Poor Relief and Community in Hadleigh, Suffolk, 1547-1600 extract

Table of Contents

1 The context of poor relief in Hadleigh

2 Hadleigh’s system of assistance

3 Recipients of relief and their households

4 The care and training of poor children

5 Aid to ill, handicapped and elderly people

6 Why?

Extract from Poor Relief and Community in Hadleigh, Suffolk, 1547-1600

Taken from the Introduction

This book describes how Hadleigh, Suffolk, a small town lying nine miles west of Ipswich, responded to the needs of its poor residents between 1547 and 1600. In that period, the leaders of this cloth-manufacturing centre developed and operated an exceptionally comprehensive and expensive system of poor relief for some of its 2,400–3,300 inhabitants. By the 1590s they were running the most complex array of help offered by any English town, one that we may still admire today. Hadleigh’s economy was dominated by its wealthy clothiers, middling-scale entrepreneurs who organised and financed the various steps necessary to the production of heavy woollen broadcloths. They hired and paid the carders, spinners, weavers and finishers and then sent many of their cloths to London or Ipswich for export to the continent. Clothiers also held political power within the town, serving as the Chief Inhabitants who made decisions about a wide array of urban matters. They also chose officers for the town and its market, the administration of poor relief and even the parish. Attitudes towards charitable assistance in Hadleigh were influenced by the preaching of its early Protestant rector, who argued that a primary obligation of a Christian community was to attend to the needs of the poor. The prosperity of the clothiers coupled with the poverty of many of their workers, the authority and concerns of the Chief Inhabitants, and the Christian charitable message were among the factors that contributed to Hadleigh’s willingness to offer aid to many needy people. Hadleigh’s system of relief, providing individual assistance to at least 603 residents between 1579 and 1596, included multiple components. Most of the help was given to people living in their own homes. The largest group, people who were poor but could usually manage on their own earnings, received aid only occasionally, in the form of cloth, clothing, fuel or cash. Others were supported during periods of special need – such as an illness – or only after death, if their families could not pay for a decent burial. A smaller set of poor or handicapped people received regular weekly payments at a level dependent upon their ability to earn part of what they needed to survive. Boarding formed a different type of aid, in which a person needing help would be cared for by another household, with expenses met by local officers. This approach was used especially for young orphans and children from troubled poor families, but also sometimes for adults temporarily unable to look after themselves owing to illness or injury. More than half of those who boarded others were themselves recipients of poor relief: the town’s assistance thus filled two social needs at the same time. A third form of relief involved entering a residential institution. The town operated two sets of almshouses, endowed with land by charitable benefactors, in which 32 elderly poor lived rent-free while receiving a weekly cash allowance plus firewood and occasional gifts of household goods. Certainly by 1589, and possibly as early as 1574, Hadleigh was running an institution that was sometimes termed a hospital but was more accurately labelled a workhouse. It provided residential care, a disciplined setting for labour, training in basic skills (preparing woollen thread and knitting stockings) and in some cases punishment for the 30 poor children and idle young people sent to it. The town also paid to have orphans placed with another family and arranged positions for slightly older children as servants or apprentices, as well as opening public employment to needy men and women ...

As well as administering residential institutions for the poor, Hadleigh’s Chief Inhabitants were also helping a wider range of people than was true elsewhere. Most interesting was the town’s willingness to assist illegitimate children, youngsters from dysfunctional families and some married adults of working age ...

To pay for the forms of aid Hadleigh’s Chief Inhabitants were able to draw upon multiple sources of income: rents from endowed properties they held in effect as charitable trustees for the poor; current gifts and bequests, some distributed over a period of years or set up in perpetuity; and poor rates, compulsory local taxes ...

Poor relief officials did not insist that extended families assume sole responsibility for their own poorer members: a third of the recipients of relief had local relatives who were prosperous enough to be assessed for rates. The assistance provided by the town was supplemented by private gifts and bequests, and it reinforced the informal help provided by friends and neighbours. While Hadleigh was thus unusually responsive to the needs of the poor, its Chief Inhabitants were also concerned about idleness, vagrancy and the cost of relief. From the mid 1570s they worked to maintain good order and prevent needy immigrants from settling in the community; they named responsible local residents to monitor their neighbourhoods, drawing to public attention any troublemakers and poor new arrivals. In the 1590s the town’s workhouse had a dual function: not only did it take in children and teenagers for training but its master was required to accept people picked up on the street as idlers and vagrants. He was to force all the residents to work, punishing them if they did not; the town purchased locks and chains for a few recalcitrant inmates in their late teens and early 20s. The Chief Inhabitants were also prepared to spend money on expelling poor people from Hadleigh before they had lived there long enough to qualify for relief, and they demanded bonds to ensure that children born in the town or newcomers to it would not become a charge on poor relief funds ...

An intriguing feature of Hadleigh’s system of poor relief is that it lacked legal authority ... The self-appointed and self-perpetuating Chief Inhabitants had no legal standing as governors of the town, yet there is no indication that Hadleigh’s residents questioned their authority, even when they appointed poor relief officers and levied poor rates. Their own personal status and willingness to devote time and energy to the community’s wellbeing apparently led to acceptance of their orders. Hadleigh’s experience illustrates many of the challenges and solutions seen in other early modern English communities as they addressed the issues of poverty. While it was generally accepted that some kind of poor relief was necessary, on grounds of both Christian charity and practical expediency, Hadleigh did not provide assistance to people other than its own established residents. Further, although those people who were physically unable to labour were supported and some temporarily unemployed clothworkers were evidently helped, the Chief Inhabitants stopped short of offering generic assistance to the families of men who could not find work. People were encouraged to remain in their own homes as long as possible and to be part of familiar community patterns even when living in an almshouse. For those who needed short-term care, boarding at the town’s expense filled the gaps in an older network of informal assistance generated throughout the community; provision of longer-term boarding ensured that orphans and certain children would receive ongoing care. Moreover, tax-based relief was seen as a supplement to the many forms of voluntary charity: the beneficence of wealthier families served to lessen the burden of obligatory rates. Although Parliamentary legislation played an enabling role in the sixteenth-century history of poor relief, Hadleigh’s Chief Inhabitants operated almost entirely on their own as they struggled with how to implement genuine religious and social concern for the poor, how to maintain order and discipline within their community and how to do all this without unsustainable expense ...

This book offers a unique analysis of poor relief within a community context during the second half of the sixteenth century. For no other town in England can we trace in such detail a network of care, looking not only at who received and provided assistance but also at patterns of aid across a span of years and at how help was given to household units ...

The study is methodologically important, furnishing an example of what may be termed ‘the new demographic history’. Whereas the first generation of computer-based studies of population and related events provided important factual information about general patterns in early modern England, they were sometimes criticised on two grounds: for failing to represent individual human experiences, and for their limited ability to identify the causes of the patterns they documented. An in-depth case study based upon rich and diverse records can address both of these issues. For Hadleigh we can integrate quantitative material from poor relief accounts and the parish register, analysed after entry into computer databases, with narrative sources to trace the lives of specific residents. Particularly significant is that we can go beneath the surface to explore not only what happened but also why people acted as they did: most notably, the concerns that motivated the leaders of this community to provide help for their needier neighbours.