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AUSTREY VILLAGERS

The Poor & Destitute

An emerging social group: the poor and destitute

The early Restoration period saw the emergence of a new social group identified primarily by their dependence upon parochial charity.  The registers first begin to use the terms 'poor man' and 'pauper' after 1700, but poverty was a familiar ingredient of town life well before then.  At Ashby between 1624-38, for example, an estimated 230 adults, or 38 per cent of the town's population, were in receipt of weekly payments from the overseers of the poor. The more prosperous Elizabethan inhabitants of the parishes customarily made at least a token bequest to the poor in their wills, a tradition continued by Richard Orton of Lea Grange in Orton in 1582 when he distributed 6d to every cottier in Orton and Twycross at the discretion of his executors. Thomas Page (1592) and William Becke (1600), both rich husbandmen, gave 12d and 2s respectively for 'the poor man’s box' in Austrey.

By the early 1600s the increasing numbers of poor were putting a severe strain on charitable resources.  The Poor Law legislation of 1601 attempted to come to grips with the pauper problem by giving churchwardens power to impose levies on the principal landholders to establish workshops and houses of correction for vagrants. By the

1650s however, this ad hoc system, based upon punitive legislation and dependent to a large extent upon the enthusiasm of the parish officers, had begun to falter.  The plaintive cry of one Appleby inhabitant in 1635 that the rector 'doth cause our towne to spend our money needlessly' is a symptom of a general malaise: the growing reluctance of the wealthier inhabitants to carry the burden of the poor.

Sources and Notes

Numbers of poor in C.J.M. Moxon, Ashby thesis, 65.

P.R.O. wills, Richard Orton, 1582, PROB 11/65/15.

Ref. Austrey poor man’s box in L.J.R.O. wills, Thomas Page, 1592/42; William Beck, 1600/40.

The vagrancy act is summarised in J. Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London, 1971), 44-57; for a more jaundiced view, see R.M. Garnier, Annals of the British Peasantry (London, 1908), 249-50.

Archdeaconry case, 1635, L.R.O. 1D 41/4/XVIII/23.

Vagabonds, itinerants, squatters and illegal immigrants

Short term movements of people into and out of rural parishes must now be accepted as normal for pre-industrial times. Migration was a natural response to outbreaks of disease or food shortage, acting as a kind of 'safety valve' for excess population. The movements of people into and out of parishes can be gauged from population estimates and the appearance of new surnames.  Local studies show that only a minority of midland families remained in the same parish for more than two generations.  On the fifteenth-century estates of the Bishop of Worcester, for example, three-quarters of the household surnames were replaced within six decades. W.G. Hoskins suggests that by 1525 only one in ten families in Leicestershire had patronymic links to one parish extending back more than five generations. The fact that only four in every ten of the 221 deponents cited in Lichfield court depositions between 1660-1665 stayed in their original parish suggests that this trend continued or even accelerated in the post-war period.  Peter Laslett's thorough analysis of two household listings made by the rector of Clayworth in Northamptonshire in 1676 and 1688, emphasises the point even more strongly, by revealing that up to forty per cent of the population of that parish may have emigrated. In the light of these findings the evidence of population movements in Austrey is fairly typical.

Austrey experienced its greatest population losses through an exodus of people in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  The pattern that emerges is of a high turnover of families coupled with a relatively high rate of emigration.  There seems to have been a steady drift of people away from the parish in the late Tudor-early Stuart period, a time of rising population in the midlands.  Gaps in the Austrey register hinder attempts to estimate the extent of migration in the immediate post-war period, but if the natural growth rate figures for the previous four decades are extrapolated somewhere around 100 people, a year were leaving the parish which approximates to the estimated natural growth between 1642 and 1670.  Estimates from Dr Thomas's 1730 survey which records only seventy households, suggests that Austrey's population stopped growing after 1676, and that it was already beginning to contract by the close of the seventeenth century.

The number of new surnames recorded in the Austrey register increased from twenty eight in the 1630s to forty in the 1650s. About sixty per cent of the householders in 1700 were new to the parish since 1642, most of them labourers and craftsmen. Peter Clark's study of Kentish migrants suggests that most of the immigrants would fit into one of two categories: moving for either 'betterment' or subsistence'.  At one end of the migrant social spectrum were wealthy yeomen and retired gentry snapping up vacant freeholds; at the other were dispossessed smallholders, labourers and craftsmen driven from their native parish by enclosures, crop failures and disease.  A.L. Beier has found that more than half the vagrants in Elizabethan England were single males, the greater proportion of them labourers, servants and clothworkers. The population crises in the midlands in the 1620s and 1630s forced hundreds of people out of their parishes in search of a livelihood.  Unemployed labourers, craftsmen, dispossessed widows and soldiers' wives appear fleetingly in constables' accounts and other records as recipients of  poor relief. The same sort of people crop up in settlement certificates as illegal 'squatters' or 'vagabonds' harried from parish to parish by anxious overseers of the poor.

Increasing numbers of exempt households in the hearth tax returns from the 1660s and 1670s highlight a growing problem of illegal settlement in the midlands.  Many of the families listed on exemption certificates, recording householders occupying ground worth less than 20s a year, were squatters.  Although not all immigrants were included on these certificates (some were automatically exempt) and not all of those exempt were immigrants the concentrations of poverty they reveal show  the general drift of pauper migration. The hearth tax exemptions reveal especially large concentrations of poor householders in the local market towns of Ashby, Atherston and Tamworth and in the coalmining areas.  Local JPs had noticed as early as 1628 an 'extraordinary great' number of poor in Atherstone compared to some of the neighbouring towns which had very few or no poor in them'. Destitute families were erecting makeshift cottages in Ridge Lane in 1639 while others had settled near the coal delphs and stone quarries in Wilnecote and Polesworth.  By 1650 this corner of Warwickshire was swarming with 'a multitude of poor impotent persons and others that are not able to work and yet wander up and down and thereby become rogues and vagrants'. Rogues included 'persons calling themselves scholars'.  'idle persons', 'fortune tellers' and 'wandering persons and common labourers being able in body and refusing work'.

The constables record ten exempt households in Austrey in 1663, fifteen (18 per cent) in 1670 and twenty (25 per cent) in 1674. Ashby and Tamworth exempted 23 per cent and 39 per cent of their inhabitants respectively while Measham and Polesworth both had more exempt than non-exempt households in 1670. While there are undoubtedly omissions and inaccuracies in these exemption lists there can be no mistaking the extent of the problem faced by parish officials.

Mixed farming parishes attracted poor families being pushed out of pastoral and forest areas by enclosure and the sudden arrival of destitute families was bound to alarm the villagers. While those among the able-bodied poor who were able to support themselves by some sort of work were tolerated, the fear of destitute families becoming a charge upon the parish prompted reaction. The 1662 Settlement Act attempted to prevent parishes being swamped by destitute people, by giving overseers of the poor the right to evict squatters who had no prospect of work within forty days. This led to an increase in forced evictions and a series of contentious wrangling as to the last place of lawful settlement of those charged.

The Warwickshire justices appear to have occasionally adopted a lenient approach to some itinerants. In 1647 John Hatchett, his wife Margaret and her unmarried sister, Alice Orme, all 'poor and impotent', were given leave to erect a small cottage on some waste ground in Austrey which John had recently purchased. In 1653 another poor newcomer was given leave to build a house 'in some convenient place upon the waste' subject to the consent of the lord of the manor. The re-appearance of these same householders in hearth tax exemption lists in the 1660s and 1670s suggests Austrey's squatter colony on the heathlands had taken on an air of permanence by then. It seems that those among the able-bodied poor who were able to support themselves by some sort of work were tolerated to some extent. In 1641. according to the presentments in a case before the Warwickshire quarter sessions, William Horseman, who is described merely as a traveller, moved into Austrey and 'procured a piece of shop where he used the trade of a cobbler'. No attempt seems to have been made to remove him until he returned to the parish after a brief absence with a wife and three children. The overseers could only offer limited assistance. There is no evidence to suggest for example that earlier provisions to provide a stock of materials to set the poor to work were ever implemented.

Sources and Notes

C. Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: the estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680-1540 (Cambridge, 1980), 366.

W.G. Hoskins, 'Galby and Frisby' in Essays in Leicestershire History

(Liverpool, 1950), 36. (counting names in the subsidy rolls)

Lichfield depositions in L.J.R.O. Cause Papers, B/C/5 (1660-85); Clark's table shows that at least half of the deponents from West Midland parishes migrated in this period: P. Clark, 'Migration in England during the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries', Past and-Present, 83 (1979), 64-5; Cf. J. Cornwall, 'Evidence of Population Mobility in Seventeenth Century England', BIHR, 40 (1964), 143-52.

P. Laslett, 'Clayworth and Cogenhoe' in, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977), 65-6; earlier figures supplied by Laslett in 1963 have been reworked by W.R. Prest who suggests that at least 8 of the 98 householders in Clayworth migrated between 1676-88: 'Stability and Change in Old and New England - Clayworth and Dedham', JIH, vi No. 3 (1976), 363.

A.L. Beier, 'Vagrants and the Social Order', loc.cit., 21.

L.R.O. Archdeaconry Court Proceedings, 1D 41/4/XVI/132-5.

WCR Hearth Tax Returns, Hemlingford Hundred I, lxxvi-lxxvii. Walker's

figures suggest that 40% of Hemlingford householders were exempt from the hearth tax.

WCR Quarter Sessions Order Book I, 63, II, 43, 182-4, , 160-1

Wilnecote (Tamworth) records 18 cottages on the common 'neere the colepitts' (1670): WCR Hearth Tax Returns I, 112.

WCR Quarter-Sessions Order Book III, 78-9, 312-3; Some saw the county was 'yearly eased of so many who by reason of ill circumstance would rather a Burden, than advantage to their neighbours; especially those places that have more hands than work': Dedicatory sermon by William Basset to the Warwickshire Meeting, 1679, cited in P. Morgan (ed.), Warwickshire Apprentices in the Stationers Company of London, 1563-1700, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, 25 (1978)

Measham records 67 out of 112 households exempt, 1664, Polesworth, 50 out of 95 exempt, 1670 WCR Hearth Tax Returns I, 2-10, 101; P.R.O. E 179/332;. E 179/245/10.

William Horseman in WCR Quarter Sessions Order Book II, 83-84.