Suchergebnisse

The first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century: the first century of welfare. The English 'Old Poor Law' was the first national system of tax-funded social welfare in the world. It provided a safety net for hundreds of thousands of paupers at a time of very limited national wealth and productivity. "The First Century of Welfare", which focusses on the poor, but developing, county of Lancashire, provides the first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century. Drawing on thousands of individual petitions for poor relief, presented by paupers themselves to magistrates, it peers into the social and economic world of England's marginal people. Taken together, these records present a vivid and sobering picture of the daily lives and struggles of the poor. We can see how their family life, their relations with their kin and their neighbours, and the dictates of contemporary gender norms conditioned their lives. We can also see how they experienced illness and physical and mental disability; and the ways in which real people's lives could be devastated by dearth, trade depression, and the destruction of the Civil Wars. But the picture is not just one of poor folk tossed by the tides of fortune. It is also one of agency: about the strategies of economic survival the poor adopted, particularly in the context of a developing industrial economy, of the support they gained from their relatives and neighbours, and of their willingness to engage with England's developing system of social welfare to ensure that they and their families did not go hungry. In this book, an intensely human picture surfaces of what it was like to experience poverty at a time when the seeds of state social welfare were being planted. JONATHAN HEALEY is University Lecturer in English Local and Social History and Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford

A large proportion of the English population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had some access to common land. This brought inevitable conflicts over shared resources and led to attempts to limit and police the access of commoners, and to exclude outsiders, usually undertaken through local manorial courts, but also resulting in a complex 'politics of the commons'. This politics also encompassed political action ranging from gossip throughpetty acts of violence up to engagement with central law courts and outright rebellion. This article discusses the key conflicts associated with English common lands – highlighted as the need to maintain sustainable usage and the need to exclude outsiders – and the institutional framework linked with managing these conflicts, before going on to describe the political tactics deployed in commoning disputes. ; A large proportion of the English population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had some access to common land. This brought inevitable conflicts over shared resources and led to attempts to limit and police the access of commoners, and to exclude outsiders, usually undertaken through local manorial courts, but also resulting in a complex 'politics of the commons'. This politics also encompassed political action ranging from gossip throughpetty acts of violence up to engagement with central law courts and outright rebellion. This article discusses the key conflicts associated with English common lands – highlighted as the need to maintain sustainable usage and the need to exclude outsiders – and the institutional framework linked with managing these conflicts, before going on to describe the political tactics deployed in commoning disputes.

ABSTRACTStudies of modern famines have found disproportionately high mortality amongst adult men. The most commonly suggested root of this 'female mortality advantage' is biological, and it seems to be strongest when starvation is the main cause of death. The present study is the first to investigate the phenomenon in an early-modern society. Looking at the famines of 1597 and 1623 in northwest England, it finds some evidence for a female mortality advantage in 1623, but that this was concentrated in the first 12 months of the crisis (after the 1622 harvest). The female advantage was also much greater in north Lancashire and Westmorland than it was in the wealthier western Lancashire plain. Together this supports the idea that there was actual starvation during the 1623 crisis, at least in these areas at these times. There are, however, some reasons to suppose that the most mortal phase of the crisis, around the winter of 1623–1624, took place at a time when food was becoming more widely available, and hence should be attributed to diseases that followed the famine.