The Lives of the Poor in the West End of London, 1725-1824

'Remember the poor prisoners': figure from Laroon's The Cryes of the City of London Drawne after life. 1687

This project is not another analysis of poor relief. It is a reconstruction of the lives of the London poor using poor relief records. We aim to study the relationship between life cycles, poor relief and survival strategies of the labouring poor in Europe's largest city between 1724 and 1824. Despite the advances of historical demography we remain relatively ignorant about the relationship between the demographic cycle and welfare, or how communal relief was used at various stages of the life cycle. Discussions do not usually progress much beyond a summary of the cycle of poverty as described by Rowntree, while pointing out that the high mortality rate of earlier centuries complicated this cycle. Discussions of survival strategies in this period tend, in their turn, to be characterised by quite reasonable information on (some) male wage rates, tolerable information on (some) male earnings, very little information about the earnings of women and children and rather patchy information about kin networks (or their absence). Snapshots are sometimes available for particular moments of time, but it is difficult to link these moments, while poor relief is hardly discussed at all. The exceptions tend to relate to the aged or, less frequently, to children.

It is particularly difficult to progress beyond this level when studying larger towns. Demographic historians have usually been compelled to avoid larger towns, as migration is considered to make family reconstitution difficult or impossible to achieve. Accordingly, little is known about the relationship between male wage rates and family welfare, the role of poor relief, particularly, the possible marginalisation of the aged or the extent of kin support in urban societies. This ignorance has also set a limit upon historians' ability to study the changing experience of children within the welfare system. However, the voluminous body of poor law material surviving for some London parishes makes such progress possible. The records for the large Westminster parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields (population c. 30,000) are particularly good. They will enable us to relate the changing familial, marital and occupational circumstances of paupers to their involvement with the parish poor law.

Historians have suggested that a majority of people would expect to come into contact with communal relief at some point in their life cycle and certainly the overwhelming majority of the lower forty per cent of the population could expect to come into contact with the poor law, particularly if they survived beyond the age of about fifty and not so infrequently before then. Most of the children of the poor who lost one parent and whose surviving parent did not remarry rapidly could also expect to be in contact with the poor law. An analysis of the poor of St. Martin's therefore enables us to develop an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the relationship between the life cycle of its poor and their welfare. It is currently very difficult for historians to analyse the effects on the family economy of factors such as declining mortality, increased family size, some fifty years of warfare and the 'industrious revolution' and it is certainly impossible to do so in London.

The two applicants are particularly well placed to work together and to achieve synergistic gains in this research. Jeremy Boulton has completed a number of studies of poor relief in the parish in the period 1580-1724 and is currently completing a book on this subject for Manchester University Press.  He has he developed a viable methodology and the biographies of the paupers reconstructed from this later project will be directly comparable with the life histories he has uncovered for the previous years. By dove-tailing, we will therefore provide information covering over more than two and a half centuries, a length of time quite unique for the study of a large English town, life cycles and welfare policies. Leonard Schwarz has published extensively on living standards, wages and family labour in London between about 1690 and 1850 and is very well acquainted with the relevant material, both primary and secondary. The two applicants have collaborated closely on their respective chapters in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain and both have considerable experience in designing and maintaining relational databases. It must be emphasised that this project is based on much richer records than were available for Boulton's studies in the earlier period. The poor of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Westminster are, it is believed, peculiarly visible in the historical record and this project aims to reconstruct their experience in unique detail.

The central problem with any reconstitution exercise in an early modern city before the census era, is, of course, the fact that most urban residents were migrants, and highly mobile within the city itself. This means that it is simply not a feasible or worthwhile exercise to attempt a full family reconstitution of a London parish register. It would be impossible in most cases to link pauper 'careers' reconstructed from poor law payments to corresponding baptism or burial entries in the local parish register. In particular, one cannot recover the important variable of age in the mobile metropolitan environment. The poor law records make possible an alternative approach. The poor law of this parish is one of the best documented in London, in particular the Examination Books, which record details of all paupers who came to the attention of JPs in the parish. We describe this in detail in our longer proposal. These reveal an enormous amount about the social economy of the poor and their attitudes to the poor law and are therefore particularly suitable for uncovering the survival strategies adopted by the poor. In many cases the ages of those examined, and frequently their marital, child-bearing, occupational and residential histories were noted. The number of persons examined per year was very large and this means that the majority of all those receiving regular parish relief in the eighteenth century have corresponding entries of varying lengths in the examination books. The voluminous nature of the parish records means that lacunae found in some records can be filled from others. For most years we have complete lists of those receiving pensions and/or inhabiting the parish workhouse. Most paupers will be listed, too, in the examination books. Much information given in the examination and workhouse admission books, too, can be verified and supplemented from parish register material. It cannot be stressed enough that we will know the names and many other details of most paupers at any one point in time. Reasons for leaving the workhouse, such as death or departure, are frequently given in the records themselves. We also have periodic censuses of parish paupers, which also supply age and residence information. We have, therefore, reasonable confidence that we can know the entire 'universe' of paupers under observation, each year, making linkage between sources a relatively simple matter.

The formal start date of the project is 1724. That is the date at which the parish constructed a workhouse to house many of its poor, and at that date detailed workhouse admission books become available to supplement the overseers accounts and examination books. It is also the date at which the parish of St George, Hanover Square was carved out of St Martin's. The project finishes in 1824, having transcribed over 100,000 workhouse entries and exits, 10,000 settlement examinations, and nearly 15, 000 payments to parish pensioners. The team is now working on the process of combining this data.