42 • Beginningsput in a “house of correction” or Bridewell, while the “deserving poor” were
taken care of in the parish of their residence by a special poor tax on house-
holders who could afford to be Good Samaritans but often were not.
This rigid division of the poor into deserving and undeserving groups was
logical to middling and upper-class families, who believed that every able-
bodied person should work and who abhorred “masterless men” who lacked
the skills to set up their own trade and were too stubborn to become some-
one else’s servant. Some adults clearly needed help to survive: they were sick,
infirm, or indigent because of widowhood (often associated with old age) or
widower status (often with a large number of dependent children). Found-
lings had to be put out to nurse at considerable cost. Orphans must be
housed and apprenticed until they could fend for themselves, another con-
siderable expense. But able-bodied poor adults who had no job deserved no
handout, it was thought.
The flood of immigrants to London made the distinction between the
meritorious and incorrigible poor difficult to uphold. Although a proclama-
tion by Charles II in 1662 still referred to “rogues, vagabonds, beggars and
other idle persons” flocking to London to live “by begging, stealing and other
lewd practices,” a parliamentary amendment to Elizabeth’s Poor Law that
same year admitted that many immigrants and residents could not find work
through no fault of their own other than lack of the proper skills. “Defects in
the law of relief and employment,” the new law declared, “doth enforce many
to turn [into] incorrigible rogues and others to perish for want.” Up to this
time, immigrants had had to wait three years before going on parish relief;
now they could claim residency after forty days and get immediate assis-
tance.
With a stroke of the royal pen endorsing the new law, Charles II greatly
expanded the legal burden on his London parishes. What were they to do,
especially in the densely populated suburbs, where most of the unskilled la-
borers lived? In principle, every parish was supposed to have a supply of raw
materials for unemployed persons to work on, preferably in a prisonlike en-
closure. But there would be virtually no such workhouse arrangements in
London until the eighteenth century.^5
Still, the machinery existed to implement the amended Poor Law. Mixing
the secular with the sacred, every royal government since Queen Elizabeth
had folded a political calendar of poor relief seamlessly into the familiar ec-
clesiastical one. Every Easter the thirty to forty leading members of each
parish gathered at their church to elect its main lay officers, substantial
householders who served without pay (or paid a fine of about ten pounds to