Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
London lives: individuals, institutions and social life, 1500-1800 (Sponsored by Maney Publishing/The London Journal)
Chair: Matthew Davies (Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR)
Abstracts
The rich among the poor: neighbourly interaction in London’s eastern suburb, 1580–1700
Philip Baker and Mark Merry (Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR)
Gideon Sjoberg's classic model of the pre-industrial city posited a concentric circle pattern, with the wealthier inhabitants living in the city centre and the poorer population fanning out towards the periphery and congregating in the suburbs. This model contains an element of truth in its application to the social geography of early modern London, but is clearly an oversimplification. From the time of the Stuarts, the development of western parts of London and the contiguous City of Westminster saw the emergence of areas of wealth away from the medieval city. Furthermore, the social intermingling of rich and poor that was prevalent in medieval London society persisted in the city centre and Westminster into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A similar pattern was also apparent in London's eastern suburb. The large extra-mural parish of St Botolph Aldgate was already famed for its poor and their number by the sixteenth century, and a period of rapid - and massive - population and industrial expansion over the following decades only exacerbated the problem. Nevertheless, the parish may well have been one of the most fashionable in London in the 1630s, when two earls, three countesses, and several baronets and knights all lived there.
This paper sets out to explore the neighbourly interactions between the rich and poor inhabitants of St Botolph Aldgate between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries. As the parish underwent rapid development, wealthier parishioners initially attracted by its open land found themselves living in closer proximity to the poor. Some moved away - raising the question of what rich and poor thought of the other - while others remained and played an important role in the community through bequests and charitable donations. This in itself could prove a source of tension, however, and there is evidence of local opposition to particular benefactors. The paper will also investigate how rich and poor interacted in their daily lives, and where and under what circumstances that interaction took place. While examining transactions based around trade, employment and accommodation, it will also consider contact that took place through the religious life and government of the parish.
Poor man, sick man, beggarman, thief: plebeian lives and the making of modern London
Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire) and Robert Shoemaker (University of Sheffield)
Through the digitisation of some 40 million words of manuscript sources about the lives of plebeian Londoners between 1690 and 1800 and the creation of an integrated search facility to trace individuals through these and other electronic sources, the ESRC-funded Plebeian Lives project is creating biographies of hundreds of otherwise obscure individuals. These life stories document the experiences of poor Londoners as they navigated their way through the institutions which provided poor relief, medical care and justice in the metropolis. These stories demonstrate, this paper will argue, that through their use of these institutions, often playing them off against each other, plebeian Londoners shaped the development of social policy. Individual biographies will be combined with a synthetic and theoretical overview to argue that the creation of an individual, rather than institutional, centered approach to social history has the potential to transform our understanding, not only of the lives of the poor, but also the development of the modern state.
The rich becoming the poor: from riches to rags in the Georgian workhouse
Jeremy Boulton (University of Newcastle) and Leonard Schwarz (University of Birmingham)
Contemporary men and women, as Michael Mascuch reminded us in a pioneering article in Social History more than a decade ago, were much more likely to fear downward social mobility than expect social advancement. The principal aim of his middling autobiographers was to make ‘the family secure in an unstable physical environment’. Fears that wives and children would not be provided for adequately after death were commonplace, many writers celebrated their efforts to get adult children suitable careers and situations. Even when material prosperity was achieved ‘fear of poverty mitigated the enjoyment of attained domestic comforts’. This ‘middle class’ sought and prized security over material acquisition or social advancement, and were always conscious of the possibility of failure and decline. To quote Mascuch ‘in the early modern view, where the abyss below was closer than the escape hatch above, a desire to avoid seeing the family’s impendent tumble into social disgrace defined the parameters of social mobility’.
This paper examines the reality of such downward social mobility as experienced by those who became paupers in St Martin in the Fields. It uncovers the life courses of paupers relieved in the parish workhouse between 1725 and 1824. It focuses on questions of inter- and intra-generational social mobility. How many of these ‘paupers’ had experience of better times, of renting substantial houses or living in fashionable streets? How many had been respectable, rate-paying ‘householders’ before age, death or sickness brought social ruin? Such questions are clearly important. Downward social mobility distorts attempts to measure the extent of material accumulation over the life-cycle (since outright losers will be omitted from calculations). Again, without such contextualisation, how can one comprehend claims for ‘pauper agency’? Paupers who had been former rate payers and householders would have been more skilled at negotiating with parish officers than those who had never risen beyond an unskilled trade and cheap lodgings.
