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Looking back … upon England, as it was before the Reformation, we find that … the religion of the country, by means of its forms and ceremonies, was interwoven with the whole business of life … The diseased growth of parishes frustrated the political as well as the religious purposes of our old parochial system, if we may be permitted to consider apart things which are, strictly speaking, inseparable. Of late years, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England. The parochial system is, no doubt, a beautiful thing in theory, and is of great value in small rural districts; but in the large town it is a mere shadow and a name. INTRODUCTION The 1911 national census highlighted a remarkable fact. By that date about 8,322 parishes in England and Wales (58 per cent of the total) were not coterminous for civil and ecclesiastical purposes. This phenomenon, which the census report emphasised as a matter of great concern, also raised apprehensions in earlier censuses. It stood in contrast to the situation in the late eighteenth century or earlier, when the very large majority of parishes had been co-extensive for civil and ecclesiastical matters. At that earlier time, as throughout the medieval and early modern period, civil and religious affairs had been closely bonded together in parish life. Yet this was far less the case by 1911. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Where do you come from?’ must be one of the most frequent opening conversational lines in English. It can be interpreted in a number of ways, yet it always produces a reply and reciprocal interest, and its answer often appears to be confirmed by accent, personality, and appearance. It may establish rapport, but occasionally arouses distrust. Each place, and the many ways in which a person may be attached to it, has different cultural and subjective connotations. These indicate the crucial importance of ideas of belonging, or the wish for it, even in the modern world. Similarly, the search for ‘roots’, for one's genealogy, fills record offices with people, inspires much local historical research, and manifests the same interest. In many other areas of culture we also witness the desire for belonging and attachment to place. We hear this in popular song, from nostalgic nineteenth-century emigration songs, like ‘The leaving of Liverpool’, and earlier ballads like ‘Loch Lomond’, to ‘It's a long way to Tipperary’, ‘Show me the way to go home’, ‘Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner’, through to the more recent lyrics of ‘The green, green grass of home’, ‘I'm going home’, ‘Going to my home town’, ‘Clare to here’, and so on. Geordie oil workers, returning from the Scottish rigs, roar in deafening crescendo ‘I'm coming home Newcastle, wish I'd never been away’, as the train approaches their destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The occupation of the labourer, as well as the nature of his being, subjects him to acute illness, chronic disorders, and at length to old age, decrepitude and impotence … without the aid of his more opulent neighbours, or, what is infinitely to the credit of this nation, without the interference of the godlike laws of his country, this useful class of our countrymen would sink in the arms of famine or despair. The basis of formal economic assistance to the elderly in the eighteenth century was created in 1597/8 and 1601 when the tenets of the Old Poor Law were set by the acts of 39 and 43 Elizabeth. These acts, “the godlike laws” applauded by Thomas Ruggles in the quotation above, stipulated that churchwardens and overseers in every parish in the realm should use taxes raised on the parish's inhabitants to care for the poor. As a guide to parish officers explained: “The stat. of Elizabeth distinguishes the poor into two classes, the able-bodied, or those who are able to work, and the impotent; and it directs the manner in which they are to be provided for, namely by setting the former to work, and by furnishing the latter with necessary relief.” The impotent, the guide continued, were “the aged and decrepit, the fatherless and motherless, the lame, the blind, persons labouring under sickness, idiots, lunatics & c.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike other aspects of the history of old age, ideals regarding old people's homes and families were quite clear and relatively uniform in the eighteenth century. First, older people expected to retain independent dwellings (or at least dwelling spaces) until, and even after, they reached decrepitude. Although older people strived to remain independent, they also sought to contribute actively and significantly to the well-being of their families. The close ties that they ideally retained with their family members were characterized by reciprocal responsibilities between the generations. Once an old person fell into need, his or her children, and even more distant kin in cases where children were not available, were expected to offer whatever assistance was possible, including co-residence. An old person's ability to meet these ideals was strongly connected to gender and economic status, as well as to age and individual family circumstances. These expectations and ideals changed little over the course of the eighteenth century, despite the sweeping changes that affected England's economy and demography. This chapter focuses on expectations of residential independence for the aged and examines the degree to which these expectations were met in the lived experiences of old men and women. It also examines the nature of the relationship between spouses, showing the variety of ways in which husbands and wives depended on each other. Older couples sought and achieved economic and residential security and autonomy as pairs rather than merely as individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Data were collected from254 skeletons at the Monroe County Almshouse in Rochester, NewYork, dating from1826–1863.Additional evidence was used to calculate mortality rates for paupers (Brighton Town Clerk's Records) and the general population of the City of Rochester (Mount Hope records and census data). Because death rates were so high at the almshouse, the signs of biological stress observed in the skeletons, with the possible exception of infants, were probably not the result of institutionalization but, rather, the result of nutritional inadequacies or diseases experienced outside the almshouse. Documentary evidence indicates that mortality in the City of Rochester around the middle of the nineteenth century was highly variable and characterized by considerable infectious and parasitic diseases. Infant and early childhood mortality was severe. At the Monroe County Almshouse almost one-half of the subadults (as evidenced in both the skeletal collection and the BTC Record) died within the first year of life. The health index for the sample is 72.3% of the possible maximum score, which is higher than that for the St. Thomas' Anglican Church sample. Documentary evidence, when available, should be included in the overall assessment of health among skeletal samples. It is evident from the Brighton Town Clerk's record that acute infectious disease played a major role in the mortality experience of almshouse residents, a situation that was not incorporated into the Mark I version of the index. In some respects, inmates of the almshouse do not appear much different from the population in general, for example, with respect to the stature of adult males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the transformation from barrack schools to family cottages by focusing on the role that middle-class conceptions of the family, domesticity and domestic space played in late Victorian debates concerning institutions for poor children. Discourses among Poor Law administrators, philanthropists and middle- and upper-class reformers regarding proper environments for poor children; Association of the notions of domestic space with middle-class values and political ideologies.

The south-west comprises the modern counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. This region bestrides the divide between highland and lowland England. The majority of the region comprises the older, harder rocks of upland Britain, together with the more acidic soils derived from those rocks, the consequent pastoral farming systems, an ancient bocage landscape and a dispersed pattern of rural settlements. There are few large towns (Map 22.8). The upland moors of Mendip and Exmoor and the granite bosses of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor add transhumance and mineral exploitation of silver, tin and lead to the economic equation, whilst the long, indented coastline to both the north and south of the peninsula brought opportunities for fishing, coastal trading and links with South Wales, Ireland, north-west France and Iberia. However, the south coast is altogether more sheltered than the north with its steep cliffs and lack of inlets. In contrast, Wiltshire, Dorset and east Devon are part of the lowland zone with fertile clay vales, chalk and limestone escarpments and plateaux. Soils are more fertile, the climate is drier, mixed farming systems predominate and nucleated village settlements are the norm. However, there were also large areas of lowland heath on the poor sandy soils of south-east Dorset, and extensive down-land pastures on the chalk of Salisbury Plain which could be exploited to feed huge flocks of sheep. Whereas water was in short supply on the downs, the opposite was true in the marshlands of the Somerset Levels which provide a third distinctive local landscape of much richer pastureland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the early fourteenth century London was pre-eminent among English urban communities. Whether ranked according to wealth or according to population, its pre-eminence was undisputed. Although London was larger, more populous and wealthier than other English towns, it was distinguished from them not only by size and volume: it developed, in the period covered here, characteristics which were distinctive. London was different not only in scale, but also in kind. This pre-eminence is reflected in the creation and for the most part survival of a remarkable series of administrative records. Although the chamberlain's records (including the apprentice and freedom registers) were destroyed in a fire in the seventeenth century, the City is rich in custumals, record books and wills and deeds enrolled in the Husting court from the mid-thirteenth century. The pleadings in the mayor's court survive from the end of the thirteenth century and the records of the meetings of the court of aldermen and court of Common Council from 1416. In addition to the City's official records, there survive thousands of testaments enrolled in the ecclesiastical courts, pre-Reformation records of some thirty of London's parish churches and material of great interest from the archives of the livery companies. Much of this material, particularly that from the city's own administration, has been edited and calendared. Moreover, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Londoners developed a taste for ‘London chronicles’, i.e. histories of England written in the vernacular and divided into mayoral, rather than regnal, years. These chronicles throw some fitful light upon the course of English history, but rather more light on the thought-world of the Londoners who commissioned and bought them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Coming into Canterbury’, wrote Charles Dickens in David Copperfield, ‘I loitered through the old streets with a sober pleasure that calmed my spirits and eased my heart. There were the old signs, the old names over the shops … the venerable Cathedral towers … the battered gateways.’ For Dickens, and for the modern visitor to towns where medieval fabric can still be seen (such as Norwich, which claims to have more surviving medieval churches than any other town in western Europe), the built environment creates a powerful sense of place and a reassuring frame of reference. We can try to reconstruct the former townscape and delve behind it to study the relationship between physical settings and the attitudes which influenced the conduct of medieval life. The construction of the built environment in medieval British towns reflected both social values and personal initiatives or personal monument making, be it repairing a bridge, erecting a conduit or adding a chapel to the local parish church. But the period was not static. Over the two and a half centuries covered by this chapter, certain developments and underlying trends can be seen. During the medieval period, several features of construction and amenity first appeared in towns: jetties for the first floor and higher by 1300 (already in London by 1246), dormer windows by 1450 and the flooring over of halls which probably happened in profusion in towns during the fifteenth century before it was necessary or thought fashionable in the countryside. The underlying motors were the conjunction of pressure on space and the availability of cash, generated by trade and other urban pursuits (such as rents), which created the climate for innovation and display, both at the level of grand patronage in a church or the ordinary house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: points of perspective In 1314 the spire of St Paul's Cathedral in London was damaged by a lightning bolt. The repairs accomplished, a man clambered carefully to the scaffold's summit and replaced the great cross, charged with its precious contents of relics which included a fragment of the cross of Christ. From up here, one commanded a panorama of the city. The square mile of the walled area, and the straggling suburbs to east and west and to the south of the River Thames, were all displayed to view. The urban vista was punctuated by the towers of a hundred parish churches and a score of convents, whose smaller scale expressed, from the perspective of the cross of Paul's, their subordinate and ancillary status. Order was additionally revealed in a network of streets still marked by a grid plan imposed four centuries before by an Anglo-Saxon king. From this vantage point the city appeared entire, comprehensible and available for possession. When, in the sixteenth century, the first urban mapmakers were encouraged by municipal councils to publish such another panoptic vision of the city, they made the same climb in order to construct from steeple-tops the impression, before the possibility of human flight, of the bird's-eye, all-encompassing view. Bishop, monarch and magistrate each conceived of the city as a visible entity, conveniently subject to his direction and control. But how many shared the universal vision of Paul's cross? Far below, the teeming alleys and tenements of early fourteenth-century London housed 80,000 individuals, hardly one of whom would ever see the city in this light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The fabric of the urban environment experienced accelerating change during the course of the eighteenth century, and the pace of change in some towns, although by no means all, underwent a dramatic gearshift from the 1780s onwards. These changes were driven by rapid population growth and migration, and by technological innovation, leading to the mechanisation of transport and of many manufacturing processes. Central government and municipal authorities contributed very little to this metamorphosis, unlike the experience of many European cities. The traditional pattern of urban social geography, in which the well-to-do lived in the centres of towns and the poor in the suburbs, was shattered in many towns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and replaced by suburban residential segregation based upon socio-economic status and the separation of home and work, in its turn dependent upon ease of transport. Everywhere it is a subtle, complex process of transformation. In some towns, such as Glasgow, it takes place within a generation. In other towns, unaffected by the first stages of industrialisation, it was the end of the nineteenth century before these processes had fully worked themselves out. Much of this growth and change had to be accommodated within ancient boundaries and administrative structures, creating problems of health, sanitation and housing upon an unprecedented scale. These problems were widely recognised by the 1830s, but it is the 1840s before central government begins to take the first tentative steps towards putting things right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foundations The topography of British towns at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the product of the interaction between successive generations of men and women living in society, and the opportunities and constraints presented by their environment over the preceding millennium. Volume I of this work, more especially Chapters 8 and 16, gives an account of the medieval antecedents to this chapter. Of all the features of towns inherited from the medieval centuries, the street plan, once laid down, has proved to be the most enduring, matched only by the similar longevity of the boundaries of the burgage plots which composed the spaces between the streets. The layout of both could be profoundly affected by the line of any fortifications which might be present. By the end of the medieval period well over a hundred English and Welsh towns had been fortified, including Coventry, Southampton, Hereford and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ‘the strength and magnificens of the waulling of this towne’, Leland thought, ‘far passith al the waulles of the cities of England and of most of the townes of Europa’. Numerous others, including Aylesbury, Chelmsford and Trowbridge, were not fortified, whilst in some cathedral cities the close formed a separate fortified enceinte, as at Salisbury. Many town walls were, by the beginning of this period, ruinous, and there was much encroaching and piecemeal destruction. A survey of Oswestry made in 1602 revealed great waste made on the castle, with stones carried away by the wagon load and whole towers taken down, with the gates of the town all very ruinous except Churchgate, where the burgesses had made their election house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period 1540–1700 saw a transformation of the religious and educational institutions of English, Welsh and Scottish towns, and of the society and culture of their inhabitants. In Britain as in Europe, towns and urban society played an important part in the reformation of the Church and of its role in secular society, both in terms of institutional change and in popular and elite responses to it. Between 1540 and 1580, many of the basic institutional structures of medieval urban society were abolished or fundamentally altered. Important foci of community and civic life, such as fraternities, chantries and ceremonial, disappeared, and town populations and governments had to find a new collective spirit and new ways of organising their sociability. Many town governments came to be influenced by a Protestant or Puritan political ideology, which shaped their view of society and their response to its problems. The reformed Scottish Church achieved a very close relationship with secular urban governments, and set the agenda for action in many spheres, beyond those of religion and education. In the century and a half after the Reformation, religion continued to play an important part in the lives of townspeople in England and Wales, but the Church as a universal institution had been weakened, and the former unity of belief and observance was never recovered. Towns came to accommodate a multiplicity of beliefs and congregations. In the longer term the fragmentation of religious gatherings was paralleled by a decline in observance overall, a growing secularisation of society to which the increase in educational endowment and provision may have contributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life began for John Chesilden II on St Valentine's Day, Wednesday 14 February, 1425 at Seaton in Rutlandshire. Although the Chesildens normally resided in Rutland, they had landed interests in Northamptonshire and, after 1428, in Leicestershire, too, when John II's grandmother, Anne or Amice, inherited the manor of Allexton from her mother, Margaret Burgh. Within a few hours of John II's birth, the stage had been set for his first public appearance in the near-by parish church of All Hallows. Before the day was out, John would be baptised here and given the name which his father also bore. But first, John senior despatched a rider, William Baxter, to fetch lady Elizabeth Longford to be his son's godmother. Meanwhile, the church was made ready; John Club carried fire to light the candles and John Murdok brought water to fill the font. Once these preparations were complete and Elizabeth Longford had arrived, a procession set out from the Chesilden's house to travel the short distance to All Hallows. Apart from John Chesilden senior and Elizabeth Longford, most of those present were probably neighbours, household servants and local tenants. There is no indication that the infant's mother attended the baptismal service. Her presence was not required and her first post-natal visit to the church would follow some days later for the ceremony known as ‘churching’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Funny you can be so lonely with all these folks around. When I come out of the country hither to the City methinks I come into another world, even out of darkness into light. The popular culture of cities and towns is, by its nature, a derived culture. Towns were a relatively late development; they could arise only when agriculture had been sufficiently developed to yield a surplus for their support, and the ratio of urban to rural population in traditional societies has always been low. Towns derived not only their basic food supply from the countryside, but also their population. Urban death-rates were generally higher, and birth-rates lower than in the countryside, and the net reproduction rate was for much of the time less than unity. There thus had to be a migration from the country to the town, and the vast number of locative personal names, indicating a village or place of origin, gives some idea of the distances covered by the migrants. Many towns had no precisely known point of origin. They had grown in response to human needs, and in some form or other seemed to have existed from time immemorial. Some had been established by the Romans, had decayed and had been abandoned, leaving only an infrastructure of roads and the rumour that there had once been a city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The family is the first refuge of the individual when the state fails him. The family was an open-ended, low-keyed, unemotional, authoritarian institution which served certain essential political, economic, sexual, procreative, and nurturant purposes. In 1676 the Reverend William Sampson was inducted into the living of Clayworth in Nottinghamshire. From the first he kept a diary in which he recorded significant events within his parish. Very wisely, he began by compiling a list of his parishioners. He counted 401 heads, and noted that there were ‘no popish recusants … nor are there (thanks to God) any other dissenters’. Twelve years later he compiled a second list, this time with greater care and ‘according to ye Order of Houses & Families, down ye North side of ye town, & up ye South-Side, and lastly those of Wyeston’, a hamlet nearby. In his second census he was at pains to give the occupations and interrelationships of those who made up the 91 households within the parish. The result is a complex pattern of familial structures. Of the 91 households the great majority were nuclear, each consisting of parents and children with at most a servant living in. Thirteen were headed by a widow or widower with children. There were only four single-person households, three of them widows, one with a servant living in. There was little evidence in Clayworth that the extended family included grandchildren and other relatives, but in no less than 26 there were servants, some of whom must have been farm labourers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the vagrants in Wicklow County, Ireland. It states that the county has been a favourite place for vagrants of the country because of its features, such as the holiday areas on both parts of the coach road and the position of principal workhouses. It says that the tramp of the country is little bothered by the laws and maintains his good humor and fine health as he is living in out-of-door conditions.

A definition of the term "workhouse" is presented. According to the British Poor Law, workhouses were designated to become deterrent institutions and were designed to enforce less eligibility by making the claiming of relief as unpleasant as possible. Residents of workhouses received institutional care as indoor relief.