A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Social Control 383

The concern for protecting
property could be seen in the
Marriage Act (1753), which for­
bade clandestine marriages. It
specifically sought to protect
property against ambitious men
who might be tempted to try to
elope with the daughters of
wealthy property owners. Parlia­
ment also passed a law permit­
ting divorce by parliamentary
act—which none but the very
wealthy and well-placed could
seek—at least partially because
gentlemen wanted to be free to
divorce wives who shamed them

with adultery or who could not
produce heirs to inherit their
estates.

A gamekeeper snags a poacher.

Subordination and Social

Control

People of means debated strategies of social control with increasing urgency

as economic crises widened the gap between rich and poor. During 1724­

1733, the French state undertook a “great confinement” of paupers, beg­

gars, and vagrants in workhouses, where they were to learn menial trades

under conditions of strict discipline. The subsequent reorganization and

expansion of royal efforts at policing the poor represented an increase in

the reach of the state. Yet temporary programs of poor relief were common

on the continent, as were periodic repressive campaigns against beggars

and vagrants. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, English

parishes or townships provided charity to those wearing the requisite “P”

for pauper. In order to keep indigents off the road, towns established work­

houses, where the poor would be forced to work in exchange for subsis­

tence. A 1782 English law replaced workhouses with somewhat more

humane “poorhouses.” In 1795, the Speenhamland system, so called after

the parish in which it was conceived, provided for a sliding scale of assis­

tance, determined by the current price of bread and wage rates. But such

programs merely scratched the surface as the problem of poverty entered

public discourse to an unprecedented degree.

Britain did not undertake the kind of largely successful campaign found

in some places on the continent to limit the number of capital crimes to

those that threatened life or the state. Parliament added almost two hun­

dred capital offenses to the law between 1688 and 1810, sixty-three of