12 - Living in Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Terling

Summary

Samuel Payne was baptised in the mid-Essex village of Terling on 1 August 1736, the fifth child of Robert and Mary Payne. After marrying in 1757 or 1758, he and his wife Sarah went on to have twelve children between 1759 and 1778, including (remarkably) three sets of twins: Hannah and Mary, baptised in June 1768, Joseph and John, baptised in June 1770, and Rhoda and Amelia, baptised in August 1773. This exceptional fertility left the Paynes heavily dependent on relief from the parish throughout the period. Samuel received relief during bouts of ‘sickness’ in each winter between 1767 and 1771, in the summer of 1773, the spring of 1776, and the late summer of 1781. Similarly, Sarah was incapacitated by her repeated pregnancies, requiring assistance in 1766, 1768, from March to December 1770, 1772 and 1773, and the summers of 1776 and 1778, coinciding with the birth of her last two children. By the time Samuel died, aged fifty-two, in January 1789, only nine of these children survived, but they and their mother continued to depend on occasional relief payments until at least 1801. Indeed, Sarah's son Robert followed his father, and his paternal grandfather and namesake, in sometimes requiring poor relief to support his family, as he struggled to make ends meet in the very difficult years at the turn of the nineteenth century.