4 - Governing Poverty and Disorder: Corporate Towns and Social Policy

Summary

Political order and governance within a corporation formed only one type of order that borough magistrates were expected to keep. Maintaining socio-economic and moral order over a town and its inhabitants also ranked high among the duties of mayors and their fellow officers. In a time of great demographic pressure and economic stress, towns were crucibles of change. Many provincial towns (as well as London) experienced significant in-migration as the rural poor increasingly left their homes seeking employment or economic betterment. Large-scale shifts in the economy across the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries due to war in Europe, trade stagnation, and inflation deeply affected urban economies, tied as they were to commerce and wage-labor. Taxed with concentrated populations of poor and un- or underemployed inhabitants, England's towns had the potential to be flashpoints for unrest. This incentivized local authorities and central government alike to enforce social and economic regulations designed to maintain order, promote appropriate behavior, and relieve those deserving help.

This chapter examines some of the main points of connection and contention between borough governors and the early Stuart state on matters of social and moral control. Local and national policies on the poor, plague orders, alehouse regulation and brewing, and controlling the associated potential for disorder that went with them were vital concerns of governance in this period. Town governments had long experience in dealing with these matters; the social and economic trends tending toward increased poverty and mobility had been in play since at least the 1550s. Indeed, some of the policies adopted on a national scale regarding the poor originated first in England's towns as they experimented in the sixteenth century with programs to address poverty. As early as 1549, Norwich instituted a compulsory poor rate, followed by provision of grain for the poor and regulation of vagrants. Ipswich developed similar programs. Balancing an impulse for charity and an imperative to maintain order, both local and central authorities attempted to knit up the unraveling social and moral fabric they saw as a particular problem in England's towns and cities.

As the king's deputies in their localities, the magistrates of provincial towns carried out parliamentary statutes and Privy Council orders, sharing common interest with the state at large to preserve order and protect the well-being of the commonwealth.