The poor in England 1700-1850: An economy of makeshifts
Language: English
Pages: 296
ISBN: 0719080436
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This fascinating study investigates the experience of English poverty between 1700 and 1900 and the ways in which the poor made ends meet. The phrase 'economy of makeshifts' has often been used to summarise the patchy, desperate and sometimes failing strategies of the poor for material survival. In The poor of England some of the leading, young historians of welfare examine how advantages gained from access to common land, mobilisation of kinship support, resorting to crime, and other marginal resources could prop up struggling households. The essays attempt to explain how and when the poor secured access to these makeshifts and suggest how the balance of these strategies might change over time or be modified by gender, life-cycle and geography. This book represents the single most significant attempt in print to supply the English 'economy of makeshifts' with a solid, empirical basis and to advance the concept of makeshifts from a vague but convenient label to a more precise yet inclusive definition.
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
Enclosure: the evidence of contemporary comment, c. 1760–1810’, Past and Present, 171 (2001). The prominence of forest and woodland resources in the provision of fuel is nicely emphasised in D. Woodward, ‘Straw, bracken and the Wicklow Whale: the exploitation of natural resources in England since 1500’, Past and Present, 159 (1998). Neeson, Commoners, pp. 158–84. G. Hardin, ‘The tragedy of the commons’, Science, 162 (1968). For an interesting theoretical critique, see B. J. McCay and J. M.
Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London, Macmillan, 1996), p. 35. Pettit, Royal Forests, pp. 143, 145. On the statute of 1589 and its implications, see Styles, ‘The evolution’; and Hindle, ‘Exclusion crises’. Pettit, Royal Forests, pp. 170–1. This formulation, even down to the (possibly formulaic?) number of poor immigrants, is intriguingly almost identical to that used in the Hertfordshire parish of Layston in 1636: Hindle, ‘Exclusion crises’, pp. 133. NRO.
And two under 6 years, and two looms and she earned 7s. 6d. per week. She received 4s. per month from the poor law and was granted a blanket and stockings to the value of 7s. 5d. The story of Mary Grimshaw, one of dozens that could be told, is both an indication of the diversity of the economy of makeshifts and confirmation of the value of charity in some cases. In money terms, this one charitable payment had provided almost as much as two month’s worth of relief from the parish. If we in turn.
Next to the Foundling Hospital in 1772; the move from Clerkenwell to Gray’s Inn Road marked an expansion of the charity’s pretensions and scale. Boys were instructed in the principles of the Church of England and learnt to read, write and cast accounts; girls also learnt writing and the ‘four rules of arithmetic’.6 Boarded boys were set to work winding worsted in 1776, some decades later than the general trend in charity schooling, to inure them to labour and early rising. While religious.
Activities of pawnbrokers further, for example by stipulating in 1784 the interest which might be charged on loans of different sums over different durations.39 There was clearly room for a significant gulf between the public, printed opinion of pawnbrokers and the practical relationships which existed between pawnbrokers and their fellow tradesmen, and between pawnbrokers and customers. The opprobrium to which pawnbrokers were subjected in the press was not necessarily a feature of their.