1 - Housing Policy

Summary

Christ should lie no more abroad in the streets.

Tudor and Stuart policy towards the poor was dominated by two perceived problems: vagrancy and idleness. The requirement to relieve the genuinely impotent poor was of long standing, and its continuation was never in doubt. Through the Tudor poor laws this requirement was discharged through an increasingly bureaucratic response which systematised and regulated local communities’ traditional responsibilities. This imposed a nationwide framework of parish rates assessed and dispensed by parish officials, overseen by justices of the peace. The problems of vagrancy and idleness, on the other hand, were seen as different from the traditional requirement to relieve the impotent; while not new issues in themselves, their scale and nature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries seemed to be new and threatening. Occasionally there were glimmers of an understanding that these were by-products of major socio-economic changes which were transforming England: an increase in landlessness among the rural population; the decay of traditional industries such as the cloth trade; the loss of time-honoured relief mechanisms in the monasteries, the confraternities and the guilds; the prohibition on retained armies resulting in large numbers of discharged soldiers after each military engagement; and extensive migration to the towns, particularly London, in search of work and opportunities. Mostly, however, the problems were couched in the moral rhetoric of condemnation, of masterless men, sturdy beggars, idle rogues. The solutions were seen to be settlement and work, ensuring that people were the legal responsibility of one place to which they could be returned and given employment, with punishment for the recalcitrant. This is the context within which the provision of housing for the poor must be viewed.

Housing was a key element in the welfare ‘system’ of early modern England. Yet there was no such thing as a coherent policy encompassing approaches to housing the poor. Prior to the late eighteenth century, there was little interest in how the poor were housed, unless it was an issue of community safety or order. Only in London was anxiety expressed about the living conditions of the poor, where overcrowding, poor people ‘heaped up together’, was thought to encourage plague, disorder and food shortages.