The process of ‘state formation’ has emerged as one of the key narratives of early modern English history. Administrative centralization, increasing taxation, improved military capability, and the growing social monopoly of the central and county law courts have all been highlighted as crucial developments in the expansion of the power and responsibilities of the ‘state’. Of these, one of the most interesting recent approaches has defined state formation in terms of a widely conceived increase in both the scope and capabilities of the organs of governance. These organs could be central or local, with institutions as diverse as the privy council in the sixteenth century, parliament in the seventeenth, the fledgling civil service in the eighteenth century, and the county bench and the parish throughout the early modern period all finding their champions as formative ‘points of contact’, or ‘social and political space[s] through which authority was transmitted’ between ‘state’ and ‘society’.Footnote 1 This picture, which implies a definition of the state akin to what we would today call the public sector is not of course without its problems. It is uncertain whether contemporaries understood the state in its modern sense, and whilst many ‘state’ institutions were undoubtedly increasingly powerful, others such as church courts and courts leet were in decline, while at the same time, for example, the central government was actually retreating from direct intervention in the grain trade, previously one of the state's most noticeable concerns.Footnote 2
Nonetheless, the expansion of welfare provision under the Elizabethan poor law constitutes one rightly uncontested area of administrative development and growth. And in terms of the application of funds raised through taxation, backed by parliamentary statute, towards relieving poverty, the establishment of the poor law in early modern times represents a major step towards the modern idea that one of the state's crucial aims should be to provide a minimum standard of living for its citizens. Indeed, the importance of this increasing maturity is not merely that this area has become one of the defining tasks of the modern-day state, it was also a critical development in contemporary terms. According to Steve Hindle, ‘the most ubiquitous and therefore perhaps the most significant politics in early modern England were the politics of the parish, and especially those of the poor rate’.Footnote 3 Michael Braddick, meanwhile, has described the growth of formal poor relief as nothing less than ‘a dramatic development of state power’.Footnote 4 Certainly the poor law became one of the most expensive activities of late Stuart government, costing ratepayers an annual aggregate of some £400,000 in 1696 according to the Board of Trade's estimation; enough, Paul Slack has calculated, to feed nearly 5 per cent of the population for the whole year.Footnote 5
The poor law is, however, also seen as possessing additional relevance within this narrative, for the administrative needs of such a complex and wide-ranging system of social welfare necessitated the placing of considerable discretionary power – theoretically at least – in the hands of ordinary people.Footnote 6 Formal poor relief was thus one of the main fires in which the power-wielding culture of the ‘middling sort’ was forged.Footnote 7 In particular, the key space for this politics was the civil parish, within which the most important institution was the vestry working in tandem with the unpaid offices it supervised.Footnote 8 According to Hindle, parishes and townships, more so than the gentry-dominated counties, are ‘precisely the arena in which the process of governance ought … to be measured’.Footnote 9 In fact, the local, parochial officeholding culture, of which overseers of the poor were increasingly the most important representatives (at least financially), is seen by Henry French not just as a way of empowering the ‘middling sorts’, but also as instrumental in the construction of their very self-image.Footnote 10
To some degree these approaches are framed as challenges to those historians who have emphasized the role of the magistracy in the formulation of social policy and in governance in general. Hindle concludes that ‘[m]agistrates’ responsibilities in administering the Poor Law were … confined to co-ordination and audit rather than the setting of policy'.Footnote 11 In short, their role was to enforce the poor law, i.e. they were ensuring parishes collected taxes and appointed overseers; although, as Hindle himself has subsequently shown, the magistracy were key players in decision-making in those cases in which paupers or parishes petitioned them.Footnote 12 French, moreover, contrasts the declining institution of the manorial court leet with the rising status of the ecclesiastical parish, which was increasingly accorded civil functions not immediately related to its original religious purpose. In particular, French states that, while ‘[b]oth bodies were subject to scrutiny by the gentry’, they differed in that ‘the manor was the lord's jurisdiction, whereas the parish was merely overseen by the JP’. The parish, indeed, was ‘run’ by men of middling rank, who were attempting ‘to mark out a sphere of authority in which they were paramount, and not subject to the intrusive powers of lordship’.Footnote 13 This approach clearly constitutes a welcome attempt to expand on earlier historiography, most obviously Anthony Fletcher's Reform in the provinces, which was based largely on the records of the magistracy.Footnote 14 As Hindle states, few of this older generation of county administrative studies extended beyond ‘rhetorical claims about the need to study governmental processes in parishes and townships’.Footnote 15 In general then, though no one dismisses entirely the administrative role of county benches in the development of poor relief and much else, there have been markedly different emphases placed on the respective roles of the magistracy and the parish officers beneath them.
The role of justices in the formal mechanisms of poor relief was essentially set down in statute, though it also required a degree of interpretation. The first edition of Michael Dalton's Countrey justice (1618), devoted six and a half pages to the poor law, based heavily on statute law, but this also included a helpful taxonomy of different kinds of pauper (the ‘poore by impotencie’, ‘poore by casualty’, and the ‘thriftlesse poore’) which can only be understood as a guide to exercising judicial discretion.Footnote 16 By its 1643 edition, Dalton's guide devoted thirteen pages to the poor law; in the 1697 edition, this had expanded even further to encompass some twenty-seven pages of text: poor relief was a continuing, indeed an apparently increasing, area of concern for JPs. Acting out of sessions, according to the statutes, they were to supervise the appointment of suitable overseers, and the setting to work of the unemployed, both children and adults. They were to audit the accounts of overseers annually, and to decide which parishes were ‘not able to levy amongst themselves suffycient sommes of money’ for the poor, and to raise taxes on neighbouring parishes to overcome any such shortfall, ‘as the saide Justices shall thinke fitt, accordinge to the intente of this lawe’. They were to commit such persons as would not work to gaol or the house of correction. Their warrants were necessary before parish officers could distrain the goods of those who refused to pay the poor rate, and their assent was necessary before a child could be bound into an apprenticeship. Acting in sessions, statute law allowed justices to rate whole counties for the support of particular parishes, to erect cottages for the poor on common land (with the assent of the lord of the manor), and to force parents or children to maintain certain chargeable relatives.Footnote 17 The poor laws did not put immediate power in the hands of JPs to determine individual relief applications; indeed it is possible that this was why the acts of 1598 and 1601 were more successful in practice than that of 1572, which did accord such power. Rather, the acts stipulated that the churchwardens and overseers were to ‘meete together at least once everie monethe in the churche of the saide parishe, upon the Sunday in the afternoone after Divine Service, there to consider of some good course to be taken and of some meete order to be set downe in the premisses’. This is important: clearly day-to-day decisions (more properly month-to-month at this stage) as to who was to get relief were taken at the parish level. Indeed, by 1601, overseers had their own published manual, An ease for overseers of the poore, helping them to tell the deserving from the undeserving poor, although unlike Dalton's Countrey justice, it seems to have only gone to one edition.Footnote 18 However, statute law also provided a mechanism for appeal: clause six of the 1598 act, and five of the 1601, stated, importantly, that
if any person or persons shall finde themselves grieved withe any sesse or taxe or other acte done by the said churchwardens and other persons, or by the saide Justices of Peace, that then it shall be lawfull for the Justices of Peace at their Generall Quarter Sessions, or the greater number of them, to take suche order therein as to them shalbe thoughte convenient, and the same to conclude and bynde all the saide parties.Footnote 19
Thus JPs acting in sessions were given an additional appellate role across any aspect of poor law administration brought to their attention by petitioners. It is this role which provides the main source material considered in this article.
The purpose of this article is not to explore the matrices of power that determined poor law policy; its aims are rather more limited. The process of development by which England's poor law grew from tentative roots, both in statute and in genuine local initiatives, into a complex welfare system remains significantly under-researched, at least in the countryside where the vast majority of the population lived. Despite the thorough urban studies of Slack, the important work on early development by Hindle, and a plethora of parish studies, there are few broad county surveys by which our ideas about social policy development, state formation, and political participation might be tested.Footnote 20 Much archival work remains to be done on rural England before the formative history of the poor law is clear.
Our knowledge is especially sparse regarding the north of England. As a ‘peripheral’ region, the north experienced these formative processes in arguably more spectacular ways, with the conquest of the marked backwardness of such ‘dark corners of the land’ arguably one of the great triumphs of the early modern state.Footnote 21 Unfortunately, however, little is known about the early history of poor relief in the north.Footnote 22 Partly, this reflects a relative paucity of source material – notably surviving overseers' accounts – when compared to the rest of the country, but it also reflects an assumption that formal provision for the poor grew slowly in such peripheral regions. Hindle, for example, evoked an historiographical ‘consensus’ in which the ‘far north lagged well behind the south’ in the instigation of formal poor relief, though he highlighted evidence for enforcement of the statutes as early as the 1630s in remote Westmorland.Footnote 23 This also bears testament to the influence of Peter Rushton's work on the north-east, which found the implementation of the poor law ‘severely delayed in Northumberland for at least twenty years’.Footnote 24 Indeed, Rushton implied that this serious underdevelopment lasted until as late as the 1650s, stating that ‘there are few clues to parish operations’ to relieve the poor before that date. Rushton was arguing in large measure from absent evidence; moreover, he also suggested that neighbouring County Durham was much more advanced. Yet this picture of northern tardiness has been endorsed by Steve King, who has suggested that formal poor relief was ‘nascent’ in Lancashire as late as the 1670s, when parish officers of Bolton-le-Moors were compiling a census of the poor as a supposed early ‘benchmark of need’.Footnote 25
This article explores in more detail the development of formal poor relief in one county, to provide a case study of one of the crucial processes of state formation highlighted in recent historiography. Focusing on Lancashire, it not only shows that formal poor relief developed more quickly than suggestions of northern ‘backwardness’ would necessarily imply, but also that it did so as a result of a complex interplay between political ‘agents’. In particular, the experience of Lancashire serves to nuance the recent emphasis on the political agency of the ‘middling sorts’. Making particular use of a remarkably good archive of Quarter Sessions papers, this article offers an analytical narrative of the early development of poor relief in Lancashire into the second half of the seventeenth century, by which time the system was well established. It concludes by teasing out some of the implications of this story. In particular, it shows that, in Lancashire, parish and township officers were subject to considerable interference in their affairs by the county bench. Frequent appeals by parishioners to Quarter Sessions placed considerable power of arbitration into the hands of the magistracy, who were regularly called upon to judge inter- and intra-community disputes, and so became crucial formulators of poor law policy even while they shrank back from direct administration.
I
Although the poor laws of 1598 and 1601 were clearly a watershed, they came after many decades of legislation aimed at tackling the problem of poverty and the poor.Footnote 26 Rising population, price inflation, and changing social structures within both rural and urban society evidently changed the nature of poverty, both in reality and in the eyes of legislators over the course of the sixteenth century.Footnote 27 Tudor legislative attempts to organize relief of the ‘deserving’ poor saw a growing acceptance of the need to regularize and bureaucratize charitable giving on the part of wealthier householders, even before the codifying statutes of 1598 and 1601.Footnote 28 A series of statutes between 1531 and 1552 proved relatively desultory, since they lacked the crucial element of compulsion. Legislative backing for what was essentially compulsory rating for the poor finally arrived in 1563, managed by JPs, while the critical office of overseer was created in 1572. Finally, in 1576, towns were instructed to create stocks of materials with which to put the able-bodied to work. Thus, the essentials of the later system had developed by the late 1570s, and the genius of the 1598 and 1601 acts was essentially administrative. In particular, the latter acts placed the onus of relief administration on parish officers, thus freeing up justices for their more achievable role as regulators.
Central legislation is one thing, but local conformity was inevitably a rather different matter. As is well known, initiatives to create rate-based systems of poor relief took off with little or no stimulus from the centre. These were generally more advanced in urban parishes, and tend to have been found in the south and east (notably London and East Anglia) rather than the north and west.Footnote 29 Unfortunately, there is little primary source material with which to test this picture in the case of Lancashire. No parish poor accounts appear to survive from before the 1630s, so if there were pre-1598 attempts to instigate organized, rate-funded relief nothing is known of them. We can, however, bring together scattered and highly impressionistic evidence to suggest there was, at least, some rudimentary provision for the poor, however fitful and inadequate. The churchwardens of Prescot, for example, received 14d from their poor box between 1549 and 1550, hinting at an attempt to make weekly collections for the impotent as stipulated in Protector Somerset's statute of 1547.Footnote 30 In 1579, ‘consideringe the greate inconveniences which doe dailie aryse to the inhabitants of this towne by reason of the multitude of idle and loytringe persons’, the mayor of Liverpool ordered that a tax be collected under the terms of the 1576 statute ‘towardes the provisyon of suche stockes and stores within this towne as by the said statute mente and intended’.Footnote 31 To manage the stock better, the town placed its administration into the hands of four men (including two aldermen), thus creating an office akin to that of the overseer of the poor. A workhouse scheme, meanwhile, was suggested for the county in 1582 by Robert Worsley, keeper of Manchester gaol, though the proposal was seemingly abortive.Footnote 32 Returning to Prescot, there is a tantalizing reference to 2d ‘spent with staing aboute the poremans gathering’ in 1589, although there is no guarantee that this had anything to do with poor relief.Footnote 33 Similarly obscure is the tax, levied in 1593 in Sharples and recorded in the Shuttleworth accounts, ‘for the maintenance of the poore people in Ashton-under-Lyne’.Footnote 34 Nonetheless, evidence for a widespread system of poor relief in the county before 1598 is practically non-existent. Indeed, the magistrates of Lancashire and Cheshire had been specifically criticized by the lord lieutenant for their ‘remissness’ in instigating formal poor relief in 1586.Footnote 35 Meanwhile, it is suggestive that the published Quarter Sessions orders from 1590 to 1592 contain no references to parochial rates or relief, in clear contrast to those after 1601.Footnote 36 Any provision that did exist thus seems to have remained ad hoc, contingent, and locally specific.Footnote 37
II
There are clear signs of change after the statutes of 1598 and 1601. Papers of the Shuttleworth family, who held land in the Bolton and Burnley areas, contain references to a number of poor rates in the immediate aftermath of the 1598 statute. In August and September that year, the family paid a shilling per month on their Sharples properties ‘for the relieffe of the poore within the parishe of Boulton’, as well as 2s 6d a month for their lands in Rivington.Footnote 38 At the same time, the neighbouring parish of Deane took a total of 13s 10d for a period of three months.Footnote 39 In 1600, the family paid a rate of ½d per acre on their lands at Gawthorpe ‘to the power of Ightenhill’.Footnote 40 In these jurisdictions, the 1598 poor law was evidently implemented immediately, possibly reflecting the serious social crisis that afflicted the region in the 1590s.Footnote 41 Indeed, justices of Bolton division would later recall that ‘the impotent poore they have beene provided for throughout our whole division ever since 39 Eliz: and the statute in that behalfe hath been ever since more duly executed hereabout (as wee believe) then in any other place that wee know of’.Footnote 42 The fact these justices highlighted their division's own precocity cautions against extrapolating too much from the experience of the Bolton region. The record of a poor rate in Ightenhill (Whalley parish), however, reveals that they were not as unusual as they believed; indeed their claim was mirrored by a similar one from Bury parish in 1638, stating that ‘the statute for the reliefe of the poore’ had been ‘put in due execucion’ since 1601.Footnote 43 Records of the courts of Quarter Sessions for the first decade of the seventeenth century also reveal evidence of working, rate-funded poor relief in at least some areas.Footnote 44 Surviving parish account books from Prescot and Childwall record overseers being appointed in 1606 and 1611 respectively, and there is also an oblique reference to overseers of the poor in the manorial papers of remote Cartmel from as early as 1613.Footnote 45
It is unclear, at this stage, whether relief structures put in place in Lancashire were regular and formalized. There is certainly evidence of slow implementation, contestation, and compromise. In 1618, a series of articles ‘for the better enforcement of certain statutes’, almost certainly originating from the privy council, were sent to justices so as to assess whether the poor law was being fully implemented.Footnote 46 In 1626, when attempting to collect a tax for the succour of John Leighe, the parish of Eccleston faced complaints from ‘all the cottingers of the towne’ that they ‘had as much need as hee’, hinting at a fraught politics of the poor rate in a nascent system.Footnote 47 In the parishes of Rochdale and Middleton, according to a report during Charles I's Personal Rule, it was only in 1626 that the poor ‘were first restrained from wanderinge and provided for by laye’.Footnote 48 A similar report from Amounderness Hundred states that, as late as 1636, the officers of Lytham, Poulton-le-Fylde, and Bispham claimed that they ‘have noe poore people within those three parishes but they are sett on worke & sufficiently provided for within themselves without begging’.Footnote 49
Other communities adopted compromise measures between full systems of rating for the poor and older, less coercive approaches.Footnote 50 The borough of Liverpool provides one example. Meeting in the common hall on Monday 12 June 1598, the town's governors agreed to set up a house of correction, and that
the poore impotente people and children, whose names are set downe in a catalogue to be releived within this said towne, shall have licence to goe abroad within the towne, in such sorte and to suche howses within the severall stretes of the same as hereafter shalbe limitted and appointed.Footnote 51
A similar attempt to circumvent the need for regular poor rates by allowing regulated begging is evident from the Petty Sessions order made at Ormskirk in 1624.Footnote 52 This declared that the ‘needy and impotent poore’ were to ‘aske and have reasonable relieffe within this parishe’, so long as they did not beg more than once a week at the same house, or at all outside the parish, and that they were ‘orderly’. Meanwhile, there were to be no more poor rates until further notice. Indeed, this order has been interpreted by one historian as a ‘last ditch stand by opponents of the Poor Law’, although another possibility could be that this was an attempt to claw back the cost of relief after the famine of 1623.Footnote 53 Even in the 1630s, localized begging was tolerated by justices – in the manner allowed in the 1598 statute but not that of 1601, i.e. in the pauper's home parish – in the Liberties of Cartmel and Furness, where several parishes reported in November 1637 that paupers were allowed to ‘goe abrood’ amongst their neighbours so long as they did not ‘wander out’.Footnote 54 Indeed, nearly half the parishes and townships in North Lonsdale were still in 1636 using a system of ‘billeting’, in which paupers were tabled in consenting households rather than receiving pensions.Footnote 55 Thus voluntary, but organized, charity was used as a substitute for rates, a compromise akin to that found in Somerset in the 1600s, where paupers were assigned to individual households from which they would regularly beg alms.Footnote 56
Whatever the state of poor relief in Lancashire at the start of the 1620s, the systems in place proved woefully inadequate to deal with the economic and social crisis in the first half of that decade. According to the most detailed estimates, around 5 per cent of the county's population died as a direct result of the famine of 1623.Footnote 57 This catastrophe seems to have prompted Assize judges to enforce fortnightly divisional meetings in which JPs could direct the ‘mayntaynaunce of the pore, and other matters concerninge the good of the countrie’.Footnote 58 Memories of the famine possibly goaded magistrates and parishes into more regular use of redistributive taxation to fund poor relief, but it is impossible to be certain since the Quarter Sessions recognizance files in which poor law petitions are stored, thereby supplying the fullest evidence of early practice, do not survive before 1626.
The most detailed evidence of early practices is supplied by reports from Lancashire JPs to the privy council in response to the second Caroline Book of Orders, issued in January 1631.Footnote 59 The Book stipulated that the poor should be relieved and regulated and that justices should meet monthly within their ‘divisions’ to do likewise. This was to be enforced by a royal commission of all privy councillors, and reports to the commission from divisional JPs in Lancashire suggest broad compliance.Footnote 60 Many returns are stereotyped, and their obscure and placatory language has left some historians extremely sceptical of their real value.Footnote 61 Nonetheless, many, if by no means a majority, of reports provide much useful detail and their contents can be used to characterize the 1630s as a decade of key advances towards comprehensive implementation. Returns containing detailed information suggest that the poor law was, by the 1630s, well established in some areas and becoming so in others. In Rochdale, for example, it was reported that ‘there hath bene everie yeare … [since 1628] an annuall taxation of at least towe hundred pounds for reliefe of the impotent’, an impressive level of redistribution at this stage.Footnote 62 Justices of Poulton-le-Fylde division reported in August 1636 on provision of poor relief in some detail in Kirkham parish, listing those ‘aged & impotent poore people’ receiving weekly doles that year.Footnote 63 The list shows a well-established system of poor relief, with eight pensioners plus ‘Widdowe Hodgson & 2 young children not fitt to bee bound apprentice’, who ‘hath a house provided for her by the said overseers & churchwardens, & maneteineth her selfe by her worke without any weekly allowance’. Two pensioners received 12d per week, a sizeable allowance for the 1630s, three took home 10d a week, while the remaining three made do with 8d, giving a mean of 9¾d per week.
Most impressive was the list compiled in 1638 of apparently all the pensioners in Lonsdale Hundred.Footnote 64 Recording the names and weekly doles of sixty-one individuals across the hundred, north and south of Morecambe Sands, the document represents an impressive feat of data compilation requiring considerable effort by local justices. The mean weekly amount received by the fifty-nine pensioners whose dole is legible was, at 5.4d, considerably lower than that in Kirkham. Even so, such pensions are still not significantly below those cited by Tim Wales for North Walsham (Norfolk), where a weekly dole of 6d was the norm in 1636.Footnote 65 Hence the north-west need not necessarily be categorized as ‘parsimonious’ at this point.Footnote 66 Indeed, Lonsdale Hundred, and particularly that part ‘north of the Sands’, constituted Lancashire's most isolated region, and the fact that each constituent parish was distributing pensions by 1638 is revealing. Moreover, there were similarly robust administrative structures in place in (yet more remote) Kendal Ward in Westmorland, although the amounts disbursed were lower in the more northern county.Footnote 67
As suggested, there is also evidence of the spread, as well as merely the existence, of formal poor relief in the 1630s. The volume of petitions in the county's Quarter Sessions papers steadily increased from the late 1620s to 1642, albeit with a major peak during the dearth of 1637–8. There were also intense drives to apprentice out poor children, with such projects reported in Rochdale division in 1626 and 1628, in Blackburn Hundred in 1634, and in an unnamed parish (almost certainly Whalley) in 1637.Footnote 68 Some of the best evidence for the entrenchment of poor relief during Charles I's Personal Rule comes, however, from the northern part of Lonsdale Hundred.Footnote 69 As noted, several parishes in the Furness and Cartmel districts adopted a system whereby paupers were ‘billeted’ out to willing host families via a scheme that was, of course, rather different to the framework of relief stipulated by statute law. In August 1636, billeting appears to have been widespread in North Lonsdale: eight out of nineteen parishes and townships surveyed used this arrangement rather than poor rates as the preferred method of relief. Indeed, some townships were impressively energetic in placing paupers out to hosts: Broughton-in-Cartmel relieved thirty-eight paupers in this way, Allithwaite thirty-nine and Holker another thirty-eight. The other side of this coin, however, is that even in the most remote part of Lancashire, poor rates had been established in most parishes by 1636 at the latest and, over time, billeting was eclipsed by moves to relieve the poor with pensions in remaining communities. When a similar report was made the following November, only one of the original eight, Kirkby Ireleth, still relied wholly on billeting.Footnote 70 Hawkshead, which had put out eleven paupers to hosts in 1636, certified the following year ‘that they doe provide for xiii poore people by way of bilittinge and all the rest of the poore is provided for by way of sessment and is not suffered to wander’. In August 1638, the parish was supporting five pensioners, each receiving either 4d or 6d per week.Footnote 71 Thus within two years, and amidst a serious dearth, the last vestiges of non-compliance in Lancashire's most remote quarter had been expunged.Footnote 72
This picture of gradual development is supported by a quantitative analysis of pauper petitions to Quarter Sessions. Assuming that the existence of a petition for relief presupposes at least some enforcement of the poor law in the named parish, petitioning can provide a blunt quantitative measure of the spread of formal poor relief. Too much should not be made of these figures, but it is at least interesting that of sixty Lancashire parishes, some twenty-four (40·0 per cent) had been mentioned in pauper petitions by 1635, while thirty-seven (61·7 per cent) had been by 1642, and fifty (83·3 per cent) had been by 1655.Footnote 73 Indeed, at the Restoration, all but five (fifty-five, or 91·7 per cent) of Lancashire's parishes had seen a petition at Quarter Sessions relating to poor relief. Most of the ‘missing’ parishes were in North Lonsdale, where it seems likely that infrequent appearances at Quarter Sessions owed more to distance and the natural barrier of Morecambe Bay than the non-existence of formal poor relief. The extent to which evidence for a greater urgency towards putting the poor law into active use in the county reflects a change in response to central direction is unclear. Obviously, one response to pressure from the privy council, especially given the geographical distances involved, was simply to report that all was well and that relief policy was progressing satisfactorily. On the other hand, direct reports of large drives to apprentice poor children and a transition from licensed begging and billeting to tax-funded pensions in North Lonsdale were significant developments.Footnote 74 Again it is uncertain whether this was a result of a new resolve in the 1630s or merely the continuation of a longer period of incremental improvement which only became visible with the better reportage of that decade. Furthermore, development between 1636 and 1638 may have been given added urgency by the serious dearth of those years. One tantalizing scrap of evidence reinforcing the case for the privy council's role, however, is a petition for relief, presented at Quarter Sessions in Epiphany 1633, of one Hugh Winstanley of Wigan.Footnote 75 The content of the petition itself is unremarkable: Winstanley claimed to be old and unable to work or beg alms in terms largely indistinguishable from other appeals. What singles this document out, however, is a note written at the foot of the page, in a different hand, dated to 28 September 1632 at Lever Hall and signed by one John Astney. It reads as follows: ‘I desire Mr Lee in Ashurst and my brother to give order to the overseers that they give something weekely to this pooreman, the rather for that his Majestie hath lately called upon us to be carefull in the releif of the poore.’ The specifics of the case are opaque, but seem indicative of some degree of local elite conception that central government was trying to implement poor relief policies more effectively, and that they (and specifically they) should act accordingly.
More generally, although there is much evidence of variety between parishes, the supervisory role of justices emerges as critical in policy formulation. In several cases, indeed, overseers were unwilling to give relief unless directed to do so by a justice. In Melling-in-Lonsdale in 1638, for example, Grace Davison's uncle petitioned that ‘the parishioners refuse to mantene her unless your worshipps give order and warrant soe to doe’.Footnote 76 As late as 1675, Isobel Taylor of Haslingden reported that she was not being allowed relief by the overseers without first getting a Quarter Sessions order.Footnote 77 Such orders were undoubtedly critical weapons in the politics of the parish. For example, although the overseers of Whittingham had been willing to relieve Jane Barton up to 1661, other ‘inhabitants’ refused to allow her a dole ‘without anie order from this honourable bench’.Footnote 78 The fact that such complaints were relatively rare, and indeed the fact that petitioners' language often suggested that this approach was unusual and deviant, cautions against regarding them as examples of clear judicial control over poor relief policy. Nonetheless, in the early days, justices may have been especially heavily involved: a list of sixteen paupers at Prescot from 1641 states that fourteen were relieved ‘by Quarter Sessions order’ with only two supported ‘without an order’.Footnote 79 Moreover, the fact that paupers petitioned justices so regularly – there are nearly 1,800 first-time petitions for poor relief in the county's Quarter Sessions papers from 1626 to 1679 – is evidence enough that the magistracy were felt to have the final word.Footnote 80 We have very few sets of overseers' papers for seventeenth-century Lancashire, but it is unlikely that more than a minority of relief cases found their way to Quarter Sessions. Nonetheless, since justices also acted in Petty Sessions, and since it was the marginal cases which were likely to be settled at Quarter Sessions, JPs' roles extended well beyond the mere enforcement of poor rates. Those cases which reached the magistracy must have served as test-cases of deservedness: these were the border-skirmishes at which the boundaries of distributional justice were set. Indeed, the importance of such precedent is attested by the fact paupers occasionally, as will be seen, referred to it in support of their appeal for relief. Another issue, though, is the frequency with which JPs actually overruled overseers. Unfortunately, the written endorsements on the petitions themselves are opaque on this matter: although plenty are endorsed with statements such as ‘churchwardens and overseers to provide’, or ‘12d a week’, or sometimes simply ‘nothing’, a large number are endorsed ‘churchwardens and overseers’, which could be an order for provision or a referral back to the parish's discretion.Footnote 81 The point, however, again, is not so much how often JPs overruled overseers, but the fact that on enough occasions they did, and the fact that they undoubtedly did in the most controversial cases.
III
The centrality of JPs to the enforcement of the poor law may have been the principal reason behind the apparent breakdown of the system in many areas in the Civil War, during which the court of Quarter Sessions ceased to sit.Footnote 82 Historiographically, the question of whether local systems of poor relief continued to operate during the Civil War years has been controversial. Earlier historians' claims that the onset of Puritan rule brought a severe attitude to the needs of the poor have not proved durable.Footnote 83 Nevertheless, there is virtually no evidence for any working system of poor relief in Lancashire during the First Civil War itself. Evidence from individual parishes is virtually non-existent. In Prescot, fifteen paupers were relieved by the churchwardens in the year ending Easter 1643, but the following year only one is recorded: Elizabeth Case, a ‘poore old blynd woman’ who received 10s.Footnote 84 The record of doles in the parish then resumes in the year beginning Easter 1647.
The reappearance of Quarter Sessions records in 1646 brought a number of petitions, suggesting that the mechanisms of the poor law had not totally broken down, but there are signs that, in some communities, relief payments were not being made and overseers not appointed.Footnote 85 In 1646, Alice Gill of Cockerham stated that she had ‘formerly had manteynance out of the said parish till within these few yeares that your petitioner could not gett any manteynance at all’.Footnote 86 Meanwhile, William Towers of Scotforth petitioned that he had been ordered relief in April 1641, but that ‘the churchwardens & overseers hath neglected the payment thereof for three yeares now past’.Footnote 87 The following year, it was reported that two blind Lancaster women had ‘beene formerly relieved forth of the parishe of Lancaster yet since theise troubles some tymes not regarded nor no helpe hath had’.Footnote 88 Nor were such problems confined to the north of the county, for in 1646 James Kirkby of Downholland complained that he had not been relieved for four years.Footnote 89 In 1647, a group of twenty-five ‘inhabitants’ of Croston complained that, although the parish had many poor, ‘wee have no overseers nor collectors nor collections for them, by reason whereof they all goe a begging daly among us and abroad in the country; and most of them are in a most miserable condicion and ready to perish for want of necessary mayntenance’.Footnote 90 Their experience was similar to that of Mary Platt of Culcheth, who asked that same year for a relief order to be ‘directed to the constables of the parish of Winwicke, in respecte of the troublesome tymes, there is but few churchwardens and overseers in the said parish but are dead’.Footnote 91 In 1648, justices sent the complete text of the 1601 statute to the overseers of Bolton, urging them to make special provision for the impotent poor, and a similar order was made to the officers of Eccles the following year, suggesting that Quarter Sessions were having to intervene to ensure full compliance with the law.Footnote 92 This picture accords with a growing body of evidence from counties as diverse as Dorset, Shropshire, Cheshire, and Warwickshire that local implementation of the poor law fell into serious abeyance in many places during the war years.Footnote 93 It is thus difficult to accept Braddick's assertion that ‘[t]he distractions of the 1640s do not appear to have disrupted administration’ of the poor law.Footnote 94
Again, we can see the impact of dearth in forcing local administrators into reinvigorating poor relief, for the years from 1647 to 1650 were economically some of the worst of the entire period.Footnote 95 It is also clear, however, that a significant role was played by petitioning by – or on behalf of – the poor themselves. John Walter and Keith Wrightson have described attempts by Lancashire petitioners to cajole magistrates into instigating social and economic regulation to mitigate the dearth.Footnote 96 The petitions just mentioned by Alice Gill, William Towers, James Kirkby, Mary Platt, and the twenty-five inhabitants of Croston were similar, albeit more modest, in their aims, and more focused on the issue of poor relief. Indeed, even petitioners who only asked for a dole for themselves were collectively acting to expand total provision in the county. And their numbers grew significantly. There are twenty-two first-time petitions surviving in Lancashire's Quarter Sessions papers for 1647, and then twenty-three for 1648, compared to a mean of 10·6 for the period 1627–42. This rose modestly to twenty-nine in 1649, but by 1650 the number reached fifty-nine.
Petitioning, then, was clearly a powerful tool of the needy. By mid-century, moreover, some petitioners were appealing to ideals not just of charitable obligation on the part of ratepayers, but also to the legal requirement for parishes and townships to relieve the poor. Some were even – in a very few cases – hinting at ideals of distributive justice and the poor's entitlement to relief. As Hindle has pointed out, clear statements of entitlement are relatively rare finds in pauper petitions.Footnote 97 Given the disincentive against supplicants being so brazen as to claim relief as a right – in marked contrast to the laboured deference that usually characterized such appeals – it is, however, significant that some did. Anne Rosse of Manchester, for example, having been abandoned by her Scottish husband when the two realms went to war in 1648, petitioned for relief ‘as may stand with justice and equitie and as is usuall in such cases’.Footnote 98 Whether this forthright invocation of distributive justice related to her husband's service as a surgeon in the parliamentary armies is unfortunately lost to the historian. Several petitioners were more circumspect, asking for relief to reflect an abstract concept of justice to be determined by the magistrates' discretion. A petition by three paupers of Winwick in 1631, for example, solicited poor relief ‘as to your worshipps shall be thought to stand with right & equitie’.Footnote 99 Others were more direct: in 1656 Anthony Higginson, a sixty-eight-year-old waller from Priest Hutton, asked for poor relief ‘as law requireth’.Footnote 100 Henry Owsey of Golborne was more forceful in 1662, claiming relief ‘by the overseers & churchwardens of the parish whoe by the lawes of this land ought to relieve & maintain the poore & impotent people’.Footnote 101 As early as 1632, widowed Jane Garth of Lydiate invoked justices' ‘accustomed clemencies & mercies heretofore extended towards widowes and fatherles children’, asking them to relieve her ‘according to the lawes of the kingdom provided for the relife of the pore’, in a way that would ‘stand with lawe and justice’.Footnote 102 Noticeably, petitioners referred specifically to the legal obligation to relieve the poor more frequently than they invoked more abstract concepts of ‘justice and equity’. Indeed, the most commonly used reference was to relief ‘by the statute’ or similar. In 1640, for example, Elizabeth Heap, a deserted mother of four from Downholland, petitioned for relief ‘according unto his majesties statute in that behalf’, while an aged widow, Elizabeth Stirzaker of Lancaster, asked for alms ‘accordinge to the statute in that case ordained’.Footnote 103 Whilst this probably meant simply that the relief given should be of the kind stipulated in the 1601 poor law – i.e. relief in money for the impotent – such references nevertheless suggest a popular understanding of what the poor law actually contained.Footnote 104 This was not necessarily representative of popular notions of distributive justice, but an ability to appeal to the statute book was certainly a welcome additional bargaining counter. Many paupers also, like Anne Rosse, invoked precedent. In 1640, for instance, cancer-stricken Dorothy Crosse of Ormskirk asked for relief ‘as is allowed to other impotent & poor people in such lyke cases’.Footnote 105 Even as early as 1631, William Ticole and his sick wife were petitioning justices at Wigan for relief ‘accordinge to your former clemencies in such lyke cases’.Footnote 106 Precedent, statute law, and abstract concepts such as ‘justice’ and ‘equity’ were seemingly powerful motives behind the formulation of poor law policy in its early years. And it was in front of a JP where, in the last resort, the arbitration of this social justice took place. Petitioners, clearly, were showing very real agency, as Hindle has shown and as – also – were the parishes and townships who disputed paupers' claims. But this agency was effectively that of suitors at law: it was the arbitrators who sifted the claims and counter-claims, and, in doing so, set the boundaries of deservingness.
A similar mix of legalism and equity informed the process by which the township came to replace the parish as the key unit of poor law administration in the county. In common with other northern counties, many of Lancashire's parishes were large and comprised multiple townships.Footnote 107 This created particular difficulties under the terms of the Elizabethan statutes, which placed responsibility for the relief of the poor in the hands of the parish. Initially, the original statutes' impracticability encouraged officials to be flexible in its interpretation, with some townships independently maintaining their own poor, and others doing so as part of a larger parish. When parish administration in the north was then formally replaced by that of townships in 1662, difficulties felt by certain heavily impoverished communities meant that justices needed to temper the new arrangements with rates-in-aid from parishes to particularly poor townships. Indeed, throughout the period, the relative role of the two units was contested between poor townships that favoured parochial administration on the one hand, and wealthier ones, which were unsurprisingly keen to maintain township autonomy, on the other. Economic geography thus pitted townships against each other, adding an unusual twist to the politics of the parish in Lancashire. Once again, petitioning the magistracy was a key weapon in this often bitter politics, and over time it was again JPs who arbitrated. It was thus a combination of statute law and abstract ideals that dictated overall policy. In 1680, for example, just after the 1662 statute had temporarily lapsed, the township of Warton-in-Lonsdale petitioned that ‘by the lawes and statutes of this realme now in force every parish are to keepe and mantaine their owne poore’, and so they could claim support from the rest of the parish.Footnote 108 The same year, the townships of Claife and Satterthwaite argued in reverse, for independence from Hawkshead parish, on the grounds that it was ‘ancient custom’ for each township to relieve its own poor, notwithstanding statutes currently in force.Footnote 109 On both occasions, the language of the appeal reveals the kinds of factors likely to sway justices. Law and custom were nevertheless not the only factors: the vagaries of economic geography meant that disputes over competing responsibilities had to be settled in practical ways, and the particular contours of need evidently carried the most influence. In 1674, for example, responding to a dispute in Bolton-le-Moors parish, the justices at Sheriff's Table, a formal meeting of JPs during Assize week, decreed that parishes could choose to implement the relief as stipulated by either the 1601 or the 1662 statutes.Footnote 110 This clearly left statute law subservient to common sense, and although it seemingly placed discretion in the hands of parishes, in reality – given that townships were unlikely to agree with each other – it was to local JPs that power was devolved. This commonsense approach was then invoked with most clarity in 1682, when a committee of JPs investigating poor law administration in the parish of Deane declared that if townships were ‘really poor or necessitous’, then ‘law and reason’ dictated that they should have support from the wider parish.Footnote 111 If not, then they were on their own.
IV
The development of poor relief in Lancashire is important as a case study of wider historical processes, but regional peculiarities inevitably militate against generalizations. Distance from London and the county's palatine status may have entrenched a culture of magisterial self-rule which left the county's justices unusually well placed to influence policy. Meanwhile, the region's dispersed settlement pattern, and the generally light regulatory demands of the pastoral economy, may have retarded the development of a communal political culture in parishes and townships.Footnote 112 Historians of ‘county communities’ have, however, been keen to show how even southern shires maintained a significant degree of independence from the centre, and Angus Winchester has emphasized the vitality of upland manor courts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing the potential for community organization in the region.Footnote 113 Indeed, the regularity of petitions in support of specific local interests like the instigation of parochial or township rating practices or the reduction of relief to a pauper deemed undeserving shows how active the officers of Lancashire's dispersed pastoral communities could be in protecting the interests of their ratepayers. Indeed, the fact that it was petitioning by parish and township officers, and by the poor themselves, which placed discretionary power in the hands of the magistracy should not be overlooked: political engagement ran deep in Lancashire.
Most broadly, the development of poor relief in counties such as Lancashire reveals much about the nature of government in early modern England. Sir Geoffrey Elton bluntly stated that ‘[n]o system of local government is worth having unless it obeys the orders of the central government’.Footnote 114 In doing so, he underestimated the complex and intensely participatory nature of early modern English governance.Footnote 115 Such participation was given meaning by the fact that local officials could mould, interpret, or even ignore policies of central government. This allowed poor relief to develop organically to fit local economic needs and political priorities. Indeed, the very strength of the Elizabethan poor laws was not that they were ‘obeyed’ in an Eltonian sense, but that they were twisted, reinterpreted, and reformulated by local officials. No system of early modern local government was worth having if it simply obeyed central directions; interpretation was key.
The clearest implication of this case study has, however, in fact been the overarching success of the process of centralization by which the poor law became established in such a remote county. By the mid-seventeenth century, poor relief practices in Lancashire would have been instantly recognizable to visitors from the south, the only major difference being the administrative importance of the township rather than the parish, which was effectively a technicality. This success appears to owe much to the power of the privy council and, increasingly, of parliament, whose statutes were frequently invoked by petitioners.Footnote 116 Nevertheless, this power remained subject to interpretation by those charged with actually implementing the poor law.Footnote 117 It was, paradoxically, the very flexibility of Stuart centralization that explains its success.
Nevertheless, it is distinctions within this ‘officeholders' ‘republic’’ that constitute perhaps the most significant finding, and serve as a caveat to recent emphases on the political engagement of the middling sort, and to underscore the very real power of the magistracy in the politics of the poor law. The core of this argument lies in the widespread discretionary power wielded by magistrates over practice within parishes and townships. Throughout the disputes over administrative structures within parishes, and particularly through the continual negotiating process by which aggrieved paupers appealed to JPs for relief, it is possible to detect a formidable self-interest at play in parochial and township politics.Footnote 118 Historians need to distinguish between, on the one hand, mere politics of the parish, and, on the other, the making of policy. Parishes, townships, and paupers displayed clear agency in pursuing their political agendas, but it was the magistracy, as arbitrators, who settled disputes and thus set the overall tone of policy. Such arbitration was – no doubt – particularly necessary in determining amorphous concepts such as ‘poverty’, ‘deservingness’, and ‘need’. Thus, although justices did not ‘go out looking for trouble’ but rather ‘presided over their districts from their parlours, and responded to what was brought before them’, their persistent mediation of the politics of the parish, both within and between communities meant that it was they who regularized social policy across wide areas.Footnote 119 Even the manner in which they heard petitions enshrined considerable magisterial power, for disputes were settled by JPs only, without interference from the Quarter Sessions jury, described by one historian as ‘the most representative institution available to the English people’.Footnote 120 Since they were divorced from the pressing localized imperatives of rate protection, magistrates were arguably more likely to judge poor relief cases more firmly on ‘justice & equittie’, and to settle disputes between townships on the grounds of ‘law and reason’, than parish vestries were. This is not, of course, to argue that there could not be policy disagreements within parishes and townships and even between ratepayers.Footnote 121 The point is rather that the continued willingness of parishioners to settle such differences through recourse to magisterial arbitration shows that however vibrant the parochial politics of the poor law were, they were – in Lancashire at least – a politics perpetually in the magistracy's shadow, not just in terms of administrative enforcement, but also in the real sense of the making of policy.
