"Stop This Overwhelming Torment of Destiny": Negotiating Financial Aid at Times of Sickness under the English Old Poor Law, 1800-1840

The issue of entitlement under the English Poor Law (1601–1834) is a complex question, and nowhere more so than in the context of the sick poor. Using the example of communities in one of England's most parsimonious Poor Law counties, Lancashire, this article will show that the sick poor faced uncertain and uneven entitlement to relief and medical intervention. Faced with such uncertainty, they adopted three core linguistic and posturing strategies when attempting to establish their eligibility for relief in the eyes of Poor Law officials. Pauper letters and the correspondence of overseers of the poor and vestries are used to unpick the process of obtaining poor relief and to highlight the subtle strategization of pauper applicants. The article concludes by suggesting that there may have been a regional patterning in access to medical relief in England in the last decades of the Old Poor Law.