An Orderly County? - Managing the Poor in Early Modern Hertfordshire

A great deal has been written about the workings of the English Old Poor Law as a system and how it operated financially. However, little detailed work has been done on how the system fundamentally affected local communities. This study illustrates how ‘management’ of the poor was attempted in some Hertfordshire parishes from c.1500-c.1800. By creating the poor law system to divert the poor to their ‘home’ parishes central government created virtually insoluble parochial problems and the effects of some of these on Hertfordshire parishes are discussed. Difficulties and attempted solutions are revealed in a range of primary sources originating from forty four parishes and their court records and are a first essay at viewing the development and evolution of the system in one county.

The thesis first considers the evolution of ideas about poverty and charity to the poor and how these might have influenced the attitudes of Hertfordshire overseers and magistrates in classifying and managing their destitute poor. It then focuses on a series of ‘problematic’ poor and how they were ‘managed’ including the sick; women without breadwinners; bastard-bearers and vagrancy.

The study raises new questions about old themes most importantly those of ‘belonging’ or ‘not belonging’ to a parish or being considered ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’, as interpreted in some Hertfordshire parishes. It also reveals the attempts at social engineering made to bring all destitute poor into line with the ‘ideal’ deferential and industrious poor labourer fabricated in parish official and judicial minds. The prime strategy employed in managing these Hertfordshire poor seems to have been to keep them under control both economically, as parochial liabilities, and physically, by being properly ‘placed’, with a male head of household or their employer or, when all else failed, the master or mistress of the House of Correction.