The Problem of the Poor in Tudor and Early Stuart England

A.L. Beier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135836023
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This pamphlet examines recent research into the poor laws of Tudor and Stuart England. Dr Beier asks the question 'who were the poor?' and in answering it places the 'problem of the poor' in its historical context, examining it in relation to medieval provisions for dealing with poverty. He shows how far legislation was influenced by economic changes, by ideas about poverty and by the interests of the legislators themselves. Dr Beier evaluates the varying interpretations of the poor laws, from those who have seen them as an early 'welfare state' to those who have considered them to be the manifestation of a 'Protestant ethic'. The major poor-law statues are summarized in an appendix, and there is a useful bibliography.

The Problem of the Poor
in Tudor and
Early Stuart England

Introduction

From 1485 to 1649 Parliament passed over two dozen statutes dealing with the poor. The legislation did not cease, moreover, with the fall of Charles I. Social security and unemployment benefits are foundation-stones of British society today, and only recently have the nineteenth-century vagrancy laws been repealed. But the Tudor and early Stuart poor-laws are not simply a series of Acts of Parliament, numerous, wordy and difficult to recall in examinations. Like other events in history, they must be viewed with reference to their ‘lives and times’. So one aim of this pamphlet is to place the legislation in its historical context: in relation to earlier, medieval facilities for handling poverty; by examining the questions, ‘who were the poor, and how numerous were they?’; and by showing the influence of economic conditions, of ideas concerning poverty, and of the interests of those who ruled.

But history involves interpreting the facts as well as describing them, and so we shall refer to certain schools of thought on the poor-laws. First, there is the ‘state-building’ view. This approach sees the legislation as an early stage in the growth of a welfare state, reaching its peak under the early Stuarts and then declining, to the detriment of the poor (13, 23). Second, there is the position that a ‘Protestant ethic’ was crucial in the treatment of the poor. One version of this interpretation is that Protestants took a uniquely harsh stance towards them, leading to statutory discrimination between those able and those unfit to work (20). A refinement of this view argues that to the ‘deserving’, at least, Protestants were extraordinarily generous with charity; so much so that the poor-laws were redundant except in emergencies (11). Historians have also stressed the role of economic and social changes in triggering official concern about the poor between 1500 and 1650: population growth, rising prices, falling wages, agrarian dislocation, migration and urbanization. The lot of the poor worsened under these pressures, it is thought (15).

However, mass distress did not begin or end with changes of regime like those of 1485 and 1649; nor with alterations in the official faith; nor with the shifting sands of economic fluctuations. What was mainly involved were two variables: the appearance of great numbers of propertyless persons, and the authorities’ reactions to them. Destitution certainly worsened under the Tudors and early Stuarts, but it is simplistic to impose precise dates on the problem, which even today remains a cause of discontent.

Medieval origins

Official concern about the needy and unemployed dates not from Tudor times, but from the Middle Ages. This is not surprising, for the two periods shared certain features of pre-industrial societies that made poverty common rather than exceptional. Human and animal power were the main sources of energy, and production was subject to myriad constraints: night and day, bad weather, and diseases (of man and beast). Another hindrance was that, because of high birth- and death-rates, a large share of the population were unemployable. The proportion of children was perhaps twice as high as today, which meant fewer productive adults than in an industrialized society. Short life-expectancy had the same result, as well as leaving many orphans and widows (5). Finally, wealth was unequally distributed, with a small minority of lords, merchants and rich peasants in possession of the lion’s share.

Medieval society experienced a number of disturbing changes from about 1200. First, rising population levels and increased exactions by lords spelt harder times for tenants. Second, towns grew both in number and in size. City air might make one free of servile bonds, but it could also make one poor. As centres of industry, towns contained hundreds, sometimes thousands of process-workers, who mostly lived on a knife-edge of poverty. The final blow was the liberation of labour from bonds of serfdom. The labour shortage caused by the Black Death, combined with migration and struggles against lords for freedom, meant that by 1500 formal serfdom was almost a dead letter.

Medieval society developed a number of institutions to deal with these upheavals. From the twelfth century canon lawyers revivified legislation requiring parish care for the indigent. In some villages manorial custom provided for the helpless and landless. Another defence was the ‘parish stock’ (often a flock of sheep or herd of cattle), the profits of which were directed to the relief of the poor. Parish guilds, to which almost all householders belonged, acted as mutual-aid societies (22).

Medieval towns also developed facilities for poor-relief. Craft guilds came to the aid of members in distress and endowed almshouses and hospitals. The numbers of hospitals reached a peak of nearly 700 between 1216 and 1350. Although not ‘hospitals’ in our sense, they included facilities for the care of the diseased, as well as almshouses and lodgings for travellers (7). Finally, some towns acted to relieve the needy, running hospitals, storing supplies of corn, and levying poor-rates. In addition to institutional relief there was a great deal of charity. After all, the Church’s doctrine held that ‘good works’ helped to aid the soul’s passage from Purgatory to Heaven. Finally, there was a considerable corpus of medieval vagrancy legislation. Before 1300 it mainly covered runaway serfs, but from that date was directed against disorderly and criminal groups, and after 1350 against labourers who refused to work for statutory wages or who begged. The appearance of a criminal underworld at this time is not surprising, for social problems were mounting in town and country from about 1250. In seeking to control labour the state regulated the poor generally. The Statute of Labourers of 1349 restrained alms-giving, particularly handouts to able-bodied beggars, so that ‘they may be compelled to labour’. In some measure, therefore, there existed ‘medieval poor-laws’.

Hard times, 1500–1650

The fullest development of the poor-laws nevertheless began in the sixteenth century. From the 1530s the system was transformed. The change came not overnight in a ‘revolution in government’, but over several decades. By the early seventeenth century it is possible to speak of a national poor-law system in England, perhaps Europe’s first. Indeed, by the end of the century the cost of relief provoked a national debate involving some of the leading minds of the age. By that time the country had seen vast institutional upheavals. Parliament had taken on the responsibility of the relief of the disabled. It passed laws that gradually imposed compulsory poor-rates on every parish in the land and required the appointment of new, secular officials to administer them. Even the monarch and the Privy Council became active in regulating the poor. Moreover, towns began to take independent action to handle the problem, often anticipating moves by central government. They made censuses of the poor, levied compulsory rates, and devised work-projects for the unemployed. But before discussing these dramatic changes, we must establish the context in which they occurred.

Perhaps the most striking feature of society’s structure on the eve of the Reformation was the great mass of the poor and vulnerable. This meant that when things got worse, as they certainly did from 1500 to 1650, there were multitudes who had little to fall back on; who possessed, in one writer’s words, ‘no property at all beyond the clothes they stood up in, the tools of their trade, and a few sticks of furniture’ (10). It was to support this considerable group, to stop them from starving and, worse, rioting, that the poor-laws were passed.

Contemporary observers were convinced the numbers of the poor were enormous, estimating them as a quarter to a half of the population. Reliable taxation records suggest that a third to a half lived in or near poverty in the 1520s and again in the 1670s. Towards the end of the period Gregory King put the total ‘decreasing the wealth of the kingdom’ as high as three-fifths. Thus England began the Tudor and ended the Stuart age with a great army of needy persons, possibly the majority of the country’s inhabitants.

Who were the poor? Statutes distinguished the disabled and the able-bodied, but it was more complicated than that. Instead we may divide them into the settled and the vagrant poor, contrasting groups receiving different treatment. The first were eligible for relief under the poor laws, but the second were treated as criminals. In reality, even this distinction is somewhat artificial, for the ‘settled’ easily slipped into vagrancy. But to the authorities the difference was important, for the resident poor might swell the poor-rates, while vagrants had no entitlement to relief. Moreover, the latter were considered greater threats to property and public order. The numbers of the settled poor varied according to time and place, generally ranging from a fifth to a third of the population. Of course their numbers rose when times were bad. In Warwick in 1587 those requiring relief doubled af...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• The Problem of the Poor In Tudor and Early Stuart England
• Bibliography
• Appendix: Provisions of Tudor and Early Stuart Poor-Laws (19)