Poor Relief and Community in Hadleigh, Suffolk 1547–1600

By Marjorie Keniston McIntosh

At the cutting edge of new social and demographic history, this book provides a detailed picture of the most comprehensive system of poor relief operated by any Elizabethan town. Well before the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, Hadleigh, Suffolk—a thriving woolen cloth center with a population of roughly 3,000—offered a complex array of assistance to many of its residents who could not provide for themselves: orphaned children, married couples with more offspring than they could support or supervise, widows, people with physical or mental disabilities, some of the unemployed, and the elderly. Hadleigh's leaders also attempted to curb idleness and vagrancy and to prevent poor people who might later need relief from settling in the town. Based upon uniquely full records, this study traces 600 people who received help and explores the social, religious, and economic considerations that made more prosperous people willing to run and pay for this system. Relevant to contemporary debates over assistance to the poor, the book provides a compelling picture of a network of care and control that resulted in the integration of public and private forms of aid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781907396946

Book preview

Introduction

England faced severe problems with poverty during the middle and later years of the sixteenth century. Population growth that outpaced economic expansion left more people in need.¹ During the 1520s, 1530s and 1540s, bad harvests, heavy taxation, changes in the value of money and the closure of monasteries and many hospitals contributed to a growing number of the poor. Indigent people who left home seeking better opportunities elsewhere heightened fears of vagrancy and begging among local and national leaders. In the reign of Edward VI the central government set up a system of parish-based assistance. A statute of 1552 (modified slightly in 1563) required parishes to collect aid from their more prosperous members to provide help for those who could not support themselves. Although the concerns of civic humanism and early Protestantism promoted this approach, all Christian churches of whatever doctrinal position advocated charity to the poor both before and after the Reformation. During the second half of the sixteenth century some of England’s towns and cities experimented with their own forms of relief. But local assistance found it increasingly difficult to keep up with demand, especially because rapid inflation was not matched by an equivalent rise in wages, squeezing those who worked for pay. The 1590s experienced crisis conditions due to a series of crop failures and resulting high food prices. In 1598 and 1601 Parliament – fearing desperation among the poor and serious unrest – passed omnibus sets of laws that intensified and extended the provisions for collecting and distributing poor rates within parishes and addressed a number of other problems with earlier forms of aid. Those statutes initiated the period commonly known as the Old Poor Law, which continued until 1834.

This book describes how Hadleigh, Suffolk, a small town lying nine miles west of Ipswich, responded to the needs of its poor residents between 1547 and 1600 (see Figure Intro.1). In that period, the leaders of this cloth-manufacturing centre developed and operated an exceptionally comprehensive and expensive system of poor relief for some of its 2,400–3,300 inhabitants. By the 1590s they were running the most complex array of help offered by any English town, one that we may still admire today.² Hadleigh’s economy was dominated by its wealthy clothiers, middling-scale entrepreneurs who organised and financed the various steps necessary to the production of heavy woollen broadcloths. They hired and paid the carders, spinners, weavers and finishers and then sent many of their cloths to London or Ipswich for export to the continent. Clothiers also held political power within the town, serving as the Chief Inhabitants who made decisions about a wide array of urban matters. They also chose officers for the town and its market, the administration of poor relief and even the parish. Attitudes towards charitable assistance in Hadleigh were influenced by the preaching of its early Protestant rector, who argued that a primary obligation of a Christian community was to attend to the needs of the poor. The prosperity of the clothiers coupled with the poverty of many of their workers, the authority and concerns of the Chief Inhabitants, and the Christian charitable message were among the factors that contributed to Hadleigh’s willingness to offer aid to many needy people.³

Figure Intro.1 Hadleigh and neighbouring communities.

Hadleigh’s system of relief, providing individual assistance to at least 603 residents between 1579 and 1596, included multiple components. Most of the help was given to people living in their own homes. The largest group, people who were poor but could usually manage on their own earnings, received aid only occasionally, in the form of cloth, clothing, fuel or cash. Others were supported during periods of special need – such as an illness – or only after death, if their families could not pay for a decent burial. A smaller set of poor or disabled people received regular weekly payments at a level dependent upon their ability to earn part of what they needed to survive. Boarding formed a different type of aid, in which a person needing help would be cared for by another household, with expenses met by local officers. This approach was used especially for young orphans and children from troubled poor families, but also sometimes for adults temporarily unable to look after themselves owing to illness or injury. More than half of those who boarded others were themselves recipients of poor relief: the town’s assistance thus filled two social needs at the same time. A third form of relief involved entering a residential institution. The town operated two sets of almshouses, endowed with land by charitable benefactors, in which 32 elderly poor lived rent-free while receiving a weekly cash allowance plus firewood and occasional gifts of household goods. Certainly by 1589, and possibly as early as 1574, Hadleigh was running an institution that was sometimes termed a hospital but was more accurately labelled a workhouse. It provided residential care, a disciplined setting for labour, training in basic skills (preparing woollen thread and knitting stockings) and in some cases punishment for the 30 poor children and idle young people sent to it. The town also paid to have orphans placed with another family and arranged positions for slightly older children as servants or apprentices, as well as opening public employment to needy men and women.

Hadleigh assisted an unusually large percentage of its residents for an Elizabethan urban community. During three years between 1582 and 1594 for which we have complete accounts, 111 to 149 people received individual relief annually (see Table Intro.1). Four to five per cent of the town’s estimated residents were thus helped directly, and many of them presumably shared their benefits with other family members.⁴ Paul Slack has suggested that one should double the number of direct recipients to obtain an approximate figure for all the people being assisted. The resulting fraction of 8–10 per cent getting aid in Hadleigh was considerably higher than the adjusted values seen in five somewhat smaller Elizabethan towns and in the cities of Exeter and Norwich, though lower than the fraction relieved in a poverty-stricken parish in Warwick.⁵ If we think in terms of households, at least one member of 91 to 110 domestic units was helped annually in Hadleigh between 1582 and 1594; those households constituted 14–15 per cent of the town’s estimated 660–780 units.⁶ Further, the average weekly payment of 3.6d per recipient in Hadleigh was well above the 2.2d awarded in the five comparable towns though below the 4.6d in seven cities. As well as administering residential institutions for the poor, Hadleigh’s Chief Inhabitants were also helping a wider range of people than was true elsewhere. Most interesting was the town’s willingness to assist illegitimate children, youngsters from dysfunctional families and some married adults of working age.

Table Intro. 1

Recipients of relief and payers of poor rates as percentage of the population for six years with full or nearly full accounts.

This complex system was expensive to run. During the 1580s the average total disbursed annually to poor people and the almshouses was £94; between 1590 and 1596, when need intensified owing to high grain prices and when the workhouse was also in operation, the average rose to £140 per year.⁷ To pay for the forms of aid Hadleigh’s Chief Inhabitants were able to draw upon multiple sources of income: rents from endowed properties they held in effect as charitable trustees for the poor; current gifts and bequests, some distributed over a period of years or set up in perpetuity; and poor rates, compulsory local taxes. Rates were imposed each year on 122 to 195 people, the heads of the town’s most economically comfortable households; some paid by the week, others by the quarter. The people assessed for rates formed 18–25 per cent of all household heads, and their payments supplied around a quarter of the total amount disbursed annually to poor people, the almshouses and the workhouse.⁸ (In most English communities, the costs of whatever poor relief was undertaken had to depend far more heavily upon taxation, as they lacked the sizeable landed endowment expressly for the poor that Hadleigh enjoyed.) Poor relief officials did not insist that extended families assume sole responsibility for their own poorer members: a third of the recipients of relief had local relatives who were prosperous enough to be assessed for rates. The assistance provided by the town was supplemented by private gifts and bequests, and it reinforced the informal help provided by friends and neighbours.

While Hadleigh was thus unusually responsive to the needs of the poor, its Chief Inhabitants were also concerned about idleness, vagrancy and the cost of relief. From the mid 1570s they worked to maintain good order and prevent needy immigrants from settling in the community; they named responsible local residents to monitor their neighbourhoods, drawing to public attention any troublemakers and poor new arrivals. In the 1590s the town’s workhouse had a dual function: not only did it take in children and teenagers for training but its master was required to accept people picked up on the street as idlers and vagrants. He was to force all the residents to work, punishing them if they did not; the town purchased locks and chains for a few recalcitrant inmates in their late teens and early 20s. The Chief Inhabitants were also prepared to spend money on expelling poor people from Hadleigh before they had lived there long enough to qualify for relief, and they demanded bonds to ensure that children born in the town or newcomers to it would not become a charge on poor relief funds. Similar practices are documented in other communities.⁹

An intriguing feature of Hadleigh’s system of poor relief is that it lacked legal authority. The statute of 1552 that initiated appointment of Collectors for the Poor and distribution of aid to the needy and the statute of 1563 that renewed and slightly expanded that measure said that the new approach was to be implemented in every parish or in those cities, boroughs and towns that had been formally incorporated.¹⁰ The statutes placed responsibility for developing and supervising poor relief upon the minister and churchwardens of parishes or upon the mayor, bailiffs or other heads of those civic bodies with corporate status. Because Hadleigh did not receive its charter of incorporation until 1618, Elizabethan poor relief should have been handled within the parish. The self-appointed and self-perpetuating Chief Inhabitants had no legal standing as governors of the town, yet there is no indication that Hadleigh’s residents questioned their authority, even when they appointed poor relief officers and levied poor rates. Their own personal status and willingness to devote time and energy to the community’s wellbeing apparently led to acceptance of their orders.

Hadleigh’s experience illustrates many of the challenges and solutions seen in other early modern English communities as they addressed the issues of poverty.¹¹ While it was generally accepted that some kind of poor relief was necessary, on grounds of both Christian charity and practical expediency, Hadleigh did not provide assistance to people other than its own established residents. Further, although those people who were physically unable to labour were supported and some temporarily unemployed clothworkers were evidently helped, the Chief Inhabitants stopped short of offering generic assistance to the families of men who could not find work. People were encouraged to remain in their own homes as long as possible and to be part of familiar community patterns even when living in an almshouse. For those who needed short-term care, boarding at the town’s expense filled the gaps in an older network of informal assistance generated throughout the community; provision of longer-term boarding ensured that orphans and certain children would receive ongoing care. Moreover, tax-based relief was seen as a supplement to the many forms of voluntary charity: the beneficence of wealthier families served to lessen the burden of obligatory rates. Although Parliamentary legislation played an enabling role in the sixteenth-century history of poor relief, Hadleigh’s Chief Inhabitants operated almost entirely on their own as they struggled with how to implement genuine religious and social concern for the poor, how to maintain order and discipline within their community and how to do all this without unsustainable expense.

Not only was Hadleigh’s approach to poor relief exceptionally ambitious, to the good fortune of historians it is also exceptionally well documented.¹² Especially valuable is the town’s own archive, including detailed accounts of income and expenditures for poor relief in many years between 1579 and 1596.¹³ The evidence is not, however, perfect: we have entirely full accounts only for 1582, 1591 and 1594, plus most of the accounts for three other years and partial information for the remainder. All figures provided in this study for the number of people helped and the amount of aid given must therefore be regarded as minimal values. We learn more about those who received and administered relief from a fairly complete parish register of baptisms, marriages and burials from the late 1550s onwards.¹⁴ Poor relief records may be supplemented by a thick book of town records, 100 sixteenth-century wills, some court cases and other material from central government sources and scattered information from the Canterbury Cathedral Archives.¹⁵ Foxe’s Actes and monuments and a surprising sermon delivered around 1600 highlight religious concerns. Our knowledge of Hadleigh’s past has also benefited from the fine research and writing of two of its town archivists. W.A.B. Jones published in 1977 a short history of the town from the early medieval period through the nineteenth century.¹⁶ His work has recently been augmented by an impressive study of the Tudor and Stuart periods prepared by Sue Andrews, the current town archivist, and Tony Springall, a historian of Hadleigh’s Alabaster family.

This book offers a unique analysis of poor relief within a community context during the second half of the sixteenth century. For no other town in England can we trace in such detail a network of care, looking not only at who received and provided assistance but also at patterns of aid across a span of years and at how help was given to household units. It thus forms a counterpoint to my general study of poor relief in England, which traces patterns throughout the country over several centuries.¹⁷ Although poor relief has not been studied in similar detail in any other Elizabethan community, we can set some of the quantified measures of Hadleigh’s activity against the experience of other villages, small towns, and cities. For reasons of brevity and focus, this discussion deals only with charitable assistance to the poor, not with education or such projects as a revolving loan fund for tradesmen.¹⁸

The study is methodologically important, furnishing an example of what may be termed ‘the new demographic history’. Whereas the first generation of computer-based studies of population and related events provided important factual information about general patterns in early modern England, they were sometimes criticised on two grounds: for failing to represent individual human experiences, and for their limited ability to identify the causes of the patterns they documented. An in-depth case study based upon rich and diverse records can address both of these issues. For Hadleigh we can integrate quantitative material from poor relief accounts and the parish register, analysed after entry into computer databases, with narrative sources to trace the lives of specific residents.¹⁹ Particularly significant is that we can go beneath the surface to explore not only what happened but also why people acted as they did: most notably, the concerns that motivated the leaders of this community to provide help for their needier neighbours.

The book begins with a description of Hadleigh in the sixteenth century, looking at its physical setting and population, economic life, religion and town government. With that picture as background, we turn to the system of relief, the men who administered it and how it was financed. The next three chapters focus on the people who received aid. Chapter 3 provides an account of the individuals and households that were helped, with a close look at 1582 as a sample year. Chapter 4 examines the care and training of poor children and teens, while Chapter 5 considers special provisions for ill, disabled and elderly people. The final chapter discusses the factors that influenced the creation and maintenance of this network of assistance and control, showing how they interacted cumulatively within the specific context of this town.

1. For fuller discussion of these general developments, see Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Poor relief in England, 1350–1600 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 15–25.

2. An assessment based upon my use of all surviving poor relief records from this period throughout England.

3. See Chapter 6 below.

4. The fraction would be even higher if one added some of the young inmates of the workhouse, which provided a form of poor relief for some of its residents. Just over half of its roughly 30 inhabitants at any one time were needy children and teens who had not been awarded other forms of public assistance but were given temporary housing, food and clothing while receiving occupational training (see Chapter 4, ‘Training and discipline in the workhouse’, below). For below, see Paul Slack, Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), p. 174.

5. The combined average in the five smaller towns was 5.6 per cent (Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Poor relief in Elizabethan communities’, forthcoming, for Bishop’s Stortford, Herts., Melton Mowbray, Leics., Framlingham, Suffolk, Wivenhoe, Essex, and Faversham, Kent, market centres or ports with estimated populations of 500 to 2,000 residents). Exeter’s adjusted figure was 4.2 per cent in 1563 and Norwich’s was 2.6 in 1578–9 (Slack, Poverty and policy, p. 177). St Mary’s parish in Warwick assisted 7.4 per cent in 1582 (A.L. Beier, ‘Poverty and progress in early modern England’, in Beier, Cannadine, and Rosenheim (eds), The first modern society, pp. 201–39, esp. p. 207).

6. In St Mary’s, Warwick, 11 per cent of the 373 families received relief in 1582, and another 18 per cent were ready to decay into poverty(A.L. Beier, ‘The social problems of an Elizabethan country town: Warwick, 1580–90’, in Clark (ed.), Country towns in pre-industrial England, pp. 46–85). Warwick had about 2,000 residents in 1563 and 2,500 in 1586. For below, see McIntosh,’Poor relief in Elizabethan communities’.

7. See App. intro.1.

8. For comparative figures, see Chapter 2, note 61 below.

9. McIntosh, Poor relief in England, pp. 245–50.

10. 5 & 6 Edward VI, c. 2, and 5 Elizabeth, c. 3 (SR, vol. iv, pp. 131–2 and 411–14).

11. See, more generally, McIntosh, Poor relief in England, esp. ch. 8, for this paragraph.

12. The Hadleigh Archive began in the early 1960s with two collections. (I am grateful to Sue Andrews, Hadleigh’s current Town Archivist, for this information.) The first set of documents was found in the office of a local solicitor’s firm when it closed down. Because the firm had been the collector for the town’s charitable properties it had records going back to the thirteenth century. The second collection, unearthed under an old staircase in the Town Hall, contained borough records, 1618–85, and some earlier pieces.The documents were catalogued by W.A.B. Jones, then the headmaster of a local primary school, and Cyril Cook, the head of history at a secondary school; in 1974 the Hadleigh Town Council became responsible for the archive. The materials are now stored in the Archive Room in the Guildhall-Town Hall complex.

13. HadlA 021/A/02–06, 021/B/05–09, 021/C/01–08 and 021/D/01–04. Most of the accounts give an annual total for each recipient of regular weekly payments, but some are laid out by week or month. For below, see App. Intro.2.

14. SRO-I FB 81/D1/1, copied by kind permission of the Rector of Hadleigh.

15. The town book is HadlA 004/A/01. The wills are scattered between TNA PRO PROB 11, ERO D/ABW, LPL and a few copies in HadlA. The court cases come primarily from TNA PRO C1, C2, C3 and REQ 2, plus material from L&P, APC, State Papers Domestic and miscellaneous central government records.

16. W.A.B. Jones, Hadleigh through the ages (Ipswich, 1977), and see also his ‘Hadleigh, a Viking royal town’, typescript published in reduced form as Hadleigh through the ages. For below, see Sue Andrews and Tony Springall, Hadleigh and the Alabaster family: the story of a Suffolk town during the Tudor and Stuart periods (privately printed, Bildeston, Suffolk, 2005). Sue Andrews wrote the chapters on Hadleigh, Tony Springall the ones on the Alabasters. Henceforth A&S, Hadleigh.

17. McIntosh, Poor relief in England.

18. Hadleigh’s Grammar School was in existence by 1382 and apparently continued to function at least on a small scale into the eighteenth century (A&S, Hadleigh, pp. 193–7). The town also had various kinds of informal primary education, and a non-classical elementary school was endowed in l637 (HadlA 004/A/01, p. 125, a payment of 40s in 1578 by the churchwardens to ‘little John Torner’s wife for teaching the children’, and A&S, Hadleigh, pp. 264–6). For loan funds, see A&S, Hadleigh, pp. 99 and 105.

19. See App. Intro.3 for the quantitative methodologies used and App. 5.1 for some biographical examples.

Chapter 1

The context of poor relief in Hadleigh

To make sense of Hadleigh’s system for dealing with the poor, we need to understand the setting within which it developed and functioned. This little town had an unusually interesting history during the mid and later sixteenth century. As well as being a successful cloth-manufacturing centre, it gained an early exposure to Protestant beliefs during the latter part of Henry VIII’s reign and under Edward VI; its reformist rector and his curate were then burned at the stake under Mary. The town was run by a self-appointed group of 20–25 men who termed themselves the Chief Inhabitants, though they held no formal authority at all.

Hadleigh’s physical setting and neighbourhoods

The parish or, as it was occasionally called, the ‘township’ of Hadleigh lay near the Stour valley of south-west Suffolk, some nine miles west of Ipswich and eight miles south-south-east of Bury St Edmunds.¹ Its 4,288 acres included the urban community in the centre, along the river Brett, plus agricultural land and a few scattered sub-settlements. The rural areas were devoted to mixed farming, with small enclosed fields used for raising grain and other arable crops intermingled with pasturage for animals, especially cows and pigs.² As was common in this region of Suffolk, Hadleigh did not have a single, dominant manorial landlord but was instead divided between multiple estates: three larger manors and two lesser ones, most of which held land in other parishes as well. Beginning in AD 991, the main manor of Hadleigh was held by Canterbury Cathedral Priory and after the Reformation by the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury; Toppesfield manor was held by a series of private owners.³ The primary residences of those two estates were located on either side of the parish church in the centre of the town, and they divided urban properties and the river’s corn (or grain) mills between them. The manor of Lafham, later known as Pond Hall, lay on the eastern side of Hadleigh and was acquired by the D’Oyley (Doyle) family in the fifteenth century.⁴ The smaller manor of Cosford Hall, located to the north of Hadleigh, went with Pond Hall into the D’Oyley’s hands, while the little manor of Mausers or Hadleighs was bought by the Timperleys of Hintlesham in the fifteenth century. Because lordship was so fragmented, manorial authority had relatively little impact and will receive scant mention in this study.

Figure 1.1 Major buildings in central Hadleigh, sixteenth century.

Hadleigh’s urban core had evidently been laid out in the earlier medieval period as a regular gridwork of streets, though it did not develop fully.⁵ Two primary bridges crossed the river on the edges of the town: Hadleigh Bridge to the north, and Toppesfield Bridge to the south. By the Elizabethan period the town’s physical, religious, economic and social centre was situated in a cluster of buildings that lay to the west of what is now High Street, Hadleigh’s main north-south thoroughfare, between Hadleigh Hall and Toppesfield Hall. As Figure 1.1 shows, that area contained the parish church (dedicated to St Mary) and cemetery, the parsonage house, the Deanery Tower and the marketplace with its associated buildings (the Market House, Market Hall and Guildhall).⁶

The religious buildings were the most impressive. Hadleigh’s church had been enlarged in the Decorated architectural style during the fourteenth century, with only its tower remaining from the previous structure; at the peak of the town’s prosperity in the fifteenth century parts of the church were rebuilt in the Perpendicular style, adding a clerestory and large stained glass windows.⁷ The church’s tower contained six medieval bells, and the clock on its eastern face had a fourteenth-century bell that rang the time. Thanks to the generosity of pious merchants and clerics, St Mary’s was well provided with crosses, plate, vestments and some books prior to the Reformation.⁸ Behind the church stood an imposing three-storey tower erected by William Pykenham in the 1480s or 1490s.⁹ Pykenham, rector of Hadleigh and Archdeacon of Suffolk by 1471, apparently intended this grand building, made of brick with four crenellated corner towers, as a gatehouse that would lead from the church to a rectory dwelling nearer the river, which he probably intended to rebuild as