6 - Case Study: A Seventeenth-Century Welfare Republic – the Parish of Leamington Hastings and its Almshouse

Summary

Almshouses require the attention of historians working at the local level if we are ever fully to understand their place in the history of the mixed economy of welfare.

As outlined in the Introduction, there have been few attempts to place almshouses within the context of the overall range of accommodation and assistance provided for poor people in early modern England. This chapter will present a detailed study of one seventeenth-century almshouse in rural Warwickshire alongside an examination of the other welfare resources available in that parish, and will analyse the way these were utilised together for the benefit of the whole community. Leamington Hastings was chosen for this case study for two main reasons. First of all, relatively unusually for a parish of its size, it had an endowed almshouse for eight people, founded in 1607, with records and accounts surviving from 1686. Secondly, a range of other contemporary records have survived for the parish, including the overseers’ accounts from 1655, the records of the Poors Plot charity from 1671, and the parish registers from 1559. Together with wills, hearth tax returns, quarter sessions orders and some manorial and settlement documents, this gave the potential to examine the almshouse alongside a number of other strands of the welfare economy in operation in this particular parish.

John Broad has challenged historians to adopt ‘a more holistic approach’ in our attempts to understand the operation of parish relief in the time of the Old Poor Law. He describes, for instance, the complementary nature of charitable funds and parish relief, which together provided a ‘raft of security’ for the poor, although how this operated in practice might differ from parish to parish according to local circumstances, resources and attitudes. Marjorie McIntosh, tracing the development of parish responsibilities for the poor in the sixteenth century, similarly points to the ‘complementarity’ and ‘lack of rigid definition’ in the networks of care which supported needy people, networks that were comprised of family, friends and neighbours as well as local institutions and officials.The seventeenth century, however, saw the imposition and spread of formal relief beyond towns like Hadleigh, to include the whole country in a statutory system based on the parish and overseen by local justices of the peace.