This law is often described as important because it makes a distinction between the idle and the truly needy. However, it does nothing of the kind. It restricts the movements of the impotent poor in order to restrict more effectively the movements of the able-bodied, who begged and wandered just as they did. It is designed to make unnecessary the distinction required by the ban on charity for sturdy beggars in the Ordinance of Labourers. Again, while the Poor Laws are always treated as if they were intended to alleviate poverty, these early statutes from which they derive are clearly designed to immobilize labor and bring down its cost. The features of the laws affecting the impotent are designed to ensure these results.
The interpretation of the laws as primarily charitable provision for the needy, rather than as attempts to control the cost and supply of labor, has given great currency to the view that they originated in the breaking up of the monasteries by Henry VIII. The eighteenth-century writer Frederick Eden, in his classic work, The State of the Poor (1797), traces the Poor Laws to these origins, as do Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Carlyle, Disraeli, Hilaire Belloc, and others. Marx mentions the fourteenth-century laws in his discussion of the Poor Laws in Capital, but he makes nothing of them. Occurring as they do long before the Reformation, they are anomalous, if one assumes that the intent of the laws was to create a secular equivalent of the disrupted institutions of Christian charity. The miseries of the mass of rural people driven from the land described in More’s Utopia, published in 1515, make very clear that the problems of poverty and beggary were fully present when the monasteries still flourished. That More should not have mentioned them in association with the suffering he describes hardly encourages one to believe that they figured significantly in alleviating need.
The institution threatening to collapse in the fourteenth century was not monasticism but feudalism. The Black Death had ravaged the society, transforming the situation of the workers by making them few. The great restlessness of the people during this period issued finally in the Peasants’ War. Jean Froissart, a contemporary of these events, a Frenchman with a courtly bias, reports in his Chronicles that in 1381 there occurred “great disasters and uprisings of the common people, on account of which the country was almost ruined beyond recovery.” Says Froissart: “It was because of the abundance and prosperity in which the common people then lived that this rebellion broke out.” Other historians find a cause in the Ordinance of Labourers. The high wages which workers seem to have been able to command where the law was skirted, together with the oppressiveness of its enforcement where it was not, might very well have produced a revolt like Wat Tyler’s. “These bad people,” wrote Froissart, “began to rebel because, they said, they were held too much in subjection, and when the world began there had been no serfs.” Serfdom was at that time, according to him, especially widespread in England.
The peasant rising swept through the country and entered London. The great army of the poor was finally dispersed by the precocious statecraft of the young King Richard II, who granted their request, the end of serfdom. When they had returned to their villages, he sent men at arms after them, the letters freeing them were torn up and scattered in front of them, and their leaders were killed, more than fifteen hundred men. Seven years later, in 1388, Richard II legally forbade the movement of working people over the countryside. The advantages of the law as a system of social control are obvious. Further, it prevented workers from finding the best market for their labor, keeping wages low even at the cost of creating idleness and indigency. This immobilization continued as a feature of the Poor Laws for five centuries. Clearly the legislation is not based on any charitable design. The intention of this law is to assure that the poor remain poor.
Other acts leading up to 43 Elizabeth, as the classic version of the Poor Laws passed in 1601 is known, are unabashedly ferocious. They lay claim to the labor of working people with sovereign indifference to the questions of freedom such appropriation necessarily entails. In the first year of the reign of the child king Edward VI, it was enacted “that if any man, or woman, able to work should refuse to labour, and live idly for three days, that he, or she, would be branded with a red hot iron on the breast with a letter ‘V’, and should be adjudged the slave, for two years, of any person who should inform against such idler.” A glimpse of hell, surely. “And the master was directed to feed his slave with bread and water or small drink and such refuse meat as he should think proper; and to cause his slave to work, by beating, chaining, or otherwise in such work and labour (how vile soever it be) as he should put him into.” Furthermore, “if he runs away from his master for the space of fourteen days, he shall become his slave for life, after being branded on the forehead or cheek with the letter ‘S’; and if he runs away a second time and shall be convicted thereof by two sufficient witnesses, he shall be taken as a felon, and suffer pains of death, as other felons ought to do.”
The preamble of the statute makes explicit the philosophical grounds for the criminalization of idleness: If “the vagabonds who were unprofitable members, or rather enemies of the commonwealth, were punished by death, whipping, imprisonment, and with other corporal pains, it were not without their deserts.” A vagabond, for the purposes of this law, is a man or woman who has been idle for three days—not in itself proof of wantonness or evil disposition. That a transgression so inconsiderable should bring down such ruin upon a man or woman accused of no crime except the withholding of labor means that the claim of “the commonwealth” upon the work of working people was, in effect, without limit. If “the commonwealth” failed to assert its claims in the person of an informer—the framers of this law were aware there existed in this world “foolish pitie and mercie,”
yet never the less justices of the peace shall be bound to inquire after such idle persons; and if it shall appear that any such have been vagrant for the space of three days, he shall be branded on the breast with a ‘V’, made with a hot iron, and shall be conveyed to the place of his birth, there to be nourished, and kept in chains, or otherwise, either at the common works on ammending highways, or in the service of individuals after all such former condition, space of years, orders, punishments for running away, as are expressed of any common or private person to whom such loiterer is adjudged a slave. If vagabonds [that is, those reported to have been idle three days] are carried to places, of which they have falsely declared themselves to be natives, then for such lie they shall be marked in the face with an ‘S’, and be slave to the inhabitants or corporation of the town, city or village where he said he was born in, for ever.
This law was soon repealed, though there were subsequent attempts to revive it. Its provisions, while extreme, nevertheless anticipate features of later laws.
A series of Elizabeth I’s laws made wages variable to deal with the problem of the changing prices of “things belonging to servants and labourers,” because earlier restrictions “could not be carried into execution without the great grief and burden of the poor labourer and the hired man.” A statute of 1572 required “a general assessment, or tax, for the relief of the impotent poor,” any remaining money to be used to employ rogues and vagabonds under supervision. The term “vagabond” was this time carefully defined to include, among others, “bearwards and common players in interludes.” If Shakespeare had not been allowed to dress as a great man’s servant, he would have fallen under the provisions of these laws, at a great ultimate cost to the tourist industry.
Another law passed in the reign of Elizabeth established “houses of correction,” where “youth might be accustomed and brought up to labour, and then not like to grow to be idle rogues; and that such as be already grown up in idleness, and so rogues at this present, may not have any excuse in saying that they cannot get service or work.” By the same authorities, needy persons were to be supplied with wool, hemp, flax, and so on, so that they could, of course, work.
A statute of 1597 established four overseers in each parish for setting poor children to work.
The law, addressed to the problem of vagrancy, directed parishes to establish housing for their own impotent poor.
These laws create an increasingly coherent system in which wages are fixed to the cost of subsistence, the movement of the poor is stabilized, the young poor and the idle poor are compelled to work—at textile manufacture, interestingly. And in being so employed, they are all objects of charity, or, to couch the matter in the modern and secular terms more appropriate to it, they are burdens on the taxpayer. Eden says, “The situation of the Poor even after the passing of the 43 Elizabeth, is represented by some authors as exceedingly deplorable; and the assessments for their relief are said to have been so low that many perished for want,” and that “The salaries of the masters and governors [of houses of correction] were directed to be paid by the treasurer of the Poor; and these alone must have added heavily to the county charges.” Never mind. The moral high ground won here will never be relinquished. Ever afterward the poor will be probationers while they work and reprobates when they cannot work, though there will be no obligation on anyone’s part to employ them.
Indeed, during the period from the Black Death onward, more and more land was being given over to the pasture of sheep—first of all because there were too few people to keep the land under cultivation, and then because wool became an important trade while England supplied the textile industry of Flanders, and then, in the sixteenth century, because England established its own textile industry.
It might seem that the ultimate pole of expropriation has been reached when one has only one’s labor to sell. A further extreme is reached when the principle is established that one’s labor has no objective value, not even of the kind established in a market. One last dispossession remains. The process was called “depopulation,” and it involved the pulling down of towns and villages—not the passive decline of the rural economy, but the active expulsions of people who had ceased to be of economic use.
The practical disadvantages that attended the consequent poverty and disruption, though never sufficiently great to outweigh their advantages, were noted. Attempts were made to slow or reverse this change, which was nevertheless precipitous. An act passed under Henry VIII in 1533–34 describes the amassing of pasture in a few hands, the destruction of towns, the driving up of the cost of food by the decline in farming, “by reason whereof a marvellous multitude and number of people of this realm be not able to provide meat, drink and clothes necessary for themselves, their wives and children, but be so discouraged with misery and poverty that they fall daily to theft, robbery and other inconvenience, or pitifully die for hunger and cold.” An act passed under Elizabeth in 1597–98 attempts to protect husbandry and tillage, on the grounds of their being “the occasion of the increase and multiplying of people both for service in the wars and in times of peace, being also a principle means that people are set on work, and thereby withdrawn from idleness, drunkenness, unlawful games and all other lewd practices and conditions of life,” and these being the means by which “the greater part of the subjects are preserved from extreme poverty in a competent estate of maintenance and means to live.” Yet during the period in which the poor were being driven off the land, laws were made which vehemently criminalized idleness, wandering, and begging. The contradiction did not go unremarked. A speaker in the House of Commons in 1601 is reported to have said, “If we debar tillage, we give scope to the depopulator; and then if the poor being thrust out of their houses go to dwell with others, straight we catch them with the Statute of Inmates; and if they wander abroad they are within danger of the Statute of the Poor to be whipped.” The displaced wretches Thomas More described as thronging the roads of sixteenth-century England were redundant, because the economy had undergone its first major revolution, and their skills as agricultural laborers existed in excess of economic need as the landscape became in effect industrialized, reorganized to supply wool for manufacture. Become unprofitable, they had the ground taken from under their feet, and they were compelled to wander, in violation of law, and to beg, in violation of law, and to live in idleness, in violation of law. How brutally people as frail as these surely were would have been affected by the beatings and brandings and like horrors to which their circumstances exposed them, a moment’s reflection will suggest. Imagine a father or mother of young children—these laws were gender-blind—starved and filthy and bewildered, beaten bloody for the crime of resourcelessness and then driven into the road again.
The Tudors are known to have executed many thousands of these “felons,” a word which, as we have seen, can merely signify the readiness of King and Parliament to punish vagrants as if they were criminals. But the outright executions cannot represent any significant fraction of the process of liquidation these depopulations must have entailed. Since life was precarious and child mortality rampant under the best circumstances, and since these people were transient and fugitive, their perishing may not have presented itself to their contemporaries as a phenomenon of demographic importance.
But only imagine—this was at the beginning of the period of enclosure of the commons, that great, bold movement of privatization which swept away the ancient right to keep a goat or a goose on common ground. It was superseded by the commercial interests of the landowning classes, the agricultural laborer being denied the only resource he had besides his redundant strength. The loss of the commons meant that the rural worker was conceded no independent, customary place in the world. His subsistence was nothing in the balance against the profits of the proto-industrialists, the suppliers of wool to the textile makers, Flemish or English.
The Poor Laws have always overlapped and contradicted one another. People who can neither stay where they are nor go elsewhere are in trouble. The question is simply whether, when, and how it would be advantageous to punish them. Fundamental institutions of British society were thus formed around legislation unconstrained by any conception of individual rights, not solicitous enough of those they affected to make their obedience possible, or even to allow for their survival. What the laws did do indisputably was to give a free hand to whoever wished to enforce them, whoever felt his interest to be infringed by this nuisance population.
I will make, at this point, a very rude suggestion. Why were the commons enclosed? To make room for sheep. But were the common lands sufficiently large, in a sparsely settled country, to be needed for that purpose? Even though penury and sharp dealing are pervasively characteristic of the British ruling class, still, would the addition of some hundreds more sheep be a sufficient motive in itself for an action so catastrophic, to these men of great fortune, whose portfolios were becoming even then increasingly diversified? A possible second motive would be “depopulation” itself. Their wages and the common lands together provided the whole subsistence of agricultural laborers. While neither was sufficient by itself, the loss of both would surely hasten the disappearance of the economically redundant. The word “redundant,” which Americans take to be a euphemism for “unemployed,” actually has a long and savage history, denoting an excess population, one whose sufferings prove it should not exist, a notion with many notable applications; for example, in Social Darwinism and in eugenics. To conceive of others’ lives in such terms is chilling, expressing a hostility to their hopes and interests deeper and more intractable than ordinary hatred.
The English and Scots countryside have long had emptiness as their primary ornament. They are seen as unspoiled by time, though in fact it was industrialization that created all that emptiness, as surely as it created Liverpool and Manchester. It seems Wordsworth used his influence as Poet Laureate to keep the railroad out of the Lake District, so that the region would remain inaccessible to working people from the cities. Whatever Cumbria has suffered, care has been taken to spare it one affliction.
A law promulgated under King Edward VI provided that if a poor woman gave birth to a child in a parish where she had no settlement, she was to be beaten and imprisoned for six months. The Poor Law specifi
ed that an indigent person should be provided for by the parish where he was born. A vagrant woman with child therefore exposed any parish through which she passed to possible liability for the support of an infant during the whole of its life. To avoid the potential addition of even one mouth to the burdens of a parish, this extraordinary transgression against decency was considered worthy of the seal of a prayer-book-writing little king. To see the mighty thus bend out of heaven, as it were, and touch these most precarious lives makes me think of Gloucester’s line from King Lear about flies and wanton boys. One may suppose that cosseted men, brooding over the injury done to them by indigency among the laboring classes, might have come up with a law like this one, not quite thinking through to the effect it would have on the survival of woman and child. But this supposition seems charitable.
I think it is at least as probable that the death of child or mother was not an unacceptable outcome. Henry Fielding quotes Edward VI with admiration to the effect that vagabonds are “spittle and filth” to be expelled from the body of the state because they have no use. There was nothing so cheap as the lives of redundant people. This was true from the beginning of the Tudor period to the end of the nineteenth century. How the statement should be amended now is a question that will arise in due course. For the moment I wish only to point out the re-enactment of this early revolution from above, when the economy was changed to produce mass unemployment, which was then condemned and penalized for the fact of its own existence, and made the pretext for undermining the relief system which supposedly protected against the consequences of unemployment. Exactly this has happened in postwar Britain, redundancy this time created not by the industrialization of agriculture but by the abandonment of industry.
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