Introduction

Summary

Almshouse: a house founded by charity, offering accommodation for poor people.

There is a very considerable body of research into the nature and scale of poverty in early modern society, and the responses to need which this prompted.More recently, historians have been interested in the experience of poverty, in the lives of the poor themselves; in particular, how poor people managed, to use Olwen Hufton's evocative phrase, in an ‘economy of makeshifts’, and how they negotiated their way through local welfare and charity systems. Nonetheless, poor people's housing seems to have remained a ‘known unknown’ until very recently.Little evidence survives to indicate the material lives of poor people in general, and their living conditions and accommodation in particular. Few examples of poor people's housing have survived, and there are scarcely any contemporary descriptions or pictorial representations before the late eighteenth century. Until then, moreover, even commentators on the state of the poor rarely mentioned their houses. Yet housing was a basic need and contemporary settlement disputes and habitation orders, together with the many prohibitions on the construction and subdivision of accommodation in a period of rising population, suggest that housing for the poor was, in fact, a major and contested issue in early modern England.

The invisibility of poor people's housing, in the historical literature as much as in the landscape, is at odds with its importance. Apart from its significance in the material culture of the poor, housing is much more than a matter of the roof over one's head. It is a fixed place, locating the occupants in geographical and social space; providing a stake in the local community, or excluding the occupants on the margins; giving individuals and families a stage on which to play the role of householder, parent, or dependant; and confirming the occupants’ status, or lack of it, within the local hierarchy. Providing housing for the poor is therefore not just about physical shelter, but is freighted with meaning. The most well-known and documented examples of houses for the poor in the early modern period are almshouses, yet they are not often considered integral to discussions of poor relief or poor people's housing. There are thus two main strands to the relevant historiography: that of poor relief, in which almshouses do not generally figure prominently; and that of almshouses, in which the historical context is sometimes lacking or only superficially addressed.