THE 2006 PHILLIMORE LECTURE
GIVEN AT THE FRIENDS’ MEETING HOUSE, LONDON, 3 JUNE 2006
Technologies of identification under the Old Poor Law
STEVE HINDLE
Reproduced by kind permission of the author. This document contains no images at present (E Lorch Feb 2007)
The Elizabethan poor laws of 1598 and 1601, which remaining on the statute book virtually without amendment until 1834, encoded the ancient scriptural distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor.[1] They empowered the overseers and churchwardens of each parish to relieve the known neighbourhood needy in their own homes, and the constables to expel wandering strangers back to the communities in which they had last lived or worked.[2] Who constituted the ‘poor of the parish’ is far more troubling than might at first be expected, both for contemporaries and for historians. Criteria for belonging were ambiguous and shifting, not least because relatively few inhabitants lived out their lives in the parishes of their birth: high population turnover had long been a significant structural characteristic of the English local community. Was ‘settlement’ conferred by the experience, perhaps over several generations, of those rituals of inclusion—baptism, marriage, burial, or even communion—through which the highly-localised ‘sense of place’ was socially constructed? Or was it a matter of social and economic participation, a function of residence, employment or apprenticeship for a specified period of time; and if so, for how long? And how might longstanding inhabitants feel about their tax assessments and charitable donations relieving those they considered aliens, strangers or (to use a nineteenth-century word which appears to have originated in the Lake Counties) ‘off-comers’?[3]
These were awkward questions in the seventeenth century and they remain awkward today. Contemporary debates about immigration policy, and the role of putative entitlement to social security benefits in encouraging applications for asylum to the United Kingdom, turn on precisely the same issues: migrants represent both a reservoir of skilled and unskilled labour without which economic development might be undermined; and a potential drain on the resources of the welfare state.[4] Just as twenty-first century Britain is struggling to resolve the challenges of international migration in the context of a national welfare system, seventeenth-century parishes wrestled with the problem of population turnover in a culture which considered that charity not only began, but also actually ended, at home.[5]
The poor relief statute of 1598 (reiterated in this respect, as in so many others, in 1601) equated ‘deservingness’ with residence and settlement; and ‘undeservingness’ with mobility and vagrancy. This distinction is reflected in the archival residue of the legislation. Overseers’ accounts are replete with references to the relief of the impotent ‘poor of the parish’, ancient inhabitants of the local community who had lived respectable lives of labour until failing eyesight and arthritic fingers had exhausted their capacity to support themselves. Constables’ accounts, by contrast, include lists of gratuities paid to (and, less frequently, expenses for the public whipping of) the idle wandering poor in an effort to induce them to cross the parish boundary and trouble the ratepayers no more.[6] From this perspective, those who drafted the poor laws perhaps held the erroneous assumption that English local communities were self-contained, their obligations to long-settled residents being compromised only by the intermittent pressure of long-distance migration.[7] According to the popular stereotype, desperate hordes of shiftless vagrants tramped their way across the countryside in search of opportunities to gull the charitable and steal their goods.[8] As students of vagrancy have shown, however, the popular ‘terror of the tramp’ was a literary construction, created in the cheap print of the day.[9] The reality of geographical mobility in early modern England was altogether different, population turnover being far more convincingly characterised as ‘betterment migration’ encouraged by developing regional and national markets for labour and marriage, than as ‘subsistence migration’ generated by the intersecting crises of warfare, dearth and industrial depression. Still less was it the ‘deep dissimulation and detestable dealing’ depicted colourfully and alliteratively in the rogue literature.[10] It is now as clear to historians as it was to contemporaries that not all migrants—not even all poor migrants—were vagrant.[11]
In the context of this tension between on the one hand, a locally-based social security system based on long residence; and, on the other, regional (and increasingly national) fields of migration, Elizabethan legislators experimented with various technologies of identification to distinguish between the worthy settled poor and the unworthy unsettled idle. Between 1550 and 1750 four such technologies—granting licences to beggars; issuing passports to vagrants; collecting settlement certificates by parish officers; and insisting that even the deserving poor wear badges—were developed and applied.[12] This paper considers these in turn, analysing their purpose, format and use, and arguing that the civil disobedience and ‘frauds of the double life and the imaginary person’ anticipated by those opposed to compulsory identity cards today were prefigured in the administration of the poor laws in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[13] What follows is unlikely to make happy reading for any home secretary, for how are we to be persuaded that databases identify us to be ourselves alone, and nobody else?[14]
The relationship between the four technologies was complex and there was inevitably some overlap. Many settlement certificates were, after all, issued on the basis of examinations initiated because a migrant had been apprehended with a vagrant’s pass.[15] It is not difficult to imagine circumstances in which a pauper might be granted a settlement certificate and be forced subsequently to wear the parish badge. On the other hand, the licence, the certificate and the badge were aimed at those considered deserving, but the fourth (the passport) was intended only for the unworthy. Nor were all the technologies applied with equal intensity throughout the period: licences were largely, though not exclusively, granted before 1601 (when they were in principle discontinued by the poor relief statute of that year); and certificates were overwhelmingly drawn up in the period after 1662, and particularly after 1697, when the procedures associated with settlement were subject to parliamentary codification. Although there were some experiments in badging the poor before the 1690s, the practice seems to have been common only in the two or three decades after a statute of 1697. Only the issuing of passports to vagrants was carried out with any consistency over the whole period, although the vagrancy problem itself seems to have waned as demographic pressure eased in the second half of the seventeenth century.[16]
Three of the technologies were documentary in the sense that they produced texts (licences, passports and certificates) which provided verification of the identity of an individual, although how that identity was actually established in the first place remains debatable. Different sectional interests within the poor law system—magistrates, parish officers, the poor themselves—had ownership of the documents generated by these technologies. The very fact that so many documents survive suggests that they were designed to be archived—and searched—as a lasting record. The fourth technology, the application of the parish badge, produced an artefact (usually a patch of cloth sewn onto the garments of the poor) rather than a text, with the result that few have survived for posterity. Of the four practices, the badging of the poor is the most difficult to interpret. It was the only one that identified the poor person without inscribing his or her name and yet was the only one expected to be on continuous public display. Unlike licences, passports or certificates, badges were principally designed to shape not only the perceptions of those who scrutinised them but also the attitudes of the person who wore them. The concluding discussion attempts to tease out what licences, passports, certificates and badges meant to those whose identity was inscribed or represented upon them; and to suggest how those meanings might compare and contrast with the technologies of identification practised and proposed today.
1: The licence to beg
Begging licences were the first of the technologies of identification. Licensed begging was encouraged in various sixteenth-century statutes, especially those of 1552 and 1563, and survived under the great Elizabethan poor law of 1598, but was quietly dropped (so quietly that several contemporaries—including some of the leading jurists in the land—entirely failed to notice) from the consolidating statute of 1601.[17] Poor parishioners might be licensed to beg around all the parishes in the hundred or wapentake, a practice which prefigured the later development of the ‘rate-in-aid’ by which better-off parishes might contribute to the relief of communities overburdened with their own poor. Thus Richard Denyson of Roydon (Essex) was licensed in these terms in 1573 on the grounds that his home parish was ‘so replenished with poor people’.[18] However, the fact that most paupers were permitted to beg only in their home parish reflects the growing consensus that each parish should look after its own. The begging licence accordingly became popular with parish officers and ratepayers alike, as a way of regularising the relief of the deserving poor in any community without resorting to compulsory local assessments to finance a local welfare system. The circumstances of the granting of a licence are usually concealed from us, but just occasionally a letter of testimonial, like that composed in 1590 by the parson and four ‘chief inhabitants’ of Thundersley (Essex) on behalf of William Warner, ‘a very poor lame and impotent person no way able to get his living’, discloses the patronage network involved.[19]
By permitting poor individuals, and often even their children, to beg victuals from house to house, magistrates exploited and perpetuated longstanding Christian traditions of almsgiving and hospitality.[20] Those licensed were probably astute enough to beg at the kitchen doors of neighbours at mealtimes, to secure scraps not only from the groaning boards of the manor house and rectory, but also from the relatively humble tables of the middling sort. If extant archives are a reliable guide, licences were used very commonly in the 1590s.[21] Their familiarity perhaps explains why when, in the harsh winter of 1596, the clergy exhorted all householders to fast and give food to the poor (irrespective of whether they carried a licence or not), they seem to have been willing to do so.[22] Nevertheless, the harvest crisis of the 1590s exposed the weaknesses of the semi-voluntary system of which begging licences formed part, and in the 1598 poor relief statute they were marginalised in a welfare regime now predicated on compulsory assessment. Those who drafted that legislation evidently intended the granting of a licence to be a last resort. However, long after the authority to grant them had been undermined by the omission of the relevant clauses in the 1601 statute, they were being issued by magistrates—in Cheshire into the 1630s, in Cumberland into the 1690s, and in the West Riding of Yorkshire even into the1710s.[23]
Licences such as that reproduced in fig.1, granted to Walter Fosse of Horsford and Horsham St Faith (Norfolk) in 1591, were usually of parchment (rather than paper) to make them more durable and to preserve the magistrates’ wax seals which validated them.[24] Unlike passports and certificates, licences remained permanently in the custody of the pauper to whom they were granted. To judge by the condition of a set of licences originating in late Elizabethan Norfolk and surviving in London University Library, they were 12 by 8 inches at full size, and folded down, usually lengthways and then two or three ways across, to 3 inches square. As a result, the outer surfaces and folds became particularly dirty.[25] As early as 1590, the licence, sometimes colloquially (and misleadingly) referred to as a passport, had become proverbial for its grubbiness. In his sensationalist autobiography published in 1590 the playwright Robert Greene described one ‘foulded up’ with ‘a greasie backside and a great seale’.[26] At least one of the extant Norfolk licences has a second pierce of parchment sewn into it to serve as a protective cover.[27]
The licence usually identified the pauper and her parish; provided a brief gloss on the reason for her poverty (and by implication the deservingness of her case); and permitted her to ‘aske gather receive and take the almes charetie [and] devocion at the house or houses of the inhabitants’, at the same time ‘willinge and requiringe’ householders and parish officers ‘not to molest or trouble’ her ‘but to bestowe on her such almes as in their discretion might seem good’.[28] In one sense then, the begging licence, remaining as it did in the hands of the poor person herself, conferred eligibility for—arguably even entitlement to—the charity of her neighbours. The magistrates were nevertheless careful both to reserve the right of householders to exercise discretion in distributing alms; and to present the case for the recipient’s moral worth. Thus the licence granted to Walter Fosse explained that he had lived in Horsford and Horsham for 21 years, ‘all which tyme he behaved him selve honestly, painefully getting his Lyveinge, with the sweate of his browes’. Because he was experiencing ‘much paine & other infirmities bothe in body and Limmes’, however, he was ‘not nowe able to worke for his Lyveinge’.[29] Such licences were usually granted for a period of twelve months, after which time those who carried them presumably had to apply for a new one, probably surrendering the expired documents to the magistrate (which perhaps explains the peculiar survival of the Norfolk sample).
Magistrates seem to have licensed begging for fear of antagonising householders with compulsory rates, and thereby inadvertently preserved the doorstep as a liminal space, or zone of transition, between the needy and their more prosperous neighbours. In most cases, those who begged were the familiar neighbourhood poor making regular, if depressing, peregrinations, and it is doubtful whether the licence itself was actually displayed with any regularity. In most cases it would have been necessary to produce it only in the first instance, both pauper and householder relying on familiarity and trust thereafter. That trust might, of course, be exploited, but the forgery of begging licences seems to have been relatively rare, precisely because those licensed were invariably long-standing residents of the community whose faces were very familiar to the inhabitants. Only in the densely-populated parishes of London and the larger provincial towns can there have been any real possibility that a begging licence could be fraudulently obtained or successfully counterfeited. In sum, a licence to beg was a testimonial of deservingness, and served as invaluable coin in the currency of neighbourliness with which the deserving poor made shift to survive.[30]
2: The vagrant’s passport
Vagrants’ passports and beggars’ licences were often confused in the popular mind, but the former was altogether different in purpose. Whereas the licensed beggar was by implication deserving, the passport-carrying vagrant was by definition a criminal undergoing punishment.[31] Passports were designed to ensure that those taken and punished as idle wandering beggars (usually by whipping, more rarely by branding on the chest or boring through the ear) were returned home, and relieved as appropriate en route to their parish of ‘settlement’.[32] Numerous amendments to the poor relief statutes during the sixteenth century modified the definition of the parish of settlement. In its most restrictive definition, settlement was conferred only by birth, but more liberal interpretations progressively required that the vagrant be removed only to the parish where he had last been resident for a period of three years, subsequently only for one year.[33] The pass took the form of a warrant, signed and sealed usually by two magistrates, giving the vagrant’s name and parish of settlement; recording the location where he had been taken begging; and requiring the constables or tithingmen between that parish and the parish of settlement to conduct him on his way, relieving him as necessary as he passed. Finally it stipulated the period of time, usually a number of days, within which the journey should be made. The vagrant would be liable to punishment only if he exceeded the specified time period, or strayed from the appointed course.
Parish officers were required to keep registers of those they had passed on their way, though very few seem to have done so in the early years of the system. Nicholas Nichols, rector of Great Easton (Essex) began one such register immediately after the act of 1598, recording the names, destinations and specified period of travel of nine vagrants dealt with by the constables of the parish over the years to 1603.[34] However, after the vagrancy legislation of the early eighteenth century allowed constables to recover their expenses, lists of vagrants and the expenditure on them were much more common. The constables of Culgaith (Cumberland), for instance, presented the justices with a schedule of the nineteen vagrants and nine associated children on whom they had spent almost £8 for travel, meat and drink in the summer of 1737.[35] More rarely, parish officers might collect the passes of those vagrants sent back to them from elsewhere. This was done in late-eighteenth century St Mathews, Ipswich, while at Puddletown (Dorset) the passes were routinely filed with settlement examinations from the 1760s.[36] The pass itself was usually in the personal possession of the vagrant, who was required to show it to the constable of each community as she crossed the parish boundary. Conscientious constables would accompany the vagrant, personally conducting her into the adjacent parish and handing her over to the appropriate parish officer. If this occurred as the statute required, the vagrant’s pass would eventually be endorsed with a sequence of signatures by the parish officers of all the relevant communities. In a nice example from 1654, the pass carried by Mary Clarke, apprehended begging in Isleworth (Middlesex) and sent to her parish of settlement (Upavon in Wiltshire), was endorsed by the constables and tithingmen of seven communities (Hounslow, Upton, Maidenhead, Reading, Speen, Benham, Ilcott) through which she was conducted, each of them in turn scrawling ‘paste be me’ and giving their name, office and parish.[37] As Mary Clarke did finally reach Upavon, it is interesting to speculate why the pass ended up in the archives of the Wiltshire magistracy. It had outlived its purpose, so perhaps the constable of the parish simply surrendered it to a local justice to prevent fraud (an issue discussed below).
The format of the vagrant’s passport can be seen in fig.2, which is another Wiltshire example, granted in 1652 to Mary Woolles, a poor vagrant cripple, requiring the constables of the parishes between St Brides (London) and Bath to conduct and relieve her en route.[38] Mary had deliberately destroyed her original pass by fire, subsequently presenting herself for relief in the town of Salisbury. The Wiltshire JPs issued a second pass, ordering her to be conducted to St Brides, but the parishioners there insisted that she return to Salisbury. A third pass was issued and survives in the papers of the Wiltshire magistracy. A paper document measuring 12 by 71⁄2 inches, it was repeatedly folded down to the size of 3 by 31⁄2 inches, and was almost certainly carried in a pocket or purse. The constables generally seem to have unfolded it to half its full size and endorsed the top half of the verso. Fig.3 shows eleven such signatures, inserted as parish officers monitored Mary’s progress across the countryside.[39]
The potential for abuse in this system was obvious. The vagrant poor were acutely conscious of the utility of a passport, since it ‘was the key to almost unhindered mobility’, and ‘gave them the right to travel and to receive relief from officials along the way’.[40] The system depended on the conscientiousness of parish constables, and (even if the portrayal of Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is a travesty of most of the men who filled the office) a well-developed sense of civic duty was not always forthcoming.[41] Constables frequently paid vagrants to move on and did not bother either to endorse the pass or conduct the offender to the next constable. There is plenty of evidence that vagrants with legitimate passports meandered to their parish of settlement, if indeed they got there at all. More striking, however, is the widespread suspicion about a lively trade in counterfeit passports.
The polemical writers of Elizabethan ‘rogue literature’ were convinced that many beggars, no matter how ‘faintly’ they looked or ‘piteously’ they went, were nothing more than tricksters carrying forged passes.[42] Two brethren of The Fraternity of Vagabonds, identified by John Awdeley in 1561, carried forged documents: the ‘whipjacks’, who ‘by colour of a counterfeit licence which they call a “Gibe” and the seals they call “Jacks”’, passed themselves off as mariners whose goods had been lost at sea; and the ‘fraters’ who went with similarly forged licences ‘to beg for some Spittalhowse or hospital’. A third, the ‘Jackman’, who could allegedly ‘read and write and sometimes speak Latin’, actually forged the documents.[43] Thomas Harman’s notorious Caveat for Common Cursitors (first published in 1566) offered an anthropological catalogue of caricatures of counterfeit beggars, 23 types being anatomised.[44] His fourth stereotype was ‘the rogue’, a term which Harman himself popularised and perhaps even coined, and which was first used in vagrancy legislation in 1572.[45] One of the rogue’s principal ‘shifts’ was to
cary a certificat or pasport about them from some Iustice of the peace, with his hand and seale unto the same, how hee hath bene whipped and punished for a vagabonde according to the lawes of this realme and that he must returne to [the parish] where he was borne or last dwelt, by a certayn day limited in the same, which shalbe a good long day, And all this fayned, because without feare they woulde wickedly wander, and wil renewe the same where or when it pleaseth them: for they have of their affinitie that can write and reade.[46]
A counterfeit passport was not intended to elevate the social status of the holder, but to allow a vagrant to claim legitimate charity across a geographical range that the counterfeiter might dictate. Counterfeiting therefore ensured that the very documents intended to limit the future movements of vagrants actually freed them from legal control,[47] for carriers of counterfeit passes probably considered that constables and magistrates would not trouble themselves to verify the information. In September 1596, the Somerset JP Edward Hext sent Lord Treasurer Burghley a counterfeit pass carried by a man named Lymeryck who claimed to be from Cornwall, although his father was actually a minor Gloucestershire gentleman with an estate worth £40. Lymeryck, Hext thought, typified the vagrant’s popular confidence that officers were unlikely to investigate a traveller over a distance of 200 or 300 miles simply ‘to discover them for a whipping matter’.[48]
It is easy to dismiss the examples provided by Awdelay, Harman and Hext as sensationalism, but the evidence suggests that anxieties about the scale of forgery were not unfounded. Richard Higgins, imprisoned in Worcester gaol in July 1618, was not the only wandering rogue who had forged documents. Thomas and Anne Pullen, for example, were whipped at York in 1652 and sent to Otley after being convicted as dangerous and incorrigible rogues travelling with counterfeit passes.[49] Under examination, some vagrants disclosed the circumstances in which their passports had been obtained. Robert Vaughan confessed in 1580 that he had purchased his for fourpence from one David Jones at Great Dunmow (Essex).[50] Indeed, there was apparently some price inflation in the costs of these forged documents, from between twopence and fourpence in the late sixteenth century to between sixpence and a shilling in the early seventeenth.[51] Humphrey Reade, whipped in Salisbury in 1609, claimed that his passport had been ‘made by a stranger under a hedge’, although doubt was cast on this account by the fact that ‘there was found about him a seal of his own carving’.[52] Indeed, it seems that counterfeit passes, or the seals to affix to them, could be bought almost anywhere, not least because so many of the forgers were themselves itinerant. The sophisticated forger had to possess the relevant equipment including pen, paper and ink; to know, or at least plausibly be able to invent, names of county justices; and to be sufficiently skilled in palaeography to vary the handwriting on the false endorsements.[53] The master-forger of passports in Elizabethan Essex was Davy Bennett who, it was reported in 1581, could counterfeit any magistrate’s seal: ‘if he seeth it in waxe he will laye it [a]fore him and carve it out in woode very perfitely, and so he will do theer handes for that he wryteth sundrye handes and hath most commonly about him a little bage full of counterfeit seales’. Henry Taverner, who made counterfeit passports for himself and others in early Stuart Wiltshire, not only always had his wax and seal in readiness but carried with him ‘a note of the names of the knights & justices of peace of sundry counties to know whose names mightfitly be used of the same counties in his counterfeit passes’.[54] Whatever the detection rate of documents forged by men such as Bennett and Taverner, 23 (4 per cent) of those vagrants sent home from Salisbury in the first half of the seventeenth century were in possessions of forged documents when they were apprehended, and more almost certainly went undetected.[55] Many a constable doubtless endorsed a passport in good faith, oblivious to the fact that the document was a forgery. Most identity theft went unrecognised in the seventeenth century, just as it does in the twenty-first.
3: The settlement certificate
The settlement certificate was the most significant document produced by the system introduced in 1662, through which the relationship between migration and eligibility for parish relief was codified. The technicalities of this complex system need not detain us here, but after 1697 a person resident in one parish could (and often did) hold a settlement elsewhere; and the officers of the parish into which a migrant moved usually demanded proof of that settlement before they granted rights of residence to any incomer.[56] The proof was a certificate which guaranteed that the officers and ratepayers of the parish of settlement would relieve the pauper no matter where she actually lived—either in the parish of settlement itself or, increasingly as the decades passed, in the parish of residence (which might be remote or adjacent). In the example in fig.4 the parish officers of Newington (Oxford) certified in 1747 that they acknowledged the settlement of Alexander Chalk and his wife Mary. The positive side of this development was the possibility of ‘non-resident relief’, which developed as early as the 1690s.[57] The disadvantage, especially for the migrant poor, was that parishes did all they could to expel incomers without a settlement certificate from another parish and were determined to prevent anybody ‘likely to become chargeable’ from securing a settlement among them. Although it did not in itself confer entitlement to poor relief (the settled pauper was only eligible to be considered deserving), the settlement certificate was prized by the poor and parish officers alike: for the former, it was a guarantee of geographical mobility, for the latter an indemnity against future welfare expenditure.
The justices who signed settlement certificates do not seem to have kept them: multiple (usually between six and eight) signatories were needed, and since it was the parish rather than the county which acted as the unit of obligation and control, copies were of little value to magistrates themselves.[58] Justices do seem, however, to have kept independent registers or short records of whom and for which parishes certificates had been issued. In most cases, the churchwardens and overseers of the community in which the pauper was resident asked the parish of settlement to provide them with the settlement certificate, and it was accordingly sent or delivered to the receiving parish, where the parish officers archived it in the parish chest. In such a case, the pauper himself or herself hardly ever, and possibly even never, saw it. Occasionally the officers of the receiving parish required the subject of a settlement certificate to obtain one, and the migrant temporarily returned to the parish of settlement to do so. In the overwhelming majority of cases the certificate was then surrendered to the parish officers for safe keeping. The pauper had the right to demand it as a future insurance, but most parish officers clung on to it tenaciously since it ensured that the ratepayers would never be liable for that particular pauper. When John Low and his family, legally settled in Ashley (Staffordshire), moved from Eccleshall to Gnosall in 1749, the parish officers of Eccleshall sent only a copy of the settlement certificate on the grounds that they were not prepared to part with the original.[59]
Settlement certificates were therefore intended to be delivered to the parish officers as soon as a migrant came into the parish. Sometimes, however, the pauper carried it with him to the new parish, showed it to the parish officers, and kept it with him. There is no doubt that this happened, because those examined about their settlement occasionally said so. It was not unknown for legal disputes between two parishes to turn on the issue of whether the certificate had actually been delivered to the parish officers and ensuing ambiguities about its whereabouts or its existence. In some cases, a long-defunct settlement certificate would be produced decades later, almost as a family heirloom, as paupers produced testimony to their father’s or grandfather’s settlement. Although such cases were rare, they do suggest that paupers were aware of the intrinsic value of such documents, which effectively conferred ‘leave to remain’—one might almost say ‘without let or hindrance’— in a foreign parish.
4: The parish badge
The badging of the deserving poor was made compulsory under a statute of 1697. Paupers were to be denied relief unless they agreed to wear a badge of red cloth consisting of the initial letters of their parish of settlement (such as KP for Kenilworth parish) on their left shoulder.[60] Any parish officer relieving a pauper who did not wear the badge could be fined 20s. Although badges had been issued to beggars, sometimes in conjunction with begging licences, in the sixteenth century, especially in the metropolis and the provincial towns, the motivation behind the late seventeenth-century statute was not principally to identify the poor, but rather to shame them and deter them from seeking relief. Badges were supposed to humiliate paupers, marking them out as a separate and dependant class among whom idleness was inherited; and rendering them vulnerable to the compulsory apprenticeship of their children, sequestration of their personal property to indemnify the parish against their funeral costs, and (from 1723) institutionalisation in the parish workhouses stipulated by Knatchbull’s Act, otherwise known as the Workhouse Test Act.[61]
Late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century overseers’ accounts are replete with payments for the purchase of cloth and the work of a tailor in cutting out the appropriate letters and sewing them on to paupers’ clothing. At Spofforth in the West Riding in 1735, for example, the overseers accounted for sevenpence ‘for half a yard of cloth for the badges’ and a shilling ‘for making the badges’ themselves. They subsequently expanded provision as necessary, paying William Owthwaite a penny ‘for setting on Edward Brown’s badge’ in 1738. Into the 1740s, they recorded sums spent for ‘the badges setting on’.[62] In most cases, badges were affixed to the paupers’ own coats, so the poor were present in person when they were stigmatised in this way, bringing an entirely new resonance to the phrase ‘red letter day’. It is easy to imagine half a dozen elderly paupers gathered in the tailor’s workshop and the parish officers of Fillongley (Warwickshire) were sensitive to the potential volatility of this encounter. When they badged the poor in 1697 they sought to mollify the paupers by providing them with ale, at a charge of fourpence, while they waited.[63] The badges were little more than patches of canvas or felt and almost invariably perished when the clothing itself finally disintegrated. One example which survives is reproduced in fig.5. For some reason, the overseers of Riccall in the East Riding kept an example of a parish badge, its livid red letters standing out starkly against a background of blue felt, with the associated 1737 printed warrant from the justices (fig.6) requiring the parish officers to badge all relief claimants.[64] Expenditure was more substantial (and physical evidence more likely to survive) if vestries opted, in the interests of durability, for metal badges. Badges made of cloth cost a penny or two each, but those stamped on tin or brass involved far greater outlay. Those for Petworth (Sussex) in 1677 were discs of brass, 3 inches in diameter, punched through with four eyelets for sewing onto clothing and with the date scratched on the rim. Even more remarkable were the paupers’ badges made in Romsey (Hampshire) in 1678, elaborate leaden plaques 4 inches by 3, inscribed with the arms of the town and the inscription: ‘I receves allemes of the town of Rumsey’.[65]
As befitted a policy of deterrence, the logic of exemplary punishment was selectively applied to those who did not wear badges. Parish pensions were actually withheld: examples include a widow from Brighton and a single mother from Solihull (Warwickshire) in 1696; a widow from Cowden (Kent) in 1698; four women of Burton-on-Trent in 1703; a widow of St Andrew’s Holborn in 1705; three women of Chalfont St Peter (Buckinghamshire) in 1729; and a single mother and her bastard child in Whinfell (Cumberland) in 1738. One of the poor pensioners of East Barnet (Hertfordshire) was committed to prison in 1732 ‘for insulting the churchwarden and not wearing his badge as the act of parliament directs’.[66] At North Bradley (Wiltshire) in 1707, the vestry stipulated that ‘Deborah Beavan and those that have not the mark shall not have their money’. The formula used to deprive the collectioners in the Chalfont St Peter case was more laconic, though no less resonant: ‘no bodge this month no pay’.[67] The preponderance of women suggests a conspicuous lack of identity between, on the one hand, the targets of those who condemned the culture of dependency—primarily young labouring men with families who preferred collection to labour—and the recipients of relief as it was actually practiced across thousands of parishes, who were primarily widows, the majority elderly.[68]
Some paupers may have seen advantages in wearing the badge, for it publicly advertised the official recognition of their respectability. The badged pauper had satisfied the overseers and the ratepayers they represented, that they were deserving of the alms of the parish and had passed the stringent tests of eligibility on which magistrates and parish officers generally insisted. To be sure, badges symbolised paupers’ inability to work, but they also publicised their sobriety, fear of God, and past careers of thrift and industry on behalf of themselves and their families. They were, furthermore, evidence that the poor accepted their lot with equanimity—that they deferred to, and accepted the charity of, their betters. In this sense, badges were marks of inclusion, indicative both of a pauper’s conformity to the standards of conduct on which the moral community of the neighbourhood insisted and of his or her right to settled residence.
5: Conclusion: identification, entitlement and citizenship
These technologies of identification were intended to regulate not merely migration but entitlement. Licences, passports, and certificates essentially validated claims to certain rights—charity, welfare, residence, and labour mobility—made by those who could not (and, in the case of passports, would not) support themselves through their own efforts. In this respect they resonate with issues, concerning civil liberties and the nature of citizenship, central to the contemporary debate about identity cards. The fundamental tension between parish-based poor relief and endemic population turnover provided the context for these experiments in the targeting of aid, just as the modern demand for certification of identity arises from concerns about the impact of global movement of population on national systems of social security. In the seventeenth century, legislators gradually recognised that the relief of their poor in their own parishes, codified in 1601, could only function successfully if sophisticated mechanisms regulated the rights of those who travelled—legitimately or otherwise—across parish boundaries and protected the interests of those who accommodated them. Modern governments contemplate ever more sophisticated techniques because of fears that various categories of visitors to these shores, including asylum seekers and economic migrants, will prejudice the security, rights and interests of taxpayers and benefit claimants alike. Today, the likely result is the more rigorous policing of international borders. In the seventeenth century, the effect was to reinforce local thresholds of belonging, especially the parish boundary.
Just as historians of international migration in seventeenth century society express some optimism that the English might prove tolerant, perhaps even hospitable, toward international refugees, local historians are ever more sensitive to the fear and hatred displayed towards those who strayed across parish boundaries. ‘The England experienced by the [European] immigrants of the first refuge—from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century—may’, it has been argued, ‘have represented a veritable oasis of tolerance between the more violent prejudice of the mediaeval period and the arrogant self-confidence that, in some quarters at least, accompanied the rise of English nationalism in the eighteenth century’. Indeed, in the international context at least, the application of the adjective ‘xenophobic’ to seventeenth-century Englishmen and women is perhaps misguided.[69] But we might endorse (though antedating its chronology by perhaps two centuries) Professor Keith Snell’s recent suggestion that relationships between the parishes under the terms of the poor laws were imbued with a ‘culture of local xenophobia’; that the social horizons of many people extended no further than the parish boundary; and even that the social identities reinforced, perhaps created, by the poor law, militated against the development of wider class consciousness in English history.[70]
Whatever the scale on which these technologies operated, each was underpinned by the information-gathering resources of the English state, already formidable in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the methods under discussion here were the more effective because they could be corroborated by the most significant bureaucratic achievement of all, the compiling of parish registers which became compulsory in 1538 and was justified by Thomas Cromwell in part on the grounds that King Henry had a right to know ‘whether any person is our subject or no’.[71] It was not unusual for differences over liability for paupers to be resolved by a search of the relevant parish registers. Thus, the protracted dispute over the maintenance of Jane Smith and her son Peter, which preoccupied the Prescot vestrymen and Lancashire justices in the late 1640s, was only settled in 1649 when the churchwardens spent eightpence on a journey to Farnworth ‘to know the age of Peter Smith’ by consulting the parish register.[72] It is, similarly, instructive that when I asked the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office for a reproduction of the passport of Mary Woolles, the archivist on his own initiative checked the registers of the parish in which Mary claimed to have been born and found her baptism dated 13 January 1630.[73] The documentary culture discussed here has left an archival trail to be as effectively followed now by historians as it was 350 years ago by parish officers and magistrates.
Doubtless there were abuses. Passports were particularly vulnerable to fraud, since most holders were travelling long distances and it was well nigh impossible for parish officers or magistrates to authenticate the claims made by strangers. Licences and certificates were, however, issued tothose with familiar faces and established local identities, and were accordingly much more difficult to falsify. But underpinning each is a paradox. A name might be inscribed on paper or parchment, and might resonate with local folk memory or nestle easily in the multiple folds of village reputation. But how was it possible to confirm that the name went with a particular face, especially in a culture where it was usual for individuals to leave the parishes of their birth or residence, escaping from the circuits of local knowledge, only to return months, perhaps even, years later? There were doubtless hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of prodigal sons returning to parishes whose doorways they had not darkened for decades.[74] This problem perhaps explains why some constables, when certifying justices as to the vagrants they had punished, chose to add pen portraits which emphasised the distinguishing features of itinerants whose assertion of identity they patently did not believe. Thus the Westmorland justices read in 1638 of the punishments of ‘a tall lusty young fellow, bare faced and having long hair upon his head, clad in blue about twenty-four yeares of age’; of ‘a short woman, wan collared with black haire on her head’; of a man ‘red haired, very short and of a faire complexion’; and of a child ‘seven yeares old or thereabouts his face white collared and a scarre on his browe’. These men, women and children, and hundreds like them, were stocked and whipped until their backs were bloody.[75] It is striking that these descriptions of named vagrants, associated with their particular parishes of settlement, referred not only to estimated age and to follicular and facial characteristics but also to clothing, which was considered no less a distinguishing feature, to be decoded and categorised by the appropriate authorities.[76] These efforts notwithstanding it is clear that the technologies under discussion here, although predicated on the notion of ‘state-approved single identities’, proved to be a potential resource for the creation of further multiples, a development which also followed the more recent British experiment with identity cards during the first and second World Wars.[77]
If licences, passports and certificates speak to the issues of civil liberties (especially those of mobility and residence), and in turn of benefit fraud, badges in particular resonate with contemporary concerns about citizenship and exclusion.[78] It is clear that in refusing to accept the public identity of dependency ascribed to them by the parish officers, recalcitrant paupers forfeited whatever ‘rights’ were conferred by the Elizabethan poor law. Perhaps they felt that entitlements of this kind were hardly worth the irrevocable public sacrifice of their independence. In the early sixteenth century, after all, the deserving poor had been encouraged to overcome their shame, to stretch out their hands and raise their voices in the gestures and cries of importunacy; and had been readily rewarded with gifts of alms. Their late seventeenth-century descendants enjoyed no such luxury. Their choice was stark: to accept the badge of dependency, or go without. They were in no position to negotiate the terms, let alone the fact, of their subordination.[79] Perhaps they should have been grateful, for the vagrants of an earlier generation had borne their stigmata in quite a literal sense, their bodies being disfigured with branding irons and bore-holes. The political technology of the body in Tudor and early Stuart England resulted in letters not sewn onto canvas but physically scorched into flesh.[80] The short-lived statute of 1547 stipulated that convicted vagrants were ‘to be marked with an hot iron in the breast the mark of V’; its more enduring successor of 1572 required all vagabonds to be ‘grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron’ an inch in diameter; and branding itself was reintroduced when the vagrancy statute of 1604 insisted that incorrigible rogues be ‘branded in the left shoulder with a hot burning iron of the breadth of an English shilling, with a great Roman “R” upon the iron’.[81] These penal semiotics were designed to be read: Somerset justices invariably searched vagrants’ bodies for physical evidence of scorched flesh when they took depositions in the early seventeenth century, an initiative doubtless motivated by the knowledge that a recidivist vagrant was guilty of a felony and therefore destined for criminal trial at the county assizes and ultimately for the gallows.
The resonances between past and present debates about identifying poor migrants and relief claimants speak to more general long-term symmetries in welfare development and social policy as a whole. The not-so-hidden message is that the technology of identification is not the only issue in which current social policy-makers speak a language familiar to their seventeenth-century predecessors. The imperative to transform ‘welfare to work’; the concern that poverty is an inherited, perhaps even a genetic, condition inculcated by ‘feckless’ parents; the fear of a self-perpetuating ‘culture of dependency’ in which households, or whole neighbourhoods, would rather accept handouts than shift for themselves—all these were no less characteristic of Stuart than of Blairite (to say nothing of Thatcherite) political culture, and have therefore constituted an integral component of the rhetoric and repertoire of rule in England since the early modern period. Might modern home secretaries actually have something to learn from those very medieval and early modern historians whose contributions they have been happy to disparage. In July 2003, the former home secretary Charles Clarke (then secretary of state for education) notoriously remarked that he didn’t ‘mind there being some medievalists [and early modernists?] around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them’. In trying to recover the situation, a spokesman for Mr Clarke helpfully explained that ‘the secretary of state was basically getting at the fact that universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change’.[82] But increasingly rapid processes of change are the staple of my kind of social history, and I cannot be the only person to believe that, in the interests of ‘understanding ourselves in time’, contemporary architects of social policy might benefit from a deeper awareness of its long-term strengths and weaknesses which are, by definition, best understood in their historical context.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
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[1] An earlier version of this paper was presented at ‘Technologies of Identification in Britain and the British Empire’, a workshop held at St Antony’s College, Oxford, 3 September 2005. I am grateful to Jane Caplan and Eddie Higgs for their invitation to speak on that occasion.
[2] 39 Elizabeth I, c.3 (1598); 43 Elizabeth I, c.2 (1601): for the context, see Paul Slack, Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England (Longman, 1988) pp.122-131; Steve Hindle, On the parish? The micro-politics of poor relief in rural England, c.1550-1750 (Oxford UP, 2004), pp.227-229.
[3] OED ‘off-comer’ … ‘a stranger in the sense of not having been born in the locality’
[4] David Feldman, ‘Migrants, immigrants and welfare from the old poor law to the welfare state’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. vol.13 (2003) pp.79-104
[5] Patrick Collinson, ‘Puritanism and the poor’, in Rosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones (eds), Pragmatic utopias: ideals and communities, 1200-1630 (Cambridge UP, 2001) pp.244-248
[6] For conveniently printed collections of these differing sets of accounts, see Steve Hindle, The birthpangs of welfare: poor relief and parish governance in seventeenth-century Warwickshire (Dugdale Society occasional papers 40, 2000) pp.37-74 (appendix II); Martyn Bennett (ed), A Nottinghamshire Village in War and Peace: The Accounts of the Constables of Upton 1640-1666 (Thoroton Society record series 39, 1995).
[7] Steve Hindle, ‘Destitution, liminality and belonging: the church porch and the politics of settlement in English rural communities, c.1590-1660’, in Christopher Dyer (ed), The self-contained village?: The social history of English rural communities, 1250-1890 (University of Hertfordshire Press, forthcoming 2006); cf Steve Hindle, ‘Exclusion crises: poverty, migration and parochial responsibility in English rural communities, c.1560-1660’, Rural History vol.7 (1996), pp.125-149
[8] A.L. Beier, Masterless men: the vagrancy problem in England 1560-1640 (Methuen, 1985) pp.7-8 provides a convenient brief summary of the putative characteristics of this ‘criminal underworld’.
[9] The original phrase is Tawney’s: R.H. Tawney, The agrarian problem in the sixteenth century (Longman Green, 1912) p.268. The scholarship, much of it by literary scholars, on the ‘rogue literature’ in which these stereotypes were propagated is rapidly growing both in scale and sophistication: see, for example, William C. Carroll, Fat king, lean beggar: representations of poverty in the age of Shakespeare (Cornell UP, 1996), esp. pp.70-96; Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, homelessness and English renaissance literature (University of Illinois Press, 2001) esp. pp.39-79; the essays collected in Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (eds), Rogues and early modern English culture (University of Michigan Press, 2004); and most recently Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: the culture of mobility and the working poor in early modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2006) pp.33-46.
[10] Peter Clark, ‘Migration in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, in Peter Clark and David Souden (eds), Migration and society in early modern England (Hutchinson, 1987) p.215; cf Thomas Harman, A caveat or warening, for common cursetors vulgarely called vagabones (Henry Middleton, 1573) [a convenient modern edition is in A.F. Kinney (ed), Rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars: a new gallery of Tudor and early Stuart rogue literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990) pp.103-154].
[11] R.A. Houston, ‘Vagrants and society in early modern England’, Cambridge Anthropology (1980) pp.18-32; J.R. Kent, ‘Population mobility and alms: poor migrants in the midlands during the early seventeenth century’, Local Population Studies no.27 (1981) pp.35-51.
[12] For the European context in which these technologies emerged, see Valentin Groebner, ‘Describing the person, reading the signs in late medieval and renaissance Europe: identity papers, vested figures, and the limits of identification, 1400-1600’ in Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting individual identity: the development of state practices in the modern world (Princeton UP, 2001) pp.15-27.
[13] Jon Agar, ‘Modern Horrors: British Identity and Identity Cards’, in Caplan and Torpey (eds), Documenting individual identity, p.120
[14] cf Groebner, ‘Describing the person’, p.27
[15] See, for example, the fifty-one individuals for whom both vagrant’s passes and settlement examinations survive in the sessions bundles of the Surrey magistracy in the 1740s and early 1750s (Surrey History Centre QS2/6/1740-53).
[16] We still lack an authoritative account of the administration of the vagrancy laws in later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. For a valuable metropolitan case-study, see Nicholas Rogers, ‘Policing the poor in eighteenth-century London: the vagrancy laws and their administration’, Histoire sociale/Social History vol.24 (1991) pp.127-147.
[17] 5 & 6 Edward VI, c.2 (1552); 5 Elizabeth I, c.3 (1563); 39 Elizabeth I, c.3 (1598); 43 Elizabeth I, c.2 (1601). Clause x of the 1598 act authorised parish officers to permit poor residents to beg for victuals, but made no explicit reference to licenses, which appear to have been stipulated only in the mid-sixteenth-century legislation. Hindle, On the parish?, pp.67-68. The wider legislative context is discussed in Slack, Poverty and policy, pp.113-137.
[18] See, for example, Essex Record Office [ERO] Q/SR 46/15.
[19] ERO Q/SR 112/69
[20] Stephen J. Pope, ‘Aquinas on almsgiving and charity: an interpretation and reassessment’, The Heythrop Journal vol.32 (1991), pp.167-191; Stephen J. Pope, ‘Christian love for the poor: almsgiving and the “preferential option”’, Horizons vol.21 (1994), pp.288-312.
[21] See, for example, Dorset Record Office [DRO] DC/BTB/DE19 (Bridport, 1594); Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone QM/SB/22A (Sittingbourne, 1594).
[22] Steve Hindle, ‘Dearth, fasting and alms: the campaign for general hospitality in late Elizabethan England’, Past and Present no.172 (2001), pp.44-86
[23] Hindle, On the parish?, pp.68-69; West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield, QS1/52/8 (Barnsley, Oct 1713) includes a petition for relief of a farmer reduced to poverty by the death of many cattle, granted a licence to beg for charity until 1 May following.
[24] London University Library [LUL] MS 684/5.
[25] Basil Clarke, ‘Norfolk licenses to beg: an unpublished collection’, Norfolk Archaeology vol.35 (1972) pp.327-334; LUL MS 684/1-15.
[26] Robert Greene, Greenes never too late: or, a powder of experience (Thomas Orwin, 1590 [RSTC 12253]) p.20
[27] Clarke, ‘Norfolk licenses to beg’, p.328
[28] LUL MS 684/1
[29] LUL MS 684/5
[30] Hindle, On the parish?, pp.58-81
[31] On the absence of the term ‘vagrant’, a pejorative label implying the practice of an occupation forbidden by law, from criminal indictments, see J.S. Cockburn (ed), Calendar of assize records, home circuit indictments Elizabeth I and James I: introduction (HMSO, 1985) p.78. On the crimes of which the wandering poor were suspected and accused, see Beier, Masterless men, pp.126-145.
[32] For the most notorious of the sixteenth-century vagrancy statutes, see C.S.L. Davies, ‘Slavery and Protector Somerset: the vagrancy act of 1547’, Economic History Review 2nd ser. vol.19 (1966) pp.533-549.
[33] The evolution of the definition of settlement is traced in Hindle, On the parish?, pp.306-10; cf Philip Styles, ‘The Evolution of the Laws of Settlement’, reprinted in Philip Styles, Studies in seventeenth-century West Midlands history (Roundwood Press, 1978) pp.175-204.
[34] 39 Elizabeth I, c.4; F.G. Emmison, ‘The care of the poor in Elizabethan Essex: recently discovered records’, Essex Review vol.62 (1953) p.19. For other extant lists, see E. Melling (ed.), The poor: a collection of examples from original sources in the Kent Archives Office, from the 16th to the 19th century (Kentish Sources, vol.4, Kent County Council, 1964) pp.18-19 (Charing, 1601-2); C.D. Stooks, A history of Crondall and Yateley, in the county of Hants, chiefly taken from the churchwardens’ accounts and other records in the parish chests (Warren, 1905) pp.29-30.
[35] 13 Anne c.26 (1714); Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle, Q/11/1/185/32
[36] Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich, FB95/G6/1-8 (a bundle of eight passes 1746-1806); DRO PE/PUD/OV/3/41, 66, 67, 124, 126, 129, 132 (settlement examinations with vagrants passes attached)
[37] B.H. Cunnington (ed.), Records of the county of Wilts., being extracts from the quarter sessions great rolls of the seventeenth century (George Simpson, 1932) p.226
[38] Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office [WSRO] A1/110/1652E/218
[39] WSRO A1/110/1652E/218, 220, 222. For the parish state, see Steve Hindle, ‘Power, poor relief and social relations in Holland Fen, c.1600-1800’, Historical Journal vol.41 (1998), pp.94-96; Hindle, On the parish?, pp.445-449
[40] Beier, Masterless men, p.79
[41] Joan Kent, The English village constable: a social and administrative study (Oxford UP, 1986), esp. pp.200-205
[42] For the European roots of this tradition, see Lee Palmer Wandel, Always among us: images of the poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (Cambridge UP, 1990) pp.100-103; Groebner, ‘Describing the person’, pp.21-22.
[43] John Awdelay, The fraternitye of uacabondes (John Awdelay, 1575 edn) sigs.A2r, A3r [a convenient modern edition is in Kinney (ed), Rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars, pp.85-101].
[44] Harman, A caveat or warening, from which all subsequent quotations are taken.
[45] Woodbridge, Vagrancy, pp.41-42
[46] Harman, Caveat, sig.B4v
[47] Martine von Elk, ‘The counterfeit vagrant: the dynamics of deviance in the Bridewell court records and the literature of roguery’, in Dionne and Mentz (eds), Rogues and early modern English culture, pp.127-128.
[48] R.H. Tawney and Eileen Power (eds.), Tudor economic documents (3 vols, Longman, 1924) vol.3 p.343.
[49] Worcestershire Record Office QSR 1/1/26/37; York City Archives, York, F.7/328
[50] ERO Q/SR 76/56
[51] Beier, Masterless men, p.143; cf. William Hunt, The puritan moment: the coming of revolution in an English county (Harvard UP, 1983) p.51
[52] Paul Slack (ed.), Poverty in early Stuart Salisbury (Wiltshire Record Society vol.31, 1975) p.42 [no.295].
[53] For a particularly well executed counterfeit pass, see Cunnington (ed.), Records of the county of Wilts., pp.236-237
[54] ERO Q/SR 79/82; Cunnington (ed.), Records of the county of Wilts., p.52.
[55] Based on an analysis of the 567 passports listed in the Salisbury register of passports for vagrants, c.1598-1669 in Slack (ed.), Poverty in early Stuart Salisbury, pp.17-65.
[56] Although settlement itself was codified by 13 & 14 Charles II c.12 (1662), certificates were first stipulated by 8 & 9 William III c.30 (1697). The legal technicalities of this complex system are unravelled in K.D.M. Snell, ‘Pauper settlement and the right to poor relief in England and Wales’, Continuity and Change vol.6 (1991) pp.375-415; and K.D.M. Snell, ‘Settlement, poor law and the rural historian: new approaches and opportunities’, Rural History vol.3 (1992),pp.145-72.
[57] For studies of the implications of ‘non-resident’ or ‘out-parish’ relief, see Pamela Sharpe, ‘”The bowels of compation”’: a labouring family and the law, c.1790-1834’, J.S. Taylor, ‘Voices in the crowd: the Kirkby Lonsdale township letters, 1809-36’, and Thomas Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty: the record of Essex pauper letters, 1780-1834’, all in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Chronicling poverty: the voices and strategies of the English poor, 1640-1840 (Macmillan, 1997) pp.87-108, 109-126, 127-154. For late seventeenth-century examples drawn from Cambridge (in 1690) and Alcester, Warwickshire (in 1693), see E.M. Hampson, ‘Settlement and removal in Cambridgeshire, 1662-1834’, Cambridge Historical Journal vol.2 (1926-28) p.287; Styles, ‘The evolution of the laws of settlement’, pp.62-63.
[58] I am immensely grateful to Professor Keith Snell of the University of Leicester for his invaluable help in reconstructing the bureaucratic culture associated withthe settlement laws on which this and the subsequent paragraph are based.
[59] S.A. Cutlack, ‘The Gnosall records, 1679 to 1837: poor law administration’, Collections for a history of Staffordshire, Part I (Mort, 1936) p.67.
[60] 8 & 9 William III, c.30; Steve Hindle, ‘Dependency, shame and belonging: badging the deserving poor, c.1550-1750’, Cultural and Social History vol.1 (2004) pp.6-35.
[61] 9 George I, c.7
[62] West Yorkshire Record Office, Leeds, RDP 96/71 (Spofforth overseers accounts, 1707-67), unfol.
[63] Warwickshire Record Office DR404/67, unfol.
[64] University of York, Institute of Historical Research, MS Romans 60
[65] Hindle, ‘Dependency, shame and belonging’, p.22 (& figure 1)
[66] Dorothy Marshall, The English poor in the eighteenth century: a study in social and administrative history (Routledge, 1926) p.103; Edward Turner, ‘Ancient parochial account book of Cowden’, Sussex Archaeological Collections vol.20 (1882) p.115; S.C. Ratcliff, H.C. Johnson, and N.J. Williams (eds.), Warwick county records (9 vols., Warwickshire County Council, 1935-1964) vol.9 p.129; Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, English local government volume VII, English poor law history part I: the old poor law (Longman Green, 1927) p.161; W.J. Hardy, Middlesex county records: calendar of sessions books, 1689-1709 (Middlesex County Council, 1905) p.291; G.C. Edmonds, ‘Accounts of eighteenth-century overseers of the poor of Chalfont St Peter’, Records of Buckinghamshire vol.18 (1966) p.7; Cumbria Record Office, Kendal, WQ/SR/93/3; W. Le Hardy (ed.), Hertford County Records (9 vols, Hertfordshire County Council, 1905-1939) vol.2 p.70.
[67] WSRO 533/38 (North Bradley overseers disbursements 1707-1716), unfol. (May 1707); Edmonds, ‘Overseers of the Poor of Chalfont St Peter’, p.7
[68] Tim Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle: some evidence from seventeenth-century Norfolk’; and W. Newman-Brown, ‘The receipt of poor relief and family situation: Aldenham, Hertfordshire 1630-90’, both in R.M. Smith (ed), Land, kinship and life-cycle (Cambridge UP, 1984), esp. pp.353, 360-78, 412, 419; Hindle, The birthpangs of welfare, p.18
[69] Nigel Goose, ‘”Xenophobia” in Elizabethan and early Stuart England: an epithet too far’, in Nigel Goose and Lien Luu (eds), Immigrants in Tudor and early Stuart England (Sussex Academic Press, 2005) pp.110-35 (quoting p.129)
[70] K.D.M Snell, ‘The Culture of Local Xenophobia’, Social History vol.28 (2003) pp.1-30
[71] W.H. Frere and W.M. Kennedy, Visitation articles and injunctions of the period of the reformation (Alcuin Club collections, 1910), vol.II, pp.39-40; G.R. Elton, Policy and police: the enforcement of the Reformation in the age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge UP, 1972) pp.259-260
[72] Thomas Steel (ed.), Prescot churchwardens’ accounts, 1635-1663 (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol.137, 2002) p.134. For the context, see Hindle, On the parish?, pp.421-422.
[73] I am immensely grateful to Steve Hobbs of the WSRO for his efforts in this, as in so many other regards.
[74] N.Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard UP, 1983)
[75] The National Archives SP16/388/7/10/3, 16/1, 18/1-2
[76] N.B. Harte, ‘State control of dress and social change in pre-industrial England’, in D.C. Coleman and A.H. John (eds), Trade, government and economy in pre-industrial England (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1976) pp.132-165.
[77] cf Agar, ‘Modern Horrors’, p.102
[78] E. Higgs, The Information State in England (Palgrave, 2004) pp.194-205
[79] cf David Levine and Keith Wrightson, The making of an industrial society: Whickham, 1560-1765 (Oxford UP, 1991) p.348; Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, ‘Introduction: grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society’, in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society (Cambridge UP, 2001), p.42
[80] Kellie Robertson, ‘Branding and the technologies of labor regulation’, in Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (eds), The middle ages at work: practicing labor in late medieval England (Palgrave, 2004) pp.133-53; Carroll. Fat king, pp.33-47
[81] 1 Edward VI c.3 (1547); 14 Elizabeth 1, c.5 (1572); 1 James I c.7 (1604) For the wide range of retributive punishments to which vagrants might be subject, see Beier, Masterless men, pp.158-64.
[82] Will Woodward and Rebecca Smithers, ‘Clarke dismisses medieval historians’, The Guardian (9 May 2003)
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