Jonathan Healey

THE DEVELOPMENT OF POOR RELIEF IN LANCASHIRE, c. 1598–1680

The development of the poor law has formed a key element of recent discussions of ‘state formation’ in early modern England. There are, however, still few local studies of how formal poor relief, stipulated in the great Tudor statutes, was implemented on the ground. This article offers such a study, focusing on Lancashire, an economically marginal county, far from Westminster. It argues that the poor law developed in Lancashire surprisingly quickly in the early seventeenth century, despite the fact that there is almost no evidence of implementation of statutory relief before 1598, and formal relief mechanisms were essentially in place before the Civil War even if the numbers on relief remained small. After a brief hiatus during the conflict, the poor law was quickly revived in the 1650s. The role of the magistracy is emphasized as a crucial driving force, not just in the enforcement of the statutes, but also in setting relief policy. The thousands of petitions to JPs by paupers, parishes, and townships that survive in the county archives suggests that magistrates were crucial players in the ‘politics of the parish’.

Famine and the female mortality advantage: sex, gender and mortality in northwest England, c. 1590–1630

Studies of modern famines have found disproportionately high mortality amongst adult men. The most commonly suggested root of this ‘female mortality advantage’ is biological, and it seems to be strongest when starvation is the main cause of death. The present study is the first to investigate the phenomenon in an early-modern society. Looking at the famines of 1597 and 1623 in northwest England, it finds some evidence for a female mortality advantage in 1623, but that this was concentrated in the first 12 months of the crisis (after the 1622 harvest). The female advantage was also much greater in north Lancashire and Westmorland than it was in the wealthier western Lancashire plain. Together this supports the idea that there was actual starvation during the 1623 crisis, at least in these areas at these times. There are, however, some reasons to suppose that the most mortal phase of the crisis, around the winter of 1623–1624, took place at a time when food was becoming more widely available, and hence should be attributed to diseases that followed the famine.

THE NORTHERN MANOR AND THE POLITICS OF NEIGHBOURHOOD: DILSTON, NORTHUMBERLAND, 1558–1640

IN THE MEDIEVAL COUNTRYSIDE, the most accessible institutions of government and law operated at the level of the manor. These ‘manor courts’, as they are usually known, acted as local legislative and judicial bodies. Depending on their precise configuration, they might make and enforce by-laws, maintain agricultural and tenurial customs, and act as the lowest rung of the common law, sometimes dealing with petty offences — occasionally even initiating felony prosecutions — and hearing private suits.1 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw manor courts decline in importance, as common land was gradually enclosed, copyhold slowly disappeared, and as parish and county government matured. In many cases they simply disappeared.2 Nonetheless, throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many manors were still performing important governmental and legal functions. In the legal theory of the age, there were (in effect) two types of manor-level courts.3 Courts baron were manorial courts proper, usually dealing with minor agrarian infractions, the management of common land, and the transmission of customary tenancies. They sometimes heard lawsuits of various kinds (to the value of 40s.), including some torts such as trespass and defamation. In many communities, the lord of the manor also had the right to hold a court leet, technically a royal court that was franchised to a manorial lord. Leets normally oversaw the old medieval system of ‘frankpledge’, whereby neighbours nominally offered ‘pledge’ for each other’s good behaviour. But they also exercised minor administrative and criminal jurisdiction, including some regulation of brewing and alehouses, and the prosecution of petty offences and public nuisances. The degree to which this jurisdictional distinction was clearly observed remains obscure, and in northern England it may scarcely have even existed: Angus Winchester has shown that single assemblies often acted as both courts within a single

Poverty in an industrializing town: deserving hardship in Bolton, 1674–99

Abstract The question of what kinds of people were relieved by Englands Old Poor Law is one of the most pressing in early modern social history. Most of our knowledge about the social characteristics of the relieved poor comes from studies of rural communities in the south and east of the country, where old age and the problems of being ‘overcharged with children’ have been emphasized as key causes of hardship. This article uses three exceptionally detailed censuses (1674, 1686, 1699) to reconstruct the social and economic characteristics of relieved poverty in the industrializing town of Bolton (Lancashire), examining the way in which local economic conditions helped determine the configuration of poverty. It finds that family breakdown and sickness were more common characteristics of the pauper community here than old age and large families. In addition, the importance of cotton-using textile industries to the towns economy rendered it especially vulnerable to periodic economic crises, one of which, that of 1674–5, is analysed in detail here.

‘By the charitie of good people’: poverty and neighbourly support in seventeenth century Lancashire

Historians of early-modern poverty have emphasized the ways in which the poor ‘made shift’, reducing or even preventing their dependence on formal poor relief. This article looks at one aspect of that ‘economy of makeshifts’: the casual support of the poor by their neighbours. It uses evidence from a uniquely extensive archive of pauper petitions from Lancashire (1626–1710), many of which contain incidental information about strategies of making shift. The petitions suggest that neighbourly support for the needy was common in Lancashire, both through localized begging and in more stable supportive relationships. Nonetheless, the charity of neighbours could easily be exhausted, leaving those in poverty forced to call upon the more formalized support of the Poor Law.

Agrarian Social Structure in the Central Lake District, c. 1574–1830: The Fall of the ‘Mountain Republic’?

Abstract Many social commentators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably those influenced by Romanticism, were keen to highlight the historical stability of agrarian life in the northern uplands. Founded on the supposed existence of an egalitarian ‘republic’ of smallholding yeomen, this stability was then contrasted to the apparently inexorable erosion of the economic position of such farmers around 1800. The present article uses records from the central Lakeland manor of Grasmere (with a comparison with the neighbouring manor of Langdale) to explore the agrarian social structure of the uplands between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It argues that while a stable core of farmers can be found in the early modern period, there is also clear evidence of greater social differentiation amongst the customary tenantry by the third quarter of the eighteenth century, well before the process began to be noticed by social commentators and Romantic writers.