Marié 27 – immerses himself in physical labour which is necessary if he is to progress through the Castle of Labour and attain the Castle of the beautiful lady, Richesse. On the continuum of medieval views on poverty which is set out in the first chapter of this volume, this view that poverty is the worst fate that can befall a person, and that the poor person is culpable of having fallen into that state, stands at the opposite end to the view that the poor are blessed of God, and that poverty is a state to be embraced as a means of spiritual edification.
24 For an up-to-date synthesis and interpretation of allegorical writings from antiquity through to modern times, useful and illuminating material can be found in Rita Copeland and Peter D. Struck (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (Cambridge, 2010). 25 Chapter 10, ‘Poverty as a Mobile Signifier: Waldensians, Lollards,Dives and Pauper’. 26 Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (Oxford, 1994), p. 72. 27 In the manuscript, he is called nouvel marié and nouvel mesnagier. I shall refer to him as the Nouvel Marié, the newly married man. 258 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
This view is not confined to this poem, nor to France. The poem portrays poverty as the worst of evils, in terms familiar to readers of much medieval literature. In the Roman de la Rose, Poverty is portrayed not only as an outcast, outside the walls of the garden, but in the company of the vices, as if her state is culpable. Poverty’s repulsiveness as she cowers naked but for an old sack, is accentuated by her being depicted outside the walls of the garden enclosing the Rose. Still more damning, her image is ranged among the portraits of the seven deadly sins implying that she is both morally and socially outcast, and it is glossed by the narrator’s comment:
car povre chose, ou qu’ele soit, | est tot jors honteuse et despite. L’eure puise ester la maudite | que povres hom fu conceüz! qu’il ne sera ja bien chauciez | n’il n’est amez ne essauciez. (lines 454–60)
[Anything poor, wherever it may be, is always shamed and despised. Cursed be the hour in which a poor man was conceived, for he will never be well fed, well clothed, nor well shod; he is neither loved nor advanced in fortune (p. 37).]28
At several points throughout the Roman, Poverty is characterized as a threatening, disreputable woman who leads people to destruction, evoking through allegory, the socio-economic condition of poor people who might be observed by both writer and readers of the poem. For instance, when Richesse describes the folly of those who enter the garden of delight with no thought for prudence she confirms that they are bound for the state of poverty and a life of vice:
Se Povreté vos peut baillier | seur un poi de chaume ou de fain qu’el vos lera morir de Fain, | qui fut jadis sa chambriere et la servi de tel maniere | que Povreté por so servise, dom Fain iert ardanz et esprise, | li enseigna toute malice et la fist mestresse et norrice | Larrecin, le valleton let. (lines 10107–10117)
[If Poverty can get you in her power, she will make you give so much that she will let you die of hunger on a little stubble or hay. Hunger was formerly Poverty’s chambermaid and served her in such a way that for her service, in which Hunger was eager and ardent, Poverty taught her all sorts of malice and made her the mistress and nurse of larceny, the ugly young fellow (p. 181).]
28 All references to the Roman are taken from Guillaume De Lorris et Jean De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose (Paris, 1973–75). Translations are from The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton, 1971). Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 259
Hunger herself has the most fearsome appearance:
Longue est et megre, lasse et vaine, | grant soffroite a de pain d’avaine; les cheveus a touz hericiez, | les euz crués en parfont gliciez, vis pale et baulievres seches, | joes de roïlle entechees; par sa piau dure, qui voroit, | ses entrailles voair porroit. Les os par les illiers li saillent, | ou trestoutes humeurs defaillent, n’el n’a, ce semble, point du ventre | fors le leu, qui si parfont entre que touz li piz a la meschine | pent a la claie de l’eschine. (lines 10133–46)
[She is long and lean, weak and hollow, and in great want from a diet of oat-bread. Her hair is all bristly, her eyes hard and hollow, her face pale and her lips dry, her cheeks soiled with dirt. Whoever wanted to could see her entrails through her hard skin. Along her flanks, where all humours are lacking, her bones stick out, and she has no stomach whatever, only the place for it, which goes in so deep that the girl’s whole chest hangs on her backbone (p. 181).]
This portrayal has resonances with some of Dante’s early work in which he negotiates a wide range of ideas about poverty,29 including, at the end of his Epistola 2, a portrayal of Lady Poverty as a ‘persecutrix’ who, like some romance enchantress, holds her knight in prison.30 To view poverty as a terrible condition is not confined to secular literature; Innocent III’s De miseria condicionis humane treats poverty as one of the miseries of the human condition.31 Much of the De miseria draws its inspiration and authority from Old Testament Scripture, particularly the wisdom literature
29 Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the ‘Commedia’ (Cambridge, 2004), p. 10. 30 ‘For she, like a savage persecutor, has thrust me down into the abyss of her bondage without horses or arms; and although I struggle with all my might to rise, she, accursed, thus far prevailing, contrives to restrain me’: Dante, Epistola 2, in Charles Latham (trans.), George Carpenter (ed.), A Translation of Dante’s Eleven Letters (Boston, 1892). 31 Lotario dei Segni (Pope Innocent III), De Miseria Condicionis Humane, ed. and trans. Robert E. Lewis (Athens, 1978). Chaucer taps into this tradition in his Man of Law’s Tale which is based on many of Innocent’s concepts, and opens with the lines: ‘O hateful harm, condicion of poverte! | With thurst, with coold, with hunger so confoundid! | To asken help thee shameth in thyn herte; | If thou noon aske, with nede artow so wounded | That verray nede unwrappeth al thy wounde hid! | Maugree thyn heed, thou most for indigence | Or stele, or begge, or borwe thy despence!: Prologue to the Man of Lawe’s Tale, lines 99–105, in Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (Boston, 1987). 260 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France which takes a sharply realistic view of human life and its attendant sufferings which are to be endured rather than alleviated:32
The poor are indeed oppressed by starvation, tortured by need, hunger, thirst, cold, nakedness; they become worthless and waste away, are despised and confounded. O miserable condition of a beggar! If he begs, he is confounded with shame, and if he does not beg, he is consumed with want, and indeed is compelled by necessity to beg. … ‘It is better to die than to want.’33 ‘The poor man shall be hateful even to his own neighbour.’34 ‘All the days of the poor are evil.’35
This, rather than the presentation of poor people as beloved of God and meriting charitable compassion, or as struck down by Fortune and bearing their affliction with patience, is the stark reality of poverty allegorized in La voie de povreté et de richesse. Two remarkable features of this poem are its strong connection between poverty and the sin of sloth, and the unmistakeable impulse towards the acquisition of material wealth within the type of didactic framework more usually employed in exalting spiritual over material riches.
Poverty and Work
It is well-known that attitudes towards poverty and the poor were many and varied in Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Often quoted is the concept of society as divided into estates, with the poor benefiting the non- poor by providing them with the opportunity to practise charity. In this view of society, the poor have both passive and active roles, remaining poor in order to be present to the non-poor, but reciprocating by doing what work they can – praying for their donors. This view of society working in balanced harmony is not considered or developed by the writer of La voie de povreté et de richesse. Like many contemporary French allegories, the poem is written for an aristocratic,
32 ‘Pauperes enim premuntur inedia, cruciantur erumpa, fame, siti, frigore, nuditate; vilescunt et contabescunt, spernuntur et confunduntur. O miserabilis condicio mendicantis! Et si petit, pudore confunditur, et si non petit, egestate consumitur, set ut mendicet necessitate compellitur. “Melius est mori quam indigere.” “Eciam proximo suo pauper odiosus erit.” “Omnes dies pauperis mali.”’ 33 Ecclus. 40:29. 34 Prov. 14:20. 35 Prov. 15:15. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 261 or at least wealthy and literate readership.36 Although ‘Poverty’ is personified as a hag, the poor themselves do not appear. As in many European texts, the poor are invisible, their existence implied, their condition to be inferred rather than described.37 Poverty is the awful warning, the hell into which people who do not work will fall. The vast gulf that separates poor from non-poor is intimated elsewhere by the English poet, Hoccleve, who feelingly portrays his own terror of falling into poverty, having enjoyed a lifetime of work in the Privy Seal, and served under four English monarchs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.38 Interestingly in the context of La voie de povreté et de richesse, the antidote to Hoccleve’s anxiety is to take the advice given by an old man, and work – write a piece of literature that will gain patronage for him, and thus maintain his position in court circles.39 The invisible poor were not confined to one nation, nor were they invisible only to the wealthy. Even Francis of Assisi has been accused of eclipsing the socio-economic poor by deliberately abrogating their way of life, and diverting to himself and his brethren the gifts that might have been given them.40 While his embracing of poverty was seen by many contemporaries to be virtuous, it had the effect of implying that the involuntarily poor, for whom work was not always an option, were less than virtuous in contrast.41 The text ofLa voie de povreté et de richesse stresses the importance of work by offering the protagonist a choice between two paths in life. One is the path of Diligence, and the other, the path of Paresse. Diligence leads to the Castle
36 See Stephanie Gibbs and Rita Copeland, ‘Medieval Secular Allegory: French and English’, in Copeland and Struck, Cambridge Companion to Allegory, pp. 136–61. Writing of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung, and the Roman de la Rose, the authors state: ‘Their experiments provoked innovative responses in the vernacular secular allegory produced for the aristocratic milieus of France and England’, p. 136. 37 See David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, 1997) pp. 17–30, for a discussion of the invisible yet powerful presence of the populo minuto in fourteenth-century Florence, and its influence on Chaucer’s ideas of association and felawshipe. 38 Thomas Hoccleve, The Regement of Princes in Hoccleve’s Works, vol. 3, Early English Text Society, ES 72 (London, 1897), lines 1–2016. 39 For a discussion of Hoccleve’s fear of poverty, see Anne M. Scott, ‘Speaking up for the Aged: Thomas Hoccleve andThe Regiment of Princes’, in Nicholas Eckstein and Nicholas Terpstra (eds), Sociability and its Discontents (Turnhout, 2009), pp. 87–105. 40 Kenneth Baxter Wolf, The Poverty of Riches: St Francis of Assisi Reconsidered (Oxford, 2003), pp. 14–15. 41 Wolf devotes an entire chapter to this issue, concluding that ‘just as no truly poor person had the means to climb out of his or her poverty in this world, so no truly poor person had the means to secure a place for himself in the next world by demonstrating his disdain for the things of this world’: ibid., pp. 19–29, at p. 29. 262 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France of Richesse, and Paresse leads straight to the hovel of Povreté (Plate 3). The illuminations in the Widener manuscript stress the importance of work, with many representations of labourers in the fields, and a variety of workers and crafts people engaged in constructing the chateau (Plate 4). The author, Jean Bruyant, was a notary of King Philip VI, 1328–52. In fourteenth-century Paris, he would have witnessed dazzling wealth as well as massive poverty. France at the end of Louis IX’s reign (1270) was accounted the richest kingdom on earth and in the first half of the fourteenth century the French court was still the European centre of culture and wealth.42 Yet because Paris was the queen of all cities, it was also home to vast numbers of poor and landless people. In response to the city’s needs for craftspeople, suppliers and labourers, migrants came in droves. Farmer tells us that between 1240 and 1328 Paris grew from an estimated 160,000 to somewhere around 210,000, which was at least twice, if not four times, the size of any other town in northern Europe and probably larger than the largest cities in Italy.43 Many of these labourers were very poor, the kind of worker typified by Jacques de Vitry, those who by working with their own hands for the whole day obtain their meagre daily bread and have nothing left over when they have had dinner,44 and those on whose behalf Aquinas stipulated that they should be paid at the end of each working day so that they could go out and buy food:
Workmen who offer their labour for hire are poor men who toil for their daily bread: and therefore the Law commanded wisely that they should be paid at once, lest they should lack food.45
Yet while migrant labourers were needed to supply the needs of such a thriving city, not all could work all the time, and the existence of so many poor and nearly destitute people created problems. In France as in England, the mobile poor were subject to punitive legislation which forbade vagrancy and enjoined all to work in their own locality. Anne Middleton charts the shift in language about the poor in fourteenth- century England, particularly in the light of the Statutes of Labourers which legislated against vagrancy, and concludes that work became the new civic
42 Sharon A. Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca, 2002), p. 11. 43 Ibid., p. 17. 44 ‘qui, propriis manibus laborando, victum tenuem omni die sibi acquirebat, nec ei plusquam cenaret quicquam remanebat’: The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the ‘Sermones Vulgares’ of Jacques de Vitry, ed. T.F. Crane (London, 1890), p. 27. 45 Summa Theologica. I–II q. 105. a. 2. My translation. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 263 virtue.46 She traces the terminology of the Statutes of Labourers from the post- Black Death Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 through to the 1388 Statute of Labourers, finding that legislation targeted the able-bodied poor, making any refusal to work an offence punishable by law.47 Implications of sinfulness come through in a clause which states that:
… because many sturdy beggars, so long as they can live by begging for alms, refuse to labour, living in idleness and sin and sometimes by thefts and other crimes, no man, under the aforesaid penalty of imprisonment, shall presume under colour of pity or alms to give anything to such as shall be able profitably to labour, or to cherish them in their sloth, so that they may be compelled to labour for the necessaries of life.48
In particular, Middleton notes that:
a subtle shift of terms and assumptions, in which work rather than “estate” designated the most fundamental term for the participation of individuals and groups in the totality of the human community, was one that the 1349 Ordinance, despite its purportedly merely restorative aims, did much to promote, and it directly enabled the creation of the fraudulent nonworker as a kind of back- formation of its own largely implicit and inadvertent political logic.49
In France, the first official references to the need to prosecute vagabonds – the non-workers and, effectively, the homeless poor – are found in the thirteenth century in Les Etablissements de Saint Louis,50 but, as in England, the full force of legislation against vagrancy came in the wake of the Black Death in an ordinance of John the Good at the beginning of 1351. Michel Mollat’s team of researchers, studying contemporary legislation and court documents, found that from the Royal Ordinance of 1351 to the end of the fifteenth century, there was a succession of royal and municipal ordinances whose aim, impelled by economic considerations very similar to those of the English, was to force the unemployed,
46 Anne Middleton, ‘Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version “Autobiography” and the Statute of 1388’, in Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (eds), Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship (Philadelphia, 1997), pp. 208–388. 47 Ibid., pp. 228–9. 48 From the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers, quoted in ibid., p. 229. 49 Ibid., p. 230. 50 Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1987), p. 30. 264 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France vagabonds, and healthy beggars to work.51 In 1367 the municipality instituted a type of forced labour. Idlers [‘les gens oyseux’] had to work in the trenches of the town. Priests and religious were enjoined to refuse alms to ‘people healthy in body and limb’ who, additionally, were not to receive shelter in hospitals and hotels dieux for longer than one night.52 As Misraki notes, ‘Before the justice, in particular, the poor person is treated with a glaring inequality in comparison to the rich. This is seen in the pleas of advocates before the Parlement of Paris. To speak of poverty or the mean condition of “la partie adverse” is often a way of giving him no consideration, while simultaneously being a strong presumption of guilt.’53 These conclusions imply that the poor have become a group to engender fear and loathing, rather than compassion and charity, an attitude that informs the whole of La voie de povreté et de richesse. For while the poem represents Poverty as a state to fear, it also implies that the poor, too, are to be feared for their subversive influence. Each one of the allegorical offspring of Poverty is aggressive and harmful to the dreamer, threatening to overwhelm him, and raising in him the kind of fears echoed by contemporary legislators. The consensus of opinion expressed by the writers of legislation and the works referred to is that, if only the poor would work, they would thrive. This adds another element of illustration to support Christopher Dyer’s contention that, in the years following the Black Death, a high proportion of wage-earners for whom work was now plentiful aimed, by working and earning increased wages, to improve their whole material experience.54 In some of the manuscripts the poem is called Le livre du Castel de Labour, a title that highlights the connection between well-being and work. Work is now the positive virtue, and upward mobility is an aspiration that, after the Black Death, became a possibility for many throughout Europe.55 The great sin of vagrants was that they did not work, and if they were able-bodied, and therefore assumed to be fraudulently begging,56 they were especially harmful, not just to the landlords for whom they
51 Jacqueline J. Misraki, ‘Criminalité et pauvreté en France à l’époque de la guerre de cent ans’, in Michel Mollat (ed.), Etudes sur l’histoire de la pauvreté, Moyen âge–XVIe siècle, 8 (Paris, 1974), pp. 535–46. 52 Ibid., p. 544. 53 Ibid., p. 542, my translation. 54 Dyer, pp. 21–42. 55 For a general appraisal of material improvements in Europe, see Robert Fossier (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Middle Ages 1250–1520 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 172–91. 56 Even willing workers moving location to earn better wages elsewhere were included in these strictures, and legislation was enacted both in France and in England to prevent them from moving from place to place. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 265 refused to labour, but to the other poor whose unavoidable suffering they aped, whose alms they diverted and whose honesty they tainted.
The Poem
The poem aims to advise its protagonist, a newly married man who has, since his wedding, indulged himself in idle entertainments, how to conduct his life. The ultimate goal is to attain theChastel de Richesse by choosing the road of Diligence rather than the road of Paresse. In a dream the Nouvel Marié is visited and attacked by several allegorical figures (Plate 2):Besoing [Want], Necessitee [Need], Souffrete [Suffering] andDisette [Hunger], all siblings, whose mother and father are Poverty and Misfortune; and by Pensee [Anxiety] who is swiftly joined bySoussy [Anxiety], Desconfort [Distress], and finallyDesespoir [Despair], daughter of Distress, a wild, enraged woman who almost succeeds in making him give up all hope of ever reaching the Chastel de Richesse. The Nouvel Marié is on the point of turning to crime in order to make money when he is stopped by the beautiful lady, Raison [Reason]. She puts the case for self-control based on the practice of the virtues and avoidance of the seven deadly sins, and outlines the way to achieve true richesse – by taking the fair road named Diligence which leads to the beautiful Castle of Richesse, while steadfastly avoiding the potholed road of Paresse which goes straight to the hovel of Povreté. Although the Dreamer is almost won over by Raison, he has to run the gamut of temptation offered byBarat [Fraud], who, in the garb of a lawyer, advocates becoming rich by telling lies, defrauding others, and generally behaving in a treacherous manner. The idea of becoming rich without too much hard work is appealing to the Nouvel Marié, but he is restrained from giving in to this temptation by Raison who returns and reminds him of the Last Judgement, when all wrongs will be exposed and punished with damnation. This convinces him, and theNouvel Marié starts out on the road to Richesse under the guidance of three mentors, Bon-Cuer [Good Heart], Bonne-Voulenté [Good Will] and Talent-de-bien-faire [Desire-to-do-well]. Together they take the well-paved road of Diligence, and arrive at the Chastel de Labour. Here, under the tutelage of a fierce warder,Soing [Vigilance], and a powerful woman, Peine [Pains], he joins more than a hundred thousand workers who toil from before dawn until after nightfall. Willingly committing himself to the effort required, he joins the workers at his appointed task. He shares their meagre meal of bread and water, and goes home at the curfew bell, exhausted but ready to return the next day. ThisChastel de Labour is the only route to the Castle of Richesse which the dreamer never attains in the poem. The poem ends with the 266 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France dreamer trying in vain, over supper, to explain his experiences to his disbelieving wife, and pledging to return next morning to persevere in the absorbing toil of building the Castle of Labour. Unlike works that chart the socio-economic experience of poverty, such as Sharon Farmer’s account of the poor whose visits to the tomb of St Louis were recorded, together with graphic accounts of their maladies and poor economic state,57 this poem does not give a historically imagined picture of the experience of poverty. Instead, the poet recreates the emotional experience of a non-poor man, the Nouvel Marié, who fears falling into poverty and interiorizes that experience. In a dream, he goes through three stages, each involving him in pain. First he is visited by terrifying characters, all blood relatives of Poverty; secondly, he becomes the target of a debate between Reason and Fraud on the best way to achieve wealth and avoid poverty; and lastly, he resolves to take the path of Diligence to the Castle of Labour where he willingly suffers the hardships of a common labourer’s life in order, one day, to attain to the Castle of Richesse. Each of the features associated with poverty is personified, and the dreamer’s encounter is simultaneously internalized and externalized. Internal is the fear that accompanies the visitations; external is the physical effect of these. His earliest visitors, the offspring of Poverty and Misfortune, have terrifying names and forbidding demeanour: they are ireux [angry], mornes [careworn], pensifs [depressed], desireux [grasping]; desconfortes [desolate], triste et las [exhausted]. These first visitors attack without a word, but their attack is fierce and life- threatening, manhandling him as if about to strangle him; Besoing [Need] grabs his arms and, pinning him down forcibly, overpowers him; all four pummel, beat and attack him until the arrival of Pensee [Anxiety]. She is a large old woman with hideous grey skin, looking like a witch bent on cruelty. Filthy and foul- smelling but strong, she sits on his chest, making him sweat, gasp, and gag. He feels she must be kin to the devil whose physical manifestations often include a foul stench, but cannot avoid the involuntary nauseous response. She is swiftly joined bySoussy [Anxiety], Desconfort [Distress], and finally Desespoir [Despair]. The mental torment inflicted by these allegorical figures translates itself into powerful physical suffering in terms well-known to medieval writers on melancholy. Anxiety causes the dreamer to tremble, shiver, go hot and cold, pale, thin, excitable, and jumpy.58 Up to this point, the dreamer suffers from anxiety about unspecified problems.Desconfort forces the dreamer to apply the
57 Farmer, pp. 136–64. 58 Hoccleve, recounting his severe attack of melancholy, describes (‘Complaint’, lines 151–4) how his heart felt wet and moist with his own sweat, which was ‘now frosty cold / now fyry hoot’: Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. J.A. Burrow, EETS, o.s. 313 (Oxford, 1999). Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 267 abstract to his particular situation: he is in severe debt, with nothing to pledge except his clothing. With the arrival of Despair, daughter of Distress, his teeth begin to chatter; his colour fades and he speaks for the first time, only to despair, concluding that ‘If one is going to the devil, it is best not to wait around.’ ‘You cannot drown if you are going to hang.’ Viewed in the light of medieval medical encyclopedias such as the De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartolomaeus Anglicus, the dreamer’s nightmare may be interpreted as arising from melancholia which is akin to the sin of accidie [sloth] which leads to despair.59 The effect of all the visitors is to cause him to suffer huge distress and pain, to lose his sense of discretion, understanding, memory, and will. In medieval thought, excessive emotions are considered sinful;60 there is no doubt that the experience of these emotions, all identified as the children of Poverty, is leading the Nouvel Marié straight into sin. He is on the point of turning to crime in order to make money when he is stopped by Reason. Reason61 is an important figure in allegorical treatises, especially those concerned with the vices and virtues, in a long tradition of allegorical struggle and debate, stemming from the Psychomachia of Prudentius, but perhaps influencing the writer of this poem through its incarnation in the Roman de la Rose.62 The functions assigned to Reason in this poem are crucial for the moral and emotional well-being of the dreamer. Reason’s disquisition on the seven sins and the seven works of mercy implies that those who follow Reason and
59 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum: A critical Text, ed. M.C. Seymour et al. (3 vols, Oxford, 1975–88), I, 4.9, pp. 159–62. Siegfried Wenzel quotes from Gerson’s Sermon on acedia (Opera omnia, 3, 1037), which directly connects poverty, anxiety and melancholy as the result of the sin: ‘deinde est paupertas, mater latrocinii, comitata angustia et melancholia’, quoted in The Sin of Sloth (Chapel Hill, 1960, 1967), p. 192. 60 On the excesses of passion that may lead to madness and their connection with sin, see Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven, 1974), pp. 1–53. She points out the Thomistic interrelationship of madness, sin and reason to be found in Summa Theologica I–II. q. 74 and 77 (2: 601–16, 630–43). 61 Definitions of Reason: ‘II. The intellectual power, the capacity for rational thought, and related senses. Cf. rationality n. 5. a. The power of the mind to think and form valid judgements by a process of logic; the mental faculty which is used in adapting thought or action to some end; the guiding principle of the mind in the process of thinking. Freq. contrasted with will, imagination, passion, etc. Often personified.’Oxford English Dictionary. 62 Thestrongest exponent of this influence is Långfors, ‘Jacques Bruyant et son poème’, pp. 58–9. It must be said, however, that Bruyant’s Reason is a poor shadow of her counterpart in the Roman, and I suggest that its influence on this poem is in not much more than Reason’s name. 268 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France avoid Poverty will attain heavenly riches – salvation. Poverty is placed on the opposite end of the scale to God: her children attack the dreamer and cause him to think of sin and death; Reason shows the dreamer the moral path that leads to virtuous living and therefore salvation. This is depicted graphically by two roads. The right,Diligence , a fine, straight road, leads to the manor of Richesse. The left,Paresse , muddy, full of pot-holes, hard, but short, leads straight to Poverty (Plate 3). There is no doubting the moral turpitude associated with Poverty. The principal cause of poverty throughout the poem is attributed to what lay people call ‘paresse’ and clerks call ‘accidie’: idleness, sloth or laziness – strongly linked with the melancholia which the dreamer suffers in the first section of the poem. Not to seek the path of Diligence is the result of laziness, ignorance, stupidity, lack of judgement, and moral baseness, which is also allied with being poor, lowly and miserable (p. 821, col. 2).63 Not only is this a path with terrible physical hazards, it is fraught with moral ones, exemplified by the emotional debilitation wrought on those who take this path:
On n’y treuve confort, n’aide, | ne conseil, n’espoir, ne chevance, Fors peine, ennui et meschéance; | C’est un chemin moult destravé. Plein de boullons, tout encavé. (p. 821, col. 2)
[There one finds no comfort or help, no counsel, no hope, no success other than pain, annoyance, misery; it’s a road that’s ruinous. Mud to your chest, full of potholes.]
Poverty, who is to be found living at the end of this road, is:
Une dame qui n’est prisée, | En ce monde, n’auctorisée Ne qu’un viel chien, en verité. | De lui vient toute adversité, Meschief, peine, ennui et contraire. (p. 821. col. 2)
[A lady who is considered worth nothing in this world, and has no more authority than an old dog. Truly every trouble comes from her – harm, pain, annoyance and conflict.]
And most damning, although the poor are undernourished, naked, trembling with cold, bent over in pain, no sympathy should be given to them because they
63 The character Richesse in the Roman de la Rose also equates poverty with idleness: car par vie oiseuse et fetarde | peut l’en a Povreté venir, lines 10168–9 [one can come to Poverty through an idle, lazy life (p. 182)]. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 269 have willingly embarked on the road that leads them to such disaster (p. 823, col. 1). This section of the poem is crucial in defining the attitude towards poverty – it is terrible, it is choosable64 and it is avoidable:
Arri ère se fait donc bon traire | Du chemin qui a lui adresce Et prendre la plaisant adresse | Du beau chemin de Diligence, Car chascun puet voir en ce | Qui est a chois et puet eslire, Il ne doit pas prendre le pire. (p. 821, col. 2)
[So it is best to flee from the road that leads to her and to take the pleasant path of the fair road of Diligence, for everyone can see in this that there is a choice, and choice is possible, the worse road should not be taken.]
Yet after the devastating depiction of Poverty, her effects and her dwelling place, Reason then moves to more subtle distinctions, warning the Nouvel Marié that, although he seeks wealth, he must not be avaricious, but always strive for souffisance [sufficiency]. Within the first few lines of the poem wealth had been equated with sufficiency.Richesse now seems to be a material wealth, but the notion of sufficiency cuts down the importance of riches as something of value in themselves:
Par moi meismes le puis plevir: | Tout aie-je ma chevissance Petitement, mais souffisance, | Si comme l’Escripture adresce, Au monde est parfaicte richesse. (p. 813, col. 1).
[For myself I can promise that so long as I have the necessities of life, however small they may be, providing a sufficiency, this, as Scripture directs us, is the most perfect wealth in the world.]
This concept of ‘Sufficiency’ is what makes it possible for the pursuit of wealth to become the subject of a moral treatise. That it is not a poem advising on how to amass wealth for its own sake becomes amply clear in the explication of the seven sins when Avarice is denounced, and still clearer in Reason’s advice to the protagonist on not being diverted from the true road to riches by taking the byway of Covetise. The text explains that bothAvarice and Covetise lead unerringly to poverty. For Covetise, in particular, the dangers arise when, having reached the Castle of Richesse, the traveller is not satisfied, but presses on to
64 In addition to her admonitions to take the right-hand road, Reason embarks on a lengthy and, for that period, topical disquisition on free will, stressing that poverty does not happen by accident. 270 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France still greater heights, only to be cast down by Fortune. Then he takes the path of Paresse, turns to crime and eventually dies destitute. It seems that there is a cap to the balanced acquisition of wealth, beyond which comes excess, Covetise, which leads to avarice and the further moral disorder of Sloth, whereas sufficiency makes a person as rich as the King of France:
De la destre te vueil parler: | Par celle fait-il bon aler, Car tant est vertueuse adresse | Qu’il maine à parfaicte richesse C’est Souffisance la séure. (p. 823, col. 2)
[I want to talk to you about the right-hand road. It is good to go by this one because this path is of such efficacy that it leads to perfect riches, that’s to say Sufficiency, the secure state.]
This concept of sufficiency is in line with Aristotelian teachings on moderation, and the teaching of writers and preachers from the early Church fathers on, whose texts abound in recommendations to give away that which is superfluous, and place a firm responsibility on those who have plenty to attend to the want of their indigent brethren. How to define what is sufficient, however, is not specified. Aquinas says: ‘it would be inordinate to deprive oneself of one’s own, in order to give to others to such an extent that the residue would be insufficient for one to live in keeping with one’s station and the ordinary occurrences of life: for no man ought to live unbecomingly’.65 This leaves the definition of what is sufficient up to the individual. This sufficiency, however, does appear, in all the texts, to be a material sufficiency. Reason’s arguments are countered by Barat [Fraud], dressed, ironically, like a lawyer, accompanied by Tricherie [Treachery] and his valet, Hoquelerie [Falsehood]. While Reason has counselled diligence as the antidote to poverty, Barat declares that Reason’s way is the one that will directly lead to poverty, since following Reason will ensure that you will never come to great estate, but always live in great hardship, suffering, and making no profit or gain:
Qui selon raison ouverroit | Jamais riche ne se verroit, Ains seroit tousjours en un point | Sans ce que il enrichist point. Toujours seroit com povre et chiche, | Dolent, subjet et serf au riche … . (p. 826, col. 1)
65 Summa Theologica II–II, q. 32, a. 6. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 271
[The person who operates according to Reason will never become rich. He will always find himself in a state where he cannot enrich himself. He will always seem poor worthless, suffering, subjected and enslaved to the rich].
By contrast, he who imitates Barat will become rich, powerful, will be served and honoured, and do everything that he wants (p. 826, col. 1). These are the rewards of attaining wealth by Barat’s means, which are: first to be a flatterer; deceive everyone but appear to be courteous and friends with everyone; be niggardly not generous – thus becoming rich; be convivial and cheerful, make jokes and make people feel good – ensuring you are welcome everywhere. Above all, keep your hands on other people’s money and refuse to pay your debts: ‘Acrois partout sans rien payer’ (p. 826, col. 2):
Ceulx qui te doivent fay contraindre, | De les mengier ne te dois faindre, Et les mener à povreté | Sans avoir d’eulx pitié. (p. 826, col. 2)
[For those whom you have to oppress, do not be afraid to ruin them and to drive them into poverty without having any pity on them.]
In this exchange, it becomes apparent that one way towards becoming wealthy is by defrauding others and driving them to poverty. For a short while, Barat recreates what might be recognizable as a contemporary scene of empty patronage in which a powerful man of no substance deceives others and takes all their substance – a topos played out in many other literary versions:66
Moy et mon clerc et mon varlet | Tous ensemble t’irons aidier Ou cas qu’il te fauldra plaidier. (p. 826, col. 2)
[I, my clerk and my man will, all three of us, help you in cases where you need to plead.]
The dreamer is almost seduced by the apparently easy path to material wealth outlined by Barat, but Reason returns and persuades him to follow her way. It might be tempting, in this context, to assume that the poem represents material wealth as leading to or stemming from falsehood and deception, and spiritual wealth as being the true goal of the righteous person. The text, however, does not
66 One among a multitude is Ben Jonson’s Alchemist in which a team of fraudsters trick the gullible into giving all their substance in exchange for a promise that the alchemist can turn base metal into gold: Ben Jonson, Four Comedies, ed. Helen Ostovich (London, 1997). 272 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France make these clear-cut distinctions, and consideration of the dreamer’s journey to and sojourn in the Castle of Labour helps to shed light on the issue.
The Castle
While the title of the poem in several manuscripts opposes poverty and wealth, the polarization in the poem is actually between poverty and work. Wealth, or Richesse is not defined, but the text describes the search for it in terms reminiscent of the Christian’s search for the kingdom of heaven. In order to attain the Castle of Richesse the protagonist is advised to avoid the seven sins and practise their contrary virtues, and the poem proceeds with an extended allegory of a journey – voie – taken to a castle – chastel – both images traditionally associated with the search for moral rectitude. The castle – castellum – as an allegory of the virtuous life has a long literary lineage, and is one among many ‘edifice’ allegories that include house, tabernacle, temple, tower, cloister and abbey.67 Similarly the voie or pilgrimage is well-known in French as well as English didactic literature which deals with an individual’s quest for righteousness, and it is familiar to readers of romance for its associations with the knight’s path: la droite voie.68 In this poem, however, the building itself is of no architectural significance, unlike many ‘castle/cloister/tower’ allegories which use the features of the building to represent the practice of virtue. In this castle all energies are directed to one objective: work which will lead to wealth – a concept that seems to blend both moral and material properties. The Castle ofRichesse cannot be accessed except via the Castle of Labour (Figure 12.3, Plate 4). Once inside the castle the dreamer must prove himself to the forbidding and demanding warders and overseers – an initially surly fellow named Soing [Vigilance], with a wife named Cure [Carefulness] and another husband/wife team, Travail [Hard Work] and Peine [Pains]. His passport to proceed to the castle of the lady Richesse is to satisfy his mentors in the castle of work, and he is only allowed to remain here on condition that he perseveres in doing his duty. Much emphasis is placed on the dreamer’s desire, not for wealth, but to participate in the activities of the workers. Words like béance [desire], aspiration, grant voulenté [great longing], grant désir [intense desire], are used by his three guides, Bon-Cuer [Good Heart], Bonne-Voulenté [Good Will] and
67 Domus, tabernaculum, templum, turris, Cornelius, pp. 82–7. Whitehead, temple, memory, ark, church, cloister, castle, household, pp. 7–142. 68 Stephen A. Barney, ‘Allegorical Visions’, in John Alford (ed.), A Companion to Piers Plowman (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 117–34, at p. 127. I am grateful to Andrew Lynch for pointing out the connection with the knightly quest. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 273
Talent-de-bien-faire [Desire-to-do-well], to vouch for his readiness to start his trial in the castle. For his part, he declares:
Quant les ouvriers vy et oy, | J’en eu le cuer tout esjoy Et me fut tart que je m’y veisse | Et que je aussi comme eulx feisse. (p. 833, col. 2)
[As soon as I heard and saw the workers, my heart lifted in all-encompassing joy, and I could hardly wait to get myself installed there, and to embark on work just as they were doing.]
The work he must do is hard manual labour, not work that carries any prestige, and it assaults all his senses. Even if he had not slept for three days, the din within the working castle would be enough to keep him wide awake. The forbidding chatelaine, Peine, works with as much painful effort as she demands of her charges. Stripped down to her working undershirt she moves so swiftly and with such enthusiasm that she looks about to sweat blood as, with a loud and strident voice, she inspects the workers, making sure they do not slack. The poem takes us, in literal terms, through the whole day in which the dreamer works by the light of a candle from the dark hours of early morning until daylight comes in at the windows, and then works on without any break until it is the hour for the meal – which is both breakfast and dinner, as befits labourers. Everyone falls upon the dry bread, salt and water with a good appetite, following on with water drunk from a bowl. Observing them, he enthusiastically imitates their peasant manners and shares their frugal meal, admitting wryly that the meagre fare equals the finest of banquets with meats, poultry and select wines. By the end of the working day, Travail, husband of Peine, admitting that his wife has made them suffer greatly, agrees that they should have a reward for their hard labour:
Apr ès la tribulation | Que ma femme leur fait souffrir Quant à lui se veullent offrir.| Et pour ce qu’à lui t’es ofert et grant ahan as huy souffert,| congié te doing, en guerredon, D’aler à Repos le preudon. (p. 835, col. 2)
[After the tribulation which my wife has made you endure since you chose to subject yourself to her, and because you offered yourself to her and consequently had to undergo huge trials, I grant you leave, as a reward, to go to that gentle person, Rest.] 274 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
The pains the dreamer has voluntarily chosen to endure do not differ materially from those of the poor, and emotionally he is subjected to the same kinds of anxieties: doubt, exhaustion, hunger, wanting to give up that he experienced in his first stage of mortal terror at the start of the poem. But the difference is that these are the pains of work. While the poor, through their idleness, suffer the pains of physical deprivation, he has freely chosen not to take the path of idleness which leads inevitably to poverty and thence to crime. Within the community, supported by three mentors, Bon-Cuer Bonne-Voulenté and Talent- de-bien-faire, safe within the Castle of Labour, he works with a purpose. While the practical and physical aspects of the dreamer’s experience in the Castle of Labour are stressed, and suggest that material work will lead to material wealth, nevertheless elements of the experience draw on terms carrying moral overtones. The basic meal of the workers is that of the Lenten fast – bread, salt and plain water – and it is referred to as ‘abstinence’; the presence of allegorical mentors with names like Bon-Cuer Bonne-Voulenté and Talent-de-bien-faire, the dreamer’s own determination to work with mind, heart and body – entente y mis, et cuer et corps – and repetition of devoir [duty], carry unmistakeable echoes of moral treatises.69 One of the teasing features of allegory is that, often, the allegory can be at cross-purposes with the poetry. Here, the allegory might well be interpreted as elevating ‘work’ to something more general than literally to labour with one’s hands, since manual labour would not, realistically, be a mode of ‘work’ undertaken by the bourgeois mesnagier. The hard work within the castle is manual, but its implied reward is in securing for the future the material comforts of the household to which the mesnagier returns. Yet tantalizingly, within the poem neither the dreamer nor the workers progress beyond the Castle of Labour, as if they are set within an image of the estates, in which workers remain fixed in their labouring role. If the allegory were pushed to its logical conclusion, these would be the poor for whom there would be no security once the task – in this case, building the castle – is finished. Out of work, they would then become the mobile poor pilloried in the statutes and in the poem as idle and therefore sinful. Yet when the dreamer returns home to the domestic comforts offered by his wife, he is once more in the environment of that bourgeois material comfort which is poles apart from a life of feared poverty and, so the poem implies,
69 Parallels have been drawn between this poem and Piers Plowman. While La voie may be or may not have been known to Langland, it is clear that the two texts share an understanding of commonly used terms like ‘devoir’, which in Piers Plowman represents the claim that poor people have to be admitted to heaven – being poor on earth has qualified them as performing their devoir: Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin, 2004), pp. 143–55. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 275 represents the virtuous life which can be secured by hard work. This is the life of material and social status celebrated in Le mesnagier de Paris, the text within which, in three manuscripts, this poem is embedded.70 It is the life of social improvement envisioned by the writers and commissioners of courtesy books and a vast array of contemporary manuals of instruction.71 The purpose of these secular books of instruction is self-improvement within society, and La voie de povreté et de richesse is a work that sits comfortably within this genre.
The Book
The book itself is a monument not only to having enough, but to the surplus that allows for the commissioning of a splendid work of art. It is sumptuously illustrated with 46 miniatures and 74 initials of superior quality. Art historians are divided in their opinion as to the artist. Sandra Hindman’s opinion, that it is the work of the Fastolfe master or one of his school, is quoted in the catalogue of the Free Library of Philadelphia, along with that of König and Bartz who attribute it to the school of the Bedford Master. Either way, the manuscript is an example of superb Parisian illumination in the first half of the fifteenth century. Books like this were an overt sign of great wealth, costly to produce, sumptuous when completed, symbols of great prestige.72 Recent evidence from Jean Mesqui, a French historian of architecture, identifies the castle, which appears in six miniatures, as the Château de La Roche-Guyon on the Seine.73 Mesqui argues that the book was commissioned, possibly as a marriage gift to his wife, by a Norman, Guy le Bouteillier. This man turned traitor to France, served Henry V and the Duke of Bedford, and
70 In the manuscripts, the poem is found at the start of the second section. Modern editions either place it at the end of the work as an annex (Brereton) or omit it altogether, as in The Goodman of Paris: A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris, c.1393, trans. Eileen Power, 3rd edn (Woodbridge, 2006). 71 See Juanita Feros Ruys (ed.), What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early-Modern Periods (Turnhout, 2008) for a wide-ranging study of medieval and early modern European didactic treatises and their significance for the rise of the merchant and gentry classes. 72 Janet Backhouse, The Bedford Hours (London, 1990), p. 12. See also Christopher de Hamel, ‘Books for Aristocrats’, in A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 2nd edn (London, 1994), pp. 142–67. 73 www.mesqui.net/Articles_fortif/pdf/Guy-le-Bouteillier-et-La-Roche-Guyon.pdf, accessed: 8 January 2012. See also Jean and Claire Le Roy, ‘Guillaume le Bouteillier, le château de La Roche-Guyon et le Maître de Falstolf vers 1425’, Bulletin Monumental, 166(2) (2008): 135–50. 276 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France was rewarded with the Château de La Roche-Guyon by a gift confirmed on 20 March 1420. The coat of arms belongs to le Bouteillier, and its frequent appearance, with the motto, ‘Nulle que Vous’ (Plate 1), a distinctive and unusual drawbridge, gate and portcullis combined (Plates 2 and 4), and the six illustrations of the castle (for one of these, see Plate 4), strengthen the argument for Guy le Bouteillier being the original commissioner of the manuscript. There is no debate about the date of the manuscript’s creation,c. 1430–1440, placing it during the closing years of the Hundred Years War. If indeed it was commissioned by Guy le Bouteillier, having his arms, motto and distinctive features of his castle inscribed in the manuscript, would make an evocative and much needed statement of his wealth and power. Perhaps, too, the choice of text is significant for its association of wealth, first with hard labour in the acquisition, and secondly with a life of virtue. A man who was pilloried in chronicles as a traitor to France74 might well seek to reinforce his standing and his virtue by associating his family and his home with the Castle of Labour which the poem implies is the antechamber to the Castle of Richesse – the seat of all virtue and goal of all desires.75 The book is itself the strongest argument for accepting that the poem is concerned with the pursuit of material wealth which, throughout the poem, has been represented as good in itself, and the struggle to acquire it by hard work a laudable goal. The manuscript illuminations highlight, not only the magnificent castle, but the serene and comfortable domesticity of the newly married mesnagier, who is no aristocrat, but for whom good food, a properly laid table, a comfortable bed and the closeness of his wife combine to assuage his fear of poverty and the suffering involved in persevering in the Castle ofLabour . The miniatures have been given detailed commentary by Eberhard König in his facsimile of 2005, but even without the advantage of viewing either the original manuscript or the facsimile, it is possible to appreciate the beauty and richness of the book through online images. The gold leaf, gold paint and silver highlights shine brilliantly, and the colours, particularly the reds and blues are intense. The home of the Nouvel Marié is that of a wealthy person, with green tiled floors, stone arches, and a coat of arms in the latticed window panes. Themesnagier and his wife are shown sleeping in a comfortable four-poster bed upholstered in vermilion (Plate 2), and Reason’s sermon on the seven deadly sins is illustrated in terms of the siege of a splendid castle, attacked by the armed vices as men-
74 Mesqui, p. 2. 75 It is interesting to note that ‘labour’ is a big gentry word in English documents of this period, for example, Plumpton Letters, and used by Malory to denote lofty tasks, for example the Grail Quest. I am grateful to Andrew Lynch for these comments. Le Chastel de Labour, La Voie de Povreté ou de Richesse 277 at-arms and defended from the castle battlements by the female virtues: Faith, Loyalty and Humility. The full manuscript with its text will repay further study. Up to now the poem has, to my knowledge, been discussed at length only twice – in an article by Långfors, 1918/19, and in 411 pages of commentary in the König and Bartz 2005 facsimile. The poem receives mention from time to time in works discussing allegory – sometimes cursorily, as in Christiania Whitehead’s monograph,76 and sometimes inaccurately, as in an article by Stephen Barney.77 Here I have discussed it in the context of ‘the experience of poverty’, but there is more to be said about its place in contemporary French literature. There is also room for a comparison of this poem with its later rewriting by Pierre Gringore, and its translation by Alexander Barclay.78 The patron who selected this poem as the vehicle for such a luxury item has given the world an artefact that has become a lasting testimony to the belief that the pursuit of material wealth through the practice of diligent hard work is a virtue in itself. The poem represents a single-minded and secular view of Povreté as seen from the standpoint of the non-poor, and both poem and book celebrate the life of worldly happiness, security and virtue that is made possible by attaining to Richesse.
76 Whitehead, p. 5. 77 Barney gives a brief and inaccurate synopsis of the narrative, p. 128. 78 See full references at n. 20 above. This page has been left blank intentionally Plate 2 Widener 1, Fol. 1r. Want, Necessity, Suffering, and Hunger visit Newlywed Source: Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. Plate 3 Widener 1, Fol. 28r. Reason shows Newlywed the path to the House of Poverty Source: Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia Plate 4 Widener 1, Fol. 61v. The Castle of Labour Source: Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 13 The Gifts of the Poor: Worth and Value, Poverty and Justice in Robert Daborne’s The Poor Man’s Comfort Mike Nolan
Jacobean playwright Robert Daborne was not a prolific writer. Of seven plays that may be attributed to him either as author or collaborator, only two – A Christian Turned Turk (printed in 1612) and The Poor Man’s Comfort (performed 1616–17 but printed in 1655) – have survived.1 The extant plays are worthy of attention in themselves, but critical interest in Daborne has been more concerned with his correspondence with the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe,2 which has given us some valuable insights into the sometimes strained business relationship between Henslowe and the playwright in the years 1613–14. Daborne was no stranger to poverty:3 his father had died in debt and he lived a pen-to-mouth existence, writing to support a wife and family in the hectic, cut-throat London theatrical world. In his dealings with Henslowe, which were mostly financial and contractual, Daborne was able to mitigate the parlous state of his domestic affairs by being proficient in gaining advances (and in some cases loans beyond the agreed sum) for the promise of work to be completed.4 The relationship is thus characterized by deals, exchanges, contracts, understandings, negotiations, re-negotiations, deadlines and the failure to meet
1 While Daborne appears to have collaborated with Philip Massinger and Nathan Field on plays that have been lost, the two plays mentioned are his alone. 2 Walter W. Greg (ed.), Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary (London, 1907). 3 Daborne, though poor, was an educated gentleman, and therefore had the means to receive payment in exchange for his writing and was able later, because of his education and through his connections, to be ordained in 1617 and obtain some financial security. His situation was thus more favourable than the majority of those who made up London’s underclasses. 4 It is clear from Daborne’s letters that Henslowe was very lenient with the playwright with regard to deadlines and responded quite positively to pleas for money to be advanced. 280 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France deadlines. The Poor Man’s Comfort is a rare example from the early modern period of a play that deals in some depth with the processes of poverty, and that demonstrates how questions of justice are involved with any discussion of the poor in a community. The business transactions between the two men formed, I believe, the basis for Daborne’s examination of poverty in his play and I will deal with this before proceeding to a discussion of the play itself.5 My argument is that The Poor Man’s Comfort offers a remarkable analysis of the ways by which the discrepancies between the rich and the poor are maintained. While it is certainly true, as Robert Jütte notes, that the poor were seen by many ‘as an integral part of a Christian commonwealth and a necessary stimulus for the rich to practise virtue and to show humility’,6 in the mercantile world inhabited by monied men such as Henslowe, charity was more hard-headed. Contracts were fundamental to the arrangements between the two men and were the means by which Daborne was able to retain a degree of independence:
Memorandum tis agreed between phillip hinchlow Esq & Robert daborn gent, that the said Robert shall before the end of this Easter Term deliver in his Tragedy called Machiavell & the devil into the hands of the said phillip for the sum of 20 pounds, six pounds whereof the said Robert acknowledgeth to have received in earnest of the said play this 17th of April & must have other four pound upon delivery in of 3 acts, & other ten pound upon delivery in of the last scene.7
Much of the correspondence, however, comprises urgent pleas from Daborne for Henslowe to alleviate his poverty or to alter deadlines: ‘Mr Hinchlaw I am enforced to make bold with you for one 29 shillings of 10 pound & one Friday night will deliver in the 3 acts fair written’;8 and ‘Mr Hinchlow I acquainted you with my necessity which I know you did in part supply but if you do not help me
5 Henslowe’s supplementary papers, in that they deal specifically with relationships between playwrights and Henslowe, are a valuable source of interpreting texts from this period more generally. Cf. for instance, Richard Halpern, ‘Marlowe’s Theater of Night: Doctor Faustus and Capital’, English Literary History, 71 (2004): 455–95. Halpern uses Daborne’s correspondence with Henslowe in his interpretation of aspects of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. 6 Jütte is responding to a quote by ‘an anonymous English writer of the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century’ who said: ‘Thus we saie that the poor are made for the good of the ritche’: Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2001), p. 9. 7 Greg, Henslowe Papers, p. 67. I have modernized the spelling in this and all subsequent references to the supplements. Original spelling of names has been retained. 8 Ibid., p. 69. The Gifts of the Poor 281 to ten shillings by this bearer by the living god I am utterly disgraced. One Friday night I will bring you papers to the value of three acts.’9 The emphasis throughout the letters, in spite of the pleading and the missed deadlines, is still on negotiation and exchange: the fair papers will be provided in exchange for money. Daborne recognizes that although his circumstances are straitened, he is able to alleviate his suffering through his ability to trade. Tellingly, as an example of the precariousness of his position, on at least two occasions Daborne asks for money and a revised deadline because of illness or infirmity. The opening scenes of The Poor Man’s Comfort are likewise concerned with value, trading and the capacity for the empowerment of each party as a consequence of the exchange. In the opening of the play, the two lovers, Urania and Lucius (a nobleman disguised as Lysander, a shepherd, in order to escape a recent putsch in the city) use the language of exchange to negotiate their love. Lucius bargains with Urania:
By all my hopes I sweare returne my love … and on my faithe, A tryall (beyond which the covetous thought Of man ne’er went) and I will undergoe.10
Urania responds with ‘You undervalue me’ (13), referring teasingly to the strength of her position in the village as the daughter of the landed shepherd Gisbert compared to Lucius’s much lower status as his labourer. In his defence, Lucius lists his accomplishments as part of the bargaining. Gisbert enters and the lovers are able to justify their love with his approval. As part of the wedding settlement, Gisbert, an old man, makes a gift of all his flocks and his land to Lucius. Daborne here offers us a view of a stable society where a just order is maintained through equitable bargaining. Services are provided and payment is made. The love between the couple is foremost (certainly as far as Urania is concerned) but it is grounded in principles of fair exchange. In this way, the empowerment I mentioned earlier is realized; each party gains some degree of control, however limited, through the careful articulation of the agreement; and, in spite of the sometimes strained business dealings between Daborne and
9 Ibid., p. 81. 10 Robert Daborne, The Poor Man’s Comfort, ed. Kenneth Palmer (Oxford, 1954), lines 9–12. All references to the play will be from this edition. I have retained the spelling of the original printed text with the exception of slight changes to assist the meaning. For example ‘the’ is quoted as ‘thee’. Further line references will appear in text. 282 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Henslowe, the opening scenes of the play may be interpreted as reflecting the overall successful nature of their working relationship. Daborne is not attempting to literalize this relationship in dramatic form, nor does he seem to be engaged in meta-theatrical commentary on the production aspects of performance. He is, nevertheless, suggesting that formal contractual arrangements, such as existed between Henslowe and himself, offered some protection to the poor. News that the deposed King has been reinstated and has recalled his former noble supporters interrupts the wedding celebrations for Lucius, as he appreciates that he can now exchange his poverty for power, wealth and position. Disdaining his newly married status, Lucius slinks away but not before he does a deal with an enemy of Gisbert to exchange his newly inherited land and livestock for money to equip himself for acceptance at court. This action has the immediate effect of impoverishing Gisbert and Urania. Poverty is thus the result of a broken agreement and the denial of personal responsibility for the consequences of actions that flout common perceptions of justice. Here poverty is not a by-product of behaviour, a result of misfortune or accident but derives solely from the pernicious, casual indifference of a nobleman. Daborne is careful not to portray Lucius’s actions as purely villainous. He is simply acting in a way that is consistent with the amorality of his class as represented in the play. He is given a soliloquy in which he calmly and logically presents the facts as he interprets them. First, he acknowledges Urania’s worth: she is ‘virtuous and fayre’, her position: ‘hir birth is lowe, thats fortunes fault not hers’, and the reality of his position: ‘shee is my wife I have maryed her | & shall I leave her now?’ Importantly, Lucius makes a distinction between his moral viewpoint as Lysander, ‘a poore shepherde swayne’, and as Lucius, ‘sonne unto a Senater, | great in my birth’. The former is bound to a shepherd’s good judgement that accepts the moral claims of Urania but the latter is the realist who reasons that he cannot be tied to the ‘love of a poore Milkmaid’. This onstage bifurcation provides the audience with a stark sense of how particular processes enact poverty: the interests of the powerful will always take precedence and Gisbert and Urania are ruined through no fault of their own but because they are inconvenient and unnecessary. As Lucius explains, without malice, the required course of action:
Ile abjure her sight sel bothe lodge And flockes, to furnish mee as is my breeding, suppose old gisbert Curse, his daughter raile, talke of Ingratitude they beat the Aire. (468–72) The Gifts of the Poor 283
His ruthlessness is determined by the requisites of class, which, he believes, should not be mitigated by ordinary, common considerations. He claims that:
great men are above there crymes, who hath a thriveing soule must chandge with times, and purposinge to mownt look uppwarde still hees weake that takes acquaintence of his ill. (472–3)
According to this logic, there is an economic imperative at work which justifies the actions of a ‘thriveing soule’. Lucius moves decisively from a position where arrangements are based on mutual benefit to one that encourages moral ambivalence, personal expediency, self-interest and unconscionable conduct. Having made this switch, Lucius therefore on-sells Urania’s dowry to Cosmo, knowing that Cosmo’s hatred of Gisbert will facilitate the transaction. The deals continue but this time they are grounded in the primacy of self-interest. What Gisbert offered, however, is much more gift than dowry, for in handing over all his worldly goods to Lucius, he exceeds that which would fulfil his obligations as Urania’s father, and his selfless action highlights the duplicitous nature of Lucius’s commercial transactioning. Daborne is at pains to show that Lucius’s actions are not isolated, nor that his treachery is unique. The creation and maintenance of poverty in the play are not the results of individual actions but are systemic in nature – as becomes most apparent in the court scenes later in the play. The Poor Man’s Comfort does not present poverty primarily as lack – a lack of goods, a lack of money, the lack of property. Rather, the play shows how poverty can be a consequence of the interruption of fair exchange and the breaking of contracts by the powerful. Poverty can be an engineered state, the result of the actions of the powerful and not the inaction of the poor.11 The play refuses to cast Gisbert and his daughter as passive victims. Upon hearing of Lucius’s duplicity, they immediately assume agency and both set out, taking different paths, to challenge the processes directed against them. Gisbert goes to the Court in the city to demand justice while Urania will follow Lucius, to reclaim him through her love. So, in response to the misery imposed on the old man and Urania, Daborne proposes Justice and Love as the main weapons against the self-interested abuse of power.
11 Linda Woodbridge highlights the opprobrium directed towards the unsettled, displaced or undeserving poor in early modern writings: Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Chicago, 2001). Daborne, in making his chief protagonist a vagrant and presenting his poverty as deserving of our sympathy, offers a corrective to the stigmatizing of the poor as shiftless and deviant. 284 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Before considering the outcomes of Gisbert’s and Urania’s journeys, it will be worthwhile to reflect on how Daborne utilized the source material for his play as this has some bearing on his treatment of poverty. In 1942, Wallace A. Bacon established that the main plot of The Poor Man’s Comfort is based upon William Warner’s novel Syrinx, or A Sevenfold History (1584). Bacon was somewhat dismissive of Daborne’s dramaturgy, alleging that ‘the playwright has simply set the action in dialogue for the stage’.12 As will be shown, however, while there are similarities in plot detail, Daborne made significant changes to the structure and the social implications of the play. The claim that Daborne simply transcribed from Warner is not borne out by any careful study of the play itself. Gender roles in Syrinx are strictly delineated whereby Alcippe (Urania in The Poor Man’s Comfort) is cast as the passive, virtuous victim: ‘Often (poor soul) she did inwardly devour her tears with patience (a rare patience, and in her sex a black swan) whilst standing upon her own unworthiness.’13 An unreflexive misogyny runs through the text, determining that the woman has worth only in terms of the degree to which she can defy gender stereotypes: Alcippe’s patience is valued because of its supposed rareness. Syrinx opens with the poor man’s appeal to the unnamed king and Alcippe enters in the second half of the story. In the play, Daborne gives Urania equal billing with Gisbert and he establishes her agency from the opening scene. She bargains with Lucius to ascertain the nature of his love and when he rejects her, she immediately resolves to go on a quest to reclaim her husband. Crucially, Urania demands that she be accused with Lucius of the killing of Flavia (Lucius’s mistress) even though she is merely a witness to the act. Her moral courage derives from a sense of her own worth and an independence which characterizes her behaviour throughout the play. If Alcippe’s chief virtue is dutiful patience, Urania’s is purposeful action. The re-positioning of the poor man’s daughter as co-protagonist in the drama is not only illustrative of Daborne’s interest in the positive portrayal of women in performance,14 but is also demonstrative of the playwright’s particular
12 Wallace A. Bacon, ‘The Source of Robert Daborne’sThe Poor Man’s Comfort’, Modern Language Notes, 57 (1942): 345–8, at 347. 13 Wallace A. Bacon (ed.), William Warner’s Syrinx, or A Sevenfold History (Evanston, IL, 1950), p. 154. 14 It may well be that Philip Henslowe had an influence on Daborne’s portrayal of a strong, relatively independent female. Natasha Corda notes that ‘There are many instances in the Diary of women – including members of Henslowe’s family, business associates and hired employees – participating in his business ventures, both theatrical and otherwise. Henslowe’s wife, Agnes, for example, is listed several times disbursing loans to actors’: Corda, ‘Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker’, Theatre Journal, 48 (1996): 185–95 at 188. The Gifts of the Poor 285 engagement with issues concerning poverty, especially the relationship between gender and poverty. Lucius has disrupted the harmony of the community. His action of repudiating his marriage vows is catastrophic for Urania. The subsequent act of selling the means of his father-in-law’s livelihood ruins Gilbert. According to the logic of equitable exchange that is established in the first scene, two contracts have been broken and the impact is shared equally by daughter and father.15 Poverty results from an iniquitous abuse of power that affects the injured parties in discrete ways. The resolution that is sought then is likewise to be applied discretely. In the final scene, Gisbert states that ‘a man consists of soule & bodie | the one by nature the other Justice ruld’ (2127–8). Daborne sees the restoration of Lucius to Urania as to do with the ‘soul’ and Gisbert’s later quest for justice as related to the ‘bodie’. Harmony will be achieved through the recuperative power of Urania’s love, offered to Lucius as untrammelled gift, and through Gisbert’s challenge to the senators in the City which is a consequence of his petition for justice. In a play that deals squarely with exchange and bargains being struck, the question of value underscores the many transactions. Flavia barters her body for Lucius’s gold and his value to her depends on the steady flow of money. Lucius lusts after Flavia and his money is the means by which he can acquire her. The transactions that result in Gisbert being beggared, as we have seen, are also based on the satisfaction of particular desires. Conventional wisdom was that the poor could not transact as their poverty – the lack of material goods – precluded them from engaging in exchange, which then rendered them powerless. Urania has worth that transcends the marketplace. Her value lies within herself – her ‘soule’ as Daborne would have it – and is not negotiable. Her love for Lucius, which is offered as gift, disrupts the tainted exchanges16 that proliferate in the play. Exchange now can be based not on the offer of goods or services in return for other goods or services or money, but on the free endowment of a gift from one to the other – it no longer needs to be reciprocal. Unlike Flavia, whose worth is material and confined to her willingness or unwillingness to provide access to her body, Urania’s worth is realized in the action of giving. While Urania has no expectation of benefiting from her gift freely given, there is nevertheless an exchange as she gains value within the community. She alone is prepared to stand
Daborne’s wife and daughter were also involved at various times in the dealings with Henslowe. 15 This is a major divergence from Warner’s Syrinx where the primary concerns are the petition of the father, Philargus, and the gracious wisdom of the king. 16 Tainted in the sense that exchanges such as Flavia’s with Lucius, Lucius’s with Cosmo and Lucius’s with his fellow senators (whereby they support each other out of class solidarity) are prejudicial to the welfare of Urania and Gisbert. 286 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France by Lucius when, friendless after being disgraced once his treatment of Gisbert and Urania is revealed to King Ferdinand, he despairs: ‘I am poore, & poverty | When nothing else doot, makes all frend flye’ (1598–9). Urania, disguised as Flavia’s servant, ministers to him: ‘Sir, I am Castadora | One that ner fawned on your prosperity, nor will forsake you in your adversitie’ (1600–1601). Urania establishes love as a currency in opposition to the various forms of trading which are practised throughout the play, forms which aver that Lucius’s poverty is defined by the absence of a viable and recognized financial identity and this lack excludes him from participating in the world of trade. Her refusal to ‘forsake [him] in [his] adversitie’ when he is destitute – unlike his former friends and his lover Flavia – illustrates that her sense of Lucius’s value is in direct contradistinction to the economic situation in which he now finds himself. For Urania, Lucius’s value is intrinsic and not as defined in the world to which he formerly belonged – extrinsic. There are also no performative requirements demanded of Lucius by Urania as the price of her devotion; her giving does not require a response, unlike all other transactions in the play, and it is this non-reciprocal aspect that is truly subversive,17 that is, she models self- excluding gift as the basis for exchange.18 This principle is endorsed in the final moments of the play when Ferdinand stops Gisbert (who has been appointed a judge by him) from sending Lucius and Urania to their executions for Flavia’s murder. Acting as rex ex machina, Ferdinand identifies gift as the perfect means of exchange:
Stay let me Imbrace thee thow fetst man that ere made nature prowd. Renowned Gisbert loe, as thow gavest unto thy Countryes good thy onely daughter: having no other gifte worthy thy merit, I returne thy guift which to recompence with any other Benefitt wud speake us poore And much ungratefull. (2172–8)
17 The actions of both Gisbert and Urania are an indictment of the political, social and economic practices of the state but they are subversive only in their being oppositional. They are wishing to reform, not transform, the dominant power structures. 18 In giving so freely to Lucius, Urania mimics the action of her father at the beginning of the play when he offers his house and all his livestock to his son-in-law. Her gift, in essence, redeems the earlier act, as, due to her love, Lucius truly repents his betrayal of father and daughter. The redemptive nature of the gift is formally recognized by Ferdinand (see lines 2172–8). The Gifts of the Poor 287
Before his assembled court, the king associates ‘merit’, ‘benefit’ and ‘recompence’ with the free exchange of gift – and in an action redolent for a Jacobean audience of God staying the hand of Abraham just as he is about to sacrifice Isaac – he reconstitutes the harmony of the natural pattern of non-exploitative exchanges which characterized relationships at the beginning of the play. The love-talk that Lucius previously had indulged in is now replaced by true affection for Urania. The significant change in his character is illustrated on the three separate occasions19 where he tries to protect her by declaring that he alone is responsible for Flavia’s death. Lucius attempts to offer his life as gift to preserve the life of his wife. As I have previously argued, the actions of Urania are complementary to the quest by Gisbert to find justice. Ferdinand’s dramatic intervention is positioned by Daborne to show that without love, justice can be righteous but excessively harsh.20 This is a departure from Warner who has Philargus (the Gisbert character) exempt himself from passing judgement on Opheltes (Lucius) and Alcippe. Warner’s king, in dismissing the charges, seems to do so less out of a sense of compassion – of tempering justice with mercy – than as a special favour to Opheltes and Philargus. Warner suggests that Opheltes’s actions are an aberration from the standards of normal courtly behaviour and that class interests take precedence and must be preserved. Indeed, in Syrinx, while Philargus is critical of the obstruction he receives from the minor court officials, he has ready access to the king who responds sympathetically and supports his claim against Opheltes. The impoverishment of a shepherd results from the renegade actions of an individual noble and the situation is quickly rectified once the citizen makes an application to the monarch. The clerks will be dealt with for their lack of compassion: the system is self-correcting and demonstrates that wrongs can be easily righted. Daborne rejects this premise. The experience of Gisbert as he moves through the levels of the judiciary becomes almost Kafkaesque.
19 The play, although set in the classical Greek era, is replete with biblical references – Lucius serves Gisbert for seven years just as Jacob worked likewise for Laban; and Gisbert as a type of Abraham, which has been touched on, represent but a few examples. The three attempts Lucius makes to take all the blame for the slaying of Flavia are suggestive of Peter’s three denials of Christ, with the inversion that Lucius is sanctified by his actions, unlike Peter whose betrayal reminds us of Lucius’s former intransigence when he rejects Urania. Daborne makes use of these biblical resonances to emphasize the nature and extent of redemption within the play, the rehabilitation of Lucius being the foremost example. 20 Vincentio, who is portrayed as a wise and honest senator, is critical of the just harshness of Gisbert’s ruling on Lucius and his daughter: ‘Strang and unheard of ’ and ‘Beyond all president’. As he was one senator who was sympathetic to Gisbert’s suit, his responses alert the audience to the judge’s seemingly excessive zeal and anticipate the later intervention of Ferdinand to save Urania and Lucius. 288 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
His initial optimism that ‘The oppressed poore mans advocate [will] report the wronge | upon the oppressors head’ (913–15) is challenged by the satirical irony Daborne injects in Gisbert’s speech when he describes the courtiers to whom he will presently take his suit:
There brains are troubled bout the affaires of state, the kingdomes good whilst others slepe secure thes outwach night and wast ther blood to gaine Titles of honor hardly worth there paine. (921–4)
Jaspero, a courtier enters and reveals that what causes him to ‘outwach night’ is court gossip and small talk. Appearance masks reality and the expectations of the citizen are at variance with the venal actuality. When he presents his petition to the men of state, Gisbert is quickly disabused of his civic idealism. He claims that his ‘cause is just & I am poore’ (963). Jaspero responds:
We had rather thy cause were wronge, & thow rich. Do we look as though we liv’d by releveinge the poore? You whoresonne gull, you sheaphard. (964–6)
Licurgo adds: ‘Foh! How the knave smells of tarr and hogges grease’ (967). These men are friends and fellow courtiers of Lucius. Their casual contempt and class viciousness are thus shown to be characteristic of the nobility at court and their state and judicial preoccupations do not proceed beyond their own class boundaries. Lucius is therefore a product of his courtly environment and so the villainy expressed in his soliloquy early in the play, where he resolves to ruin Gisbert and Urania, is reflective of the attitude of his class to those beneath them. Jaspero’s indignant rhetorical question – ‘Do we look as though we liv’d by releveinge the poore?’ – expresses a shared view of the limits of class responsibility. His question also draws attention to the link between the courtiers’ costs of living and the lack of poor relief. To provide for the poor, as they see it, would not be compatible with the maintenance of their opulent lifestyles. Curiously, there is some confusion on the part of the courtiers as to the real purpose of Gisbert’s petition. Licurgo and Jaspero assume Gisbert’s concern is with his poverty. Certainly he is distressed because of his penury, but the main motivations for his suit are to have his case heard and to obtain justice. As monied people, the courtiers have neither high expectations of, nor great regard for, the legal system as it is a commodity that they have easy access to when and The Gifts of the Poor 289 if they have need of it: justice can be bought or seduced so that their interests are always protected. For Gisbert, justice is the only means of empowerment. Daborne aims much of his satire at the pretensions of the court gentlemen. Nonetheless, there is some sense that the odiousness of much of their behaviour stems from ignorance and from an indolent lifestyle which has been actively encouraged at the court. When Ferdinand banishes two friends of Lucius – Leonardo and Silleus – for their role in the mistreatment of Gisbert as he tries to address the Senate, they are immediately remorseful and at the end of the play they act honourably to regain the king’s favour. The play highlights the social conditioning which accommodates the abuse of privilege and position and which is then conducive to the maintenance of inequality and the production of poverty. In spite of the abuse he receives from Jaspero and Licurgo, Gisbert continues with his quest for justice which he terms ‘The poore mans frind’ (982), a reference to the ‘poor man’s comfort’ of the title. Proverbially, virtue is the poor man’s comfort, but the play has little patience with virtue that is either passive and fatalistic or unwilling to challenge injustice: the actions of Gisbert in pursuing justice are fully endorsed. He goes to the Senate, confident of achieving justice from those he terms ‘Impartiall Judges’ (1083) and convinced that as a result of the presentation of his case ‘the world shall know great men are Just & good’ (1091). There is a purity in the naïveté of Gisbert’s innocence and the worldly wise audience, acutely aware of corrupt practices in the law and at court, is prepared for his enlightenment in the ways of the world. With Lucius present as a senator and eager to name Gisbert as representing a common threat to privilege, the case falters. Most senators, acting out of self-interest, treat the old man as a senile madman. Only Vincentio offers some support. Lucius appeals to class solidarity and asserts his refusal to martyr himself for their interests: ‘for you that please | to sit & here myne Honor scandalizde | know tyme may right me … [and] my tyme may come to laugh’ (1216–24). His observation that his opportunistic treatment of the poor is no different from theirs and that therefore they may find themselves in the future similarly accused strikes home. Leonardo acknowledges that Gisbert may have just cause but that Lucius’s ‘worth is knowne’ and that ‘how ever his desert, for so meane a fact | doth plead sufficient pardon were the Act | more capital by much’ (1240–42). He then accentuates the powerlessness of Gisbert’s situation: ‘men of your ranckes | must put up Injuryes & render thanks’ (1243–4). Justice is here directly related to privilege: the poor should respect but have no recourse to the law. A distinction is thus made between the deference due to the legal system, as the theoretical protector of individual rights within the community, and the application of the law by politicians to maintain their 290 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France privileged positions.21 Silleus supports Leonardo’s interpretation, adding that the warning about the nature of Gisbert’s threat made by Lucius is worthy of their consideration; they could truly find themselves in his position:
Hee tells you true, it may be our owne case, shall we upon complaint of men so base be questioned? Noe. Cedars are cedars still. Poor men must suffer, ritch do what they will. (1245–8)
National interests are read in terms of the interests of the ruling class.22 That the senators are so blunt in their appraisal of the options available to them – and for them there is only one option – is indicative of the vast difference in status and perceived worth of the two men. At this stage in the proceedings, the senators (now that Lucius has left the chamber) show no animosity to Gisbert as they no longer see him as a threat. Unlike the old man’s previous encounters with authority, this dismissal of his suit is not contemptuous although it is perhaps their callous indifference to his fate which is more disturbing, especially as he refers to the senate, with intended bitter irony this time, as ‘the poore mans Audience | chamber’ (1258–9). The site of justice is demonstrably the exclusive property of the rich as the system articulates and perpetuates their interests. Now that the business has been ‘settled’, the senators vacate the house, leaving Gisbert alone on the stage and what follows is one of the most remarkable scenes in Jacobean drama. In the deserted chamber, he creates his own house of justice that ‘admits no favour, Bribe nor feare’ (1269). He imagines himself addressing senators who will listen eagerly to his petition. Then, recognizing that this vision of justice is a chimera, he replays the previous scene, acting the part of each of the senators who was involved in the discussion of his suit but overlaying their words with his almost unbearably moving, sardonic commentary. He imitates in turn Lucius, Leonardo, Glisco, Silleus and Vincentio, modifying their words with devastating effect. Thus Leonardo’s ‘men of your ranckes | must put up Injuryes & render thanks’ is transformed into: ‘poore men are borne to wronge, low are their
21 Initially Daborne does not make any clear distinctions between the judiciary and the executive powers of the state; Gisbert’s quest for justice crosses the lines of the two. It is only when he is made Chief Justice later in the play that the role of judge becomes an oppositional force against institutionalized corrupt class self-interest. 22 A variation perhaps on the maxim that ‘What is good for our country is good for General Motors and vice versa’: Chairman and CEO of General Motors, Charlie Wilson, 1953, quoted in Martin H. Redish and Howard M. Wasserman, ‘What’s Good for General Motors: Corporate Speech and the Theory of Free Expression’,George Washington Law Review, 66 (1997–98): 235–50, at 235. The Gifts of the Poor 291 ranke | the more they are trod upon, the more they must give thankes’ (1288–9). This instant replay isolates and exposes the inflexibility, the atrophy, the self- serving brutality and the rhetorical viciousness of the power structure that is meant to serve all. Attention is also drawn to the hypocrisy of the senatorial statements and to the triteness of the positions they hold. Even a sympathetic voice such as Vincentio’s is ridiculed; his attempt at comfort ‘thow hadst best goe home, thy sorrowes make thee sad, | the good that I can do is this – the world is sad’ (1255–6) is transformed by Gisbert into: ‘thow hadst best goe | home or stay here & goe mad, all | the good that I can do thee is this, the world is bad’ (1298–1300). This scene is centred on a discussion of rank, social responsibility that is proactive as well as reciprocal and the legitimate role of the judiciary. Daborne castigates those processes of government that are negligent and unthinking in the execution of their roles. The pauperization of Gisbert and Urania, within the context of the play, is not irregular; it occurs because it can. The structure of government is protective of specific class interests and the creation of poverty is not necessarily an intended or predicted outcome, but it is certainly a consequence of the practice of the administration of power that is heedless of questions of social accountability. Gisbert is optimistic of finding justice because, as a good man living in a community, he is steeped in the principles (and practice) of equitable negotiation between people, and he trusts, initially, in his belief that the relationships between government and the governed will be similarly based on reciprocity. There is passion at the heart of Daborne’s satire. Gisbert finishes his solo performance with an outburst against the powers that refuse to listen:
You empty pated Judges, painted Idolls. Whose soules are puerpler than the robes you weare, Whose eares, more deafer to the poore mans Cry – then Hell is to pitti. (1301–1304)
The comparison with Hell works well as a simile to describe the obduracy of the judges, but it is also extremely perceptive. Hell lacks agency; it is a state into which souls are cast. By associating the senate with Hell, Gisbert is asserting that the former has become moribund through the idleness, the profligacy and the corrupt self-interest of its members. Through a reliance on bribes and an inability to act justly, the senate is no longer able to function as a governing body. Senate positions are sinecures and the qualities required of a senator, as outlined by Jaspero, are hardly conducive to good governance: ‘[a senator must be able to] wear | perfumd bootes & beggar my Taylor, keep a whore … | 292 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France carowse, laugh at I understand not | & lye … damnably’ (931–4). Gisbert serves to demonstrate how fatally fractured the system of government has become and it is at this moment in the play that Daborne follows Warner and has Ferdinand meet with Gisbert.23 It is important to recognize that Ferdinand has been restored to power after having been driven from his kingdom by the usurper Oswell. He returns as a wise and honest ruler who has defeated a corrupt despot. However, the king’s loyal followers, including Lucius, who have had their titles and estates restored, do not necessarily share the monarch’s vision and, as we have seen, the treatment meted out to Gisbert is indicative of the amoral behaviour of the new men of government. Gisbert presents his story to Ferdinand who acts immediately condemning the ‘corrupted Judges, the states most dangerous foes’ (1480). The king confiscates Lucius’s estate, gives him four days to find Urania and banishes Silleus and Leonardo; he then makes Gisbert the state’s Chief justice. Significantly, Ferdinand establishes merit as the criterion for promotion: ‘for what wante in thy Births pre-eminence | thow hast in virtue & in Innocence’ (1517–18). The man who sought justice is now invested with the responsibility for dispensing justice, and the qualities that are now privileged are ‘virtue’ and ‘innocence’, the latter quality referring to his impartiality and his incorruptibility rather than his simplicity. Also, the appointment of Gisbert and his subsequent demeanour in the play clarify the separation of the judiciary from the executive by disrupting the nexus between power and privilege. With the banishing of Silleus and Leonardo who had actively supported Lucius in the humiliation of Gisbert, Ferdinand makes important, systemic changes to the management of his government. He is disrupting the rule of expediency and the tyranny of privilege without responsibility by removing those most guilty of perverting the processes of justice. The king’s actions are decisive: he rewards merit, placing it above birth as a prerequisite for advancement and he attacks the plutocracy that has stifled the administration of justice in the kingdom. Nonetheless, we are not being asked to view these reforms as expressions of a proto-democratic sensibility; Ferdinand is acting as an absolute, ‘enlightened’ seventeenth-century monarch, with all the authority associated with that position, and it is certainly not the case that Daborne is advocating radical power and wealth redistribution. However, the play is offering a critique of calculated manipulation and distortion of justice so that privileged elites can enjoy an access to the law that is denied to the poor in the community.
23 Warner begins his story with the meeting of the king and Philargus, and the incident is shown from the king’s perspective. The Gifts of the Poor 293
What is radical in the play is the degree to which Gisbert shows his impartiality when pronouncing judgement on Lucius and Urania. Vincentio, an honest senator, has claimed at their trial that Lucius had unintentionally killed Flavia and that ‘wee judge them free’ (2118), an opinion shared by all present – except for Gisbert. He acknowledges his feelings as a father which would let them be free, but then he states that ‘tho all the world should faile | Justice must be her self beare Equall saile’ (2165–6) and he orders them to be executed. This ruling, as we have seen, is countermanded by the king, much to Gisbert’s relief. Just as Abraham’s preparedness to kill his only son Isaac was a demonstration of his complete trust in the will of God and a testament to his absolute obedience, so too, but in a different sense, is the judgement of Gisbert the supreme authentication of his belief in the impartiality and the transformative nature of justice, by which is meant that justice, unassailable and untainted, can re-form a society. In order to prevent such a justice from becoming severe and inflexible, however, the righteous judge must also be capable of mercy, which is demonstrated with Ferdinand’s intervention. Robert Daborne’s business dealings with Philip Henslowe appear to inform the early scenes in The Poor Man’s Comfort, whereby men and women barter and exchange, make vows and break them, all within an environment where human worth is determined by market forces. The villainy of Lucius is unremarkable in a city setting where rich and powerful young men are contemptuous of the rights of others and where the subsequent abuses of justice result in the impoverishment of those who lack the means to engage in transactions. In the concluding scenes, Daborne illustrates that a properly instituted and impartial judiciary can disrupt those unjust processes that inhibit a fairer distribution of wealth, and that the poor may be able to initiate change through access to the means to determine their own worth. Urania’s gifting of herself to Lucius (unworthy as he is of such a gift), combined with Gisbert’s willingness to administer justice that is without prejudice, are liberating forces in the play and together they provide the true poor man’s comfort. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 14 ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’: Changing Perceptions of Rural Poverty and Plebeian Noise in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Peter Denney
In 1790, the intrepid traveller, John Byng, Viscount Torrington, embarked on a tour of some of the Midland counties in pursuit of quiet, picturesque scenery. This was a region of Britain increasingly renowned for its burgeoning industrial productivity rather than its picturesque beauty, and Byng was frequently frustrated in his desire to seek refuge from the noise and bustle of the city. It was to satisfy a desire for quietness that he had decided to travel alone, or almost alone; despite his insistence that travelling on horseback rather than by coach distinguished his wholesome exercise from the idleness of the modern ‘fine’ gentry, he had taken with him a servant to ensure that he did not have to do too much exercise. Apparently, riding and sightseeing were arduous enough. Although Byng occasionally wished for genteel company, to travel in a party, he noted, would court ‘schis’ms and wrangles’, and he was a man of solitary pleasures, a lover of retirement, fond of the ‘shaded sequester’d vale’. So conscientious was he to avoid company that when a fellow traveller began to ride alongside him and make conversation, he remained ‘glum’ until this unwanted companion ‘push’d forward’, complaining in his diary ‘I come abroad for quiet, country air, fresh scenery, and to go my own way and my own pace; to escape from London blockheads, and the many who will, without caring for you, ask how you do?’ Metropolitan manners, Byng everywhere made clear, had penetrated deep into the countryside, and, as the land was given over to lead-mining and large-scale cotton manufacturing, an influx of noise was destroying the beauty as well as the integrity of rural life. ‘Every pastoral vale’, he complained in another tour, now throbbed with the discordant din of industrial activity and the drunken, 296 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France rebellious voices of industrial workers.1 As Anna Seward wrote of a similar development at Coalbrookdale, the ‘silent reign’ of nature was being ‘usurpt’ by the ‘mingled tones’ of ‘pond’rous’, clanging engines, of shouting and of restive, clamouring ‘artificers, with brazen throats’.2 For Byng, nowhere was this so pronounced as at Cromford, in Derbyshire, where the famous cotton mill of Richard Arkwright had produced a fundamental change in the rural soundscape, fatal to the picturesque valuation of ‘quiet, and wild scenery’.3 Of the same region, a contemporary observer had championed precisely this transformation as a source of population growth, commerce and the refinement of the ‘rude manners’ of the ‘lowest class of people’. In particular, the ‘introduction of a more free intercourse with the world’ had begun to ‘polish’ the poor, whose rough, boisterous conduct promoted solidarity among themselves but nurtured hostility to outsiders.4 Although an ardent opponent of such cosmopolitanism, Byng was reluctant to reject a place like Cromford, which clearly sustained a large, active and growing population. As a citizen, he believed that a flourishing population was a vital component of a strong and successful nation, even if it was increasingly engaged in industrial rather than agricultural activity. Yet ‘speaking as a tourist’, he wrote:
these vales have lost all their beauties; the rural cot has given place to the lofty red mill, and the grand houses of overseers; the stream perverted from its course by sluices, and aquaducts, will no longer ripple and cascade. Every rural sound is sunk in the clamours of cotton works; and the simple peasant (for to be simple we must be sequester’d) is changed into the impudent mechanic.5
To some extent, Byng was an unreconstructed paternalist, alarmed by the destruction of the moral economy of the countryside, a process he perceived to be marked by a shift in the rural soundscape, from quiet to noisy, virtuous to corrupt, and harmonious to discordant. And yet there was the odd moment when the advance of commercial modernity was heard to have made the land and its society silent and dispirited rather than loud and unruly. In a lament at the abandonment of regulated bread marketing practices, for example, Byng
1 C. Bruyn Andrews (ed.), The Torrington Diaries: A Selection from the Tours of the Hon. John Byng (London, 1954), pp. 268, 417. 2 Anna Seward, ‘Colebrook Dale’ (1798), in Walter Scott (ed.), The Poetical Works of Anna Seward (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1810), 2, 315. 3 Andrews, Torrington Diaries, p. 251. 4 James Pilkington, A View of the Present State of Derbyshire (2 vols, London, 1789), 2, 57–9. 5 Andrews, Torrington Diaries, p. 251. ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’ 297 commented on the lack of energy and dynamism which characterized the typical, modern market day.6 Encouraging ‘open and fair dealings’, it was once a ‘day of joy’, when ‘bells rang merrily’, controlling who could purchase bread at what price; where ‘jolly farmers assembled’, clattering wagons came and went, and the poor laughed at the ‘harmless asseverations of a … mountebank’ or the ‘wit of Mister Punch’. But now bread marketing was a secretive business, and the market-place was almost empty, for cottages had been ‘pull’d down’, small farms had been ‘swallow’d by the greater’, and food commodities went directly to London or to manufacturing towns.7 It was as if provincial Britain had realized the model of a sick, tyrannical society described by Adam Ferguson, in which order was conceived to be inconsistent with ‘commotion’ and synonymous with ‘obedience, secrecy, and the silent passing of affairs through the hands of a few’.8 More commonly, though, Byng represented most forms of social noise as undesirable aspects of the countryside, repugnant to taste no less than virtue. He avoided ‘rustic revelry’ and condemned public sports, because these events were attended by ‘drunkards’ and accompanied by ‘much clamour of trumpetting’; similarly, whereas the sound of the militia had long evoked notions of liberty, bravery and loyalty, now it was a source of ‘noisy, useless music, and drummings’, despotic and vulgar. Despite being committed to the ideal of populousness, Byng believed ‘coalition and collision bring us every vice’, and hoped for a land of ‘less intercourse’ and ‘more virtue’, a pre-enclosed soundscape where the rural poor were quiet, sober, industrious, orderly and badly paid.9 In this sense, there was something peculiarly modern about this critique of commercial modernity, for earlier in the century, before the triumph of political economy and picturesque taste, a countryside pulsating with noisy collective activity was frequently imagined to be a symbol of a healthy nation.10 This chapter will examine the way in which, during the late eighteenth century in Britain, the land and its labouring inhabitants came to be valued for being quiet. More specifically, it will argue that a combination of agricultural improvement and picturesque tourism created in the literature of rural life a tendency to represent the poor as silent objects, figures to be seen but not
6 For the decline of the moral economy of bread-marketing, see the classic essay by E.P. Thompson,Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1993), chapter 4, pp. 185–258. 7 Andrews, Torrington Diaries, p. 267. 8 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge, 1995), p. 254. 9 Andrews, Torrington Diaries, pp. 236–8. 10 See Peter Denney, ‘Silencing the Poor: Soundscape, Landscape and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 2008), pp. 2–83. 298 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France heard. This development was conscientiously resisted in Oliver Goldsmith’s nostalgic poem, The Deserted Village (1770), which lamented the loss of social noise caused by the growth of commerce and the attendant depopulation of the countryside. By contrast, in William Cowper’s sentimental georgic poem, The Task (1785), picturesque landscape taste merged with a more utilitarian view of the land, resulting in the quietness of the poor being imagined to be a typical and wholly desirable feature of rural society. Only a matter of decades earlier, this had not always been the case. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the georgic tradition in poetry gave rise to a nationalistic image of a countryside inhabited by a rowdy rural populace, in what became a potent, almost dominant, representation of Britain.11 This was a place of ‘busy joy-resounding fields’, noted James Thomson, where, at harvest time especially, the ‘voice | Of happy labour, love and social glee’ rung out across the land.12 Similarly, in the Hop-Garden by Christopher Smart, the hop harvest was depicted as a remarkably noisy affair, worked by a ‘tumultuous crew’ of labourers whose industry was often interrupted by intervals of ‘boist’rous uproar’. But despite causing some inconvenience, which needed to be tactfully managed by an employer, the ‘cries’ and ‘shouts’ of the ‘mob | Irrational’ were meant to testify to the liberty and vitality of a thriving polity.13 For such an image of the poor was concerned to demonstrate that English rural society was a place of exceptional freedom and prosperity, in contrast to despotic countries like France. As one commentator noted in the early 1730s, the heyday of georgic ideology, while a ‘slavish’, ‘ French’ maxim declared that ‘to keep a People poor is the way to keep them quiet, this bitter Pill … will never down with English Men, but work the quite contrary Effect, for they are People us’d to Liberty and Plenty’, and ready to counter ‘Schemes of Poverty and Slavery’ with ‘terrible Oppositions and Disturbances’.14 In addition, the early eighteenth century placed great emphasis on the ideal of populousness, which was widely believed to be the ‘Sign or Effect’ of a ‘thriving’ state.15 There was also an abiding fear that luxury – the inevitable consequence of the advance of commerce – would lead to depopulation, plunging the country
11 For a related interpretation of the English georgic tradition, see John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 35–88. 12 James Thomson,The Seasons (1730–46), in J. Logie Robertson (ed.), Poetical Works (Oxford, 1908; repr. London, 1971), p. 155. 13 Christopher Smart, The Hop-Garden, in Smart, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1752), pp. 125–31. 14 Thomas Baston, Observations on Trade and Publick Spirit (London, 1732), p. 30. 15 Bishop Berkeley, The Querist (London, 1736), pp. 11–12. ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’ 299 into what the authors of Cato’s Letters described as a ‘woeful and silent solitude’.16 Self-evidently, the georgic image of large numbers of voluble agricultural workers constituted part of a general celebration of the populousness and, therefore, the greatness of the nation. But for many writers, it was the spirit, especially the martial spirit, of the population that mattered more than its size or density, and in the poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century, there was a tendency to accentuate the military benefits of a noisy rural populace, who combined boisterous, manly recreation with wholesome, outdoor work. Thus, conceiving the poor as a ‘rude militia’, William Somerville portrayed in glowing terms a ‘shouting Crowd’ of ‘Rustic Heroes’, cultivating their ‘Valour’ by wrestling and fighting, before sitting beneath a tree to drink beer, gossip, joke and praise the glory of Britain.17 Clearly, this image of the rural poor was far from unequivocally sympathetic, not least because noisiness was regarded as a symptom of irrationality as well as vitality, a failure to regulate the passions and effectively govern the self. As Henry Fielding wrote, in Tom Jones, of a group of unsupervised villagers in a country churchyard ‘so roared forth the Somersetshire mob an hallaloo, made up of almost as many squawls, passions, among them: some were inspired by rage, others alarmed by fear, and others had nothing in their heads but the love of fun’.18 But despite such condescension, there appears to have been a constituency among the polite who attributed to the noisy public leisure of the poor – at least as it was represented in literature – an important social function, proof of the bravery and harmony of a great nation. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, partly as a result of the growing acceptance of commercial society, the noisy behaviour of rural labouring people came increasingly to be reclassified as a threat to civility and prosperity. On the one hand, many forms of social noise which had previously been regarded as manifestations of the laudable warlike temper of the populace began to be regarded as, at best, instances of savagery and, at worst, auxiliaries of rebellion. As is well known, this polite intolerance of noisy plebeian leisure was not especially new. But it gained a new insistence in the late eighteenth century, partly as a consequence of the ‘reformation of manners’ movement.19 This
16 John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon,Cato’s Letters (1720–23), ed. Ronald Hamowy (2 vols, Indianapolis, 1995), 2, 540. 17 William Somerville, Hobbinol, or, The Rural Games, 2nd edn (London, 1740), pp. 46–9. 18 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749), ed. R.P.C. Mutter (1966; London, 1985), p. 141. 19 See Joanna Innes, ‘Politics and Morals: The Reformation of Manners Movement in Later Eighteenth-Century England’, in Eckhart Hellmuth (ed.), The Transformation of 300 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France middle-class campaign aimed to improve the morality of the poor by increasing discipline, reducing idleness and limiting opportunities for disorderly conduct. Constituting a crackdown on the social noise of the poor, it was powerfully shaped by the rise of Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on the virtues of sobriety, industriousness, domesticity, deference and piety.20 Needless to say, these were not virtues promoted by noisy recreational customs. On the contrary, such customs were believed to be inimical to Godliness and were often criticized for their Pagan associations. Of popular festivals, for example, one Evangelical writer noted in the 1770s that they were celebrated with the ‘noise, riots, and frantic mirth of the Bacchanals; rather than with … decent solemnity, pious chearfulness, and strict temperance’; and he then went on to condemn violent blood sports, lamenting the way in which the ‘surrounding, savage mob rends the very heavens with the most horrid imprecations, and repeated shouts of applauding joy’.21 Certainly, recreations actively patronized by the elite sometimes survived this onslaught, but there was even an attempt made by Sarah Trimmer to banish from the harvest home what she described as all that ‘boisterous noisy mirth, and intemperate excess’.22 This attack on plebeian noise in the name of civility, piety and public decency was both related to and reinforced by the rise of the science of political economy, with the result that quietness became the chief and sometimes the only virtue of the rural poor. Political economy defined the health of society almost exclusively by its prosperity, which meant that the poor were valued only to the extent that they contributed to increasing the wealth of the nation. As the spokesman for agricultural experiment, Arthur Young made clear, ‘the loss of a single hour’s work, of a labouring hand, however small, is nevertheless a public one … What a wretched policy must it therefore be … to give the least encouragement to idleness, which is constantly attended with such a prodigious loss to the public!’23 Within this conception of society, no benefits could be attributed to the noisy leisure of labouring people, and any activity opposed to industriousness was accordingly reclassified as mere
Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (London, 1990), pp. 58–71; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–83 (1989; Oxford, 1992), pp. 498–505, 719–25. 20 See Deborah Valenze, ‘Charity, Custom and Humanity: Changing Attitudes to the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (eds), Revival and Religion since 1700 (London, 1993), pp. 59–78. 21 John William Fletcher, An Appeal to Matter of Fact and Common Sense (Bristol, 1772), pp. 115–20. 22 Sarah Trimmer, The Two Farmers (London, 1787), p. 109. 23 Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Letters to the People of England (London, 1768), p. 279. ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’ 301 idleness. In the opinion of James Steuart, for instance, ‘idleness will not be totally rooted out, until people be forced, in one way or other, to give up both superfluity and days of recreation’.24 Furthermore, for some commentators, the industriousness of the poor could be fostered not just by eliminating holidays, but also by discouraging indiscriminate almsgiving and curtailing parish relief. This restriction of charity, it was argued, would leave the poor no choice but to depend on their own industry for survival, thereby motivating them to prefer a life of unremitting labour to one of even occasional leisure. Indeed, in the opinion of Joseph Townsend in the 1780s, the result would be to make labouring people more compliant as well as more hardworking, and revealingly his model of self-reliance was the ‘silent sufferer’ in the ‘sequestered cottage’.25 The belief that the poor should work in silence, uninterrupted by intervals of leisure, pervaded writings about agricultural improvement, that branch of political economy concerned with increasing the productivity of the land. In a classic rejection of the georgic idealization of the harvest as a raucous, leisurely affair, for example, Arthur Young stressed the importance of supervision to the maintenance of labour discipline, pointing out that ‘men should work as long as they can see … for it is a maxim in most countries, that men are not to talk of hours in harvest, but to do whatever they are ordered’.26 This notion that the poor should be seen but not heard became a recurrent theme of the literature of agricultural improvement. A revealing example of this was the recommendation that every farm should have a grindstone of its own to prevent ‘Servants from gadding to the Smith’s shop upon every small occasion’, where they might discuss the news free from the surveillance of their master.27 In this way, a correlation existed between keeping the poor under observation and enforcing their quietness. Moreover, one major concern was that labourers, if permitted to pursue sociability, would not simply engage in idle gossip, but would complain about their working conditions. It was for this reason that Young wrote of the advantage of utilizing a bailiff ‘to be perpetually on the watch on all the people … employed’; or, if a farmer could not afford a bailiff, to be careful to hire ‘docile’ farm workers, who were likely to ‘obey … orders, without that round of murmuring and complaints so often heard from these people’.28 In order to
24 James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (2 vols, London, 1767), 2, 504. 25 Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786), ed. Ashley Montagu (Berkeley, 1971), p. 19. 26 Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Kalendar (London, 1771), p. 249. 27 Daniel Hillman, Tusser Redivivus (London, 1710), ‘December’, p. 10. 28 Young, Farmer’s Kalendar, pp. 310, 315. 302 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France choose appropriately quiet workers, he added, it would be beneficial for a farmer to learn the art of physiognomy. Thus, as the surveillance of labouring people became a growing concern in the late eighteenth century, the dominant image of the rural poor in polite poetry shifted from noisy to quiet, uninhibited to observed, irrepressible to docile. Particularly in the poetry of rural life, the result was a distanced view of the poor, often portrayed as isolated figures working with discipline and under strict supervision. Whereas the harvest, for instance, had previously been depicted as a rowdy event, in which large numbers of labourers enjoyed all manner of noisy activities during and after their work, now it was an occasion for the poor to practise the virtues of quietness, obedience and industriousness. Similarly, this key episode in the agricultural calendar was always represented as a source of mostly visual pleasure, a pleasure inseparable from the satisfaction of supervising the work of the poor, and making sure that they neither complained nor wasted time. A consummate example of this new, quiet image of the poor occurs in the description of the corn harvest in The Village Curate (1788), a poem written by the clergyman, James Hurdis. In this representation of a stock georgic episode, Hurdis begins by noting that, just as the farmer derives enormous satisfaction from watching the progress of the harvest and contemplating its revenue, so ‘we too are gratified’ by the same visual experience. According to the poet, there is nothing more delightful than observing from behind a ‘window’ the ‘reaper strip … and put his sickle to the wheat’; nothing more agreeable than ‘studiously’ tracing the ‘vast effects | Of unabated labour’, observing a ‘golden field’ grow ‘thick with sheaves’, or watching crops ‘fall | In frequent lines before the hungry scythe’. And so enamoured with this vision of unremitting work is Hurdis that it is actually painful to ponder the fact that, once the field is cleared, the harvest must end.
Work on ye swains And make one autumn of your lives, your toil Still new, your harvest never done. Work on, And stay the progress of the falling year … Never faint, Nor ever let us hear the hearty shout Sent up to heav’n, your annual work complete And harvest ended. It may seem to you The sound of joy, but not of joy to us. We grieve to think how soon your toil has ceas’d … . 29
29 James Hurdis, The Village Curate (London, 1787), pp. 90–92. ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’ 303
It had been customary in the poetry of rural life to depict the noisy celebration, which concluded the harvest, as a positive symbol of the harmony of rural society, along with the contentment and vitality of the poor. Even for the labouring-class poet, Stephen Duck, who exposed this image of Merry England as a patent falsification, the convivial noise of post-harvest rituals was a source of deep psychic satisfaction.30 For Hurdis, however, the satisfaction is all in the view of unceasing toil, and the recreational noise, ‘the hearty shout’, which announces its completion is a source of profound regret. It is impossible to be sure, here, whether Hurdis most dislikes the noisy behaviour of the harvest workers, or the prospect of the end of their seasonal labour. But either way, labour is associated with quietness, and what the poor perceive as the ‘sound of joy’ is heard by the polite reading public as the sound of idleness. In this especially revealing representation of the rural poor as a silent, disciplined workforce, the perspective adopted by the poet was clearly that of the agricultural improvement lobby. Indeed, the enclosure movement, which reached something of a climax in the late eighteenth century, was often praised for imposing a sense of visual order on an unruly, unproductive countryside, bringing about a quiet disposition in labourers. Unenclosed land, it was frequently argued, encouraged the poor to be idle, insular and irreverent. Commoners were refractory and savage, complained one improver; they derived their education from ghost stories and old wives’ tales, which made them ignorant ‘Abettors of … Clamour’ in the face of rational arguments for progress.31 On the Sabbath, according to another commentator, far from seeing scenes of piety, it was not unusual to witness ‘every Common … profaned with noisy Sports and Pastimes’.32 Furthermore, as the quietness of the countryside became an index of civilization, there followed a tendency to value the land for its visible appearance at the expense of its collective social life. As Charles Vancouver noted, better for labourers to work on consolidated farms under the eye of their employer than to be ‘grouped together in gossips in … country villages’.33 In fact, the prioritization of sight over sound was a basic assumption of the new individualistic attitude, for enclosure was pre-eminently an attempt to make the rural environment conform to an exclusively visual idea of order.
30 See John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 78–80. 31 Anon., The True Interest of the Landowners of Great Britain (London, 1734), p. 38. 32 Lancaster Adkin, The Sabbath: A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of St Stephen’s, Norwich, to Promote the Establishment of Sunday Schools (Norwich, 1785), p. 25. 33 Charles Vancouver, General View of the Agriculture of Hampshire (London, 1810), p. 505. 304 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Following in the footsteps of Hurdis, the poet and agricultural writer Thomas Bachelor described the harvest in terms of its appeal to the eye, a ‘joyous scene’ which made the heart bound with ‘silent rapture’. In the same work, Bachelor also argued that the enclosure of open fields and wastes created regularity out of an uncivilized land which had formerly been in a state of noise and confusion, as amorphous as it was discordant. ‘But industry’, the poet concluded:
Has chang’d the formless aspect of the land. To distant fields no more the peasants roam, Their cottage-lands and farms surround their home; And hawthorn fences, stretch’d from side to side, Contiguous pastures, meadows, fields divide.34
Such a privatization of the land clearly diminished the scale of public interaction, which advocates of enclosure generally heard as contention and rumour rather than negotiation or conversation. ‘Often even among old neighbours’, wrote one improving clergyman, ‘there is anger and frenzy and the stink of bitter speech … while far and wide the fields resound with ear- piercing cries’.35 Whereas open-field country was thought to be characterized by commotion, especially by roaming, arguing, restive labourers, enclosed land was conceived as an exclusively visual phenomenon, a series of rectilinear lines, forms and spaces virtually devoid of human content. And this reflected the fact that the new arrangement of visible, property divisions, the hedgerows, actually prevented the production of noise by restricting the public use of and access to the land. Such visual language saturated writings about agricultural improvement, resulting in the sound of the rural poor being excluded from consideration or, worse still, being interpreted as inappropriate noise. ‘The first object of our attention shall be the shape, size, and cloathing of arable fields’, wrote Thomas Ruggles in a series of essays on the beauty of an enclosed, utilitarian landscape; but the last point in this account of ‘Picturesque Farming’ was a recommendation to abolish the noisy customary practice of gleaning on the grounds that the ability of labourers to ‘wander from field to field’ occasioned ‘much idleness and loss of
34 Thomas Bachelor, Village Scenes, The Progress of Agriculture, and Other Poems (London, 1804), pp. 81–2. For commentary on this poem in relation to enclosure, see John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 75–6. 35 James Tyley, ‘Inclosure of Open Fields in Northamptonshire’, trans. Dorothy Halton, Northamptonshire Past and Present, 1(4) (1951): 35–41, at 36–7. ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’ 305 time’.36 Given that for Ruggles, as for most improvers, an enclosed landscape was as beautiful as it was productive, anything which impinged on the proprietor’s quiet, visual enjoyment of his property was regarded as a violation of taste as well as an impediment to industry. The theory of the picturesque, as expounded by William Gilpin, was actually based on a dissociation between utility and taste; but even more than the literature of agricultural improvement, this was also characterized by a preference for a quiet countryside apprehended in predominantly visual terms. For the lover of picturesque scenery, the geometrical appearance of enclosed, cultivated land was regarded as a source of aesthetic displeasure. ‘He is disgusted’, wrote Gilpin, ‘with the formal separations of property – with houses, towns, the haunts of men, which have oftener a bad effect on the landscape than a good one’.37 But Gilpin himself was equally disgusted by the appearance of common fields. The new taste was for the irregular forms of uncultivated, if not completely wild, nature. Accordingly, supreme value was placed on a rural environment with only minimal signs of human activity, an unpopulated landscape where the spectator could enjoy tranquil and sequestered scenes, distant from the ‘haunts of men’. These scenes, however, were prized exclusively for their visual properties – of shape, colour and overall composition. As Gilpin declared, the ‘province of the picturesque eye is to survey nature’. 38 More than this, the cult of the picturesque constituted the triumph of a way of evaluating the land according to pictorial criteria, with aesthetic pleasure deriving from viewing a chunk of the natural world as if it were a painting. For the land to resemble a painting, to be picturesque, it had by definition to be quiet, its human presence eliminated, pushed into the distance, or, at the very least, reduced to some solitary figures in the foreground. Throughout his various tours through river, mountain and woodland environments, Gilpin frequently described picturesque scenery as opposed to noisy human activity, especially industrial activity.39 During his visit to Tintern Abbey, for instance, he made it clear that when he described this popular
36 Thomas Ruggles, ‘Picturesque Farming’, Annals of Agriculture, 6 (1786), pp. 175–84, at p. 176; Thomas Ruggles, ‘Picturesque Farming’,Annals of Agriculture, 9 (1788), pp. 1–15, at p. 13. 37 William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape (London, 1792), p. 57. 38 Ibid., p. 26. 39 For a study of this tension between industrial activity and picturesque taste, see Stephen Copley, ‘Gilpin on the Wye: Tourists, Tintern Abbey, and the Picturesque,’ in Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne and Scott Wilcox (eds), Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape 1750–1880 (New Haven, 1997), pp. 133–55. 306 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France picturesque hot-spot as a pleasing attraction for the traveller, he was certainly not referring to the nearby iron works:
The country aboutTintern-abbey hath been described as a solitary, tranquil scene: but its immediate environs only are meant. Within half mile of it are carried great iron-works; which introduce noise and bustle into these regions of tranquillity.40
Conveniently enough, these iron works were concealed behind a wooded hill, so they did not interfere with the pictorial composition of the rural region around the ruined abbey. But Gilpin’s point was that the appreciation of picturesque landscape required the spectator to be out of earshot of ‘noise and bustle’ as well as distant from its visible effects. The same point was made, too, during his tour of the Lake District, when he described his journey up the River Lune, beginning about a mile or so from Lancaster. Initially, noted Gilpin disapprovingly, the river was a ‘busy, noisy scene’, characterized by all manner of ‘nautic clamour’ – no doubt referring, at least in part, to the proverbially bad language and boisterous conduct of sailors. Only a few miles up-river, however, the Lune became agreeably picturesque, winding ‘quietly and unobserved’ around rocky projections and passing through areas of uninhabited woodland.41 Self-evidently, then, the picturesque taste for quiet, natural scenery was very much a reaction against industrialization, as the country came to be defined against the noise and hubbub of the city.42 But the subsequent pursuit of quietness in the country led also to a disavowal of the noise of collective, rural activity. The image of the singing milkmaid and the whistling ploughman from John Milton’s L’A l l e g r o , for example, had been a stock-in-trade of early eighteenth-century georgic poetry; but for Gilpin, such noisy, sociable labour had a ‘bad effect’ on the landscape.43 Equally unpicturesque were the ‘crouded scenes’ of a painter like Claude, for it was better for the landscape to be deserted rather than marked by commotion. If figures were to be included in a picturesque view, in Gilpin’s opinion, they must be ‘introduced sparingly’, their primary function being to diversify the foreground or lead the eye to the horizon of a natural environment conceived
40 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye (London, 1782), p. 37. 41 William Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty … Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland (2 vols, London, 1786), 1, 75. 42 See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), pp. 652–7; Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London, 2000), pp. 126–39. 43 William Gilpin, Observations on the Western Parts of England, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London, 1798), pp. 328–9. ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’ 307 in pictorial terms.44 In this context, it is not surprising that at Tintern Abbey, the founder of the picturesque condemned the way in which the poverty of the local inhabitants led them to congregate together, forming a crowd of indolent beggars; but at the very same location, he expressed sympathy for an isolated member of this community, a ‘silent sufferer’ in a serene, sequestered setting. Despite its anti-utilitarian impulse, the cult of picturesque tourism, which Gilpin helped to promote, reinforced the quiet, visual attitude to the land characteristic of the literature of agricultural improvement. From this perspective, the noisy social life of the poor was regarded as a source of disturbance, preventing the traveller from taking aesthetic pleasure in the countryside. In between locating the best viewing stations for appreciating the picturesque qualities of the Lake District, for example, James Clarke recounted an old form of popular festivity as so much ‘unmeaning noise’. 45 Even for a tourist who dwelt with some satisfaction on the ‘hum of numberless voices’ which made a village market in south Wales an ‘animated, interesting scene’, it was ‘necessary’ to leave this ‘busy spot’ in order to satisfy the taste for picturesque landscape, searching for a ‘very different scene, a scene of silence and desolation’ – namely, in this instance, the ruins of a castle. Indeed, the primary object of this lover of the picturesque was to escape the ‘busy hum of men’.46 In other words, the picturesque qualities of the landscape increased as the traces of human activity disappeared. As Thomas West noted during a description of the area immediately north of Keskcadale in the Lake District, ‘here untamed nature holds her reign in solemn silence, amidst the gloom and grandeur of dreary solitude’. From such a secluded situation, it was possible to contemplate the ‘effects of light and shade’, quietness being the precondition of this pictorial view of the land.47 This picturesque taste for quiet nature exerted a significant influence on the poetry of rural life in the late eighteenth century. In the prospect poem, Lewesdon Hill (1788), for instance, William Crowe self-consciously adopts the perspective of the traveller, engaging in wholesome outdoor exercise as he rambles in pursuit of examples of picturesque beauty. Such beauty is nowhere better appreciated than from the top of the hill, which is the subject of the poem. One advantage of this high viewpoint is that, as Gilpin suggested, it enables a vision of immense variety, a ‘variegated scene’, where signs of human
44 Gilpin, Three Essays, pp. 77–8. 45 James Clarke, A Survey of the Lakes of Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (London, 1789), p. 124. 46 Richard Warner, A Walk through Wales (Bath, 1798), pp. 27–9. 47 Thomas West, A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, 3rd edn (London, 1784), pp. 128–9. 308 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France habitation are seen so far in the distance that they blur into rather than intrude on the prospect.48 In fact, Crowe notes that the remote ‘villages’ lie ‘half-hid in tufted orchards’, their obscurity a chief source of their aesthetic delight.49 Similarly, Samuel Jackson Pratt takes an equally extensive view from a high vantage point, admiring ‘Mortals diminish’d’ into tiny figures, including the ‘scarce-distinguish’d husbandman, who bends | To dress the grateful soil’ while ‘quiet sheep … seem to hang | Their fleeces’ on the mountain side.50 But this distancing function of the elevated prospect had an acoustic as well as a visual effect. For from a high viewpoint, not only could the landscape be spread out in a panoramic prospect, but the picturesque spectator could be removed from the sound of the countryside below. It is not surprising, then, that upon reaching the summit of Lewesdon Hill, Crowe rejoices in the fact that he has lifted himself ‘Above the noise and stir of yonder fields’, occupying a ‘sequester’d’ spot remote from the world, where he can enjoy ‘peaceful contemplation and calm ease’.51 As diminished figures, the poor can be included in a picturesque prospect so long as they can be seen but not heard. This new attitude to the poor is perhaps best exemplified in William Cowper’s The Task (1785), a poem that created an influential representation of rural quietness by knotting together a picturesque mode of vision and a georgic concern for agricultural improvement. For Cowper, to ‘love the country’ is to love ‘its silence and its shade’, not to witness the dancing, feasting and singing of ‘self-deluded nymphs and swains’, refugees from an outmoded literary tradition he hoped would migrate to London where such vices belonged. Only in ‘sequester’d scenes’, undisturbed even by the ‘ratt’ling wheels’ of local traffic, is it possible to enjoy the contemplation of nature. Furthermore, the noisy labour of the poor is as inimical to taste as their noisy leisure. At one point, Cowper even fantasizes about living in a retired, run-down cottage, far removed from ‘such unpleasing sounds as haunt the ear | In village or in town’, a place in which he could possess the ‘poet’s treasure, silence’, out of earshot of ‘clinking hammers’, ‘grinding wheels’ or any other sounds of industriousness. So far, so picturesque, with Cowper’s experience of the land being predicated on a preference for the
48 For an analysis of the picturesque aspects of this poem, see Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 162–4. 49 William Crowe, Lewesdon Hill (Oxford, 1788), p. 1. 50 Samuel Jackson Pratt, Landscapes in Verse (London, 1785), p. 16. 51 Crowe, Lewesdon Hill, p. 4. ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’ 309 quietness of unpopulated nature and an aversion to the noise of rural plebeian life, whether industrious or idle.52 And yet, The Task is more a georgic than a picturesque poem.53 The poor are expected to work, and the default landscape is a cultivated one, with signs of industry everywhere present, if frequently seen from a considerable distance. There is no sympathy for the beggars, gypsies and bandits, who Gilpin thought were pleasing if considered in a picturesque light; for Cowper evaluates the poor from a strictly moral perspective, and sympathy is only extended to those who are ‘industrious, quiet, modest, neat’. Even confronted with starvation, the ‘deserving’ poor ‘silently retire’ rather than solicit alms or discuss grievances, a habit of conduct advocated by many hard-nosed political economists. Indeed, Cowper seems to agree with the agricultural improvers that poverty is a largely ‘self-inflicted’ state, a product of ‘laziness’, not high food prices, under- employment, declining real wages or enclosure. For this reason, the undeserving poor are characterized by a lamentable preference for noisy leisure, like the rural artisans who down their tools and head to the alehouse, where ‘all loud alike | All learned and all drunk’. By contrast, in his descriptions of the rural poor actually working, Cowper imagines labour to be a mostly quiet affair, unmixed with sociability. This is partly because agricultural workers are simply seen as distant ornaments in a landscape, conceived in pictorial terms and frequently viewed from an elevated vantage point. Enjoying a panoramic prospect from one particular eminence, for instance, Cowper waxes lyrical on the tranquil movement of a ‘distant plough’, just discernible across a vast area of space, which also has the effect of diminishing a ‘sturdy swain’ into something like a ‘boy’. The result, of course, is a quiet landscape, where the poor are represented as tiny, harmless, isolated figures, well out of earshot of the polite spectator.54 It was in protest against the actualization of this silent, pictorial attitude to the land in the form of the landscape park that Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Deserted Village (1770), his famous critique of depopulation. In The Task, Cowper also criticized the way in which the landscape park contributed to the destruction of traditional rural society. This form of improvement, ‘the idol of the age’, constituted a commodification of the countryside, as men of new wealth
52 William Cowper, The Task (1785), in James Sambrook (ed.), The Task and Selected Other Poems (London, 1994), pp. 65, 120, 145. 53 Of course, The Task is a far more nuanced poem than this, as shown in the fascinating recent study by Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 67–105. 54 Cowper, The Task, pp. 63, 152–6. 310 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France viewed their estates in aesthetic terms dictated by metropolitan fashions.55 Accordingly, the landscape park was simply an exchangeable source of pleasure for the polite rather than a permanent source of support for the community. But if Cowper regarded the landscape park as a perversion of nature, this did not prevent him from seeking pleasure in similarly unpopulated rural areas, though areas apparently untouched by the influence of the city. On the other hand, Goldsmith seemed to believe that improvement itself had a silencing effect on rural society, and he looked back to an age when nature was animated by the noise of prolific, happy human activity. As is well known, The Deserted Village is an account of the emparkment of a village, Auburn, and the subsequent dispossession of its inhabitants. The catastrophic effects of this process are largely imagined in terms of a transformation of the rural soundscape, from noisy to silent. Before the emparkment, Auburn was characterized by social noise precisely, Goldsmith suggests, because its inhabitants enjoyed ample opportunities for leisure. Living on common land, the villagers comprised a community of independent smallholders who, since they owned their own labour and existed outside any luxury economy, worked only to satisfy their basic subsistence needs. Labour, therefore, was ‘light’, and leisure was makeshift, public and relatively abundant.56 It was also noisy, whether in the form of spontaneous laughter, dancing, energetic sports, conversations, alehouse sociability or banter and so on. In the context of Goldsmith’s larger political argument, all this implies not just a once populous countryside, but a population full of vitality. For in economic writings, such as Arthur Young’s Political Arithmetic (1774), the argument was increasingly put forward that it was the size of the population that mattered more than whether it was predominantly rural or urban, or whether it exhibited that vigour believed to be fostered by life in the country.57 Furthermore, never in the poem does Goldsmith attribute a positive meaning to silence, which is associated not only with the simple decline of a community, but with the dejection of its members. In turn, this is directly linked to the spread of luxury, the chief source of the silencing of the rural environment and the labouring poor. A wealthy merchant, who has made a windfall in colonial enterprise and foreign trade, demolishes the village of Auburn in order to make way for his new landscape park, a vast, empty space devoid of public activity. As a consequence, the villagers are forced to flee to London, before migrating across the Atlantic to a primitive wilderness, where even ‘birds forget to sing’. But there is equally no noise in the new, improved
55 See Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, 1993), p. 83. 56 See Barrell, Dark Side of the Landscape, pp. 72–7. 57 Arthur Young, Political Arithmetic (London, 1774), pp. 80–82. ‘The Sounds of Population Fail’ 311 estate: only striking vistas and mournful, departing peasants, as the country is transformed into a quiet landscape, subordinated to aesthetic concerns – ‘a garden and a grave’.58 Given the picturesque preference for silent rather than noisy rural environments, it is quite surprising that many tourists, John Byng among them, complained about the modernization of rural life, quoting The Deserted Village as an authority on the matter. For the Auburn of old was a decidedly unpicturesque as well as an unimproved place, the home of a labouring community who enjoyed leisure enough to make as much ‘noise’ as they pleased on the green and in the local alehouse, ‘where village statesmen talked with looks profound, | And news much older than their ale went round’. As a consequence of the enclosure and emparkment of the village, however, this noisy soundscape was transformed into the very kind of silent landscape celebrated by picturesque travellers:
But now the sounds of population fail, No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale, No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread, But all the blooming flush of life is fled.59
On his travels, John Byng frequently cited The Deserted Village, believing Goldsmith to be a man after his own heart. And, indeed, both shared a profound fear of depopulation, along with many other social, economic and political concerns. But whereas Goldsmith looked back to the English georgic tradition and heard the advance of commercial modernity as ushering in an age of ‘woeful and silent solitude’, Byng was seeking refuge from modern, urban society in the very silent countryside that commerce had created.
58 Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770), in John Lucas (ed.), Selected Poems (Manchester, 1988), pp. 51–62, at pp. 59–60. 59 Ibid., pp. 54, 57. This page has been left blank intentionally Select Bibliography
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Abraham, 287, 293 apprentice, 64–5, 69, 70–71, 73, 78–83, abuse, 63, 80, 144, 146, 170–73, 175, 190, 92, 217 283, 285, 289, 293 parish, xi, 65–7, 69, 71, 73, 76–81 Accounts of the Poor, (Exeter) 7, 12, 108 factory, 71, 78 1564–65 list, ix, 12, 109, 113, 116, female, 73 120–21, 123, 125–30 girl, 72–3 1570 list, 11–12, 109, 125–9 pauper, xi, xv, 4, 10, 64–9, 72, 76–8, Act of 1536, 12, 108, 110, 112, 118, 120 80–83 aged, the, 123, 137, 145, 149, 167, 261 private, xi, 66–9, 78 agricultural improvement, 7, 14, 297, 301, apprenticeship, 10–12, 44, 63–84, 92, 215 303–5, 307–8 female apprenticeship, 72–6 aid, 9, 22, 38, 161, 171, 229, 236, 238, 243 Arkwright, Richard, 296 alderman, 101, 141, 144–5, 150–51, Assize of Bread, 56, 194 153–4, 183, 185–6, 188, 191–2, Augustine, Saint, 6, 8, 241 195, 197 avarice, 255, 269–70 alimentatio, 45, 49, 50–57, 61 see also ‘child maintenance’ Bachelor, Thomas, 304 allegorical (figure), 254, 257, 264–6, 274 Barclay, Alexander, 256, 277 allegory, 13, 256–8, 261, 272, 274, 277 Bartolomaeus Anglicus, 267 alms, ix, xi, 6, 19, 20–21, 28, 36–8, 90–93, bastard, 32, 41–4, 85 95–6, 99, 103, 110, 115–18, bastardy, 42 123–4, 127–9, 142–5, 147, Bedford Master/School, 254, 275 150–56, 161, 167, 171, 174, 181, beggar, 2, 20–22, 27, 30, 33, 37–9, 85, 101, 229, 231–3, 236–9, 242, 245, 255, 147, 152, 231–2, 236, 238, 245, 263–5, 309 249, 260, 263–4, 307, 309 almsgiver, 20 beggary, xiii, 109–11, 129 almsgiving, 161, 177, 228, 242, 248, begging, 2, 38, 142, 145, 151, 161, 167, 301 190, 240–41, 246–7, 263–4 almshouse, 19, 21, 38, 55, 114–20, 122, benefactor, 161–3, 166, 167, 172, 177, 179, 124, 248, 250 181 Hurst’s, 114–18, 122, 124 Bennett, Judith, 42–4, 87–9, 124, 178 Palmer’s, 114–17, 118–19, 122 Bennett, Michael, xiii, xvii, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, Ambrose, Saint, 5, 6 199, 216 Amsler, Mark, xiii, 3, 8, 10, 13, 227, 230, bequest, 44, 54, 93, 150, 160, 177, 184, 257 186–7, 190 328 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Black Death, 20, 30, 43, 57–8, 263–4 as an organisation, 160, 166, 177–9, Blincoe, Robert, 63–4, 67, 70, 73, 76, 78, 181–2, 203, 205 80–81, 217 material aid, 20–21, 51, 53–4, 118–20, bourgeois, 8, 139, 140–42, 146, 149, 150, 124–5, 129, 133, 135–7, 140, 143, 154, 168, 274 148–50, 154–7, 159–62, 166–8, Briçonnet, Jean, 8, 139–40, 148–9 172, 175, 184, 190–91, 193, 195, Brodie, Nicholas, xiii, 3, 7, 10–12, 14, 107, 200–201, 207–8, 210, 217, 219, 109–10, 119, 129 229, 231, 239, 242–3, 248, 250, Bromyard, 8 260, 280, 300–301 Broomhall, Susan, xiv, xv, xvii, 3, 7, 8, 10, chateau, 256, 262, 275–6 12–13, 48, 86, 133–4, 136–7, 149, see also ‘castle’ 163, 177–8 Chelmsford, 205, 208 Bruyant, Jacques, 253, 262, 267 Chester, 211, 219, 220 Byng, John, 295–7, 311 child, 32, 41–6, 48–61, 63–6, 70, 75–6, 78, 82–4, 89–90, 92, 96–8, 100, Canon law, 11, 43–4, 49, 242, 255 102, 173–4, 201, 203, 205, 213–14, canonist, 6, 7, 45, 46, 228 216–20, 223 Corpus Iuris Canonici, 6 child maintenance, 45, 50–53 Droit Canonique, 166 see also ‘alimentatio’ Catherine de Médicis, 147, 149, 169 children, xi, 2, 4, 9, 11, 21, 25, 31–4, castle, ix, 28, 33, 36, 253, 256–7, 261, 41–5, 47–53, 55–66, 69–85, 87, 265–6, 269, 272–7, 307 90–91, 94–103, 137, 145, 149, see also ‘chateau’ 150, 152, 154, 167, 177–8, 197, Catholic/ism, 7, 10, 12, 133, 136, 142–3, 199–205, 208, 211, 213–22, 227, 152–6, 159–60, 162–7, 169, 240, 267–8 170–82 Christ, 5, 229, 244, 257, 287 census, 11, 64, 74, 81–4 Christian, 5, 14–15, 38, 124, 146, 149, see also ‘1570 Norwich Census of the 155–6, 162, 167, 175–7, 182, 207, Poor’ 229, 231–2, 235, 238, 241–3, 246, Chambre des Comptes, 139, 149, 172–3 254–5, 279–80 Chancery, 11, 43, 55 Chrysostom, 5–7 charitable donation, 55, 145, 148 civic elite, 135, 140, 148, 153, 156 see also ‘donation’ civic men, 7–8, 12, 136–7, 140, 148, 150 charity compter, xi, 183, 185–93, 195, 197 Christian virtue of, xv, 1–2, 5–6, 10, 12, community, 1, 3, 8, 9, 11, 15, 19, 22, 32, 19, 136, 140, 146, 148, 151, 153–4, 36–9, 43, 107, 125, 138, 144, 156, 160–63, 165–7, 170, 172–3, 146, 150, 156, 203, 208, 212, 215, 175–7, 179, 182, 185–6, 206, 231, 218–19, 227, 231, 233, 235, 237, 233, 238, 241, 243–4, 246–50, 255, 241, 246–9, 263, 274, 280, 285, 264 289, 291–2, 307, 310–11 allegorical figure, ix contract, 38, 45, 47, 60, 71, 174, 179, 279, 280, 283, 285 Index 329 contributor, xi, 12, 109, 112–13, 124–31 deserted wife, 86, 89–90, 94, 100, 103 corruption, xiv, 7, 143, 159, 168, 187, deserving poor, 6, 7, 14, 31, 133, 157, 161, 249–50 167–8, 250, 283, 309 cottager, 23, 27–9, 33, 38 Diefendorf, Barbara, 136, 141, 160–62, 164 court, 10, 25, 51, 86, 138–39 diligence, 151, 254, 261, 265–6, 268–70 consistory court, 41, 50–53 Dimsdale, Dr Thomas, 209, 212–13, 219 Court des Aides, 154 disability, 22, 31, 87, 96, 123 Court of aldermen, 183, 185–6, disabled, 21, 102, 159, 167, 199 188–94, 197–8 discrimination, 7 ecclesiastical court, 11, 42–3, 45–6, disease, 9, 139, 145, 167, 189–91, 195, 48–9, 51, 56, 58–62 198–204, 208, 212–223 manorial court, 11, 22, 24–33, 36–8, Dives and Pauper, 8, 13, 227, 231, 243–50, 42–3, 228 257 Mayor’s court, 97, 99–101 Dives, 8, 230, 233, 247, 248 royal court, 15, 21, 139, 166, 169, 172, Pauper, 247–8 261–3, 282–3, 287–9 see also ‘pauper’ covetise, 269, 270 Dominican, 232, 234–5 Cowper, William, 14, 217, 298, 308–10 donation, 141–2, 145, 150–51, 154, 156, Cow-Pock Institute, 223 177, 190 cowpox, 200, 220–22 see also ‘charitable donation’ cow pock, 223 donor, 19–21, 151, 167, 260 Crassons, Kate, 2, 4, 8, 13, 228, 249 Dorey, Margaret, xiv, 3, 10, 12, 183, 191 Crawford, Patricia, 2, 6, 10, 34, 62, 66, 75, dowry/dowries, 4, 6, 9, 159, 169, 170–71, 200 174, 178, 180, 183 crime, 9, 21, 33, 61, 178, 184, 208, 263, Duke and Duchess of Nevers, 159–61, 265, 267, 270, 274 165–6, 168–82 Cromford, 296 see also ‘Nevers Foundation’ Dyer, Christopher, xiv, xvii, 1, 3, 8, 10–11, Daborne, Robert, xv, 7, 13, 279–85, 287, 19, 22, 26, 36, 55, 255, 264 288–93 debt, 23–4, 29, 34, 101, 151, 169, 184, 192, elderly, 31, 87, 89, 92, 98, 102, 123, 137, 222, 267, 271, 279 156–7 debtor, xi, 12, 23, 183–5, 187, 190–93, 195, see also ‘aged’ and ‘old age’ 197 Elliott, Lisa, xv, 3–4, 6, 9–10, 12–13, 149, De miseria condicionis humane, 259 159, 163, 166, 175 Denney, Peter, xiv, 3, 7–8, 14, 295, 297 enclosure, 303–4, 309, 311 depopulation, 298, 309, 311 epidemic, 137, 200, 202–3, 205–6, 208 De Proprietatibus Rerum, 267 exchange, 249, 271, 279, 281–3, 285–7, Derbyshire, xv, 4, 11, 63–7, 70–71, 73–6, 293 78–80, 84, 215, 217, 296 Exeter, ix, xi, 7, 12, 107–13, 115–26, 128, 130–31, 210 330 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France factory, xv, 64, 67–8, 70–72, 78–9 Gregory, 6 famine, 25, 33, 140–41, 153, 157, 167, 233 gresse Farmer, Sharon, 2, 19, 20, 22, 160, 177–8, gresse mayde, 85, 94, 97, 98 206, 262, 266 gresse wenche, 97 Fastolfe Master, 275 gresswoman, 96, 103 Finn, Margot, 184–5, 190, 197 see also ‘grass widow’ fortune, 14, 27, 30, 37–8, 72, 107, 218, 249, Gringore, Pierre, 256, 277 258, 282 Guy le Bouteillier, 275–6 Fortune, 260, 270 Foundling Hospital, 13, 204–5, 208, 215 Henslowe, Philip, 279–80, 282, 284–5, 293 Fourth Lateran Council, 255 heretic, 12, 26, 153, 162–3, 166, 232, 236 Francis of Assisi, 161 harlot, 85, 94, 96–9, 101–3 Franciscan, 232–3, 244, 259 see also ‘hore’ and ‘prostitute’ fraud, 170, 173, 193, 257, 265–6, 270 Haygarth, John, 209, 211, 216, 219–20 Free Library of Philadelphia, xvii, 253, 256, Hilton, Rodney, 1, 26 275 Hindman, Sandra, 254, 275 friar, 229–33, 239–40, 242–9 Hitchcock, Tim, 1–2, 195 Friar Daw’s Reply, 13, 244 Honeyman, Katrina, 63–4, 67, 71, 78, 80 Hooker, John, 107–8, 131 georgic, 298–9, 301–2, 306, 308–9, 311 Hop-Garden, 298 Geremek, Bronislaw, 1, 6, 135, 161–2, 166, Hôpital Général, 156 178, 257, 263 hore, 85, 97–8 gift, 20, 21, 36, 118, 145, 180, 186, 189, see also ‘harlot’ and ‘prostitute’ 229, 245, 261, 275–6, 279, 281, hospital, 8, 13, 19, 21, 38, 50, 91, 118–19, 283, 285–7, 293 133–40, 143–8, 150–51, 154–5, Gilpin, William, 305–7, 309 160, 166, 178, 197, 203–5, 208, Gisbert, 281–93 210–12, 214–15, 217, 221, 264 see also The Poor Man’s Comfort Hôtel-Dieu, xv, 8, 12, 134, 136–46, Goldsmith, Oliver, 14, 298, 309–11 149–51, 153, 155–6, 159, 166, good works, 20, 37–8, 154 171–5, 181 gospel, 229–30, 233–4, 236, 238, 250 Houlton, Rev. Robert, 208, 215 Grand Bureau des Pauvres, xv, 8, 12, 136, hunger, 153, 240, 258–60, 274 145–52, 154–5, 162–3, 165, 167, Hunger, ix, 239, 258–9, 265 175, 182 Hurdis, James, 302–4 governor, xv, 15, 137–40, 144, 149-53, 155, 157, 162–3, 165–6, 169, 171–5, idleness, 2, 7, 9, 14, 38, 95, 239, 263, 268, 204–5, 208, 217 274, 291, 295, 300–301, 303–4 grass widow, 96 see also ‘sloth’ see also ‘gresse’ idler, 231, 239, 264 Index 331 illegitimacy, 11, 41–3, 50, 61, 97 Langland 5, 231, 238, 240, 242, 263, 274 illegitimate (children), xi, 9, 11, 41–4, see also ‘William Langland’ 47–8, 50–52, 55–62, 85, 96, 102 La Roche-Guyon, 275–6 indentures, 11, 64–8, 71–3, 75–7, 79–80, Last Judgement, 265 82–3 Latin, 229–30, 234–5, 241–4, 247, 249, industrialization, 66, 306 250 industriousness, 300–302, 308 La Voie de Povreté et de Richesse, 7, 9, 13, 15, industry, xv 253, 256–7, 260–61, 264, 275 Innes, Joanna, 184, 190, 197, 209 leisure, 299–301, 308–11 inoculation, 4, 9, 10, 13, 199–223 Leland, John, 107, 119 Le mesnagier de Paris, 254, 256, 275 Jack Upland, 13, 243–50 Lettsom, Dr John Coakley, 212 Jacobean drama, 290 Levene, Alysa, 73, 77–8, 204–5 Jenner, Edward, 200, 216, 220–21 Lewesdon Hill, 307–8 Jesus, 229–30, 235, 238–9, 241–3, 245, life-cycle poverty, 24, 31, 33, 39, 124, 200 247–8 literacy, 228–35, 242–43, 247, 249, 251 justice, 5, 7, 9, 13, 15, 183–5, 238, 243, Litton Mill, 64, 81 249, 263–4, 279–80, 282–3, 285, London, xiv, 12–13, 20, 43, 52, 54–5, 57– 287–93 9, 61, 64, 73, 77, 79–81, 99–100, 119, 125, 183–5, 189–97, 200, King Ferdinand, 286–7, 289, 292–3 202–5, 208, 211–14, 217–18, 220, see also ‘The Poor Man’s Comfort’ 223, 243, 279, 295, 297, 308, 310 King’s Bench prison, 197 love, 4–5, 60, 99, 100, 233, 245, 250, Kirkpatrick, Dr James, 202–3, 206, 214, 281–7, 298–9 218 Lucius, 281–90, 292–3 König and Bartz, 253–4, 275–7 see also ‘The Poor Man’s Comfort’ Ludgate prison, 183, 185, 187, 191, 193 labour, ix, 6, 20, 29, 31, 57–8, 63–4, 66, 70, 72, 75, 84, 147, 150, 167–8, 215, McEwan, Joanne, xvii, 2 218, 237–9, 245–6, 253, 255–7, McIntosh, Marjorie K., 1, 9, 19, 125, 129, 262–6, 272–4, 276, 298, 301–3, 228 306, 308–10 Maddern, Philippa, xv, 3–4, 9–11, 19, 41, labourer, 57, 71, 81, 84, 90, 95, 152, 203, 48, 58 214, 228, 262–3, 266, 273, 281, maintenance, 45–6, 50–53, 80, 83, 142, 298, 301–4 173, 283, 288–9, 301 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 200, 202, see also ‘child maintenance’ 210, 214, 216 manufacturing, 70, 72, 74, 295, 297 Lake District, 306–7 married woman, 32, 39, 47–8, 60, 85, 87–8, landscape, xiv, 25, 297–8, 304–11 94, 96, 102 Lane, Joan, 63, 65–6, 69–70 Marshalsea prison, 184, 197 332 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Martin, Jean, xv, 8, 79, 148–50, 162–3, 165, orphan, 21, 64, 149, 202, 217 175, 182 Oxford, 210–12 Mayor’s Book of the Poor, 89, 92, 94, 96, Oxfordshire, 25, 35 101–2 Melbourne, Derbyshire, 11, 64, 67–70, 72, Paresse, 254, 261–2, 265, 268, 270 74, 77–80 Paris, xv, 1–2, 7, 12, 20, 133–50, 152, Mesqui, Jean, 275–6 154–5, 157, 159–68, 170–75, Metzler, Irina, 22, 37 177–8, 181, 204, 213, 262, 262–4 Minister, Ann, xv, 3, 4, 10–11, 63 parish, xi, 9, 11–14, 36, 38, 42, 51–2, 54–5, misfortune, 7, 20, 23, 27, 39, 196, 254, 257, 58–9, 63–7, 69, 70–86, 89, 91–3, 265–6, 282 95–101, 107–18, 120–31, 144, Mollat, Michel, 1, 5, 9, 19, 161–2, 167–8, 146–7, 149, 151, 156, 169, 171, 178, 228, 255, 263–4 173–4, 176, 179–80, 185, 201–2, monasteries, 21, 237 205–10, 215, 217–20, 229, 232, 301, 303 nede, 229, 240, 244–5, 247, 259 parlement, 108, 135–6, 138–40, 142–6, need, 3–5, 37, 58, 93, 124, 150, 227–8, 148–50, 154–5, 166, 172–3, 181, 231, 233, 235, 237, 240–41, 244–7, 264 249–50, 260, 265–6, 289 Parliament, 120, 166, 194, 219, 222–3, 249 negotiation, 256, 279, 281, 291, 304 paternity, 51–2, 55 Nevers, 6, 159, 170–72, 175 pauper, xi, xv, 2–4, 10–11, 24, 27–8, 30– see also ‘Duke and Duchess of Nevers’ 31, 35, 39, 63–9, 71–2, 76, 77–8, Nevers Foundation, 159–60, 163, 168, 80–84, 113, 116, 120, 123–4, 133, 170–72, 174, 177–8, 180–81 152, 157 Newcastle, 211, 219 see also ‘Dives and Pauper’ Newgate prison, 183–5, 187, 191–3, 195, pauper, 233–5, 238, 242, 244, 247–8, 202, 214 260 noise, 8, 14, 295, 297–300, 303–4, 306–11 pauperes Christi, 5, 229 Nolan, Mike, xv, 3, 10, 13, 279 petition, 11–12, 43, 55, 140, 183–5, Norfolk, 4, 35, 89, 96, 99, 109 188–92, 194, 198, 285, 288, 290 Norwich, 34, 43–4, 46, 48, 54, 85, 87–92, philanthropy, 125, 215, 219 94, 96–7, 99–102, 108–9, 116, picturesque, xiv, 7, 14, 295–8, 304–9, 311 123, 131, 303 Pierce Plowman’s Creede, 13, 231 Norwich Census of the Poor 1570, 11, 85, Piers Plowman, xiii, 2, 5, 8–9, 13, 19–21, 87, 89–103, 109, 113, 116 38, 229, 231, 238–46, 248–9, 272, Nouvel Marié, 257, 265–7, 269, 276 274 Pigafetta, Filippo, 152–3 old age, 31–2, 87, 122–3 political economy, 134, 297, 300–301 see also ‘aged’ and ‘elderly’ poor box, 151–2, 156 ordinance, 111, 141, 144, 148, 150, 154, Poor Law, 5–6, 64, 66–7, 73, 111, 129, 229 263 Index 333 poor relief, xi, xiii, 6, 12, 21, 65, 67, 83, Reformation, 1, 125, 250, 255 91–4, 96–8, 102, 105, 108–10, Catholic Reformation, 136, 155, 160, 113–14, 116, 118–21, 124–9, 165, 167 131, 133–4, 136, 155–6, 160–62, Counter-Reformation, 134, 160, 182 166–9, 172, 178, 181–2, 196, 200, relief, xi, xiii, 5–6, 8, 12, 21, 36, 63, 65, 67, 231, 242–3, 249, 288 81, 83, 91–98, 102, 105, 107–14, see also ‘relief ’ 116, 118–21, 123–9, 131, 133–4, population, 10, 21, 26, 42–3, 71, 88, 113, 136–7, 139, 146, 151, 155–6, 120, 127, 134–5, 142, 152–3, 160–62, 166–9, 172, 178, 181–2, 157, 200–202, 206, 210, 220–21, 185, 196, 200, 203, 219, 231, 295–6, 299, 310–11 241–3, 249, 288, 301 populousness, 297–9 see also ‘poor relief ’ Poultry Comptor, 183, 185, 189, 197 religious conflict, 10, 12, 163, 165, 170, Poverty (allegorical figure) ix, 254, 257–9, 175, 182 261, 264–9 Repton, 11, 64, 67–72, 74–5, 77–80, 82–4 Povreté, 7, 9, 13, 15, 253–8, 260–62, Richesse, 7, 9, 13, 15, 253–4, 256–8, 264–5, 268, 271, 275, 277 260–62, 264–70, 272, 275–7 power, 2, 9–10, 12–13, 20, 94, 133–7, Roman de la Rose, 254, 257–8, 261, 267–8 143, 148, 157, 169, 180, 185, 210, rural life, 14, 295, 297, 302–3, 307, 311 228, 230, 233, 235, 237, 239, 242, rural poor, 8, 14, 210, 297–300, 302–4, 309 246–7, 249, 251, 258, 261, 267, rural soundscape, xiv, 296–7, 310–11 276, 282–3, 285–6, 290–92 pregnancy, 52, 60, 97, 214 Saint Bartholomew Massacre, 165, 169, 170 pregnant, 50, 52, 58, 60, 85, 97–9, 102, salvation, 162–3, 167, 229, 233, 235, 243, 214, 217 245–7, 250, 268 Princess of Wales, 202, 214 scenery, 295–6, 305–6 prisoner, 10, 12–13, 55, 142, 183–95, Scott, Anne M. xiii, xviii, 1–4, 7–9, 13–14, 197–8 19–20, 238, 253, 261, 274 prostitute, 20, 47–8, 50, 59, 94, 96, 168, servant, xv, 27–8, 31–3, 39, 41, 47–8, 177–8 50–54, 57–9, 74–5, 82–3, 97, 99, see also ‘harlot’ and ‘hore’ 194, 203, 213–15, 286, 295, 301 Protestant, 12, 119, 133, 160, 162–5, 167, seven sins, 257–8, 265, 267, 269, 272, 276 182 Sharpe, Pamela, 1, 2, 73, 75, 210 siege, 107, 152–3, 157, 276 quietness, 295, 298, 300–303, 306–9 Silvester, Lesley, xvi, 3–4, 9–11, 85 single Reason (allegorical figure) ix, 257, 265–71 single mother, 41–6, 49, 51, 53, 55–60, Reckliss, Thomas, 183, 194, 197–8 62 reciprocity, 4, 7–8, 249, 291 single poor girls, 12, 159, 178 reform, 133, 137–40, 143, 146, 155, 159, single woman/women, 4, 9, 43, 47–8, 162, 165, 170, 174, 230, 235, 237, 51, 85–94, 96–99, 101–3 242, 244, 249, 250, 286, 292 334 Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France
Slack, Paul, 1, 4, 6, 8–9, 26, 109, 111, 119, unmarried woman, 87–9, 178 124–5, 129 Urania, 281–8, 291–3 sloth, 9, 254, 257, 260, 263, 267–8, 270 see also ‘The Poor Man’s Comfort’ see also ‘idleness’ smallholder, 27–9, 33, 310 vaccination, xiii, 200, 216, 220–23 smallpox, xiii, 9, 13, 199–223 vaccine, 220–23 Small-pox Hospital, 203, 211–12, 214, vagabond, 20, 22, 37, 39, 133, 141, 157, 217, 221 263–4 Smallpox Society, 211 Vagabond Act of 1572, 184–5 Smart, Christopher, 298 vagabondage, xiii, 2, 109–11, 129 sound, 8, 295–7, 302–4, 308, 311 vagrancy, 167, 228, 262–3, 283 statute, xiii, 108–12, 118, 120, 192, 248, vagrant, 2, 20, 101, 168, 264, 283 262–3, 274 Vantandillo, Sophia, 213, 217, 223 Stuart, David, 210, 215 variolation, 200, 220, 222 Suffolk, 25, 28, 36–8, 123, 207, 217 vernacular, 13, 229–31, 233–6, 242, Summa Praedicantium, 8 249–50, 261 Summa Theologica, 262, 267, 270 voluntary poverty, 5, 13, 157, 228–33, supervision, 49, 137, 301–2 235–6, 241, 247–8, 250 Sutton, Robert, Daniel and William, 207–9, 211–12, 215–16, 219 Waldensian, 13, 231, 236–8, 243, 248 Syrinx, or A Sevenfold History, 284–5, 287 Waldes, 233–5, 237 Wars of Religion, 12, 152, 162–3, 165 tax, 22, 25, 36, 38, 57, 151, 155, 185 waster, 13, 21, 38, 239 tenant, 23–4, 26–32, 34–5, 55 Watkinson, Dr John, 212–13 Thames, 61, 185–6, 195 welfare, xi, 6, 63, 74, 80, 98, 108, 111, The Deserted Village, 298, 309, 311 123–5, 131, 133, 136, 140, 142–3, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 203–7, 209–11, 146, 148, 150–51, 153, 156–7, 187, 215–16, 219 215, 239, 285 The Poor Man’s Comfort, 7, 10, 279–81, wealth, 2–3, 14, 44, 137, 228, 231, 233, 283–4, 293 235, 238, 241–2, 244, 246, 253, The Task, 298, 308–9 255–6, 260, 262, 266, 269–72, 274, Ticknall, 11, 64–72, 74–5, 77–80, 84 275–7, 282, 292–3, 300, 309–10 Tintern Abbey, 305–7 Widener, ix, xvii, 253–4, 256, 262 widow, 21, 24, 27, 30–31, 34, 37, 47, 86–7, undeserving poor, 6, 7, 103, 161, 168, 250, 89, 91–4, 96, 100, 103, 121, 149, 283, 309 178 unemployment, 21, 65, 84, 167, 227, 249 William Akclum, 23, 27, 31, 34 unmarried William Langland, 9, 20–21, 229, 239, 241 unmarried girl, 160, 170 see also ‘Langland’ unmarried mother, 33, 38, 58, 97, 98, wills, 11, 19, 23, 36–7, 43, 125 102–3 Wood Street Compter, xi, 183, 185–90, 193 Index 335 workhouse, ix, 81, 119, 195–7, 214, 217, Wycliffite, 13, 244–5 221 work, 2, 8, 13–14, 23, 54–5, 57–9, 62, yardlander, 28, 30 65, 69–71, 73–4, 81, 83–4, 87, York, 21, 23, 43, 45–6, 49, 52, 58, 86–7, 89, 95–6, 99, 123, 134–6, 141, 108–9, 119, 131, 197, 211, 222 145, 147, 161, 199, 215, 235, 239, Yorkshire, 23–5, 28–30, 32, 35, 49, 51, 54, 246, 248–9, 253–5, 257, 260–65, 60, 87, 109, 209 272–77, 279, 299–300, 302 Young, Arthur, 216–18, 300–301, 310