ABSTRACT

Robert Wortley and John Allen had a canny advocate. Prosecuted for having entered the parish church of Oundle, Northamptonshire, and stolen a poor box, at the 1846 Northampton Assizes the defendants were acquitted by a jury of breaking and entering the church (most likely on the basis that the church was unlocked). When they were found guilty of theft their lawyer then objected with a series of procedural and legal arguments centring on the poor box. The judge reserved immediate judgement, with arguments presented at the Queen’s Bench before nine judges. 1 For the historian of late medieval and early modern charity, the nineteenth-century theft of a poor box provides a fascinating insight into how old poor boxes were placed, used, and understood in the nineteenth-century English parish church. But the trial also highlights wider problems in understanding the history of the early modern English parish poor box, and raises methodological questions about exploring medieval and early modern constructions of ‘charity’.