Abstract
The same peculiar combination of fear and confidence which fostered the insistence on exemplary punishment also brought forth the Elizabethan Poor Laws. Serious structural problems had emerged in the English economy by 1580 and their perceived providential origin provoked a flood of governmental and ecclesiastical exhortations to charity by the rich and repentance among the poor.2 Because the debate over the causes of poverty turned on perceptions of human failings, the need for a discriminatory classification of the poor was all the greater. The age-old distinction between the deserving and the undeserving was therefore reinforced by sixteenth-century thinkers to whom it was axiomatic that the impotent and physically afflicted should be maintained. Their attitude to sturdy beggars was, however, complicated by an emerging awareness of distinctions among the idle, especially when the urban censuses of the 1570s and 1580 produced evidence of the labouring poor, those who were willing but unable to find work. By the late sixteenth century, therefore, a tripartite classification of the poor – the impotent, the thriftless, the labouring – had become orthodox. Remedies for poverty flowed directly from this understanding: an act of 1572 both established compulsory poor rates for the relief of the impotent, and stipulated severe punishments including whipping, boring in the ear and (in the case of recidivists) death for vagrants.
I know very well that the world…commonly is apt to think that the care of the commonwealth is but a pretext in matters of state…
Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon to James I, 16201
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Notes
Slack, Poverty & Policy, p. 145. For its legislative origins in the 1530s, see G.R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Reform of the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1973);
and C.S.L. Davies, ‘The Cromwellian Decade: Authority and Consent’, TRHS 6th ser. 7 (1997), 177–96.
Cf. Alan Hunt, The Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 291.
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Slack, ‘Dearth & Social Policy’, 17; E. Lipson, The Economic History of England (2nd edn, 3 vols, 1934), III, 448–9.
A. Hassell Smith and Gillian M. Baker (ed.), The Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Volume III: 1586–1595 (Norfolk Record Society 53, 1987–8), pp. 294–303;
Todd Gray (ed.), Harvest Failure in Cornwall and Devon: The Book of Orders and the Corn Surveys of 1623 and 1630–31 (Sources of Cornish History 1, Plymouth, 1992); Walter and Wrightson, ‘Dearth & the Social Order’, 32–4.
Keith Wrightson, ‘Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England, 1590–1660’, in Eileen and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton, 1981), pp. 5–11;
Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (1983), pp. 166–8.
D.H. Willson (ed.), The Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, 1606–07 (Minneapolis, 1931), pp. 35, 79; Quintrell, ‘Government in Perspective’, 36 n.5.
C. Stella Davies (ed.), A History of Macclesfield (Manchester, 1961), pp. 51–2;
John Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century (1989), p. 5; CRO QJB 1/5, fos. 426v, 461v, 480v; QJF 69/2/65; 70/1/29.
PRO SP 16/194/9, 11, 19; Clark, English Provincial Society, pp. 240–1; Paul Slack, ‘Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597–1666’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (1972), p. 177.
Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 338; Hindle, ‘The State & Local Society’, pp. 424–5.
Lindsay Boynton, ‘The Tudor Provost-Marshal’, EHR 77 (1962), 437–55; Williams, The Tudor Regime, pp. 202–3, 212–13; Beier, Masterless Men, p. 153; Manning, Village Revolts, p.182; CRO DDX 358/1, fos. 68–68v, 70v, 72–72v.
Smith, County & Court, pp. 131–3; Fletcher, Sussex, p. 167; Stephen K. Roberts, ‘Alehouses, Brewing and Government under the Early Stuarts’, Southern History 2 (1980), 57; Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 152–3; Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, pp. 209–10; Manning, Village Revolts, pp. 178–85;
Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn., 1992), pp. 481–2, 542; Cogswell, Home Divisions, pp. 43, 124, 137, 215.
Joanna Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555–1800’, in Francis Snyder and Douglas Hay (eds), Labour, Law and Crime (1987), pp. 42–3; Giddens, The Nation-State & Violence, pp. 100–1.
Hunt, The Puritan Moment, p. 79; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Orgins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 221.
Archer, The Pursuit of Stability, p. 222; Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor’, p. 74. Cf. Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe, 1460–1600 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 1–19.
Holt KB 680, cited in D.E.C. Yale (ed.), Lord Nottingham’s Chancery Cases, Volume I (Selden Society 73, 1954), p. xlvi.
Wrightson, English Society, pp. 181–2; Wales, ‘Poverty, Poor Relief & the Life-Cycle’; W. Newman-Brown, ‘The Receipt of Poor Relief and Family Situation: Aldenham, Hertfordshire 1630–90’, in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship & Life-Cycle, pp. 405–22; Peter Rushton, ‘The Poor Law, the Parish and the Community in North-East England, 1600–1800’, NH 25 (1989), 135–52; Levine and Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society, pp. 351–5; Hindle, ‘Exclusion Crises’;
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; and Hindle, ‘Power, Poor Relief & Social Relations’.
John Walter and Roger Schofield, ‘Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality in Early Modern Society’, in Walter and Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease & the Social Order, p. 36; Andrew B. Appleby, ‘Grain Prices and Subsistence Crises in England and France, 1590–1740’, Journal of Economic History 39 (1979), 865–87;
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Peter Solar, ‘Poor Relief and English Economic Development before the Industrial Revolution’, EcHR 2nd ser. 48 (1995), 7–12;
Keith Snell, ‘Pauper Settlement and the Right to Poor Relief in England and Wales’, C&C 6 (1991), 400–1.
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© 2002 Steve Hindle
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Hindle, S. (2002). The Enforcement of Social Policy. In: The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288461_6
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