THE DEVELOPMENT OF POOR RELIEF IN LANCASHIRE, c. 1598–1680

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN HEALEY
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor

ABSTRACTThe development of the poor law has formed a key element of recent discussions of ‘state formation’ in early modern England. There are, however, still few local studies of how formal poor relief, stipulated in the great Tudor statutes, was implemented on the ground. This article offers such a study, focusing on Lancashire, an economically marginal county, far from Westminster. It argues that the poor law developed in Lancashire surprisingly quickly in the early seventeenth century, despite the fact that there is almost no evidence of implementation of statutory relief before 1598, and formal relief mechanisms were essentially in place before the Civil War even if the numbers on relief remained small. After a brief hiatus during the conflict, the poor law was quickly revived in the 1650s. The role of the magistracy is emphasized as a crucial driving force, not just in the enforcement of the statutes, but also in setting relief policy. The thousands of petitions to JPs by paupers, parishes, and townships that survive in the county archives suggests that magistrates were crucial players in the ‘politics of the parish’.

Changing Patterns of Poor Relief in Some English Rural Parishes Circa 1650–1750

Rural History ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOAN KENT ◽  
STEVE KING
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Rural Parishes ◽  
Changing Patterns

This article uses court records, overseers' accounts, pauper examinations and other records from several counties, including Huntingdonshire and Staffordshire, to look at the experiences of poor relief in early modern England. It shows the varied circumstances under which the poor ‘encountered’ the poor law in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, highlighting the often contradictory attitudes that poor people encountered. More than this, it argues that there were many sorts of ‘poor’ people with very different capacities to negotiate about relief and to help themselves and each other. These features compounded enduring regional differences in the nature and extent of relief to generate a complex patchwork of experiences for the poor in early modern England.

“Constructing the Poor in Early Seventeenth-Century London”1

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-463
Author(s):  
Claire S. Schen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Demographic Pressure ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Undeserving Poor

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

Episcopal Tombs in Early Modern England

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

scholarly journals Charity and Conflict: Poor Relief in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Dundee

2016 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCallum
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Town ◽  
Insight Into

This article addresses the poor relief provided in Dundee during the 1640s and 1650s, years of particular upheaval in the burgh. Contrary to some assumptions, some unusually rich archival evidence on this subject survives and offers rich insight into the collection and distribution of welfare by the kirk treasurers. The article argues that significant fundraising activities took place and survived the disasters of the late 1640s and early 1650s, pointing to the resilience of the town and its charitable structures. This relief was effectively administered and carefully recorded, and drew on a variety of additional sources such as voluntary gifts, as well as regular church-door collections. The article also analyses the recipients of regular and exceptional relief payments and considers the much more limited care provided by Dundee's hospital. As well as suggesting further opportunities for the study of poor relief in pre-modern Scotland, the article also helps to shed new light on the seventeenth-century experiences of one of the less well-studied of Scotland's leading early modern burghs.

Inventing Leonardo

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-166
Author(s):  
Margaret Dalivalle ◽  
Martin Kemp ◽  
Robert B. Simon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Cultural Entity

From the evidence of contemporary literary sources, manuscript inventories, correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Chapter 8 considers the penetration of literary concepts of Leonardo as an artist and thinker (pictor doctus), how the early reception relates to the wider ‘invention’ of Leonardo as a cultural entity, and whether a distinctly ‘British version’ of Leonardo can be detected. It focuses on the introduction into England of sixteenth-century Italian receptions of Leonardo via Richard Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, and from contact with Giorgio Vasari’s Lives. It proposes that, due to the scarcity of Vasari’s text in early modern England, it was Lomazzo’s account of Leonardo that influenced the earliest understanding of the artist in Britain. The chapter tracks the absorption of Vasari’s text in seventeenth-century England through the interventions of key individuals at the Stuart courts, before and after the Interregnum. A particular focus is the prominent role of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, who collected Leonardo’s writings and drawings from the Jacobean period until the mid 1640s. The dispersal of his collection throughout the seventeenth century, and the acquisition in the 1670s of the Windsor Volume by Charles II, and the Codex Arundel by the Royal Society, signal key staging posts in the reception of Leonardo in Restoration England.

PARISH ECONOMIES OF WELFARE, 1650–1834

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 985-1006 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN BROAD
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Basic Needs ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Southern England ◽  
Rural Employment ◽  
The Poor

This article argues for a more holistic approach to understanding the Old Poor Law. Using three detailed case studies from southern England, it focuses on the dynamics of differing social groups within the parish. It also looks at the role of the law, looking beyond the statutes to the parts played by King's Bench, Quarter Sessions and individual justices and petty sessions in creating a diversity of experiences for the poor. However, it also stresses the differential access to charitable funds, common rights, and poor relief in individual communities, and the ways in which parish elites attempted to put the total available resources to what they saw as the best uses. From 1650 to 1780 these combined resources allowed a generally humane approach to the treatment of poverty and misfortune, and maintained the independence of the cottager and labourer in southern England. Only after 1780 when population rose sharply and rural employment shrank did the flexibility of combined charitable and rate-based relief founder and more drastic devices were employed to cope with basic needs. In this process the independence of the labourer and cottager was undermined, charitable sources were marginalized, and the seeds were sown for the acceptance of the New Poor Law.

scholarly journals Krytyka nowego prawa o ubogich w ujęciu ruchu oksfordzkiego (1833‑1845)

Politeja ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (55) ◽  
pp. 57-75
Author(s):  
Piotr Musiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Personal Approach ◽  
History Of

The Oxford Movement’s Critique of the Poor Law Amendment ActThe paper presents a short history of poor laws in England and Great Britain, the content and justifications of the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), general characteristics of the Oxford Movement and its main political ideas, the state of contemporary research on the topic, and finally the Movement’s approach to the new Poor Law. This approach – the Oxford Movement’s critique – has been reconstructed into three main groups of arguments. In the first group there are arguments pointing out why a state’s responsibility, and state-organised system of poor relief, is to be irrelevant and why the Church should play a far greater role in this field. The second group of arguments underlines the impracticality of centralisation in the system and proposes the major role of the local units in poor relief, as well as more ‘personal’ approach to the poor, also by reforming workhouses. The third group of arguments undermines the liberal (and Puritan) idea of solely individual responsibility for one’s poverty and destitution – an idea underlying the new Poor Law.

Demographic Outline

2012 ◽  
pp. 61-76
Author(s):  
Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Single Women ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Economic Depression

This chapter presents a demographic outline of poverty in the Portuguese Jewish community in early modern Amsterdam. It has become clear from examining records of the numbers of people on poor relief that at times the community was larger than used to be assumed. Behind the beautiful façade of prosperity and grandeza that the community liked to show to the outside world, the kahal had to wrestle with the ever more pressing dilemma of having to look after paupers, who had flocked to Amsterdam expecting to find there a safe and sheltered life, free of persecution, war, and economic depression. By the end of the seventeenth century, a third of all Portuguese Jews were drawing permanent poor relief and almost half were drawing either permanent or temporary poor relief. Portuguese on welfare were often found in small families, mostly headed by women; larger families tended to be headed by men. In the eighteenth century, the character of Portuguese poverty changed. From then on—with the exception of single women—the poor were dominated by men trying to support their families through the economic slump with financial help from the Portuguese community.

Law, Status, and the Lash: Judicial Whipping in Early Modern England

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
K. J. Kesselring
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Expanded Group ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Law ◽  
Star Chamber

Abstract This article focuses on the contested development of judicial whipping as a marker and maker of status in the particular social, cultural, and political context of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In these years people disputed with special vigor who could be whipped and why, often in battles fought in and around parliaments and the Court of Star Chamber, and often invoking fears of “servility.” Tracing the rise and spread of judicial whipping, its linking with the poor, and disputes over its use, this article demonstrates how whipping served as a distinctively and explicitly status-based disciplinary tool, embedding hierarchical values in the law not just in practice but also in prescript. Some authorities thought the whip appropriate only for the “servile” and, indeed, both valuable and dangerous for its ability to inculcate a “slavish disposition.” After men of the gentry successfully asserted their freedom from the lash, so too did a somewhat expanded group of “free” and “sufficient” men. By the later seventeenth century, challenges over the uses of judicial whipping left it limited ever more firmly to people of low status, affixed by law to offenses typically associated with the insubordinate poor.

John Locke: The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Empirical Stance

The purpose of this book is to present the philosophical thought of John Locke as the work of a Christian virtuoso. In his role as ‘virtuoso’, an experimental natural philosopher of the sort that flourished in England during the seventeenth century, Locke was a proponent of the so-called ‘new philosophy’, a variety of atomism that emerged in early modern Europe. But he was also a practicing Christian, and he professed confidence that the two vocations were not only compatible but mutually sustaining. Locke aspired, without compromising his empirical stance, to unite the two vocations in a single philosophical endeavor with the aim of producing a system of Christian philosophy. Although the birth of the modern secular outlook did not happen smoothly or without many conflicts of belief, Locke, in his role of Christian virtuoso, endeavored to resolve apparent contradictions. Nuovo draws attention to the often-overlooked complexities and diversity of Locke’s thought, and argues that Locke must now be counted among the creators of early modern systems of philosophy.

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