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Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis, 1700–1850 pp 1–43Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction: Illegitimacy in London

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Abstract

This chapter sets out the context of unmarried parenthood in London between 1700 and 1850. Illegitimacy levels rose throughout the period and only started to decline after the mid-nineteenth century. Williams explores the explanations given by historians to explain illegitimacy and to account for this rise, as well as the legal context of illegitimacy and the framework of the bastardy laws from 1576. The chapter describes the specific nature of illegitimacy in London. Finally, the chapter justifies the sources used for the research and the themes explored throughout the book. The study aims to explore the making of metropolitan bastardy and the experience of unmarried motherhood.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    St. Luke Chelsea workhouse admission and discharge registers, 1743–1769, 1782–1799: http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Chelsea/Chelsea1743.shtml, last accessed January 2017; London Metropolitan Archives [LMA], P74/LUK/123-139 (X15/39-45), St. Luke Chelsea Settlement and bastardy examinations, 1782–1838.

  2. 2.

    W. King, ‘Punishment for bastardy in early seventeenth-century England’, Albion: a quarterly journal concerned with British studies, 10:2 (1978), pp. 130–51; G. Walker, Crime, gender and social order in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 227; L. Gowing ‘Giving birth at the magistrate’s gate: single mothers in the early modern city’, in S. Tarbin and S. Broomhall (eds), Women, identities and communities in early modern Europe (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2008), pp. 137–52; F. Dabhoiwala, The origins of sex: a history of the first sexual revolution (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 13.

  3. 3.

    The same laws of affiliation could be, and were, invoked against fathers deserting their wives and children, but in many fewer numbers. See, for instance, Southwark Local Studies Library [SLSL] 763, St. George the Martyr Churchwardens and overseer maintenance accounts on affiliation orders, 1818–1835.

  4. 4.

    M. Ingram, Church courts, sex and marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); F. Dabhoiwala, ‘Summary justice in early modern London’, English Historical Review, 121 (2006), pp. 796–822.

  5. 5.

    R.B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and punishment: petty crime and the law in London and rural Middlesex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 7.

  6. 6.

    U.R.Q. Henriques, ‘Bastardy and the new poor law’, Past & present, 37 (1967), pp. 103–29.

  7. 7.

    T.V. Hitchcock, ‘The English workhouse: a study in institutional poor relief in selected countries 1696–1750’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1985); T. Hitchcock ‘“Unlawfully begotten on her body”: illegitimacy and the parish poor in St. Luke’s Chelsea’, in T. Hitchcock, P. King and P. Sharpe (eds), Chronicling poverty: the voices and strategies of the English poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 70–86; T. Hitchcock and R.B. Shoemaker, London lives: poverty, crime and the making of a modern city, 1690–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 121–33, 139–48.

  8. 8.

    A. Wilson, The making of man-midwifery: childbirth in England, 1660–1770 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), ch. 11; L. Forman Cody, Birthing the nation: sex, science, and the conception of eighteenth-century Britons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 176–83; T. Evans, ‘Unfortunate Objects’: lone mothers in eighteenth-century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), ch. 7; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives, pp. 254–6.

  9. 9.

    Hitchcock, ‘Unlawfully begotten’, p. 76; Evans, Unfortunate Objects, ch. 5; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives, pp. 259–62.

  10. 10.

    Wilson, Making of man-midwifery, part III; Cody, Birthing the nation, pp. 283–91.

  11. 11.

    A.-M. Kilday, A history of infanticide in Britain c.1600 to the present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), ch. 2; M. Clayton, ‘Changes in Old Bailey trials for the murder of newborn babies, 1674–1803’, Continuity and Change, 24:2 (2009), pp. 337–359. For the seventeenth century see L. Gowing, ‘Secret births and infanticide in seventeenth-century England’, Past & present, 156 (1997), pp. 87–115.

  12. 12.

    R.W. Malcolmson, ‘Infanticide in the eighteenth century’, in J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1550–1800 (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 187–209; Kilday, Infanticide, pp. 114–16.

  13. 13.

    P. Langford, Polite and commercial people: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 145; Forman Cody, Birthing the nation, pp. 283–91.

  14. 14.

    T.R. Malthus, An essay on the principle of population, D. Winch (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 24, n. 6, 259–70.

  15. 15.

    M.C. Finn, The character of credit: personal debt in English culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 152–4.

  16. 16.

    D.R. Green, Pauper capital: London and the poor law, 1790–1870 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 26–7.

  17. 17.

    (1834) Report from His Majesty’s Commission for inquiring into the administration and practical operation of the poor laws (London), pp. 92–9, 195.

  18. 18.

    T. Nutt, ‘The paradox and problems of illegitimate paternity in old poor law Essex’, in Levene et al., Illegitimacy, pp. 102–21.

  19. 19.

    Henriques, ‘Bastardy’, p. 114; A. Brundage, The English poor laws, 1700–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 69. See also L. Forman Cody, ‘The politics of illegitimacy in an age of reform: women, reproduction, and political economy in England’s new poor law of 1834’, Journal of Women’s History, 11:4 (2000), pp. 131–156, at pp. 146–50; T. Nutt, ‘Illegitimacy, paternal financial responsibility, and the 1834 Poor Law Commission Report: the myth of the old poor law and the making of the new’, Economic History Review, 63 (2010), pp. 335–61, at pp. 339–43.

  20. 20.

    Hitchcock, ‘The English workhouse’; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives, pp. 121–33; Green, Pauper capital, pp. 57–69.

  21. 21.

    A. Levene, T. Nutt and S. Williams, ‘Introduction’, in A. Levene, T. Nutt and S. Williams (eds), Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 1–17, at pp. 10–14.

  22. 22.

    Levene et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 11.

  23. 23.

    On plebeian agency in eighteenth-century London see Hitchcock, ‘Unlawfully begotten’ and Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives.

  24. 24.

    T. Hitchcock, Down and out in eighteenth-century London (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2004); A. Eccles, Vagrancy in law and practice under the old poor law (Farnham, Ashgate, 2012); D. Hitchcock, Vagrancy in English culture and society, 1650–1750 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

  25. 25.

    Evans, Unfortunate objects; R. Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution: heterosexuality and the third gender in Enlightenment London, I (London, University of Chicago, 1998); N. Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge: illegitimacy in eighteenth-century Westminster’, Journal of Social History, 23:2 (1989), pp. 355–375; Hitchcock, ‘Unlawfully begotten’; J. Black, ‘Who were the putative fathers of illegitimate children in London, 1740–1810?’, in Levene et al., Illegitimacy, pp. 50–65; J. Hurl-Eamon, ‘“The lowest and most abandoned trull of a soldier”: the crime of bastardy in early modern London’, in R. Hillman and P. Ruberry-Blanc (eds), Female transgression in early modern Britain: literary and historical explorations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 163–90.

  26. 26.

    Nutt, ‘Paternal financial responsibility’ pp. 336–7; S. Williams, ‘The maintenance of bastard children in London, 1790–1834’, Economic History Review, 69:3 (2016), pp. 945–71; P. Thane, ‘Women and the poor law in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop, 6 (1978), pp. 30–51.

  27. 27.

    P. Laslett, ‘Introduction; comparing illegitimacy over time and between cultures’, in P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen and R.M. Smith (eds), Bastardy and its comparative history: studies in the history of illegitimacy and marital nonconformism in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, North America, Jamaica and Japan (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), pp. 1–68, Tables 1.1(a) and 1.1(b), figure 1.2, pp. 14–18; E.A. Wrigley, ‘Marriage, fertility and population growth in eighteenth-century England’, in R.B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and society: studies in the social history of marriage (London: Europa Publications, 1981), pp. 137–85, at p. 162; E.A. Wrigley, ‘British population during the “long” eighteenth century, 1680–1840’, in R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), volume I Industrialisation, 1700–1860, pp. 57–95, at pp. 70–1.

  28. 28.

    See, for instance, K. Oosterveen, R.M. Smith and S. Stewart, ‘Family reconstitution and the study of bastardy: evidence from certain English parishes’, in Laslett et al., Bastardy, pp. 86–140, at pp. 87–88, 99, 113–20; A. Newman, ‘An evaluation of bastardy recordings in an east Kent parish’, in Laslett, Bastardy, pp. 141–57, at p. 144; P. Laslett, ‘The bastardy prone sub-society’, in Laslett, Bastardy, pp. 217–46, at pp. 232–8; P. Laslett, Family life and illicit love in earlier generations: essays in historical sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Table 3.12, p. 150.

  29. 29.

    Laslett, ‘Introduction’, Table 1.3, p. 23; E.A. Wrigley, R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen, and R.S. Schofield, English population history from family reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 421–7; Wrigley, ‘British population’, p. 70.

  30. 30.

    Wrigley, ‘British population’, p. 70.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., p. 74.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., pp. 74–5.

  33. 33.

    Laslett, ‘Introduction’, p. 55. For age of unmarried mothers in London, see Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution, Tables 8.1–8.3, pp. 243–4; Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge’, p. 367.

  34. 34.

    R. Finlay, Population and metropolis: the demography of London 1580–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 149–50; R. Adair, Courtship, illegitimacy and marriage in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 202–23, P. Laslett, ‘Introduction’, in Laslett et al., Bastardy, pp. 1–68.

  35. 35.

    45 th Annual report of the Registrar General (1884), and see Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution, p. 229; Levene et al., ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8; Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge’, p. 356; T. Nutt, ‘Illegitimacy and the poor law in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005), pp. 204–12. See also Adair, Courtship, pp. 45–7; E. Hubbard, City women: money, sex, and the social order in early modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 87; Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution, pp. 229–30. Cressy argues that the seventeenth-century statistics from parish registers ‘stand up well alongside evidence from the ecclesiastical courts and other sources’: D. Cressy, Birth, marriage and death: ritual, religion, and the life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 73–4.

  36. 36.

    A. Wilson, ‘Illegitimacy and its implications in mid-eighteenth-century London: the evidence of the Foundling Hospital’, Continuity and Change, 4:1 (1989), pp. 103–64, at pp. 104, 136–7.

  37. 37.

    A. Levene, ‘The origins of the children of the London Foundling Hospital, 1741–1760: a reconsideration’, Continuity and Change, 18:2 (2003), pp, 201–35, at p. 228.

  38. 38.

    Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge’, n 7, p. 370.

  39. 39.

    Pauper Lives project (https://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives/), database funded by the ESRC (RES-000-23-0250); R. Davenport, J. Boulton and J. Black, ‘Neonatal and maternal mortality in the workhouse of St. Martin in the Fields, 1725–1824’ (unpublished paper given at European Social Science History Association Conference, Glasgow, Saturday 14 April 2012, available at the Pauper Lives in Georgian London and Manchester project website, http://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives/), p. 10.

  40. 40.

    L. Shaw Taylor and E.A. Wrigley, ESRC-funded project ‘The occupational structure of Britain 1379–1911’, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge.

  41. 41.

    Laslett, ‘Introduction’, Table 1.6, pp. 34–5; Laslett, Family life, appendix 2, pp. 158–9; Adair, Courtship, pp. 202–23; Williams, ‘Maintenance of bastard children’, Table 1 p. 952, 955; Levene, ‘Origins of children’; A. Levene, ‘Poor families, removals and “nurture” in late Old Poor Law London’, Continuity and Change, 25:2 (2010), pp. 233–262, at p. 228; Finlay, Population and metropolis, pp. 18, 148–50; (1845) Eighth Annual Report of the Registrar General (London), pp. 73–80.

  42. 42.

    Laslett et al., Bastardy; Laslett, Family life.

  43. 43.

    Adair, Courtship.

  44. 44.

    These studies are reviewed in E. Griffin, ‘Sex, illegitimacy and social change in industrializing Britain’, Social History, 38:2 (2013), pp. 139–161.

  45. 45.

    D. Levine and K. Wrightson, ‘The social context of illegitimacy in early modern England’, in Laslett et al., Bastardy, pp. 158–75, at p. 169.

  46. 46.

    E. Shorter, ‘Illegitimacy, sexual revolution and social change in modern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, II:2 (1971), pp. 237–72.

  47. 47.

    L.A. Tilly, J.W. Scott and M. Cohen, ‘Women’s work and European fertility patterns’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6:3 (1976), pp. 447–76; C. Fairchilds, ‘Female sexual attitudes and the rise of illegitimacy: a case study’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1978), pp. 627–67; P. Seleski, ‘The women of the labouring poor: love, work and poverty in London, 1750–1820’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1989).

  48. 48.

    Tilly et al., ‘Women’s work’, p. 465.

  49. 49.

    Laslett, ‘Introduction’, pp. 20–24; Laslett, ‘Illegitimate fertility and the matrimonial market’, in J. Dupaquier, E. Helia, P. Laslett and M. Levi-Bacci (eds), Marriage and remarriage in populations in the past (London: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 461–71, at pp. 466–8; Wrigley, ‘Marriage’, pp. 155–63.

  50. 50.

    Levine and Wrightson, ‘Social context’, p. 161; Wrigley, ‘Marriage’, p. 161; D. Levine, Family formation in the age of nascent capitalism (New York: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 127–45.

  51. 51.

    Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge’, p. 369.

  52. 52.

    Levene et al., ‘Introduction’, pp. 9–10.

  53. 53.

    Ibid. On the standard of living, see C. Feinstein, ‘Pessimism perpetuated: real wages and the standard of living in Britain during and after the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History 58:3 (1998), pp. 625–58. On ‘failed courtships’ in London, see J. Black, ‘Who were the putative fathers of illegitimate children in London, 1740–1810?’, in Levene et al., Illegitimacy, pp. 50–65, at pp. 59–62; Evans, Unfortunate objects, pp. 2–3, 42–44; Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge’, p. 369.

  54. 54.

    Levene et al., Illegitimacy, pp. 9–10. For localised conditions see P. Hudson and S. King, ‘Two textile townships, c. 1660–1820: a comparative demographic analysis’, Economic History Review, 53:4 (2000), pp. 706–41; Griffin, ‘Sex, illegitimacy and social change’.

  55. 55.

    Laslett, ‘The bastardy prone sub-society’; S. King, ‘The bastardy prone sub-society again: bastards and their fathers and mothers in Lancashire, Wiltshire, and Somerset, 1800–1840’, in Levene et al., Illegitimacy, pp. 66–85.

  56. 56.

    Levene et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 13, and see B. Reay, Microhistories: demography, society and culture in rural England, 1800–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 197.

  57. 57.

    For criticism of this approach see, for instance, T. Hitchcock, ‘Redefining sex in eighteenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996), pp. 73–90; T. Hitchcock, ‘Demography and the culture of sex in the long eighteenth century’ in J. Black (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain, 1660–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 69–84.

  58. 58.

    Hitchcock, ‘Demography and the culture of sex’; Hitchcock, ‘Redefining sex’; Wilson, ‘Illegitimacy’; Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution; Dabhoiwala, Origins of sex. See also H. Abelove, ‘Some speculations on the history of sexual intercourse during the long eighteenth century in England’, Genders, 6 (1989), pp. 125–30; T. Laqueur, ‘Sex and desire in the industrial revolution’ in P. O’Brien and R. Quinault (eds), The industrial revolution and British society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 100–123. Laslett reflected upon the possibility of a sexual revolution: Laslett, ‘Introduction’, pp. 26–9.

  59. 59.

    Hitchcock, ‘Redefining sex’; Hitchcock, ‘Demography’; T. Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 39–41; Wilson, ‘Illegitimacy’; Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution.

  60. 60.

    Hitchcock, ‘Redefining sex’, p. 80.

  61. 61.

    Wilson, ‘Illegitimacy’, pp. 133–35.

  62. 62.

    Dabhoiwala, Origins of sex, ch. 1; Hitchcock, ‘Unlawfully begotten’, p. 80.

  63. 63.

    Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution.

  64. 64.

    Griffin, ‘Sex, illegitimacy and social change’, p. 151.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., pp. 160–61.

  66. 66.

    Shaw Taylor and Wrigley, ‘Occupational structure’ data.

  67. 67.

    Cressy, Birth, marriage and death, pp. 73–79; M. Finn, M. Lobban and J. Bourne Taylor, ‘Introduction: spurious issues’, in M. Finn, M. Lobban and J. Bourne Taylor (eds), Legitimacy and illegitimacy in nineteenth-century law, literature and history (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–24, at pp. 5–7.

  68. 68.

    Cressy, Birth, marriage and death, pp. 73–79, quote p. 74.

  69. 69.

    Ibid.; Finn et al., ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–7; G. Frost, Living in sin: cohabiting as husband and wife in nineteenth-century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 23–8.

  70. 70.

    Cressy, Birth, marriage and death, pp. 73–79; Ingram, Church courts, pp. 262–3.

  71. 71.

    Ingram, Church courts, Table 2 p. 68, 259–81.

  72. 72.

    Nutt, ‘Paternal financial responsibility’, pp. 336–7.

  73. 73.

    Ibid.; L. Gowing, Common bodies: women, touch and power in seventeenth century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 179.

  74. 74.

    Nutt, ‘Paternal financial responsibility’, pp. 336–7, T. Nutt, ‘Bastardy’, in A. Levene (ed.), Narratives of the poor in eighteenth-century Britain, I: Voices of the poor: poor law depositions and letters (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), pp. 127–203, at p. 127.

  75. 75.

    Gowing, Common bodies, p. 117; Kilday, Infanticide, p. 37; Eccles, Vagrancy, p. 219.

  76. 76.

    King, ‘Punishment for bastardy’, p. 134.

  77. 77.

    A.M. Froide, Never married: single women in early modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 40–1; P. Crawford, Parents of poor children in England, 1580–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 5; A. Levene, The childhood of the poor: welfare in eighteenth-century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

  78. 78.

    Nutt, ‘Paradox and problems’, p. 102.

  79. 79.

    A. Shepard, ‘Brokering fatherhood: illegitimacy and paternal rights and responsibilities in early modern England’, in S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (eds), Remaking English society: social relations and social change in early modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 41–63, pp. 41–3.

  80. 80.

    P.A. Fideler, Social welfare in pre-industrial England: the old Poor Law tradition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 128; V. Fildes, ‘Maternal feelings reassessed: child abandonment and neglect in London and Westminster, 1550–1800’, in V. Fildes (ed.), Women as mothers in pre-industrial England: essays in memory of Dorothy McLaren (London, Routledge, 1990), pp. 139–178; Levene, Childhood of the poor, pp. 3–4.

  81. 81.

    Nutt, ‘Paternal financial responsibility’, pp. 336–7; T. Hitchcock and Black (eds), ‘Introduction’, Chelsea settlement and bastardy examinations, 1733–1766 (London: London Record Society, 1999), pp. x–xi. On the relationship between the laws of settlement and the rise of the form, see N. Tadmor, ‘The settlement of the poor and the rise of the form in England, c. 1662–1780’, Past & present, 236 (2017), pp. 43–97.

  82. 82.

    Hitchcock and Black, Chelsea examinations, p. viii.

  83. 83.

    Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives, p. 299.

  84. 84.

    Nutt, ‘Paternal financial responsibility’, pp. 336–7.

  85. 85.

    Ibid.; S. Williams, ‘Maintenance of bastard children’.

  86. 86.

    Nutt, ‘Paternal financial responsibility’, p. 337. On seventeenth-century maternity and parental roles, see P. Crawford, Blood, bodies and families in early modern England (Harlow: Pearson, 2004), ch. 3.

  87. 87.

    P. Crawford, ‘The construction and experience of maternity in seventeenth-century England’, in V. Fildes, Women as mothers in pre-industrial England (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990), pp. 3–38, at p. 13; Crawford, Parents of poor children.

  88. 88.

    Nutt, ‘Bastardy’, p. 131; Nutt, ‘Paradox and problems’, pp. 103–4; Hitchcock and Black, ‘Introduction’, pp. vii–xiii.

  89. 89.

    SLSL 1121–2, St. George the Martyr bastardy bonds, 1628–1756, and transcript by C. Powell.

  90. 90.

    LMA P92/MRY/357, St. Mary Newington register of bastard children, 1802–35.

  91. 91.

    Eccles, Vagrancy, p. 88. See also K.D.M. Snell, Parish and belonging: community, identity and welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 85; P. Sharpe, ‘Parish women: maternity and the limitations of maiden settlement in England 1662–1834’, in P. Jones and S. King (eds), Obligation, entitlement and dispute under the English poor laws (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), pp. 168–92.

  92. 92.

    Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives, p. 69. And see Snell, Parish and belonging.

  93. 93.

    Levene, Childhood of the poor, pp. 17; Levene, ‘Poor families’, p. 248; L. Charlesworth, Welfare’s forgotten past: a socio-legal history of the poor law (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 130; LMA P74/LUK/144 (X015/047), St. Luke Chelsea, Removal orders, examinations, and bastardy orders, 1799–1837, 03/03/1817. And see Nutt, ‘Paradox and problems’, pp. 119–20.

  94. 94.

    Crawford, ‘Construction and experience of maternity’, p. 12.

  95. 95.

    Levene, ‘Poor families’, p. 237; Gowing, Common bodies, p. 120; L. Gowing, ‘Ordering the body: illegitimacy and female authority in seventeenth-century England’, in M.J. Braddick, Michael and J. Walter (eds), Negotiating power in early modern society: order, hierarchy and subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 43–62, at pp. 43–4; Eccles, Vagrancy, p. 89.

  96. 96.

    Eccles, Vagrancy, p. 89.

  97. 97.

    LMA P74/LUK/144-5 (X015/047); St. Luke Chelsea Workhouse admission and discharge registers, 1743–1835; St. Martin in the Fields Workhouse admission and discharge registers, 1725–1824, provided by ‘Pauper lives in Georgian London and Manchester’ project, https://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives/; LMA P92/GEO/137, St. George the Martyr Examinations and removals, 1833–1842; LMA SO/BG/24 St. George the Martyr Examinations and visits, 1844–1860.

  98. 98.

    https://www.londonlives.org/static/BridgenElizabeth.jsp Accessed 10 February 2018.

  99. 99.

    Green, Pauper capital, p. 18. Levene did not find that unmarried mothers and their children were a large proportion of those removed from London parishes: Levene, ‘Poor families’, p. 248. See also Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives, pp. 237–44. On settlement see J.S. Taylor, ‘The impact of pauper settlement 1691–1834’, Past & Present, 73 (1976), pp. 42–74.

  100. 100.

    T. Sokoll (ed.), Essex pauper letters, 1731–1837 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), letters 6, 114, 189, 211, 217, 220.

  101. 101.

    B. Capp, When gossips meet: women, family, and neighbourhood in early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 147.

  102. 102.

    Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge’, p. 358.

  103. 103.

    SLSL 844 St. Mary Newington settlement and bastardy examinations, transcript, 30/5/1783.

  104. 104.

    Ibid., 25/2/1784.

  105. 105.

    Eccles, Vagrancy, pp. 14, 88, 102.

  106. 106.

    Ibid., pp. 88–9.

  107. 107.

    Ibid., p. 11, 88.

  108. 108.

    Ibid., pp. 88–90.

  109. 109.

    Ibid., pp. 88–90. On the changing law on whipping pregnant and lying-in women see Eccles, Vagrancy, pp. 8, 11, 14.

  110. 110.

    Eccles, Vagrancy, pp. 18, 115.

  111. 111.

    N. Landau, ‘The laws of settlement and the surveillance of immigration in eighteenth-century Kent’, Continuity and Change 3:3 (1988), pp. 391–420, at p. 400; Levene, ‘Poor families’, p. 237; Charlesworth, Welfare’s forgotten past, p. 58. Levene points out that unmarried mothers were perceived to be actually chargeable both before and after amendments to the law in 1795 due to their pregnancies: Levene, ‘Poor families’, p. 249.

  112. 112.

    K.D.M. Snell, ‘Pauper settlement and the right to poor relief in England and Wales’, Continuity and Change, 6:3 (1991), pp. 375–415, p. 384.

  113. 113.

    S. Williams, ‘“I was Forced to Leave my Place to Hide my Shame”: the living arrangements of unmarried mothers in London in the early nineteenth century’, in J. McEwan and P. Sharpe (eds.), Accommodating Poverty: the housing and living arrangements of the English poor, c. 1600–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 191–218, at p. 198.

  114. 114.

    Levene, ‘Poor families’, p. 248.

  115. 115.

    Ibid., p. 248, fn 43 p. 261.

  116. 116.

    Sokoll, Essex pauper letters, letters 6, 114, 189, 211, 217, 220.

  117. 117.

    (1834) ‘An Act for the Amendment and better Administration of the Laws relating to the Poor in England and Wales’, P.P. 4 & 5 George IV, c.76 cited in Nutt, ‘Paternal financial responsibility’, p. 340.

  118. 118.

    U.R.Q. Henriques, ‘Bastardy and the new poor law’, Past & present, 37 (1967), pp. 103–29, at pp. 112–14.

  119. 119.

    Ibid., pp. 108, 114.

  120. 120.

    D.R. Green, ‘Medical relief and the new poor law in London’, in O.P. Grell, A. Cunningham and R. Jütte (eds), Health care and poor relief in eighteenth and nineteenth-century northern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 220–45, at pp. 228–9; Henriques, ‘Bastardy and the new poor law’; L. Forman Cody, ‘The politics of illegitimacy in an age of reform: women, reproduction, and political economy in England’s new poor law of 1834’, Journal of Women’s History, 11:4 (2000), pp. 131–56; Nutt, ‘Paradox and problems’, pp. 104–6; Nutt, ‘Paternal financial responsibility’, pp. 339–40; J.A. Sheetz-Nguyen, Victorian women, unwed mothers and the London Foundling Hospital (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 15–35 (in which the Bill’s passage through the House of Commons and the House of Lords are also discussed); G. Frost, ‘“Your mother has never forgotten you”: illegitimacy, motherhood, and the London Foundling Hospital, 1860–1930, Annales de Démographie Historique, 1 (2014), pp. 45–72; E. Sandy, ‘Lone motherhood in late-Victorian and Edwardian Poplar’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011), pp. 214, 229. See also A. Hinde and F. Turnbull, ‘The populations of two Hampshire workhouses, 1851–1861, Local Population Studies, 61 (1998), pp. 38–53; N. Goose, ‘Workhouse populations in the mid-nineteenth century: the case of Hertfordshire’, Local Population Studies, 62 (1999), pp. 52–69, at p. 38; A. Hinde (ed.), special issue on the new poor law, Local Population Studies, 99 (2017).

  121. 121.

    M.A. Crowther, The workhouse system, 1834–1929: the history of an English social institution (London: Methuen, 1983), fig. 1, p. 60; Snell, Parish and belonging, pp. 219–20.

  122. 122.

    Crowther, Workhouse system, pp. 40–2. And see M. Levine-Clark, ‘Engendering relief: women, ablebodiedness, and the new poor law in early Victorian England’, Journal of Women’s History, 11:4 (2000), pp. 107–130.

  123. 123.

    Thane, ‘Women and the poor law’, pp. 48–49; Levine-Clark, ‘Engendering relief’.

  124. 124.

    Henriques, ‘Bastardy and the new poor law’, p. 119; Nutt, ‘Paternal financial responsibility’, pp. 341–3; Sheetz-Nguyen, Victorian women, pp. 37–8; W. Acton, ‘Observations on illegitimacy in the London parishes on St. Marylebone, St. Pancras, and St. George’s, Southwark, during the year 1857; deduced from the returns of the Registrar-General’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London (1859), pp. 491–505, at pp. 496–7.

  125. 125.

    Henriques, ‘Bastardy and the new poor law’, p. 120; Sheetz-Nguyen, Victorian Women, pp. 38–41.

  126. 126.

    J. Boulton, ‘London 1540–1700’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), II 1540–1840, pp. 315–46, at pp. 315–16; L. Schwarz, ‘London 1700–1840’, in Clark, Cambridge Urban history, II, pp. 641–672, at p. 643.

  127. 127.

    J. Hanway, An earnest appeal for mercy to the children of the poor (London, 1766), p. 1.

  128. 128.

    Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution, p. 11; P. Earle, A city full of people: men and women of London 1650–1750 (London: Methuen, 1994), p. 44; T. Reinke-Williams, Women, work and sociability in early modern London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 6.

  129. 129.

    Schwarz, ‘London 1700–1840’, p. 647.

  130. 130.

    E.A Wrigley, ‘A simple model of London’s importance in changing English society and economy, 1650–1750’, Past & Present, 37 (1967), pp. 44–70; Wilson, ‘Illegitimacy’, p. 103.

  131. 131.

    Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution, p. 11.

  132. 132.

    Dabhoiwala, ‘Summary justice’, p. 796.

  133. 133.

    Schwarz, ‘London 1700–1840’, pp. 645–7.

  134. 134.

    R. Finlay and B. Shearer, ‘Population growth and suburban expansion’, in A.L. Beier and Roger Finlay (eds), London 1500–1700: the making of the metropolis (London: Longman, 1986), pp. 37–59, Table 1, p. 39; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, p. 10; L. Schwarz, London in the age of industrialisation: entrepreneurs, labour force, and living conditions, 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Table 126, p. 126; Schwarz, ‘London 1700–1840’, p. 644, Table 19.1 p. 650; R. Dennis, ‘Modern London’, in M. Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, III 1840–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 95–132, at p. 98.

  135. 135.

    Boulton, ‘London 1540–1700’, pp. 203, 207–9, 318–19; Schwarz, ‘London 1700–1840’, pp. 649–51.

  136. 136.

    Beier and Finlay, Making of the Metropolis; P. Earle, ‘The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review, 42:3 (1989), pp. 328–53; P. Wallis and C. Webb, ‘Leaving home and entering service: the age of apprenticeship in early modern London’, Continuity and Change, 25:3 (2010), pp. 377–404; T. Meldrum, Domestic service and gender, 1660–1750: life and work in the London household (Harlow: Longman, 2000), ch. 2; Evans, Unfortunate objects, p. 18; Hubbard, City women; P. Humfrey (ed.), The experience of domestic service for women in early modern London (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 12–18.

  137. 137.

    Wrigley, ‘London’s importance’, p. 50.

  138. 138.

    Hitchcock and Black, ‘Introduction’, pp. xvii–xviii; Trumbach, Sex and the gender revolution, pp. 242–4 and Table 8.4; J. Black, ‘Illegitimacy and the urban poor in London, 1740–1830’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1999), pp. 122–5.

  139. 139.

    D.A. Kent, ‘Ubiquitous but invisible: female domestic servants in mid-eighteenth century London’, History Workshop, 28 (1989), pp. 111–128, at pp. 120–21; Hitchcock and Black, ‘Introduction’, pp. xvii–xviii; Humfrey, Domestic service, p. 3. See also P. Griffiths, Youth and authority formative experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 191; L. Pollock, ‘Little commonwealths I: the household and family’, in K. Wrightson (ed.), A social history of England, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 60–83, at p. 61.

  140. 140.

    J. Black, ‘Illegitimacy’, Table 3.5, p. 92; and see Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge’, pp. 357–8.

  141. 141.

    S. Williams, ‘“They lived together as Man and Wife”: plebeian cohabitation, illegitimacy, and broken relationships in London, 1700–1840’, in R. Probert (ed.), Changing Relationships? Cohabitation and births outside marriage, 1600–2012 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 65–79, at p. 79. For outside London, see Newman, ‘Bastardy recordings’, p. 151. However, also see Higginbotham who found that 35% of unmarried mothers who entered Lambeth workhouse, in the later period 1875–1877, had cohabited: A.R. Higginbotham, ‘The unmarried mother and her child in Victorian London, 1834–1914’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Indiana, 1985), Table 2.2 p. 51.

  142. 142.

    The poor law in London is generally under-researched. See Green, Pauper capital.

  143. 143.

    Gowing, ‘Giving birth at the magistrate’s gate’, pp. 137–40.

  144. 144.

    J. Innes, ‘Managing the metropolis: London’s social problems and their control, c.1660–1830’, in P. Clark and R. Gillespie (eds), Two capitals: London and Dublin 1500–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 53–79, at p. 55.

  145. 145.

    P. Griffiths, Lost Londons: change, crime, and control in the capital city, 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 57–9; Gowing, ‘Giving birth at the magistrate’s gate’, pp. 140–41, 146; J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and society: a London suburb in the seventeenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 272–3; E. Fox and M. Ingram, ‘Bridewell, bawdy courts and bastardy in early seventeenth-century London’, in R. Probert (ed.), Cohabitation and non-marital births in England and Wales, 1600–2012 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 10–32, at pp. 17–18.

  146. 146.

    Gowing, ‘Magistrate’s gate’, p. 141.

  147. 147.

    On seventeenth-century foundlings in London see Griffin, Lost Londons, and Gowing, ‘Giving birth at the magistrates’ gate’; on the eighteenth century see Levene, Childhood of the poor.

  148. 148.

    Gowing, ‘Giving birth at the magistrates’ gate’, pp. 140–1; Griffiths, Lost Londons.

  149. 149.

    Gowing, ‘Ordering the body’; Gowing, ‘Giving birth at the magistrates’ gate’; Hubbard, City women; Griffin, Lost Londons; King, ‘Punishment’, pp. 138–40; Ingram, Church courts; R.B. Outhwaite, The rise and fall of the English ecclesiastical courts, 1500–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, online ed., 2007); Dabhoiwala, Origins of sex.

  150. 150.

    Capp, When gossips meet, ch. 4; Black, ‘Illegitimacy and the urban poor’, Tables 3.7 and 3.8, pp. 106–07; Evans, Unfortunate objects, p. 159; Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge’, p. 358; Schwarz, ‘London’, pp. 649; Griffiths, Youth and authority, pp. 271–4; Hitchcock and Black, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii.

  151. 151.

    Gowing, ‘Ordering the body’, pp. 45–6; Gowing, Common bodies, pp. 13, 15, 25, 53, 54, 58, 63, 90–101, 204, 205; G. Walker, ‘Rereading rape and sexual violence in early modern England’, Gender and History, 10:1 (1998), pp. 1–25, at pp. 12–13; T. Mendrum, Domestic service and gender, 1660–1750: life and work in the London household (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 93–4, 100–110, 103–4, 107–8, 116, 124, 126, 208; Hubbard, City women, pp. 86–8, 99–102; Black, ‘Illegitimacy’, pp. 114, 114, 116–17; Evans, Unfortunate objects, p. 117, 161; Nutt, Bastardy, pp. 180–2, 202–3.

  152. 152.

    Gowing, ‘Ordering the body’ p. 46.

  153. 153.

    M. Jackson, New-born child murder: women, illegitimacy and the courts in eighteenth-century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 49.

  154. 154.

    Gowing, Common bodies, pp. 156–7; Gowing, ‘Giving birth at the magistrate’s gate’, pp. 141–2; King, ‘Punishment for bastardy’, p. 138; Reinke-Williams, Women, work and sociability, p. 100; S. Hindle, ‘A sense of place? Becoming and belonging in the rural parish, 1550–1650’, in A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds), Communities in early modern England: networks, place, rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 96, 101.

  155. 155.

    Hubbard, City women, p. 94.

  156. 156.

    Eccles, Vagrancy, p. 211.

  157. 157.

    Gowing, ‘Ordering the body’; Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 57–9; Eccles, Vagrancy, pp. 87–103.

  158. 158.

    Gowing, Common bodies, pp. 120, 151, 156–9; Gowing, ‘Giving birth at the magistrate’s gate’, pp. 141–2; Gowing, ‘Ordering the body’, p. 44; Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 55–6; Eccles, Vagrancy, pp. 87–103.

  159. 159.

    Gowing, Common bodies, pp. 156–7; Gowing, ‘Giving birth at the magistrate’s gate’, p. 141; Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 58–60; Fox and Ingram, ‘Bridewell, bawdy courts and bastardy’, pp. 17–18.

  160. 160.

    Gowing, ‘Ordering the body’, pp. 46–51.

  161. 161.

    Griffiths, Lost Londons, p. 269.

  162. 162.

    Gowing, ‘Ordering the body’, p. 53.

  163. 163.

    Ibid.

  164. 164.

    Kilday, Infanticide, p. 26 (Kilday’s italics).

  165. 165.

    Gowing, ‘Ordering the body’, pp. 46–51; Gowing, ‘Secret births’, pp. 96; Kilday, Infanticide, p. 57.

  166. 166.

    Kilday, Infanticide, pp. 17–19, 28–31, 116–17; Clayton, ‘Old Bailey trials’, p. 339.

  167. 167.

    L. Rose, The massacre of the innocent: infanticide in Britain 1800–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); A.R. Higginbotham, ‘“Sin of the age”: infanticide and illegitimacy in Victorian London’, in K.O. Garrigan (ed.), Victorian scandals (Athens Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1992), pp. 257–88; A.R. Higginbotham, ‘Infanticide and illegitimacy in Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, 32 (1989), pp. 319–39; M.L. Arnot, ‘Infant death, child care and the state: the baby-farming scandal and the first infant life protection legislation of 1872’, Continuity and Change, 9:2 (1994), pp. 271–311.

  168. 168.

    S. Mendelson and P. Crawford, Women in early modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 148.

  169. 169.

    Crawford, ‘Construction and experience of maternity’.

  170. 170.

    Ibid., p. 12; Levene, Childhood.

  171. 171.

    J. Bailey, ‘“Think wot a mother must feel”: parenting in English pauper letters, c. 1760–1834’, Family and Community History, 13:1 (2010), pp. 5–19; Evans, Unfortunate objects; J. Humphries, Childhood and child labour and the British industrial revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  172. 172.

    Evans, Unfortunate objects; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives.

  173. 173.

    Evans, Unfortunate objects.

  174. 174.

    L. Schwarz, review of Evans, Unfortunate objects, Economic History Review, LIX, 4 (2006), pp. 847–9.

  175. 175.

    Evans, Unfortunate objects. See also A. Levene, ‘Institutional Responses: The London Foundling Hospital’, in A. Levene (ed.), Narratives of the poor in eighteenth-century Britain, III (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006).

  176. 176.

    Hitchcock, ‘Unlawfully begotten’, pp. 75–6; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives.

  177. 177.

    P. Slack, ‘Hospitals, workhouses and the relief of the poor in early modern London’, in O.P. Grell and A. Cunningham (eds), Health care and poor relief in Protestant Europe, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 234–51, at p. 237.

  178. 178.

    R. McClure, Coram’s Children: the London Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); Evans, Unfortunate objects; Levene, ‘Institutional Responses: The London Foundling Hospital’. But on settlement and the General Lying-in Hospital, see Forman Cody, Birthing the nation, pp. 283–4.

  179. 179.

    Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives, pp. 145–7; Hitchcock, ‘Unlawfully begotten’, pp. 70, 73–6.

  180. 180.

    See Williams, ‘Maintenance of bastard children’.

  181. 181.

    J. Innes, ‘The “mixed economy of welfare” in early modern England: assessments of the options from Hale to Malthus (c. 1683–1803)’, in M. Daunton (ed.), Charity, self-interest and welfare in the English past (London: UCL Press, 1996), pp. 139–80; S. King and A. Tomkins (eds), The poor in England 1700–1850: an economy of makeshifts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

  182. 182.

    F. Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality and desire among working-class men and women in nineteenth-century London, translated by J. Howe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992); Sheetz- Nguyen, Victorian women; J. Gillis, ‘Servants, sexual relations and the risks of illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900’, in J.L. Newton, M.P. Ryan and J.R. Walkowitz (eds), Sex and class in women’s history (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 114–45, at pp. 117–19. And see G. Frost, Promises broken: courtship, class, and gender in Victorian England (London: University Press of Virginia, 1995), ch II; G. Frost, Living in sin: cohabiting as husband and wife in nineteenth-century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), ch. 6.

  183. 183.

    A.R. Higginbotham, ‘Respectable sinners: Salvation Army rescue work with unmarried mothers, 1884–1914’, in G. Malmgreen (ed.), Religion in the lives of English women, 1760–1930 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 216–33; P. Bartley, Prostitution: prevention and reform in England, 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000), ch. 4.

  184. 184.

    Thane, ‘Women and the poor law’. See also L.H. Lees, The solidarity of strangers: the English poor laws and the people, 1700–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  185. 185.

    A.R. Higginbotham, ‘The unmarried mother and her child in Victorian London’, (unpublished PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1985), pp. x–xii, 207–10; J. Paxman, The Victorians: Britain through the paintings of the age (London: BBC Books, 2010), ch. 3.

  186. 186.

    Hitchcock, ‘Unlawfully begotten’.

  187. 187.

    J. Innes, ‘Managing the metropolis: London’s social problems and their control, c.1660–1830’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 107 (2001), pp. 53–79, at p. 55.

  188. 188.

    Ibid., p. 62; Green, Pauper capital; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives; Levene, childhood of the poor, pp. 15–16; A. Tanner, ‘The casual poor and the city of London poor law union, 1837–1869’, The Historical Journal, 42 (1999), pp. 183–206.

  189. 189.

    Green, Pauper, pp. 34–6.

  190. 190.

    Ibid., pp. xiv, 16–20, 34–6; and see Innes, ‘Managing the metropolis’.

  191. 191.

    Green, Pauper capital, p. 19.

  192. 192.

    J. Langton, ‘Urban growth and economic change: from the late seventeenth century to 1841’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban history of Britain, II 1540–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 453–90, Table 14.4, pp. 473–4.

  193. 193.

    M.C. Finn, ‘Law’s empire: English legal cultures at home and abroad’, Historical Journal, 48 (2005), pp. 295–303, at pp. 295, 297; S. Hindle, On the parish The micro-politics of poor relief in rural England c. 1550–1750 (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2004), pp. 195–203, 306–11, 405–32; J. Healey, ‘The development of poor relief in Lancashire, c. 1598–1680’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), pp. 551–72; P. King, ‘The summary courts and social relations in eighteenth-century England’, Past & Present, 183 (2004), pp. 125–72; P. King, ‘The rights of the poor and the role of the law: the impact of pauper appeals to the summary courts 1750–1834’, in Jones and King, Obligation, pp. 235–262; Nutt, ‘Illegitimacy and the poor law’, chs. 4–6; Nutt, ‘Bastardy’, pp. 128–9; D. Eastwood, Governing rural England: tradition and transformation in local government, 1780–1840 (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1994), chs. 3–4; R.B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and punishment: petty crime and the law in London and rural Middlesex, c. 1660–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 23–5, 35–64, 81–94, 178–87, 225–37; Dabhoiwala, ‘Summary justice’; D.D. Gray, Crime, prosecution and social relations: the summary courts of the city of London in the late eighteenth century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), ch. 2; J.M. Beattie, Crime and the courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 59–67, 283–8. See also N. Landau, The justices of the peace, 1679–1760 (London: University of California Press, 1984).

  194. 194.

    Green, Pauper capital, p. xiv, 170–6; Gray, Crime, ch. 2; Dabhoiwala, ‘Summary justice’; Abridgement of Abstract of Answers and Returns Relative to Expense and Maintenance of the Poor in England and Wales (P.P. 1818, XIX), app. a, p. 88a.

  195. 195.

    Gray, Crime, tab. 6.1, p. 117. Poor law offences accounted for 1.2% of a sample of committals to the Middlesex and Westminster houses of correction, 1670–1721: Shoemaker, Prosecution and punishment, tab. 7.1, p. 169.

  196. 196.

    Beattie, Crime, pp. 65–7.

  197. 197.

    1851 Census of Britain, Populations Tables 2, http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk, last accessed 3 February 2016.

  198. 198.

    Hitchcock and Black, ‘Introduction’, p. xv. See also C. Nielsen ‘Disability, fraud and medical experience at the Royal Hospital of Chelsea in the long eighteenth century’, in K. Linch and M. McCormack (eds), Britain’s soldiers: rethinking war and society, 1715–1815 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), pp. 183–201.

  199. 199.

    J. Boulton and J. Black, ‘Paupers and their experience of a London workhouse: St. Martin in the Fields, 1725–1824’, in J. Hamlett, L. Hoskins, and R. Preston (eds.), Residential institutions in Britain, 1725–1970: inmates and environments (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), pp. 79–92, at p. 80; 1851 Census of Britain, Populations Tables 2, http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk, last accessed 3 February 2016.

  200. 200.

    L. MacKay, ‘Culture of poverty? The St. Martin in the Fields’ workhouse, 1817’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 26:2 (1995), pp. 209–231, at pp. 212–13.

  201. 201.

    Data collected by Jacob Field from the recognizances and indictments in Southwark (LMA), Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.

  202. 202.

    R. Porter, London: a social history (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 269; J. White, A great and monstrous thing: London in the eighteenth century (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), pp. 1–2, 32, 77. On seventeenth-century Southwark see Boulton, Neighbourhood and society.

  203. 203.

    Population totals 1801–1831 are given in (1834) ‘Appendix to the First Report from the Commissioners on the Poor Laws, Answers to Town Queries’ (P.P. 1834 (44)), XXXV.

  204. 204.

    White, London, p. 6.

  205. 205.

    Ibid., pp. 212–13.

  206. 206.

    Green, Pauper capital, pp. 56–7.

  207. 207.

    Data collected by Jacob Field from the recognizances and indictments, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.

  208. 208.

    Meldrum, Domestic service, table 6.1, p. 188; Kent, ‘Ubiquitous but invisible’, table 3, p. 188; J.F. Field ‘Domestic service, gender, and wages in rural England, c.1700–1860’, Economic History Review, 66:1 (2013), pp. 249–72, table 1, p. 254.

  209. 209.

    Seleski, ‘Women of the labouring poor’.

  210. 210.

    Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge’, p. 369; Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives, Figure 5.1, p. 195, p. 268.

  211. 211.

    Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives, pp. 195, 268.

  212. 212.

    Tadmor, ‘The settlement of the poor’, p. 46, and see S. Hindle, The state and social change in early modern England, 1560–1640 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Hindle, On the Parish?; Snell, Parish and belonging.

  213. 213.

    William Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress (1733), plate 4.

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Williams, S. (2018). Introduction: Illegitimacy in London. In: Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis, 1700–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73320-3_1

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