Rough Lives: Autobiography and Migration in Eighteenth-Century England

The history of poverty and the family privileges the unadventurous and stay at home. In an English context, and in the work of scholars such as Paul Slack, Steve Hindle, Joanna Innes and Lynn Hollen Lees, we are possessed of wonderful analyses of the workings of the institutions of charity, of the Old Poor Law and, at least tangentially, the experience of the settled poor. ¹ This literature has charted the unusual evolution of the uniquely comprehensive system of taxation, redistribution and settlement that characterized English poor relief following the passage of the Old Poor Law at the beginning of the seventeenth century. ² But the bureaucratic nature of the precocious English system, and the extent to which it privileged the ‘deserving poor’, has naturally led its historians to overemphasize the experience of people who fitted within the system’s cosy categories and were able to access its resources. ³ A pension list records all the grey-haired men and women of the parish, its ill-starred children and broken families, but is silent about the casual poor, the wandering peddler and unsettled drunk. Even the hundreds of thousands of settlement examinations that litter English archives – mini-biographies demanded by magistrates in exchange for alms – tend to reflect the lives of those whose migratory peregrinations have come to a natural halt.