Lowestoft Overseers of the Poor Accounts (1656-1712)

The largest administrative task by far to demand both the attention and the time of the parochial authorities in Lowestoft during the Early Modern period was relief of the poor – a weighty responsibility placed upon English parishes by the formative Poor Law Act of 1601. And the fortunate survival of Overseers of the Poor account books for the period 1656-1712 (Suffolk Archives, Ipswich - 01/13/1/1&2) reveals much about the implementation of this legislation. Four overseers were elected annually in the town, which was double the number appointed in some other communities, and it would seem that this practice had been in operation for a considerable time. The financial year ran from April to April and each of the overseers was responsible for collecting the poor-rate and making the various disbursements for a period of three months. At the end of the year, the four respective accounts were properly audited and signed by local justices of the peace.

The overseers themselves were drawn from the more substantial levels of local society, as was the case with all other offices in the parish, and the likely reason for there being four of them (rather than two) is that spreading the work-load in this manner made the task less onerous for those involved. The choice available from among the merchants, the tradespeople, the seafarers and the more affluent craftsmen, of men able to perform the duties required, was quite a wide one – and once someone had fulfilled his quarterly commitment, he was not likely to be called upon again for at least another twelve or thirteen years, or even longer. If a seafarer (mariner or fisherman) were chosen to serve, he would have had to suspend his normal activities, and there is no visible evidence of surrogates standing in to do the work. What was required of all overseers, of course, was proficiency in both literacy and numeracy. 

The amount of poor-rate paid by parishioners, in accordance with statute, was based upon ownership of property in the parish, where such means of assessment was relevant, and on a person’s financial situation where no real estate was held. One interesting feature of the system is that the richest people in the town were not necessarily the ones who paid the most. For instance, Samuel Pacy (merchant), who was the wealthiest man in Lowestoft during the second half of the 17th century, did not pay as much as his uncle Thomas (yeoman and brewer) – the difference being that Thomas Pacy owned more real estate in the parish than his nephew. The system employed seems to have been flexible in operation and productive of funds, and it confirms the statement made by the historian Peter Clarke (in his book Transformation of English Provincial Towns - 1984 - p 31) that parish poor-rates were capable of raising increasing sums of money during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

From £56 2s 4d in 1656, the amount raised annually in Lowestoft had risen to £181 3s 6d by 1712. There were occasions when the total slipped back to below that of the previous year, but generally speaking the trend was strongly and noticeably upwards. This was not due to any progressive fall in the number of people requiring relief, but to the increasing population and prosperity of the town making it possible for more money to be raised. From 6s 2d per head in 1656, the average annual contribution had risen to 15s 9d by 1712. The average benefit received per capita during the same period rose from £2 2s 9d to about £4 10s 0d. The money due was collected from the wealthier parishioners on a weekly basis and on a quarterly one from the less affluent, while payments to those in need were always made weekly. An overall view of the system’s operation is best achieved by a summary of the finances of six single years, taken at ten-year intervals – though the decadal approach can not be strictly adhered to because of certain incomplete accounts. The years to be considered follow below, with it needing to be said that the allowance for children was for those boys and girls farmed out for someone to care for, usually because both parents were dead. The amount varied, according to their age, with older ones being more expensive to keep. The task of looking after orphaned children was usually undertaken by widows (with or without children of their own) who would have found the weekly allowance a means of boosting their income. 

The six years cited above are sufficient to demonstrate the basic structure of the system of poor relief in Lowestoft and most of the discernible trends (the notable increases in collections and extra spending for 1676-7 and for 1707-8 seem to have been largely due to the overseers purchasing stocks of material for the poor to work on (in their own homes or in a small proto-workhouse of some kind which may possibly have existed). The town’s growth in population during the last quarter of the seventeenth century was not spectacular, but it can be seen in the increased number of contributors. Interestingly, perhaps, the number of recipients did not increase in a similar fashion, which may have been at least partly the result of greater prosperity resulting from the awarding of port status in May 1679. In fact, apart from one point during the 1680s, when it dropped for a time, the total number of people in receipt of poor relief in Lowestoft stayed much the same, varying between about twenty-three and thirty-five people annually. The low number of sixteen for 1686-7 reflects a general fall during 1682-7, for which there seems to be no ready explanation.

The usual proportion of people in receipt of poor relief was only about 1.75% of the town’s population at any one time, which is a noticeably lower proportion of the deserving poor than has sometimes been cited for other communities. The figure may well serve to reinforce the opinion that the problem of the poor was less critical by 1700 than it had been one hundred years before, largely owing to effective implementation of poor law legislation and refinement of its methods. Unfortunately, there are no statistics relating to Lowestoft from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods on which to base any comparisons and contrasts. The only piece of evidence which suggests that the town may have had a problem with poor people is to be found in 1582, when the annual leet court attempted to prevent residents giving shelter to the migrant poor from places outside the town by the imposition of prohibitive financial penalties on anyone making accommodation available (39s 11d being the sum recorded). The reference is a frustrating one, because it stands in isolation from any corroborative material, there being no surveys extant for Lowestoft of the kind which exist for Ipswich, Norwich, Salisbury and Warwick and other major towns and cities.

The categories of people granted relief in Lowestoft during the second half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth, as shown in the six representative years above, are predictable enough and represent those groups least able to fend for themselves. There must have been considerably more people just above them in the social and economic hierarchy, who were not in sufficiently dire need to merit relief but whose situation was far from comfortable. The 1674 Hearth Tax, for instance – S.H.A. Hervey (ed.), Suffolk in 1674 (Woodbridge, 1905), pp.197-9 - Suffolk Green Books, vol XI – shows that, out of the 222 houses recorded, there were 101 exempted from paying the levy. Their occupants consisted of fifty-eight men (many of them mariners and fishermen), eight single women and thirty-five widows. The great majority of them lived in small dwellings with just one hearth.

There is no way of ascertaining the numbers of people just above the official poverty level accurately, but family reconstitution of the Lowestoft parish registers for the period 1561-1730 suggests that 25%-27% of the town’s population had a residency period of three years or less, and many of those people would have been among the least affluent members of society. With regard to the recognised indigent or deserving poor in Lowestoft during the years covered by the overseers’ accounts, the majority were widows (56%), followed by poor men (20%), spinsters and married women (13%) and children (11%). There were actually very few married women on relief (with only two of the six sample years chosen showing them) and such ones as there were usually had husbands who were either sick or incapacitated in some way. The overall annual payments made during the 1670s, amalgamating these four categories (c. £2 10s 0d per capita, on average), were far more generous than those disbursed in York (£1 11s 0d), and those received during the late 1690s (c. £4 0s 0d per capita) better than the sums paid out in Norwich (£3 17s 0d in 1700). Unfortunately, there is no way of accessing or establishing any prior negotiations which must have taken place before individual handouts were made.

It is always dangerous when attempting to convert statistics into something with the feel of humanity about them, yet the impression derived from study of the Lowestoft overseers’ accounts is one of care being shown to the least fortunate members of society. Katherine Garret, for instance, described as a beggar in her burial registration of 3 September 1665, had been drawing 8d per week from the parish for at least nine years. Even more intriguing is the case of Prudence and Robert Grene, the children of John Grene (husbandman). Prudence was baptised on 25 November 1632, but her brother’s christening is not recorded. In September 1672, at an age when most of her female contemporaries would have been married for at least fifteen years (had they lived that long!), she began to draw a weekly allowance of 9d for Robert, payment which had increased to 1s 6d by the end of the century. Her will of 23 July 1704 (she was buried on the 27th) made reference to this payment in the request that Dorothy Hudson, her executor, wife of Roger Hudson (tailor), should take care of Robert and receive the parish allowance. 

The circumstances behind that particular little family drama can only be guessed at. Prior to this, from December 1659, Robert Grene had been in the care of Richard Brissingham, who kept The Dolphin inn at the northern end of the High Street, on its western side – occupying the site of the present-day No. 174. Brissingham seems to have specialised in looking after needy and aged men (as well as orphaned children), because he had three or four of them in his charge at any one time and drew their parish allowance. There is nothing to suggest why, or how, Robert Grene became dependent on the parish, but there is some kind of ending to his story to be found in his parish register burial entry of 25 October 1719, which recorded his age as eighty years! This means that he must have been born in either 1638 or 1639, making him the younger brother of Prudence Grene by some six or seven years, who had undergone some life-changing experience at about the age of twenty which left him unable to work and needing full-time care. And it then becomes clear that his older sister sacrificed her own adult life to see to his welfare.

As well as regular disbursements to the long-term poor, there were also contingency payments made to all kinds of people on a short-term basis, according to particular need (these forming a noticeable part of the extra spending shown in the decadal breakdown above). Mary Bentley, for instance, drew 1s 9d a week during her husband’s illness in 1666, and there are numerous other references to people being “in distress”, “in want” or “in sickness”, with varying amounts of money granted – though specific details of individual misfortune are unfortunately never recorded. In 1675, an unnamed woman, who had broken her leg at the house of John Hunt, received a payment of 2s 6d and somebody else (also unnamed) received the sum of 14s for acting as “a keeper for old widow Bollard and minding her” – the woman receiving this care being the relict of a seafarer. 

Specialist medical care also features from time to time, with payments made to local doctors for success in curing the sick, while the end of life was given due dignity for those who could not afford it in the provision of burial clothes at about 3s per set (such as those which clad Henry Atkins, a sawyer) and of coffins at about 6s or 7s each. By 1681, the widow Bollard, previously referred to, had recovered sufficiently from her indisposition to “wind” (wrap) the corpse of Robert Emeris (shoemaker) in a five yard length of cotton shroud (cost, 5s) and be given 1s for her service – this, at a time when people were supposed to be buried in woolllen shrouds as a means of boosting the native textile industry. Nor did the care stop at local people. During 1675, a sum of 1s was given to “an officer that came beyond Sea”, while the following year “a traveller with a pass” was given 6d to help him on his way – not the first time that this had happened, and not to be the last. Finally, “two men that came out of Turkey” were each given 6d in 1676, though without any indication of their origins or how they came to be in town. Some kind of maritime connection would seem to have been the cause.

In studying the Lowestoft accounts, it is clear that the overseers were sufficiently prudent not to spend more on relief than was able to be raised from local contributions. There were always a few pounds left over to form a credit balance. Furthermore, given the way that individual allowances to those in need rose over the course of time, the suggestion which has been made that poor relief may sometimes have provided a mild stimulus to urban demand for goods and services is perhaps correct. The spending power of the deserving poor in Lowestoft did increase in real terms; and while the payments made cannot be termed generous, they were better than those many other communities were prepared to disburse. Another factor to be borne in mind, in the whole matter of relieving poverty, is that the cancellation of trade debts in favour of people unable to repay what they owed has been judged to have been of greater importance than the collection of the poor rate itself. Indeed, it has been claimed that the passing of the formative Poor Law Act of 1601 was an attempt to combat the rising number of defaults by providing a minimum, predictable income (known to everyone in a community), in the form of a cash dole, to reduce the amount of trade credit which needed to be extended to the poor.

The attitude of those who contributed to maintenance of people less fortunate than themselves is impossible to assess. Comment has been made how, by the late seventeenth century, wealthy inhabitants of parishes had, in the administration of poor law, an effective means of disciplining the poor, many of whom were seen as potentially and actually criminal. The system of relief became more a means of maintaining social order and preventing civil unrest than of extending Christian charity to people in need. And even the state of poverty itself was sometimes construed as criminal by a peculiarly Puritan interpretation of God’s favour manifesting itself in the rewards which personal industriousness could bring. While such ideas may have been current in post-Restoration England, it is wise not to generalise too readily concerning their effect. There is no evidence in the Lowestoft documentation to suggest whether or not poor law administration was manipulated in such a way as to exercise social discipline and control. The account books, in so far as figures can say anything, seem to suggest that the system was operated with a little more humanity than was the case in a number of other places.

Overseers of the Poor (1656-1712) 

- occupations given (where known), drawing mainly uponparish register, probate and manorial court sources. Original spelling of the names has been maintained throughout.

CREDIT:David Butcher