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Introduction: Impressions of a Century of Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2017

Paul A. Fideler
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Extract

The three fine essays that follow and the recent turn of the century provide the occasion for an assessment of the state of the early modern social welfare history endeavor. What do we know now about the poor and poverty relief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the great policy historians of the early twentieth century did not know? Why? What methodological assumptions and foci have emerged over the past hundred years, and how have they deepened our understanding of social welfare? What are the current points of research departure? With such a potentially vast historical literature to consider, I must dismiss at the outset any claim to complete thoroughness. I have, rather, organized the essay around eight clusters of work that have shaped the historiographical corpus.

Type
Symposium: The Study of the Early Modern Poor and Poverty Relief
Information
Albion , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , Fall 2000 , pp. 381 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 2000

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Footnotes

*

The editor is grateful to Paul Fideler for his assistance in arranging this symposium.

References

1 Leonard, E. M., The Early History of English Poor Relief (New York, 1965 [1900])Google Scholar; Tawney, R. H., The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1967 [1912]), and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Gloucester, MA, 1954 [1926])Google Scholar; Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government: English Poor Law History: Part I. The Old Poor Law (London, 1927).Google Scholar See also these earlier histories: Burn, Richard, The History of the Poor Laws: With Observations (London, 1764)Google Scholar; Ruggles, Thomas, The History of the Poor, Their Rights, Duties, and the Laws Respecting Them, 2 vols. (London, 1793-94), 2d ed. in 1 vol. (London, 1797)Google Scholar; SirEden, Frederic, The State of the Poor: Or, An History of the Labouring Classes in England, 3 vols. (London, 1797), esp. two extended essays in vol. 1: “Of the Poor from the Conquest to the Present” and “Of National Establishments for the Maintenance of the Poor”Google Scholar; and SirNicholls, George, A History of the English Poor Law, 2 vols. (London, 1854), rev. ed. in 3 vols. (London, 1898-1900)Google Scholar. Harris, Jose has noted that in the first half of the twentieth century proponents of “idealist” social science sought, among other things, to “reintegrate the fragmented consciousness of modern man” and to insure that the state should have the central role in welfare provision. Adding to the intensity that Tawney and the Webbs brought to this agenda was their Fabian socialism and commitment to labor organization (“Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870-1940,” Past and Present 135 [May 1992]: 127, 132, 133, 136-37, 140–41)Google Scholar.

2 Parish churchwardens assisted by four overseers of the poor (substantial householders, the middling sort) were to raise a parish fund “by taxing inhabitants and occupiers of land in the parish” and in kind and apply this fund to: purchase make-work materials for the able-bodied poor (sometimes utilized in Houses of Correction); relieve at home or outdoors the “lame, impotent, old, blind,” and those otherwise unable to support themselves (and whose grandparents, parents or children were unable to maintain them); and put poor children to work or into apprenticeships. “Wandering and begging” were prohibited, unless begging was for food and approved by the overseers (The Statutes of the Realm, 12 vols. [London, 1963 (1810-28)], 4: 896–98)Google Scholar.

3 For their praise of Burleigh, Charles I, Laud, and the Council for enforcing the poor law, see: Tawney, , Religion, pp. 170–75; and Webb, English Local Government, pp. 67, 70, 77, 398Google Scholar. Leonard noted the irony that “these infringers of individual liberties were also…the protectors of the poor” in their vigorous enforcement of the “socialistic schemes” of the old poor law, which provided “more poor relief in England than we ever had before or since (English Poor Relief, pp. 163–64, 171, 185, 165-06, 277)Google Scholar. For the historians’ harsh estimates of post-Restoration poor relief, which nevertheless made the transition to industrialization relatively peaceful, see: ibid., pp. 293-94, 302, 304; Tawney, , Religion, pp. 237, 262; and Webb, English Local Government, pp. 424, 404–05Google Scholar. For parish, laissez faire see Marshall, Dorothy, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1926), pp. 6–9.Google Scholar

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6 Webb, English Local Government, pp. 401, 150, 350, 406–07Google Scholar. “religion”, Tawney’s volume, which they admired, appeared in 1926 when much of the Webbs’s volume was already completed. In that same year, Sidney provided the Preface to Salter, F. R., ed., Some Early Tracts on Poor Relief (London, 1926)Google Scholar; he used the occasion to announce the arrival of the “fourth stage” in the history of provision for the poor—the “maintenance of a ‘National Minimum’ in the Standard of Life”—which had been hinted at by Vives, , Luther, , and Zwingli, , but “the time was not yet come” (pp. xi–xii)Google Scholar.

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10 Pound, John F., Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London, 1971), pp. 27-28, 36, 46-48, 58-75, 84–85Google Scholar; see also: Emmison, F. G., “Poor-relief,” and “The care of the poor in Elizabethan Essex,” Essex Review 52 (1953): 7–28Google Scholar.

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14 Beier, A. L., “Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England,” Past and Present 64 (August 1974): 3–29Google Scholar; and Slack, Paul, “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598-1664,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 27 (Aug. 1974): 360–78Google Scholar. See also: Beier, , Masterless men: the vagrancy problem in England 1560-1640 (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Clark, Peter, “The Migrant in Kentish Towns 1580-1640,” pp. 117–18Google Scholar; and Roberts, Peter, “Elizabethan Players and Minstrels and the Legislation of 1572 Against Retainers and Vagabonds,” in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, eds. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 1994), p. 33Google Scholar.

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24 An indispensable entry into Reformation historiography is Margo Todd, ed., Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

25 Mcintosh, Marjorie K., “Local Responses to the Poor in Late Medieval and Tudor England,” Continuity and Change 3, 2 (1988): 209–15, and A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500-1620 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar.

26 Tittler, Robert: “The Incorporation of Boroughs, 1540-1558,” History 62/204 (Feb. 1977): 24–42; “The Emergence of Urban Policy, 1536-1558,” in The Mid-Tudor Polity, c. 1540-1560, eds. Loach, Jennifer and Tittler (London, 1980), 74–93; “Reformation, Resources and Authority in English towns: An Overview,” in The Reformation in English Towns, 1500-1640, eds. Collinson, Patrick and Craig, John (New York, 1998), 190–201; and The Reformation and the Towns in England (Oxford, 1998). See also Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London and Basingstoke, 1988)Google Scholar.

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30 Underdown, David, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 40–41Google Scholar; for a general perspective on boundary and loyalty issues among hospitality, philanthropy, government-mandated parish relief, municipal initiatives, and customary responses to the poor, see Fideler, Paul A., “Societas, Civitas and Early Elizabethan Poverty Relief,” in State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honor of A. J. Slavin, ed. Charles Carlton (Stroud, 1998), pp. 59–70Google Scholar.

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34 Piety and Poverty, pp. 209-10, 212.

35 Wrightson, Keith, “The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England,” in The Experience of Authority, pp. 10-12, 13, 18-22, 35–37; and Poverty and Piety, “Postscript: Terling Revisited,” pp. 201–02Google Scholar.

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38 Hindle, Steve, “The Birthpangs of Welfare: poor relief and parish governance in seventeenth-century Warwickshire,” Dugdale Society Occasiopnal Papers, No. 40 (2000): 1–32Google Scholar. One can only look forward with anticipation to Hindle’s book, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1640 (London and New York, 2000). For a recent challenge to the conventional wisdom that responses to the Book of Orders were relatively few, see Langeluddecke, Henrik, ‘“Patchy and Spasmodic’ : The Response of Justices of the Peace to Charles I’s Book of Orders,” English Historical Review 113 (1998): 1231–48Google Scholar.

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45 Thomson, David, in his assessment of social welfare historiography since World War II, found that historians of the Welfare State tended to shorten and distort public provisions’s past into a story of “evolutionary progress.” This crude “modernization theory” leads to the “simple-minded nostalgia” that in pre-industrial and pre-modern society social welfare was exclusively a family and neighbourly matter, and ultimately to a limited ability to use the past in today’s challenging policy debates. He urged that more careful work be done on nineteenth-century social provision and that “examples from Tudor, Stuart or Hanoverian England might also be drawn into the debate as we contemplate, incredulously for many, the ‘post-Welfare State era’” (“Welfare and the Historians,” in The World We Have Gained, eds. Banfield, Lloyd, Smith, Richard M., and Wrightson, Keith (Oxford, 1986), pp. 356-58, 365–67Google Scholar.

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