Nigel Goose

Poverty, old age and gender in nineteenth-century England : the case of Hertfordshire

This article examines the relative incidence of poverty among the elderly in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire with special reference to gender. Both national and local sources are employed to highlight the particular difficulties experienced by the elderly, male poor under the New Poor Law, and the short and long term problems they faced as a result of seasonal unemployment and an overstocked labour market. For elderly women, the extent to which their poverty was relieved by employment in cottage industry, almshouse accommodation, the continuing receipt of out-relief and a higher incidence of family support are examined to provide an assessment of the manner in which poverty was gendered in the nineteenth century.

The rise and decline of philanthropy in early modern Colchester: the unacceptable face of mercantilism? ∗

The parameters of poverty in early modern England are clearly established. From a low starting point „background‟ or „shallow‟ poverty increased from the early sixteenth century through to about 1650, stabilizing in the second half of the seventeenth century. „Deep‟ poverty rose to circa 1620, declining thereafter. The impact of population growth was crucial: underway by the 1520s, possibly earlier, it continued into the 1650s with only one temporary respite in the late 1550s. England‟s population roughly doubled to 5.5 million by 1656, followed by slight decline and stagnation through to 1700. Economic growth was relatively modest, and hence the demand for labour did not keep pace with the growing supply. Despite expansion, there was no dramatic advance in agricultural productivity, and hence food prices rose roughly six fold 1500-1640. Nominal wage rates rose more slowly and real wages were eroded, to as little as 40 per cent of their value by the mid-seventeenth century, despite some amelioration in the form of payments in kind, customary perquisites, access to smallholdings or common rights and perhaps—in some areas—increased family employment. By the later sixteenth century the problems of unand underemployment continually exercised national and local governments, while the growth of vagrancy was a serious cause for concern. Towns were particularly severely affected, and probably felt these pressures earlier and more intensely than the countryside. While the few surviving local returns of recipients of regular poor relief give a figure of the order of 5 per cent of the urban population, perhaps 20 per cent were vulnerable to the economic dislocation that could accompany a slump in international trade, dearth or plague.

The Making of King's Lynn : a documentary survey

Introduction The Foundation of the Town The Salting Industry The Tolls of Lynn Religious Houses in Lynn Saint Margarets Priory Churches and Chapels of Lynn Monastic Properties Topagraphy Fleets, Quays, Staiths, the River Front Building Arrangements Amenities and Services Poll Tax Daily Life, Clothing, etc Wills and Probates Trade in the Town and the Hinterland The Jews in Lynn Lynn Merchants Gilds Hanseatic Merchants Customs and Overseas Trade The Bishop and the Town Corporation and Town Government Town Courts, including Coroner Murage, Defences of the town Lynn, the Crown and the Outside World

English pre-industrial urban economies

In an attempt to define how pre-industrial towns are differentiated from their counterparts in industrial societies, some (though not all) historians have emphasized the unspecialized nature of their economies. Of Elizabethan Leicester, Hoskins wrote ‘The special interest of Leicester to the economic and social historian is that it had no industry worth speaking of. Here was a community of some three thousand people, the largest and wealthiest town between the Trent and the Thames, which had no obvious means of livelihood…Towns which had no marked industrial character (such as Leicester) greatly outnumbered those which had (such as Coventry).’ Recently this argument has been developed by Patten, who writes ‘far from having “no obvious means of livelihood” at the time, Leicester had an urban superstructure as typical of Stuart and Restoration towns as it was of Elizabethan towns. The activities of building, brewing, provisioning, tailoring, weaving and the like in pre-industrial Leicester supported the basic economy of every pre-industrial town. Specialities in the manufactures of the day—usually textiles, iron and leather goods—were invariable additions rather than the basis of their economies… To look at the pre-industrial town is thus to look at an unspecialised economy… In dealing with the non-specialised urban economy we are dealing with the majority of English pre-industrial towns.’ The case is forcefully put, but does it stand up to scrutiny?

Accommodating the elderly poor: almshouses and the mixed economy of welfare in England in the second millennium

This article provides an outline of the development of the English almshouse across the second millennium, and its place within the broader spectrum of social welfare. It discusses the evolution of the almshouse into its modern form, as privately endowed housing dedicated to the elderly poor. It presents the results of new research that provides a firmer quantitative foundation for consideration of the role of the almshouse in welfare history and revisits the issue of the mixed economy of welfare to demonstrate the complex relationship between public and private provision.

EVALUATING THE 1881 CENSUS TRANSCRIPTION: A PILOT SURVEY OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Introduction This survey arose from an invitation received to attend a workshop at the University of Essex held 17-18 September 1998, hosted by the staff of the History Data Service of the UK Data Archive, to discuss the uses of the 1881 census transcription which had been coordinated by the Genealogical Society of Utah (hereafter GSU) in alliance with the Federation of Family History Societies. This invaluable resource, now held by the History Data Service, was being supplied on request to historians in datasets of various sizes to facilitate both teaching and research, and the main purpose of the meeting was to determine the needs of end-users with a view to discovering the most appropriate ways of developing and distributing the data. Somewhat surprisingly, there appeared to be minimal concern about the quality of the transcription, despite the fact that there was significant anecdotal testimony that should have given historical researchers cause for concern. As the coordinator of an ongoing project to work with family historians on computerising the 1851 and 1891 Hertfordshire censuses, I had received numerous personal communications concerning the 1881

Urban demography in pre-industrial England: what is to be done?

For over thirty years demography has featured prominently on the urban history agenda. As long ago as 1963, in an article subtitled ‘On broadening the relevance and scope of urban history’, Eric Lampard emphasized that ‘An autonomous social history ought to begin with a study of population: its changing distribution in time and space’. In 1968 Leo Schnore suggested concentration upon ‘the demographic and ecological aspects of urban life’, according demography the number one priority. Leading British urban historians and historical geographers repeated such injunctions in the 1970s, emphasizing how little was known about even the most basic aspects of pre-industrial urban populations and how far British researchers lagged behind their continental colleagues in the field of urban demography. Unfortunately the response of the last generation of researchers to these precepts has been decidedly muted, and pre-industrial urban demography in England remains in its infancy.

The English Poor Law, 1531-1782.

Introduction 1. Defining strategies 2. Implementing the law 3. The failure of reform 4. The law in context Appendix: statutes relating to the poor Notes Select Bibliography Additional bibliographical note Index.