Relief of the poor

[wolfinthewood]

Nice little find yesterday afternoon in the cellars of Quinto Books on the Charing Cross Road: a battered copy of the Rev. J. C. Atkinson’s Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, for a modest fiver. To anyone who doesn’t know the book, the title makes it sound pretty dull, but it is a classic of folklore and folklife.

One passage describes an indigent dumb woman, Nanny; Atkinson says that in a practical sense she ‘lived by begging’, and so did one and perhaps both of her two brothers:

But that expression must not be misunderstood. They were not professional mendicants; but they were the survivals, and the last survivals, of an outworn system. Thus Nanny, to the last day of her life and ability to go her accustomed rounds, had her dinner one day in the week at one particular farmhouse, and another dinner another day at another house; and besides this she had “a piece” here and “a piece” there given her, to carry away in her bag for home consumption. The system is, of course, utterly obsolete now, and in England generally it has been so for long. But it was an accredited system once; and I think accredited by at least unwritten law as well as custom. What I mean will appear from the following extract from the Orders made at Quarter Sessions held at Thirsk, 4th April 1654: “In regard the parishioners of Osmotherley withdraw their charitie, which formerly they gave at their doores to Alexander Swailes, a poor man, it is therefore Ordered that the parish officers there shall, for the future, pay the said poor man 12d. weekly.” Our parishioners here did not “withdraw their charitie” from poor, voiceless old Nanny up to something more than twenty years ago. I buried her in 1867, and as long as she was able to walk about I used to meet her with her accustomed bag, and knew she had a place reserved for her once a week at Howe End. (p. 249)

John Christopher Atkinson (1814–1900)

from Forty Years in a Moorland Parish: Reminiscences and Researches in Danby in Cleveland* (1891)

*on the North York Moors


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Comments

[readwrite.livejournal.com]

Henry Miller, i believe, operated under a similar system during his impoverished years in Paris.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Sounds rather like the begging scholars of the Middle Ages. It would appear from the drinking songs they left that some of them led pretty wild lives.