The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (11 page)

THE POOR

In 1570 the civic authorities in Norwich take a census of the city’s poor. When complete, there are 2,359 names on the list: about a quarter of the whole population (about 10,625 in that year).
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Not everyone included is unemployed or homeless; although 300 of them are accommodated in parish poor houses, hospital buildings, old city gatehouses or church houses, most are living in their own homes, whether these be rented or owned. Quite a few have a means of making a little money, but others are wholly impoverished. Some are disabled, some mentally unstable or ‘lunatic’, some in extreme old age. What they all have in common is that they are likely to be a burden on the community.

The poor are an unavoidable feature of Elizabethan life. In 1577 William Harrison estimates that there are 10,000 vagrants on the roads, not including the resident poor in towns and villages. In 1582 William Lambarde remarks on the increasing number of vagabonds in Kent; and in 1593 he laments that the county is ‘overspread not only with unpunished swarms of idle rogues and of counterfeit soldiers but also with numbers of poor and weak but unpitied servitors’.
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It is the same at the western end of the country. In 1600 Richard Carew writes that of the poor, ‘few shires can show more or own fewer than Cornwall’.
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He blames Ireland for sending over so many vagrants to beg in the county. The following year, Stratford-upon-Avon complains of 700 paupers in the town; and in 1602 a judge declares that there
are 30,000 ‘idle persons and masterless men’ living in London.
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Thus, whether we are talking about the urban poor or gangs of young vagrants on the roads, poverty brings us face to face with the harsher side of Elizabethan life.

Who are all these poor? William Harrison distinguishes three sorts: those who are ‘poor by impotence’ (such as the aged, blind and lame), those who are ‘poor by casualty’ (e.g. wounded soldiers) and ‘the thriftless poor’ (tramps and criminals). The first two categories he calls ‘the true poor’. The last he breaks down into those who are economic migrants, through no fault of their own; and those who choose to be vagrants and rogues. However, Harrison is atypical. Most Elizabethans don’t actually care about such differences; they are happy to describe the poor as just one big plague of wasters and thieves, for such scaremongering justifies treating them harshly and whipping them out of town.

Let us begin with the resident poor, and consider those in Norwich. No fewer than 926 of them (40 per cent) are children below the age of sixteen. For them this is a sad world: they have a significantly diminished chance of surviving to adulthood, let alone gaining an apprenticeship and a place in the community. Being poorly fed, weak and suffering from ailments such as scurvy and scald head, few masters will employ them. Of the 1,433 poor adults, about two-thirds are women, and about a quarter of these are over the age of sixty. You may think that there are more women than men because women live longer and they are widows. It comes as somewhat of a shock to realise there are just as many women who have been abandoned by their husbands. Margaret Matheu, for example, is a born-and-bred Norwich woman aged thirty-two years. Her husband Thomas Matheu left the city three years ago and she has no idea where he is. He could be dead for all she knows; but she cannot remarry while he might yet be alive. She rents a room from William Joy, receives no alms (parish charity) and is described as ‘very poor’, having nothing but a few pennies per week for spinning ‘white warp’ (yarn).
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In a similar state is Alice Reade, forty, whose husband justified his abandoning her by claiming that he was already married to someone else and therefore their marriage was invalid. He left her with three children and a baby at her breast.
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She rents a room and lives from spinning; her nine-year-old son also spins, as does her fourteen-year-old daughter. They receive no alms and are ‘very poor’. Perhaps even more lamentable
is Helen, the wife of John Williams; she is heavily pregnant, about to give birth and cannot work. Her husband has disappeared off to Cambridge and left her with no money.
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If you want to see what it is really like to be poor in an Elizabethan city, visit the property called Shipdams in the Norwich parish of St Martin at the Bale. It is a large old house, the rooms tenanted by a number of destitute people. In one you have Richard Starkyn, sixty-six, an unemployed cobbler, and his seventy-six-year-old wife, Elizabeth, who is too sick to work. They have alms of just 2d per week and are ‘very poor’. In the next room you have Cecily Barwic, fifty-four, a widow who spins white warp and is also ‘very poor’. Then there is Margaret Harrison, sixty, who lives by knitting and helping to wash dirty linen and looks after her nine-year-old son, who also knits every day. In the room next to her lives Agnes, sixty-eight, whose husband Thomas Gose is in the hospital; she spins white warp for a living, receives 1½d per week in alms and is ‘very poor’. In the next room there is Agnes’s daughter Margaret, twenty-eight, the wife of Thomas Collins, hatter, who has abandoned her and gone to London and sends no help to her in her poverty; she knits to keep herself and her two daughters. They receive no alms and when the inspector visits he finds a prostitute in their bed. In the next room there is Christopher Smythe, forty, an unemployed hatter with only one leg, and his wife Dorothy, thirty-eight, who spins white warp, and their two daughters who are both learning to spin with Widow Mallerd; they receive 3d alms per week between them. Next is Robert Haygat, forty, an unemployed brewer, and his wife Margery, twenty-five, who has a breastfed baby and spins white warp; they receive no alms and are ‘very poor’. Finally in this property there are three old widows: Katherine Mallerd, sixty-nine, who teaches Christopher Smythe’s daughters to spin, receives no alms and is ‘very poor’; Alice Colton, eighty, who spins, but is lame in her hand, receives no alms and is ‘very poor’; and Eme Stowe, eighty, who is lame in one arm, receives 2d per week in alms, but has to look after her daughter’s eleven-year-old illegitimate son. The two of them go about the streets begging together. That is what the urban poor are like: old, lame, sick, impotent, abandoned and desperate. They have all developed strategies for survival – from keeping younger people in the household, to prostitution and laundry help. You might notice a blind man in his fifties being led around the streets of Norwich by a twelve-year-old boy, an orphan, whom he provides with food.
Some women make 2s per week from caring for the sick and dying. This is a dangerous occupation, especially if they have infectious diseases such as smallpox or plague. But if as much as 6s is on offer for a week’s attendance on a plague victim, poor women willingly take on the task.
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Whereas the resident poor are mostly women, three-quarters of the itinerant poor are single men. They are inevitably much younger: two-thirds are below the age of twenty-five. One group of twenty beggars in Crompton, Lancashire, in 1597 includes twelve boys under the age of fifteen and three under the age of five. The cause of their begging is the famine of 1594–7; their parents have probably starved to death. Alternatively, look at poor Alice Morrice at about the same time. Born at Borden, Kent, she is sent at about the age of ten to be a servant in the house of her uncle. All is well until her father dies and her uncle throws her out. Orphaned, with only a small amount of money left to her by her father, she goes from town to town. When the money has all gone, she can do nothing but join those who beg or steal.
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The Devon parish of Morebath sees several ‘poor walking women’ give birth in outhouses and barns in the early 1560s.
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In London in 1583, ‘the poor lie in the streets upon pallets of straw … or else in the mire and dirt … [and] are suffered to die in the streets like dogs or beasts without any mercy or compassion’.
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The fundamental problem is that of population expansion. The number of people in England has been increasing since the second decade of the century, when it was 2.4 million.
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As we have seen, by 1600 it has risen to 4.11 million; yet no provision has been made for the extra people. With the land clearances making way for sheep grazing and parkland, there is now even less agricultural land to support them. When you also consider the harvest failures and the downturns in certain industries, you can see why there are so many beggars on the highways. Walk into Canterbury, Faversham and Maidstone and talk to the poor there. Some have travelled several hundred miles, coming from Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumberland and Cheshire. They have not travelled from the northern towns, but from rural areas, where their crops have died and they have been unable to pay their ever-increasing rents, with the result that they have been evicted. They have come south hoping for a better life.
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But when they get there they are treated like outcasts.

Unless you dress well, you yourself are likely to be treated as a vagrant
wherever you go. Property owners are scared of strangers. They deliberately conflate them with the ‘Egyptians’ or gypsies who have been travelling in England for decades. Although gypsies form a small percentage of the itinerant poor, they are a potent symbol of why such people are considered undesirable. Gypsies are considered synonymous with thieves: it is said that they travel eighty in a band and break up into groups of five or six to go searching for food and things to steal.
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In reality, they travel in small family groups; but people are not interested in the mitigating circumstances. The Egyptians Act of 1530 declares that, as gypsies have no means of making a living except palmistry, telling fortunes and robbery, they must abjure the realm. This law is confirmed by Elizabeth in 1563 in ‘An Act for further Punishment of Vagabonds calling themselves Egyptians’.
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This states that anyone even found in the company of gypsies may be hanged.

It is in this context that the law-makers turn their attention to other itinerants. A whole genre of literature springs up on the topic. The books are sensational: they purport to offer insights into the criminal world that lurks in every town, and describe in detail the sinful, filthy miscreants and their strategies for thieving and murdering the good citizens. The hatred that once applied just to the bands of gypsies is now transferred on to the roaming dispossessed and starving youths. In 1572 parliament passes ‘An Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds and for the relief of the Poor and Impotent’.
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This states that ‘a vagabond above the age of fourteen years shall be … grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron of the compass of an inch unless some credible person will take him into service for a year’. Additionally, a youth of eighteen who lapses into an itinerant lifestyle having previously been caught is to be hanged as a felon. Oh, merry, merry England! In 1589 things take a dramatic turn when – illogical though it may seem – the government prohibits anyone giving accommodation to these unfortunate people.
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This means that now only one family may legally inhabit a household, and the manor courts soon start to search for the ‘inmate’ poor. In 1600, in Moulsham, Essex, eight tenants are presented to the manor court for harbouring poor people. Three of them have sheltered a pauper and his wife for several months; one has given accommodation to two poor couples for six months; the others have all sheltered poor widows as well as couples. Some of the poor have been living in Moulsham for years. Nevertheless, the tenants are ordered to evict
their inmates immediately or pay a fine of £1.
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Clearly these couples and widows are far from the crowds of young males roaming and stealing. But they are poor, and the people of Moulsham fear that the financial responsibility for looking after the paupers will fall on them. Therefore they want these strangers thrown out – for the double crime of having no money and no home.

Surely Elizabethan England, with all its wit and political application, can do better than this? Eventually it does. Certain towns – Norwich is among them – start to make provision for their resident poor. Licences are occasionally issued to allow the genuinely needy to beg legally. There is also a growing recognition that the root of the problem is not the desire to be a vagrant, but poverty. It is a slow process, however. The first Elizabethan Poor Law is passed in 1563: it forces villagers and townspeople to pay towards the upkeep of the local poor, with those who refuse being handed over to JPs. In 1576 another Act orders civic authorities to keep a stock of capital items so that the poor might be set to work and in this way pay for their upkeep. Finally in 1597 Elizabeth’s government passes ‘An Act for the Relief of the Poor’.
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This piece of legislation is not as famous as the defeat of the Spanish Armada, but it is just as significant, for it establishes the means by which poor people in England are looked after for the next 237 years. From now on, overseers are to be appointed in every parish, who are to see to all the children that cannot be cared for by their parents, placing them as apprentices where appropriate. In addition, the overseers are to manage a supply of work for all those who cannot maintain themselves. And they are to tax the parishioners to provide for the poor. Note the word ‘tax’ – from this moment on, looking after the poor is a matter of secular social responsibility, paid for by local taxation; it is no longer an act of religious charity designed to improve the standing of the donor’s soul and send the rich man to Heaven. It is no longer a matter of choice. A second Act repeals all the earlier legislation for the punishment of vagabonds, and practices such as cutting holes in people’s ears cease. A third Act allows for hospitals or workhouses to be established for the accommodation of the poor. Workhouses might be spoken about with some horror in the modern world, but they mark a positive step away from the practice of evicting the homeless repeatedly until they are forced into felony and hanged. The Act of 1597, revised and reissued in 1601, does not solve all the problems overnight, but it leads to a long-term
solution. And it saves lives. If you hear it being proclaimed, it is worth pausing and reflecting that, partly because of it, the English will never again starve to death in their thousands because of a harvest failure.