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

International Review of Social History

Volumn 45, Issue S8, 2000, Pages 47-69

  Boulton, Jeremy ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0034358426     PISSN: 00208590     EISSN: 1469512X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020859000115287     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. This quotation, the spelling of which has been modernized, comes from a letter “found with a Child at Mr Defountain's door in Blew Cross Street on Wednesday night June 29 1709 between 12 & one a clock & taken up by me Robert Mason, Overseer”, Westminster Archives Centre [hereafter, WAC], F5002/fos 165ar-165av.
2. Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994), especially pp. 83–99.
3. As always, much of the literature is summarized expertly, or anticipated, in Paul Slack's seminal Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (Harlow, 1988), esp. pp. 73–85.
4. See also the contributions in the special issue of Social History, 18 (1993)
5. Marco H.D. van Leeuwen, “Logic of Charity: Poor Relief in Pre-industrial Europe”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 24 (1994), pp. 589–613;
6. Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, “Neighbourhood Social Change in West European Cities: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries’”, International Review of Social History, 38 (1993), pp. 1–30.
7. Another particularly insightful contribution relating to the nineteenth-century city is that by Peter Mandler, “Introduction”, in Peter Mandler (ed.), The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia, PA, 1990), pp. 1–37;
8. Catharina Lis, Social Change and the Labouring Poor: Antwerp, 1770–1860 (New Haven, CT, 1986), pp. 150–162.
9. For another comprehensive and insightful discussion see, Peregrine Horden, “Household Care and Informal Networks: Comparison and Continuities from Antiquity to the Present”, in Peregrine Horden and Richard Smith (eds), The Locus Of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions, and the Provision of Welfare Since Antiquity (London, 1998), pp. 21–67.
10. For a modern study see, Donald W. Foster, Survival Strategies of Low-Income Households in a Colombian City (Urbana, IL, 1975), a published Ph.D. thesis, a work of urban anthropology which uncovers a range of survival strategies very familiar to early modern historians.
11. Valuable work can also be done using exceptionally detailed household listings of the poor, although survival strategies have usually to be inferred from patterns of co-residence. See, Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (Harlow, 1998), pp. 145–148,152.
12. Pelling prefers “expedient” to “strategy” to “reduce the connotation of deliberate (and free) choice”; Thomas Sokoll, Household and Family Among the Poor: The Case of Two Essex Communities in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Bochum, 1992).
13. Sokoll published some preliminary observations in his, “The Pauper Household Small and Simple? The Evidence from Listings of Inhabitants and Pauper Lists of Early Modern England Reassessed”, Ethnologia Europaea, 17 (1987), pp. 25–42.
14. For similar sentiments see Tim Hitchcock, “Habits of Industry: The Eighteenth-Century English Workhouse Movement”, (unpublished typescript, 1993).
15. Pat Thane, “Old People and Their Families in the English Past”, in M. Daunton (ed.), Charity, Self-interest and Welfare in the English Past (London, 1996), pp. 113–138;
16. Pat Thane, “The Family Lives of Old People”, in Paul Johnson and Pat Thane (eds), Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity (London, 1998), pp. 180–210, the quotations are from p. 206
17. Richard Wall, “Relationships Between the Generations in British Families Past and Present”, in Catherine Marsh and Sara Arber (eds), Families and Households: Divisions and Change (London, 1992), pp. 63–85.
18. See also Richard Wall, “Beyond the Household: Marriage, Household Formation and the Role of Kin and Neighbours”, International Review of Social History, 44 (1999), pp. 55–67.
19. Richard M. Smith, “The Structured Dependence of the Elderly as a Recent Development: Some Sceptical Historical Thoughts”, Ageing and Society, 4 (1984), pp. 409–428.
20. This paper derives from the author's long-term reconstruction of the lives of the poor in London's West End, based on a biographical reconstruction of all those who received pensions from the parish. This will appear as The Making of the London Poor (Manchester, forthcoming).
21. For preliminary forays see, Jeremy Boulton, “Going on the Parish: The Parish Pension and its Meaning in the London Suburbs, 1640–1724”, in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 19–46;
22. idem, “The Poor Among the Rich”, in Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner (eds), Londinopolis (Manchester, 2000, forthcoming)
23. idem, “The Most Visible Poor in England? Constructing Pauper Biographies in Early Modern Westminster”, Westminster Historical Review, 1 (1997). pp 13–18.
24. For this legislation, see Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (Basingstoke, 1990).
25. Slack, English Poor Law, pp. 40–48.
26. The best survey of the rise of indoor relief in early eighteenth-century England is Tim Hitchcock, “Paupers and Preachers: the SPCK and the Parochial Workhouse Movement”, in Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn and Robert B. Shoemaker (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992), pp. 145–166.
27. For this strategy, see Pamela Sharpe, “‘The Bowels of Compation’: A Labouring Family and the Law, c. 1790–1834”, in Hitchcock, King, and Sharpe, Chronicling Poverty, pp. 87–108.
28. This has been estimated by inflating the number of pensioners in 1716 to take account of those whose ages were missing, and applying to a total population of 45,000 the age structure for eighteenth-century London estimated in John Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670–1830 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 180.
29. Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), p. 195, for example, after an exhaustive reconstruction of pauper budgets, concludes that the parish pension “was no more than an income supplement”.
30. Peter Laslett's comment that “only a small proportion of persons in need, therefore, could lave been completely and permanently dependent upon the community” seems amply borne out n this parish; 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. 153–175, 164.
31. When the parish opened a workhouse, seventeen of these refused to enter and lost their pensions”, Hitchcock, “Habits of Industry”.
32. For the notion that workhouses might play a central role in paupers' survival strategies, see Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, “Total Institutions' and the Survival Strategies of the Labouring Poor in Antwerp, 1770–1860”, in Mandler, Uses of Charity, pp. 38–91.
33. For an Italian example, see Giovanni Gozzini, “The Poor and the Life-Cycle in Nineteenth-Century Florence, 1813–59”, Social History, 18 (1993), pp. 300–316.
34. His Pia Casa took in “above all those expelled temporarily or definitively from their original nuclear families which were no longer able or willing to provide for their support”; Social History., p. 313.
35. See, Diana O'Hara, “‘Ruled by My Friends’: Aspects of Marriage in the Diocese of Canterbury,c.1540–1570”, Continuity and Change, 6 (1991), pp. 9–41;
36. idem, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester, 2000), pp. 30–56.
37. Laslett, “Family, Kinship and Collectivity”, p. 166.
38. This assumption surely informs the famous English example cited in Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977), p. 60.
39. Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century, (Cambridge, 1987), p. 260.
40. The quotation is from Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire, (Cambridge, 1971), p. 56.
41. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 405.
42. This is a typical finding for the period before 1750. A large family was the smallest percentage ‘cause’ of poverty in Norwich in 1570, and Salisbury in 1635; Slack, Poverty and Policy, p. 79.
43. WAC F5002/fo. 165ar. These letters left with foundlings in St Martin's are discussed, and reproduced in full, in the useful survey by Valerie Fildes, “Maternal Feelings Reassessed: Child Abandonment and Neglect in London and Westminster, 1550–1800”, in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren (London, 1999). PP- 139–178, (letters on pp. 153–155).
44. R.B. Outhwaite, “Objects of Charity’: Petitions to the London Foundling Hospital, 1768–72”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32 (1999), pp. 497–510, 505.
45. For the hospital, see the important article by Adrian Wilson, “Illegitimacy and Its Implications in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London: The Evidence of the Foundling Hospital”, Continuity and Change, 4 (1989), pp. 103–164.
46. Wilson argues that “neither marital poverty nor orphaning led parents to take their children to the Foundling Hospital” (p. 135) and that most foundlings were illegitimate. Valerie Fildes has argued, conversely, that many foundlings of London and Westminster were “legitimate children whose parent(s) could not afford to feed another mouth”; Fildes, “Child Abandonment and Neglect”, p. 157.
47. Smith, “Structured Dependence”, p. 426, argued that this category, together with the elderly, “overwhelmingly dominate the bulk of recipients of relief in the Poor Law account books and censuses of the poor which survive from the sixteenth century”.
48. Adrian Wilson suggests that in the event of a woman losing her partner whilst pregnant, or shortly after the birth, either the woman remarried or “a parent's own family rallied in support”; Wilson, “Illegitimacy and Its Implications”, p. 136.
49. Boulton, “Going on the Parish”, pp. 26–33
50. idem, “The Poor Among the Rich”.
51. Peter Earle, “The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries”, Economic History Review, 42 (1989), pp. 328–353.
52. For the occupations listed here, see WAC F5001/38, 92, 100,103, 115,123,131,151,160; F5002/28, 37, 42, 43, 59, 60, 74, 95, 101, 153.
53. Outhwaite, “Objects of Charity’”, p. 506.
54. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society, p. 221.
55. For the mobility of Londoners see also Wall, “Beyond die Household”, pp. 62–64.
56. Mary Thale (ed.), The Autobiography of Francis Place 1771–1854 (Cambridge, 1972), p. III.
57. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society, pp. 247–261.
58. Pamela Sharpe, “Survival Strategies and Stories: Poor Widows and Widowers in Early Industrial England”, in Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (eds), Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Harlow, 1999), pp. 220–239, 225–226.
59. Vivien Brodsky Elliott, “Single Women in the London Marriage Market: Age, Status and Mobility, 1598–1619”, in R.B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London, 1981), pp. 81–100, 93.
60. David Cressy, “Kinship and Kin Interaction in Early Modern England”, Past and Present, 113 (1986), pp. 38–69.
61. Thane, “Old People and their Families”, p. 117.
62. WAC F5002/169. One Charles Rumbold married an Abigail Gouch at St James's Duke Place, once a notorious centre of clandestine marriage, in 1706. Charles, their son, was baptized in St Andrew's Holborn on 30 April 1708.
63. Frances Taton, a seventy-year-old widow, for example, “believes she has one Child in die Army”, WAC F5001/21. She was granted a pension of is 3d a week in 1708 and continued receiving it until 1715, by which time it was worth 2s; WAC F438/191, F440/239, F441/161, F442/175, F444/158, F445/152.
64. Brodsky Elliott, “Single Women”, p. 93 (column showing kin providing lodgings).
65. Wall, “Beyond the Household”, pp. 64–66, notes the qualitative differences revealed between support from neighbours and kin in his sensitive analysis of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford.
66. Lark Rise to Candleford., p. 66.
67. WAC F5001/95. For the case of a female newspaper-seller, Ann Crook, the examining justice recorded that she “did lodge in at Mrs Wyatt's in Shugg Lane, who nursed her Child & her Child is there now & she says she pays 2s 6d per week for keeping her Child”; WAC F5002/37.
68. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 82, points out the immense financial value to the poor of the extent of debt forgiveness. The amount of unpaid debts was “in fact many times larger than charitable bequests and poor rates”, and was an important income supplement which would have raised the income of “poor labourers' ” families to a much higher level than that indicated by wage rates.
69. Outhwaite, “‘Objects of Charity’”, p. 508.
70. For this see also, D.A. Kent, “‘Gone for a Soldier’: Family Breakdown and the Demography of Desertion in a London Parish, 1750–91”, Local Population Studies, 45 (1990), pp. 27–42.
71. WAC F5002/167. From a letter attached to a foundling dropped in Durham Yard, 1709.
72. Boulton, “Poor Among the Rich”.
73. For foundlings in Europe see, for example, Isabel Dos Guimaraes Sa, ‘Child Abandonment in Portugal: Legislation and Institutional Care”, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994), pp. 69–89;
74. David I. Kertzer and Michael J. White, “Cheating the Angel-Makers: Surviving Infant Abandonment in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994), pp. 451–480.
75. Stuart Woolf, “The Societe de Charite Maternelle, 1788–1815”, in Jonathan Barry and Colin Jories (eds), Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State (London, 1991), pp. 99–103.
76. For this point see also Steve King, “Reconstructing Lives: The Poor, the Poor Law and Welfare in Calverley, 1650–1820”, Social History, 22 (1997), pp. 318–338.
77. One can only agree with one of Dr King's concluding comments that “there is scope for a renewed focus on the role of kinship in the welfare patchwork deployed by individuals and families”, Social History, p. 338.
78. Marjorie K. McIntosh, “Local Responses to the Poor in Late Medieval and Tudor England”, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988), pp. 209–245, 219–220.
79. The examinations are very far from the more familiar, relatively formulaic and formally written-up settlement examinations. For a splendid example and a guide to the English law of settlement, see Tim Hitchcock and John Black (eds), Chelsea Settlement and Bastardy Examinations 1733–1766, London Record Society 33, (London, 1999).