ABSTRACT
Thirty years ago it was asserted that the friendly societies of eighteenth-century England were an important ‘unifying cultural experience’ that ‘crystallised an ethos of mutuality’ amongst their members; William Hutton had described them two hundred years ago as ‘this amiable body of men, marshalled to expel disease’. Modern research has concentrated on nineteenth-century societies, especially their links with the emerging trades unions, but largely ignored those of earlier centuries or their significant provisions for medical care. Eighteenth-century evidence is undeniably difficult to find, but as early as 1698 Daniel Defoe noted that friendly societies were ‘very extensive’ and, a century later, when Sir Frederic Morton Eden travelled round 38 English counties, he noted that a hundred individual communities out of the 165 places he surveyed had at least one friendly society, some with a hundred or more members in each. Eden was keenly interested in benefit societies as part of the contemporary struggle to control poverty and he regularly noted details of how they ran their feast days and funerals, as well as their sick pay and pension arrangements. All friendly societies had sets of printed rules and from these, in combination with the clubs’ own cash books and miscellaneous papers, it is possible to see the vital role they played throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in providing health care and insurance for labourers and above – not paupers, but not so prosperous that they could afford entirely private medical care and fees. Indeed, those who had received parish relief were excluded from friendly society membership, although occasionally, as at Gnosall (founded by 1766), the Overseers would briefly take over a member's friendly society subscription to prevent its lapsing if his circumstances were temporarily difficult. In 1795 the Revd David Davies enthusiastically praised membership of friendly societies because they kept poorer 69parishioners ‘free from the shame and misery of being burdensome to their parish, [having] it in their power to make for themselves a provision against sickness, accident, or old age’.
