The Aged Landless Poor: Work and Welfare in Medieval and Early Modern England

Abstract

Abstract Possession of land enabled older people to try to control and plan their later lives in medieval and early modern England. The landless poor in all age groups and at all times found it much harder to patch together a living Their numbers grew in the century of population increase and land shortage which preceded the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century; the steady rise was resumed in the mid-sixteenth century. Since the poor leave fewest records behind, we know even less about them than about the better off in medieval England. But their strategies for survival, driven by necessity, appear to have changed little over the centuries and information about them becomes less scanty over time. The poor of medieval and early modern England, and indeed in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, struggled in an “economy of makeshifts’, that is, they patched together whatever resources they could gather, in ever-shifting combinations: paid work when possible, growing food, use of common rights, help from family, friends, charity, poor relief, debt and begging. The struggle grew harder with advancing age and the components of the economy of each individual shifted gradually from dependence upon work to reliance on the help of others. Some lost the battle. Old people died of neglect and starvation, such as the “old stranger’ found dead of cold and exposure in a cowshed in 1362.