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Illness among the poor in an early modern English town: the Norwich census of 1570

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Margaret Pelling
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Continuity and Change , Volume 3 , Special Issue 2: SPECIAL ISSUE: CHARITY AND THE POOR IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE EUROPE , August 1988 , pp. 273 - 290
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

ENDNOTES

1 Levy, H., ‘The economic history of sickness and medical benefit before the Puritan Revolution’, Economic History Review 13 (1943) 42–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Slack, P., ‘Social policy and the constraints of government, 1547–58’, in Loach, J. and Tittler, R. eds., The mid-Tudor polity (London and Basingstoke, 1980) 109.Google Scholar

3 Vives, J.-L.De subventione pauperum (1526), translated in part in Salter, F. R., Some early tracts on poor relief (London, 1926) 26Google Scholar; Pullan, B., ‘Catholics and the poor in early modern Europe’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976) 22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See for example the returns as to members' estate made by London companies in 1641: Dale, T. C. (transcriber), ‘The members of city companies in 1641’, 2 vols. (bound typescript, Society of Genealogists, 1934) in the Guildhall Library, London.Google Scholar

5 See e.g. London, Guildhall Library, MS 5196 (Bakers' Memorandum Book) fo 13r (1632).

6 Slack, P., ‘Poverty and politics in Salisbury 1597–1666’, in Clark, P. and Slack, P. eds., Crisis and order in English towns 1500–1700 (London, 1972) 170.Google Scholar

7 Arth, Henry (1597) in Tawney, R. H. and Power, E. eds., Tudor economic documents 3, 2nd impression (London, 1953) 445–6.Google Scholar

8 Vives in Salter, Early tracts, 9.

9 Davis, N. Z., ‘Poor relief, humanism, and heresy’, in idem, Society and culture in early modern France (London, 1975), esp. 36.Google Scholar See also Pullan, , ‘Catholics and the poor’, 24–5.Google Scholar

10 Levy, , ‘Economic history of sickness’, 52–3.Google Scholar

11 William Fleetwood quoted by Slack, P., ‘Poverty and social regulation in Elizabethan England’, in Haigh, C. ed., The reign of Elizabeth I, Problems in Focus Series. (London, 1984), 229Google Scholar; Marshall's, William version of the Ypres Forma subventionis in Salter, Early tracts, 43.Google Scholar

12 See e.g. Vives in Salter, Early tracts, 8.

13 Pelling, M., ‘Healing the sick poor: social policy and disability in Norwich 1550–1640’, Medical History 29 (1985) 115–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

14 See the very interesting work by Riley, J. C., for example his ‘Disease without death: new sources for a history of sickness’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1987) 537–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Davis, , ‘Poor relief’, esp. 39–41.Google Scholar

16 Slack, , ‘Poverty and social regulation’, 230–1.Google Scholar On English listings and censuses see also Phythian-Adams, C., Desolation of a city (Cambridge, 1979), esp. App. 2.Google Scholar

17 The full version of the Norwich census was discovered by Pound, J. F. and transcribed and analysed in his The Norwich census of the poor, 1570, Norfolk Record Society 40 (1971).Google Scholar Although I have made my own calculations, what follows is based on Pound's valuable transcript.

18 See Loudon, I. S. L., ‘The origin and growth of the dispensary movement’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 55 (1981) 323–42.Google Scholar Although less selective than hospitals, dispensaries still recorded on the basis of ‘use of service’ rather than actual incidence.

19 The following paragraph is based on Webster, C., Health: historical issues, CEPR discussion paper No. 5 (London, 1984).Google Scholar

20 Webster, , Health: historical issues, 7.Google Scholar On this see also idem, ‘Health, welfare and unemployment during the depression’, Past and Present 109 (1985) 204–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Webster, , Health: historical issues, 13.Google Scholar

22 See Webster, , Health: historical issues, 10–14Google Scholar; Bryder, L., Below the magic mountain: a social history of tuberculosis in twentieth-century Britain (Oxford, 1988) 103–9.Google Scholar On syphilis see Graunt, John, Natural and political observations… made upon the Bills of Mortality, ed. Hull, C. H., 2 vols. (New York, 1963)2 356Google Scholar; Williams, G., ‘An Elizabethan disease’, Trivium 6 (1971) 43–4.Google Scholar

23 See Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, General Household Survey 1983 (HMSO: London, 1985), chap. 9.Google Scholar

24 See General Household Survey 1983, chap. 3. A designed sample of addresses is used, reduced in 1982 by c. 14% to a maximum of 12,480; Curtis, S., Intra-urban variations in health and health care: the comparative need for health care survey of Tower Hamlets and Redbridge, Vol. I: adult morbidity and service use, 2nd edn. (Health Research Group, Dept. of Geography and Earth Science, Queen Mary College, London: London, 1984) 45, 49.Google Scholar

25 General Household Survey 1983, 151, 158, 160.

26 See Bucquet, D. and Curtis, S.,‘Socio-demographic variation in perceived illness and the use of primary care: the value of community survey data for primary care service planning’, Social Science and Medicine 23 (1986) 737–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed See also Curtis, Intra-urban variations.

27 For an analysis of households see Pound, , Census, 101.Google Scholar

28 See for example Marshall in Salter, , Early tracts, 70.Google Scholar

29 E.g. immigrant vessels, in which a delimited population also creates its own special conditions. For an analysis of the advantages of early sick fund records, see Riley, , ‘Disease without death’, esp. 540.Google Scholar Another valuable early source, the casebooks of Richard Napier, were generated on a ‘use of service’ basis. See Sawyer, R., ‘Patients, healers and disease in the southeast Midlands, 1597–1634’ (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1986).Google Scholar The results of inspection of military recruits had considerable effects on social policy at later periods, but early musters lack details of infirmity and of course- all such records are concerned only with men of certain age-groups: see Kussmaul, A., Servants in husbandry in early modern England (Cambridge, 1981) 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Space has not allowed further comparisons. The censuses nearest in value to Norwich's, with respect to sickness as well as poverty, relate to Salisbury (c. 1635), Ipswich (1597) and Warwick (1586).

31 Palliser, D., The age of Elizabeth (London and New York, 1983) 45–6.Google Scholar

32 Pelling, , ‘Healing the sick poor’, 118.Google Scholar

33 Pound estimates the English population of Norwich in 1570 as 10,625 (Census, 10).

34 Estimated alien immigration into Norwich had reached 4,000 by 1571, making a total population of approx. 14,500 at that date (Slack, P., The impact of plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), 128 and see note 33 aboveGoogle Scholar). Total population before the plague is estimated at less than 17,000 (Slack, , Impact of plague, 130Google Scholar). The alien community included its own proportion of poor.

35 For the UK the figure for 1951, at 15.7% for 60-and-overs, is closest to the Norwich figure. By 1971 this age group had risen to nearly 19% (calculated from Central Statistical Office), Annual Abstract of Statistics (HMSO: London, 1987), 8.Google Scholar Figures for 1981 are not strictly comparable.

36 See Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The population history of England 1541–1871 (London, 1981), App. 3, 528.Google Scholar I am grateful to Roger Schofield for providing me with 5-year breakdowns of the published 1571 figures. The basis for the PHE population estimates is more rural than urban, and is least urban for the 16th century. However, in the absence of complete urban listings the age-structure of large English towns in this period must remain conjectural. On social factors affecting urban age-structure, see Phythian-Adams, , Desolation of a city, esp. 80–98Google Scholar. Norwich's population underwent violent fluctuations between 1560 and 1600 (see also above). Like London Norwich attracted large numbers of apprentices, and immigration of this kind seems to have increased towards the end of the 16th century, but ‘wastage’ increased at the same time. Far less is known about emigration. Norwich is an example of ‘subsistence migration’ in that, of the 30% of the census population for whom such information is recorded, more than half were not born in Norwich (Pound, , Census, 12 and App. VIIGoogle Scholar). Norwich probably suffered a higher infant mortality rate than smaller centres, although Pound sees Norwich's poor as longlived owing to comparative cleanliness and lack of overcrowding (ibid., 13).

37 The tendency towards rounding at ages 40, 50, 60 and 80 means that for some purposes analysis in decadal age groups is more desirable than using five-year age groups (see Table 2). Other evidence also suggests that contemporary age-recording, while not always exact to the year, was likely to be correct to within 5 years: Finlay, R., Population and metropolis: the demography of London 1580–1650 (Cambridge, 1981), 124–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 To the 30% of children under 15 whose ages were stated may be added the 8.2% of children of unstated age (see Table 2), as the latter were almost invariably indicated as being less than 10 years old, and consequently not expected to work – hence the lack of detail.

39 Fewer boys (30) were present than girls (61), but 50 in this age group were unspecified as to gender. One of the defects of the twentieth-century census is a ‘loss’ in urban environments of young mobile adults aged between 25 and 44: Curtis, , Intra-urban variations, 12.Google Scholar On problems of estimating the presence of children and servants in sixteenth-century urban populations, see Phythian-Adams, , Desolation of a city, esp. 221–37.Google Scholar

40 I hope to return to this subject in a later paper.

41 Quoted, by Slack, , ‘Poverty and polities’, 171.Google Scholar

42 Cf. for the 18th century Loudon, I. S. L., Medical care and the general practitioner 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1986) 54–9, 74–5Google Scholar, showing considerable similarities.

43 Cf. Marshall's Ypres list of conditions requiring cure among the poor, which, besides those ‘roughe and scourvy and ronnynge with matter’ included especially the ‘brasten such as have the stone such as ar diseased in their faces’: Sailer, , Early tracts, 70.Google Scholar

44 See Pelling, ‘Healing the sick poor’.

45 For London see Howes's, John ‘Discourse’ (1582), in Tawney, and Power, eds., Tudor economic documents, 418, 424–5.Google Scholar Given the Norwich authorities' assumption that a person would continue to work, however aged, I have equated expressions such as ‘past work’ with major debility (see on this Pelling, M., ‘Old age and poverty in early modern towns’, Bulletin of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 34 (1984) 42–7Google Scholar). ‘Laborer work not for age’ is applied to a man of 60, but does not imply ‘retirement’ for persons this age or older (Pound, , Census, 36Google Scholar). Persons described as ‘miserable’ or ‘desolate’ have not been included, although it is likely that they were sick or disabled in some way. See for example ‘Maude House of 60 yere, a wedowe that is a desolete thinge & beggethe… Veri pore’ (Pound, , Census, 50).Google Scholar

46 Thus Elizabeth Mason, a widow of 80, lame and one-handed, is rated able: Pound, , Census, 28.Google Scholar

47 As Pound notes (Census, 16) fewer than 14% of poor women lacked employment, compared with 34% of men.

48 For some related detail, see Pelling, ‘Healing the sick poor’.

49 Power, D'A., ‘Some early hospital statistics’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (Section: History of Medicine) 14 (1921) 21–2.Google Scholar

50 Slack, P., ‘Mirrors of health and treasures of poor men: the uses of the vernacular medical literature of Tudor England’, in Webster, C., ed., Health, medicine and mortality in the sixteenth century (Cambridge, 1979) 237–73.Google Scholar

51 Curtis, , Intra-urban variations, 61–2.Google Scholar

52 Bucquet, and Curtis, , ‘Socio-demographic variation’, 737–8.Google Scholar The Nottingham Health Profile, for example, which is based on a self-completion questionnaire, uses such measures as lack of energy, pain, emotional distress, sleep disturbance, social isolation, and physical immobility.