Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (Seminar Studies in History)

By John F. Pound

Book Overview

First published in 1986. The first edition of this work was in 1971. In the intervening years a number of books and articles have appeared which deal directly, or indirectly, with the subject of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0582314054
• ISBN13: 9780582314054
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Hunger was the driving force

In Tudor England, on average, 50 to 60 per cent of the population lived on the edge of starvation. They ranged from the absolutely destitute to the wage-earners. The causes of this situation were a rising population (and rising unemployment), illnesses (the plague), enclosures (people chased from common grounds for the rising of sheep), bad harvests and perhaps, the dissolution of the monasteries. Rebellion (a certain percentage of the destitute were demobilized soldiers) seemed to be the only way of bringing the grievances of the poor to the attention of the government. For their own security and out of fear for insurrections by the vagrant class (eventually manipulated by political opponents), the wealthy, who controlled the government, acted strongly and inhumanly. They imposed harsh laws, based on the assumption that employment was available for all who sought it. The able-bodied man who wanted to work was put in an impossible position: unable to find employment, yet forbidden by statute to beg, he had the alternative of breaking the law or facing death by slow starvation. As those brutal `negative' laws didn't have much effect to maintain `social order', they were replaced by the more `positive' Elizabethan Poor Laws (which lasted 250 years until 1888), imposing forced private charity on the `haves' in order keep the `have-nots' from starvation, nothing more. The author brushes a far too rosy picture of the forced donations (`merchants, nobility, yeoman displayed an intense interest in the relief of the poor'!). At the end, he is forced to admit that even this minimal national legislation was seldom implemented and that local relief schemes were inadequate. The authorities adopted only temporary solutions in order to prevent a state of complete anarchy. In the mean time, all municipal schemes went bankrupt, except one, in the city of Norwich. This small book sketches a brutal picture of the state of humanity in the 15th till the 17th century. It is a must read for all those interested in the history of mankind. I also highly recommend the works of E.J. Burford.