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  • Caring for Poor and Fatherless Children in London, c. 1350-1550
  • Stephanie Tarbin (bio)

To what extent did formal developments in poor relief usher in significant changes in the experiences of poor children? Sixteenth-century developments in poor relief had direct implications for children, who were often the subjects of legislation. Poor laws authorized local authorities to bind poor children into apprenticeships, with the stated intention of equipping children for employment in adulthood.1 By the end of the sixteenth century, when support from parents or kin was lacking, parishes were responsible for maintaining poor children, whether they were orphaned, illegitimate, or simply destitute. Some of the larger towns also established municipal hospitals dedicated to the poor, including children, to replace charitable care formerly provided by religious houses.2 Hospitals and poor relief legislation of the sixteenth century represented efforts by public authorities to support poor children and to prepare them for adulthood.

The origins of sixteenth-century developments in welfare have been discerned in the perspectives and practices of local communities dating back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.3 Compulsory contributions and parochial administration of charity were distinctive features of the evolving national system of poor relief in England. But we need more detailed knowledge of the informal systems of support for children in the fifteenth century to assess the extent to which subsequent developments in poor relief represented significant changes for poor girls and boys. Who came to the assistance of poor children in later medieval England, and what sort of upbringing might they expect if their natal family dissolved through death, desertion, or poverty? What happened to illegitimate children whose fathers would not or could not pay maintenance or keep them? These are difficult questions to ask of medieval sources. We know, in broad outline, that kin, social networks, and religious houses all contributed to the care of destitute children.4 But how such arrangements were made and [End Page 391] what they might tell us about the experiences of poor children are more difficult to discern from the fragmentary and scattered sources of the fifteenth century, in contrast to the fuller records generated by developing poor laws and their parochial administration in the later sixteenth century and beyond.5

My method here is to use the more detailed sources from formal practices to frame the sketchier evidence of informal support and to attempt to discern both suggestions of difference and similarity. I begin with a discussion of London's distinctive experiment in child-oriented poor relief, the 1552 foundation of Christ's Hospital, and then consider medieval forms of institutional support for children before turning to an analysis of informal arrangements for the care of poor and needy children. The evidence from wills and Chancery petitions rarely provide much detail about provisions for children, still less about the nature of the care they received, but they can cast revealing sidelights on both issues.

Christ's Hospital of London

The 1552 foundation of Christ's Hospital was part of an ambitious scheme to reestablish former medieval hospitals under the government of London's civic authorities. The mayor and aldermen had secured royal permission to reopen the hospital of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield in 1544 for the ease of the sick poor and by 1553 were in control of the hospitals of St. Mary's Bethlehem ("Bedlam"), St. Thomas in Southwark, Christ's, and Bridewell. In the 1550s and 1560s, Christ's provided indoor relief to more than four hundred children as well as outdoor relief, in the form of pensions, to parents and carers. Of the children receiving indoor relief, infants and small children were boarded out to nurse while older children resided in the hospital where they might receive some schooling or practical instruction. The hospital also sought apprenticeships or positions in service for adolescents in order that each child "may virtuously occupie him sealf in good occupacion or science profitable to the common weale."6 Analysis of the biographical details recorded in the children's registers suggests that nurse-children took up residence in the hospital at about six years of age and that apprenticeships were usually commenced at thirteen to fifteen years of...

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