‘Our Poore People in Tumults Arose’: Living in Poverty in Earls Colne, Essex, 1560–1640

Abstract

Through the use of tax assessments, parish registers, and accounts of overseers of the poor we have learned such about the growing problem of the poor in early modern rural England. What remains difficult is to get at the circumstances and thoughts of the rural poor themselves and their relationships with their better-off neighbors. The search engine and the nominal linkage features of the electronic Earls Colne archive can be employed to learn more about the depth of the late-Tudor and early-Stuart crisis through construction of ‘pauper biographies’. Even without poor relief accounts, the investigation into probate, court, parish, estate and private records confirms the alarming increase in numbers of impoverished people in rural communities, particularly after 1590, and the extent to which acute poverty was the fate of many more than those receiving parish relief. The study also reveals the life-long and multi-generational nature of poverty at the time, the increasing incidence of disorder among the poor after 1620, and the effect of leniency by the elite toward the disorderly poor leading up to the political crisis of the 1640s.