The Travelling Poor in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

Latter-day writers, shocked by the density of urban squalor brought by the growth of manufacture, have woven a mental image of a bygone bucolic age. Allegedly, before the industrial era, labouring people enjoyed a comfortable existence, basked in robust health and had the security of a cosy, if simple, cottage. They are said to have enjoyed the daily pleasure of a nourishing diet made up of untainted food mainly grown in their own garden or smallholding.2 Nothing could be further from the truth. For most people this idyllic picture of rural life was illusory. The joys that did exist prior to intense industrial urbanisation were mainly restricted to a privileged select minority. Labouring people struggled to exist. For what was usually a short lifespan, they endured in harsh callous surroundings. Their problems were not so obvious, nor have they been as well-publicised, as those associated with the ugly unsanitary manufacturing towns of the industrial age but the pre-industrial economy had its own forms of wretchedness. Apprehension about the future lurked persistently with agricultural labourers who together with their families made up a massive part of the populace. Times were ‘brutalising and depressing to the human spirit’.3 Until the industrial facilities expanded sufficiently in the later eighteenth century, the macro-economy lacked the wider spread of somewhat higher earnings associated with the forests of smoky chimneys and which brought some amelioration of their disadvantages.