Defining the Boundaries of Community?

This chapter explores the parish politics of inclusion and exclusion in relation to single motherhood in early modern England. Using depositional evidence from the church courts of the dioceses of Bath and Wells, Exeter, Gloucester, and Winchester, it explores the forms of support unmarried pregnant women received both collectively and individually from their neighbours. Scholarship has focused primarily on the exclusion of unmarried pregnant women and single mothers from local communities (particularly economic exclusion in relation to settlement laws and parish poor relief). Instead, this chapter highlights how some of these women continued to participate in the social and economic networks that underpinned early modern neighbourhoods. In doing so, it argues for the importance of looking beyond economic determinants in defining the boundaries of community and in identifying senses of parochial belonging in social practices.