Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500–1930s

Comparative Perspectives

Steven King, Anne Winter, Steven King, Anne Winter

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782381464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

The issues around settlement, belonging, and poor relief have for too long been understood largely from the perspective of England and Wales. This volume offers a pan-European survey that encompasses Switzerland, Prussia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. It explores how the conception of belonging changed over time and space from the 1500s onwards, how communities dealt with the welfare expectations of an increasingly mobile population that migrated both within and between states, the welfare rights that were attached to those who "belonged, " and how ordinary people secured access to welfare resources. What emerged was a sophisticated European settlement system, which on the one hand structured itself to limit the claims of the poor, and yet on the other was peculiarly sensitive to their demands and negotiations.

CHAPTER ONE

SETTLEMENT AND THE LAW IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

David Feldman

Introduction

In 1662 Parliament enacted a new law ‘for the better relief of the poor of this Kingdom’. This was the first time in six decades that poor law legislation reached the statute book. In 1598 and again in 1601 the structure of the Elizabethan poor law had been codified and consolidated. Parliament had then placed day to day responsibility for raising poor rates, relieving the impotent, and providing work for the able-bodied in the hands of parish officers. Yet neither in 1598 nor in 1601 did Parliament define what class of person each parish was obliged to relieve. The poor were mobile and unlikely to die in the parish of their birth, childhood or even marriage. The question of how to assign to parishes a mobile and chronically vulnerable population was a vital concern for overseers, ratepayers and, of course, the poor themselves. Should the recipients of poor relief be relieved where they were found? Where they were born? Where their parents were born? Where they had lived for three years? One year? A month? Each of these solutions figured in contemporary debate. The 1662 Act addressed, even if it did not fully resolve, the limits of parochial responsibility for welfare.

Above all, the Act encased a limit to parochial responsibility. It empowered Justices of the Peace, acting on complaints from parish officers, to remove migrants within forty days of their arrival if they considered the newcomers ‘likely to be chargeable to the parish’ at some indefinite point in the future. The only exemption mentioned in the Act was for those incomers who could afford to rent a tenement with a yearly value of £10 per annum. These migrants were not vulnerable to removal. However, those who were vulnerable, the law stated, should be sent to the parish where, in the specifically legal sense, they were last settled.1 The law of 1662 – as well as a vast body of case law and subsequent legislative additions – set guidelines for parish officers, Justices of the Peace and the higher courts, to determine the parish in which any pauper, or potential pauper, was ‘legally settled’ and to which they ‘belonged’.

The meaning of settlement in the seventeenth century was a narrow one in comparison to later usages. By the early decades of the nineteenth century some poor law commentators claimed that a ‘settlement’ carried with it an entitlement, in the sense of a right, to poor relief. More recently historians have argued that this understanding of the law shaped the way the poor themselves understood their right to relief in this later period and also contributed to a subjective and inward sense of belonging to a parish on the part of the poor.2 My concern in this essay is with an earlier period. In the seventeenth century, unambiguously, settlement did not confer a right to poor relief: it merely assigned a person to a parish. Relief lay at the discretion of the overseers and justices.3 The repeated invocation in the sources of the parish to which this or that person ‘belonged’ is understood in this essay in the administrative and legal context that generated this formula. These conventional poor law usages do not in themselves provide compelling evidence of a more inward sense of ‘belonging’.

In their history of English local government, Sidney and Beatrice Webb made a dramatic and highly negative assessment of the 1662 Act. According to the Webbs, it introduced a set of ‘extraordinary provisions’ that potentially immobilized ‘the entire body of wage-earners of the Kingdom, together with their families’ in their parishes of settlement.4 Just as the Webbs’ negative appraisal of the Old Poor Law has come under general revision since the 1960s, so too their particular assessment of the law of settlement has fallen out of favour. In essays published in 1963 and 1976 Philip Styles and James Taylor argued that the 1662 Law of Settlement was neither as significant nor as vicious as the Webbs claimed. They see the Act as a necessary counterpart to the system of parochial poor relief that developed in the late sixteenth century. In his influential and much cited essay, Styles argues that the 1662 Act was not innovative but should be seen as but one symptom of a long standing concern with the mobility of the poor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The importance of the Act, Taylor tells us, has been ‘exaggerated’.5 And there the matter has stood so far as the 1662 law is concerned. Now historians focus instead on the reform of settlement law at the end of the century. Poor law reforms enacted in 1685, 1691 and 1697 are heralded as significant and progressive, introducing a more flexible regime, promoting labour mobility in an increasingly commercial and dynamic economy.6

In what follows, I offer a revision of this account of the law of settlement in the seventeenth century. Although Styles and, more recently, Hindle illumine a century-long history of legal restrictions on the movement of the poor, this chapter will argue that a backward-looking perspective understates the significance of the 1662 Act.7 I shall also suggest that the character of the legal changes at the end of the century have been misunderstood. In these ways, this chapter aims to contribute to our understanding of the entitlement of migrants within a particular welfare system. Scholars widely make the assumption that ‘settlement restrictions are essential to any welfare system based on compulsory provision for the poor by public authority’.8 Yet historians at least should know better. Settlement restrictions have been neither consistent nor ubiquitous. For example, the eligibility of ‘aliens’ for poor relief in England was established beyond doubt in 1803 and in the first half of the twentieth century many aspect of the new national welfare system were open to all comers. Moreover, when settlement restrictions have been in force their severity in law and application in practice have also changed over time. Most notably, the law of settlement under the poor law was radically attenuated after 1846. An awareness of the existence of open as well as closed welfare systems should lead us to consider why it was that a particular and increasingly restrictive legal system came into force in the course of the seventeenth century.9

Migrants and Governance c. 1580–1640

Movers not stayers were the norm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Migration reflected myriad individual and familial decisions but this did not make it a random or chance affair. Migration was intrinsic to the central institutions of family and working life – service, apprenticeship, the developing labour market more broadly and marriage. Other sorts of migration were more desperate but equally driven by endemic features of the economy: landlessness, low wages, want of work and a shortage of housing. After mid century this sort of subsistence migration became less common but mobility remained the norm for the labouring poor in and out of work.10

In contrast to this precarious and migratory reality for the mass of the population, the Statute of Artificers of 1563 imagined a world from which idleness was banished and in which labour was both adequately rewarded and sedentary. This fantasy of a stable social order whose strength was buttressed by immobility was an abiding theme in social commentary.11 Accordingly, the mobile poor provoked a torrent of complaint. For example, migrants and vagrants were prominent in the rationale for the 1593 law that aimed to restrict building within three miles of the city gates of London and Westminster. The new law was necessary because of the vast numbers migrating to the capital:

the great Mischiefes and Inconveniences that daylie growe and increase by reason of the pesteringe of Houses with divse Famylies, harboringe of Inmates, and convertinge of great Houses into sevall Tente or Dwellinges, and erectinge of new Buyldinge… whereby great Infection of Sickness & dearthe of Victaulles and Fewell hath grown and ensued, and manye idle vagrante and wicked persons have harboured themselves there.12

Almost a century after the Statute of Artificers was enacted, the Council of State commissioned a report on towns whose trade had decayed. The same preference for immobility, as well as the association of migrants with disorder, remained in its pithy diagnosis: ‘too much beer and too many strangers’.13

The laws against vagrancy were used to punish one section of the migrant population. In law, the crime of vagrancy was drawn so broadly that almost any unemployed migrant might have been charged under this heading. A statute of 1597 stated that all ‘wandering persons’ who were able-bodied but out of work should be apprehended and punished. Yet, in practice, vagrancy was a category that the authorities imposed on only a small minority of the migrant poor. The problem of how to deal with the majority remained.14

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, parishes and towns were equipped with an arsenal to repel unwanted incomers. Most notably they were armed by the 1589 statute that both forbade building cottages without at least four acres of land and which also insisted only one family or household should live in each cottage. These weapons were used widely by towns against ‘inmates’ and ‘undertenants’.15 In doing so they were keen to subordinate commerce to low taxes, good order and, in godly places, public edification. To these ends, they not only acted against migrants but also the landlords and tenants who rented space to them. At Finchingfield, in Essex, the town’s governing body visited parishioners to persuade them to rid themselves of a tenant. If landlords proved recalcitrant, however, they were to be prosecuted for keeping inmates ‘contrary to the mind of the town’. In 1626 the vestry of St Bartholomew Exchange, in the City of London, ordered a landlord to eject his lodgers so the parish ‘might sustaine no more losse and wronge as they have doone form’ly by some poore allreddie in the same house’.16 Initiatives such as these sometimes aspired to a close oversight of mobility and commerce. At Braintree in February 1622 the town’s governing body (the ‘four and twenty’) resolved to survey the town and ‘bring in account what disordered persons are crept into the parish & what inmates are either intertained already or coming in’. Five years later the same body issued a new regulation:

Nobody to build any cottage or convert any building in his dwelling house or to receive any strangers without the consent of the churchwarden and six of the Four and Twenty in writing under their hands under pain of fine of £3.17

In rural England too, enterprising householders and tenants who found space to rent to migrants aroused the anxiety of local governors charged with the welfare of the wider community. A petition in 1615 from the inhabitants of Leigh (on Mendip) to Ilchester sessions complained that Thomas Bridges, his sons and tenants had ‘received divers inmates and undertenants into many houses and small cottages there, contrary to the law; and the said Mr Bridges hath taken away the ground belonging to sundry tenements there, selling them only to poor men, which is likely to be a greater charge to the inhabitants.’ In rural areas governors, at times, attempted to uphold the 1589 statute against squatters. In 1599 a group of petitioners persuaded the justices at the Staffordshire Quarter Sessions to issue a warrant of good behaviour against Hughe Bolde from the township of Lyttle Sandon. Bolde had erected buildings for no fewer than 28 people, besides his own family, on his small freehold.18

These measures and complaints were aimed at local entrepreneurs as well as at the migrant poor. They expressed a policy which tried to adjudicate between the conflicting demands of the common weal of the town or parish – as local governors saw it – and the commercial energies of individuals. The same priorities meant that landlords, tenants and employers were asked to indemnify towns against any claims for poor relief made by their poor tenants, sub-tenants or labourers. In 1635 one landlord in Gloucester was ordered to make a weekly payment for the relief of the poor to indemnify the parish in case any of his tenants became chargeable. In 1640 Chester Quarter Sessions advised Stockport’s Justices to assess fines on those who took in ‘poore people’ and increase these fines ‘weekly or otherwise, as they shall think fitt’.19

We only have to remind ourselves of the ubiquity of migrants in early modern England to realize that attempts to impose these laws and by-laws were unsuccessful in both towns and large swathes of rural England. The law against building cottages without four acres of ground was, as Sharp comments, ‘a pious hope unrealizeable in the social and economic reality of Tudor and Stuart England’.20 We can examine the failure to regulate inmates in an urban context in the case of Southampton. Here, from the last decade of the sixteenth century the Leet Court issued a series of orders that addressed the ‘intollerable numbers of inmates and undertennants overmuche increasinge in this Towne to the great annoyaunce of all the honest inhabitants thereof’. As the problem became unmanageable so the town’s regulatory energies spiralled. In 1590 the Southampton beadles were instructed to present undertenants to the Leet Court ‘from tyme to tyme’. By 1602 this was supposed to occur weekly. The following year the town authorities declared that landlords and tenants should not let or sub-let accommodation to anyone who did not pay tax to parliament on lands and personal property, or who did not ‘give good suerties before Mr maior for the time beinge to discharge the Towne & parishes thereof of all charges concerninge themselves or there wives, familie & children’. But in 1604 the order had not come into force and, in so far as it ever did, we know that by 1611 it had fallen into abeyance because in that year there was a call for it to be enforced, a call that was repeated five ...