Civility, honesty and the identification of the deserving poor in seventeenth-century England

Abstract

The Elizabethan poor laws, codified in 1598 and 1601, institutionalised the ancient moral distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.1 The idea that the idle or the shiftless were unsuitable ‘objects of charity’ had scriptural roots in St Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians: ‘if a man shall not work, then neither shall he eat’.2 Discrimination against the wilfully idle, especially those rogues and vagabonds whose lives of itinerant theft by definition threatened the stability of a social order which was anchored in notions of private property, had accordingly been practised long before the Tudor regime began its long series of legislative experiments in social welfare.3 Just as the sixteenth-century statutes sharpened perceptions of, and punishments for, vagrancy, however, they also articulated a more coherent vision of those who were deemed fit for parish relief in cash or kind. By 1598, policy-makers felt able to distinguish vagrants not only from the labouring poor (the under-employed or unemployed who were prevented from adequately maintaining their families either by prevailing levels of wages or structural problems in the economy) but also from the impotent poor (who were simply unable through either physical or mental incapacity to maintain themselves through their labour).4 The deserving poor were, therefore, identified primarily by their inability to labour: they were the ‘lame ympotent olde blynde and such other amonge them being poore and not able to worke’.5.