A Caring County?

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: Hertfordshire in context

Steven King

2 The Old Poor Law and medicine in and around Hertford, 1700–1834

Robert Dimsdale

3 Caring for the sick and poor in eighteenth-century Royston

Carla Herrmann

4 Madhouses of Hertfordshire, 1735–1903

Gary Moyle

5 Caring for the poor in East Hertfordshire c.1620–50

Alan Thomson

6 Pensions and the care of the elderly in Ashwell, 1670–1770

David Short

7 Looking after the poor: Cheshunt parish workhouse in the mid-eighteenth century

Sheila White

8 The Old Poor Law in a rural North Hertfordshire parish, 1731–1831

Helen Hofton

Introduction to Chapters 9–11: 203 A note on the history of the London Foundling Hospital

Jennifer Sherwood

9 Foundling Hospital children at nurse in Hertfordshire in the eighteenth century

David Allin

10 Prudence West and the Foundling Hospital in Barnet, 1757–1771

Yvonne Tomlinson

11 The last years of the Foundling Hospital – Berkhamsted, 1935–55

Jennifer Sherwood

12 Hertfordshire's relationship with certified industrial schools, 1857–1933

Gillian Gear

Extract from A Caring County?

Taken from Chapter 5 Caring for the poor in East Hertfordshire c.1620–50 by Alan Thomson

The poor received care and support in a number of different ways in the mid-seventeenth century. Firstly there were the products of the medieval and post-medieval charities, whose benefactors specified the purposes to which the charities should be put, which might include hand-outs of cash or in kind at specified times, support for the building and maintenance of almshouses or income from grants of land aimed at specific groups, such as poor widows.¹ In theory these charities were perpetual, in contrast, secondly, to the one-off payments that arose from the bequests in individual wills whose authors specified the amount of their estate that should be distributed, usually to the poor of their own parish.² Thirdly, there were the charitable collections, often on a weekly basis, through the poor box in the parish church, which were seldom recorded in the churchwardens' accounts. These were sometimes supplemented by charitable giving on feast days such as Christmas or Easter, when either a special collection was made for the poor or hospitality was extended from the wealthy to others in the wider community.³ These were also seldom recorded except in the detailed accounts of the great estates, churchwardens, traders or businessmen. However, from the late sixteenth century there was, fourthly, provision for a parish poor rate to be levied on the better-off members of the community to support the poorer, which was often raised only in years of particular hardship.⁴ These were increasingly recorded in the accounts of the overseers of the poor. Lastly, in an emergency which had arisen through harvest failure or high bread prices specific funds were raised locally, as was the case in the early 1630s...

The grain crisis and poor relief in East Hertfordshire in the early 1630s

In 1629 and 1630 there were two consecutive poor harvests, that of the latter year being 50 per cent deficient across England. This had devastating effects on the poor, whose diet included large quantities of bread. Charles I, who was ruling without parliament, having dismissed it in 1629, resurrected the Jacobean device of the Book of Orders. These were instructions, issued to all local magistrates, on how to cope with bread shortages and mass poverty. They involved the local JPs, in their divisions of the shire, controlling local markets, trying to provide a variety of bread grains at an affordable price to the poor and raising poor rates to provide a local subsidy. They were then required to report back to the king's Privy Council, the main executive arm of government, in principle once a month, on a variety of issues associated with poverty and law and order. All seventeenth-century governments feared revolution from below, notably when hunger drove the poor to desperate measures. The Book of Orders was therefore just as much about controlling the poor as feeding them.⁵

The device laid down by Charles I and his ministers for achieving these aims was the monthly meeting of magistrates in their divisions. There are in the National Archives more than 100 reports of these monthly meetings from various parts of the county that were sent to the Privy Council; many of them are from East Hertfordshire.⁶ The County and Borough Quarter Sessions for Hertford and the local parish accounts also contain some details of how magistrates tried to carry out the orders of central government within their jurisdictions and how parishioners coped with the problems that arose. The magistrates succeeded in preventing the London corn chandlers from buying in markets less than 35 miles from London as a measure to protect the local poor. This meant that the chandlers were banned from the markets in Hertford and Ware but could buy grain in Royston. Nevertheless, in the period from September 1630 to April 1631, the price of wheat, normally about 3s 4d per bushel, trebled in price to 10s per bushel. In London it even rose as high as 12s 4d. This resulted in a major crisis in the county, as reflected in reports coming from different parishes and divisions in the first six months of 1631.⁷

 In Ware the constables, overseers and churchwardens, the local parish officials with responsibility towards the poor, reported to the JPs for the hundred of Braughing, of which Ware was a part, that they had £30 of stock accumulated to set the poor on work (a parish stock was a stock of raw materials and tools with which the poor could manufacture goods to be sold to pay for their upkeep). They had managed to get three young people apprenticed but had nine more for whom they still had to find a master. They normally had £80 from the annually levied poor rate, but had collected more than that since the previous September. A total of £93 had been raised and bread corn was sold to the poor at 4s a bushel.⁸ The local inhabitants had given a further £26 at Christmas, which had been distributed to the poor to buy essentials. As Ware was on the Old North Road, the main route between London and York, its inhabitants also had to keep watch for sturdy rogues and vagabonds coming through the parish, 13 of whom had been rounded up, punished and given passes to go elsewhere. The town was clearly well organised and had enough wealth to look after its own poor, but was not going to countenance providing for the vagrant poor from other parishes. Standon and Braughing, in contrast, distributed bread to the poor each Sunday.⁹

 Most of these reports were responses to particular questions that were laid down in the Book of Orders. Magistrates had to show they were responding to the crisis not only by subsidising bread but also by punishing rogues. They were asked if there were unlicensed alehouses, of which Ware had three, and whether local charities were providing sums according to the details of bequests. The parish officials of Stortford claimed not only to have no unlicensed alehouses but also that they had a stock to set the poor on work to make cloth out of hemp and flax: 22 poor spinners had been set to work and 24 children apprenticed. In Sawbridgeworth, too, there were no unlicensed alehouses and, moreover, 10s had been raised from fines on drunkards. These sums were used to help the poor, as was a stock of corn which was sold to the poor at the old price of 3s 4d a bushel. Gabriel Whittacre and his wife and daughter were said 'to live idly and are hedge-breakers', but otherwise all the poor were set to work. For all these towns, keeping the local poor busy by making them work and providing them with cheap bread would prevent disorder breaking out. Keeping out the poor from other areas was equally important as the weather improved and men sought work elsewhere; the Braughing divisional JPs punished 16 such people in April, 30 in May and more than 50 in June.¹⁰

In May 1631 the JPs reported to the Privy Council on the grain supply in the area. They showed that a whole variety of bread grains was still available, including 552 quarters of wheat and 424 quarters of barley, as well as rye, meslin (mixed wheat and rye sown and harvested together) and oats. The JPs Thomas Leventhorpe of Sawbridgeworth and Sir John Watts of Mardocks, near Ware, had also accumulated 374 quarters of malt, made from barley, which was an essential ingredient of ale. In the following September the High Sheriff, John Boteler, reported to the Privy Council, among other things, that four rogues had been punished at Standon and 10s given weekly to the poor along with five dozen loaves of bread. He had received a certificate the month before from Sir Thomas Dacres of Cheshunt and Sir Richard Lucy of Broxbourne, JPs for the hundred of Hertford, which painted an optimistic picture in terms of falling grain prices and the availability of work at harvest time. They claimed that there were then no able-bodied poor, only the old and infirm. One reason was that 134 poor children, who would otherwise have been a burden on the rates, had been apprenticed, their new masters having to provide food and accommodation for them. Child labour was not seen to be a problem: the magistrates commented that, as for those who were not yet fit for service, 'order taken for the setting of them to such worke as they are able to undergoe according to their severall years towards their better maintenance & provision of living'. In another report this view was reiterated: those not old enough to be apprenticed 'we have caused to be set to spinning and such small work as is most meet for them, according to the tenderness of their age, that idleness may not fasten in them'.¹¹

1. For an overview, see W.K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660. A study of the changing pattern of English social aspirations (New York, 1959).
2. On post-mortem giving see S. Hindle, '"Good, godly and charitable uses": endowed charity and the relief of poverty in rural England, c.1550–1750', in A. Goldgar and R. Frost (eds), Institutional culture in early modern society (Leiden, 2004), pp. 164–88.
3. On inter vivos charitable giving see I.W. Archer, 'The charity of early modern Londoners', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12 (2002), pp. 240–73.
4. On the early history of poor rates see S. Hindle, On the parish? The micro-politics of poor relief in rural England c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 229–56.
5. W.G. Hoskins, 'Harvest fluctuations and English economic history 1620–1759', Agricultural History Review, XVI, Pt I (1968), pp. 17–18; B.W. Quintrell, 'Making of Charles I's Book of Orders', English Historical Review, XCV (1980), pp. 553–72; P. Slack, 'Books of Orders: the making of English social policy 1577–1631',Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 30 (1980), pp. 2–4.
6. TNA SP16 State Papers Domestic for the reign of Charles I.
7. J. Larkin (ed.) Stuart proclamations Vol. II, royal proclamations of King Charles I 1625–1646 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 271–3, 298, 300–1, 304, 312–14.
8. TNA SP16/182 fo. 40; 183 fo. 37; 185 fo. 27; PC 2/40 f 289 Registers of the Privy Council.
9. TNA SP16/189 fos 80, 98.
10. TNA SP16/197 fo. 69; 203 fo. 84; 211 fo. 3; 233 fo. 90.
11. TNA SP16/189 fos 79, 80.