Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500

Lynn Botelho, Pat Thane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317881148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Women have always made up the majority of older people: this examination of the lives of elderly women in Britain in the period 1500 to the present reveals attitudes towards the ageing process. It sheds light on household structures as well as wider issues - including the history of the family, the process of industrialisation, the poor law, and welfare provision - and questions many common beliefs about elderly women, particularly that female old age was a time of poverty and want. An important book for students of history and sociology alike.

CHAPTER ONE

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Strategies of poor aged women and widows in sixteenth-century London

CLAIRE S. SCHEN

The Reformation signalled the end of official Catholic practices in England, altering traditional religious practices and disrupting many aspects of parish life. One point where Protestant theology and parochial practice were at odds was in the traditional support for the sick, aged and the poor. Nearly all pre-Reformation gifts to the poor contained the stipulation that the recipient pray for the soul of the benefactor, and often for the benefactor’s deceased relatives as well. Protestantism denied the validity of such prayers, and outlawed such practices. Consequently, traditional Catholic charity, with its emphasis on the now heretical prayers for the dead, was curtailed. The civic parish, therefore, was forced to incur additional expenses as it sought to fill this lacuna in poor relief. The result, according to many historians, was the reform of relief and the transformation of medieval ideals of charity into stricter definitions of deserving and undeserving poor, and more parsimonious charitable giving to the indigent.¹ The destitute and aged woman, despite being a traditional figure of the deserving poor, found herself in the midst of these changes, faced with an uncertain future and the damaging possibility of being declared unworthy.²

Traditionally, elderly pauper women survived and managed to maintain some independence by utilising networks of kinship, friendship and neighbourhood in their search for charity, employment and poor relief. The reform of poor relief and charity that swept England, and indeed all of Europe, in the late sixteenth century disrupted these strategies for survival. This essay explores how elderly women in London responded to these new conditions and adapted their traditional ‘economy of makeshifts’, those cobbled together sources of income and support, to fit this new environment.³

During the sixteenth century, London perceived or experienced an increase in poverty and withstood waves of religious and cultural change. Its overcrowded suburbs, in part a product of the attempts of poor people to survive, were condemned by social critics and legislated against by governing elites as fountains of disorder and disease. The city’s population grew from an estimated 50,000 in 1500 to 141,000 in 1603, and unlike other cities, its sex ratio was 113 male to 100 female inhabitants.⁴ Given its centrality to government, its highly developed civic structure, and its well documented poverty, London is an excellent place to chart the interplay between changing religious practices and the lives of poor, old women. Yet, because of these circumstances, in addition to London’s high mortality rates and its urban lifestyle, one must be cautious about generalising from this unique city to the rest of England with its plethora of rural villages and farms.

This study concentrates on four London parishes of varying size and wealth within and without the City walls: St Botolph without Aldersgate, St Mary Woolnoth, St Michael Cornhill and St Stephen Walbrook. As London grew by migration rather than because of a rising birth rate, a demographic study based on ‘family reconstitution’ would be difficult. Instead, an analysis of the records of the Court of Aldermen and other civic and parochial sources illustrates the erosion of survival strategies of older and poorer women. As Richard Smith has pointed out, religious institutions have often been overlooked in studying the balance between family and collective support for the poor in the past.⁵ Similarly, historians of the aged have paid little attention to the impact of the English Reformation on the problems of the aged poor. Therefore, an examination of these parishes’ financial and ‘business’ records, including churchwardens’ accounts, vestry minutes and burial registers, as well as literary sources and last wills and testaments, are used to uncover the experience of poor ageing women and widows during the century of England’s religious reformation.

Defining age and poverty for women

Old age has been differentiated into chronological, functional and cultural age.⁶ Functional old age, or decline in abilities and health, brought many poorer people into contact with sixteenth-century parish officials. Research on the lifecycle of families has shown that as people aged, they dipped further and further into poverty, even if they had not previously been poor.⁷ Furthermore, older women were especially likely to suffer from poverty in sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century London. While many of the women on parish poor relief were likely to be chronologically old, others may have been ‘old’ in ‘many social senses’, as Peter Stearns has described it, although such women were not old in terms of years.⁸ Descriptions of women in personal documents and parish records rarely indicate chronological age, but the nature of women’s jobs and households often indicate their physical decline and functional old age. A person’s functional age, ultimately, rather than the arrival at a predetermined chronological point, determined both women and men’s entry into old age.

Furthermore, the nature of the demographic records of early modern London preclude defining age chronologically. Some sixteenth-century burial registers included information on age at death, but such detail is of dubious value even, or especially, when it seems precise. For instance, the scribe or parish clerk working in St Michael Cornhill recorded remarkable ages: Henry Johnson buried in 1561 at 105; Margery Morgayne buried in 1575, a widow of 100 years. Further, the clerk described eight parishioners over 90 years old between 1561 and 1604 and others he claimed were in their eighties or simply Very old’ or ‘ancient’.⁹ While some individuals did live to venerable ages, the apparently precise recording of ages, especially since so many were 92 or 94, raises suspicions. Parish officials were likely to exaggerate ages because of the nature of early modern life and the toll it could take on an individual’s body. ‘Age’ had a qualitative dimension that expressed the social or cultural aspects of ageing. Furthermore, parish records, such as these burial registers, also filled a need for spectacle, news or gossip and were read or heard in the church or vestry meeting. They marked and memorialised, and sometimes embroidered on, the significant occasions in the lives of parishioners.

With few reliable chronological markers available, the historian must utilise the vocabulary of the period that describes age and status in order to identify elderly individuals. Parochial records use a variety of terms to delineate the different stages of women’s adult lifecycle: mother, mistress, goodwife, widow. These titles identified women in their relationship to other women, to men and to other social groups. Their meaning was also dependent upon the context in which they were used. For example, the word for a parent, ‘Mother’, served also as a term of address for elderly women of the lower social orders, or could even refer to a ‘stout or untidy old woman’.¹⁰ William Gorsuche left a ‘poor gown’ worth 10s. to Mother Gregory of Hendon, a simple gift for a woman of humble status.¹¹ The extensive will of Elizabeth Stevyns, written in 1550, illustrates the contrast between mother and mistress. Stevyns left clothing and rent to two women, Mother Gam and Mother Draper.¹² For each, she specified five years’ rent money, provided that they lived that long. Later in her will she bequeathed one-time gifts to the widowed Mother More, Mother Katherine in Abchurch Lane, and the widowed Mother Taper.¹³ Stevyns considered the first two mothers old, since she suspected they would die within five years, but viewed the other widowed mothers differently. Regardless of their chronological ages, these women were poor and considered worthy recipients of charity.

Alongside these legacies, Stevyns left a number of gold rings inscribed with her initials as a ‘token of remembrance’ to ‘mistresses’ and to some well known men, such as Sir Martin Bowes, knight and Lord Mayor of London.¹⁴ ‘Mistress’ carried a variable meaning, from Falstaff calling the prostitute Doll Tearsheet ‘Mistress’, to the mistresses hired by the parish to work for low wages, to the wealthy friends identified in wills and testaments like Stevyns’s.¹⁵ A mistress had control over servants, households and families, or men’s hearts. Mistresses who had worked for low wages may have experienced poverty when grown children left the household or when they felt the effects of ageing. Consequently, this term could also be granted to older women in receipt of poor relief as a token of politeness and respect.¹⁶

The terms goodwife and widow are more difficult to define in relation to age and status. The goodwife was the female head of a household or establishment, which implied a certain social status and independence, while those goodwives collecting relief through testamentary or parish charity seem to have been considered old by their neighbours.¹⁷ In 1551, Jane Spencer specified a number of goodmen and goodwives (none with shared surnames) to receive gowns, to round out the group of 60 poor men and women in her burial procession, a place reserved (both before and after the Reformation) for the aged, the sick and the poor. Jane Spencer especially remembered her poor neighbours and asked her executors to distribute spice bread at her funeral ‘as well among the poor as Rich’. For the relief and refreshment of these neighbours, Spencer provided 40s., while she gave an additional £5 to supply a dinner for her ‘othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Women and Men in History
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Strategies of poor aged women and widows in sixteenth-century London
• 2. Who most needs to marry? Ageing and inequality among women and men in early modern Norwich
• 3. Old age and menopause in rural women of early modern Suffolk
• 4. 'I feel myself decay apace': Old age in the diary of Lady Sarah Cowper (1644-1720)
• 5. Old maids: the lifecycle of single women in early modern England
• 6. The old woman's home in eighteenth-century England
• 7. The residence patterns of elderly English women in comparative perspective
• 8. Old and incapable? Louisa Twining and elderly women in Victorian Britain
• 9. 'An inheritance of fear': older women in the twentieth-century countryside
• 10. Old women in twentieth-century Britain
• Bibliographical essay: Older women in Britain since 1500
• Index