1 - Charity Never Faileth: Defining Neighbourhood

Summary

This chapter discusses the widespread belief in early modern England that neighbourliness was dead and charity grown cold. It assesses the melancholy that was built on a nostalgic sense of lost social virtues. Yet, contradictorily, it shows that even as contemporaries lamented the end of neighbourhood, they simultaneously celebrated and asserted neighbourly values. The chapter therefore balances evidence for social atomization against ongoing investment by early modern people in Christian discourses of charity and good neighbourhood, which generated powerful senses of local reciprocities and continued social bonds that included gifts of cash, food and shelter to the poor; communal feasting and festivity; and Christian values of friendship.