Hi Laurel!

Thanks for the comment and welcome to TheSupercargo.com.

If Isenberger is to be believed (and she makes a good case) then the USA’s – and before that the English colonies’ – poor whites have had a raw deal for a very long time indeed. My interest in the earlier period relates to Elin’s Story because the population explosion in England during the Tudor period was an issue of debate throughout the 1500s. And in the debate you see interpretations of poverty and vagrancy that clearly informed the subsequent debate in the American colonies.

The Tudor population explosion coincided with the sweeping away of the social and health support provided by the Church following the Reformation and resulted in a noticeable increase in “sturdy beggars”. Sturdy beggars meant people who looked like they were strong enough to work but who had “chosen” a life as beggars. The 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor was, I think, the first law that distinguished between “the deserving poor” – hard-working, disabled, a neighbour and a home owner – and “the undeserving poor” – idle, pretending to be disabled, foreign (which could mean from another county), homeless. But the concepts existed earlier, and the sturdy beggars were certainly undeserving.

Some were former monks, nuns and others turned out of their monasteries. Many more were country people driven from their lands by landlords who were already enclosing farming land for sheep breeding. (Something that was to go on for centuries.) They were the target of moral sermons on sloth, of local village gangs that chased them from place to place, of educated treatises discussing the origins of their natural indolence, of local constables who arrested them for vagrancy. For vagrancy the penalties were severe. Following the 1547 anti-vagrancy acts the harshest penalties were enslavement or banishment, but there was also branding on the face with an R (for rogue) or a V (for vagrant) and whipping. We haven’t quite got back to that but you can see the way the wind is blowing.

By the late 1600s, banishment had morphed into indentured servitude in the colonies. It’s an indication of how important the American colonies were to Britain as a dumping ground for vagrants that following American Independence the prisons of Britain quickly filled to overflowing. It was such a severe problem the government was prepared to finance the First Fleet and subsequent expeditions to establish Australia as a penal colony.

Oops – sorry for all that. Sometimes I regret/forget I no longer work as a history teacher.

🙂