1. Accounting for illegitimacy: parish politics and the poor

Louise Falcini

In the early morning of 15 February 1757 Thomas Turner, the parish overseer, walked the short distance to John Durrant’s house and informed John’s daughter, Ann, that he would accompany her to see the local magistrate Mr George Courthope later that day. Courthope lived some four miles away in Uckfield, a short walk if you were fit and healthy but an arduous journey if, like Ann, you were heavily pregnant. The previous evening Ann had readily agreed to ‘swear the father’ of her unborn child ‘at any time’, and so she set off a short while later in company with Susan Swift, who was paid sixpence for her trouble, with Turner following on behind.1 The process of an unmarried woman formally naming the father of her expected child set in motion a chain of events that was played out across thousands of local communities during the eighteenth century. This chapter looks at these encounters in one small Sussex village, East Hoathly, in a single decade, the 1750s, when the law, parochial authorities and settled paupers came together over the seemingly simple but nonetheless intractably messy issue of managing unmarried motherhood.

In the eighteenth century parishes across rural England continued to experience a steady rise in illegitimacy. In many parishes, the ratio of illegitimate first births to similar legitimate births increased considerably in the decades around mid-century, creating financial tensions in the systems of support.2 Parishioners and their vestries became increasingly concerned with the economics of unmarried motherhood. An impending illegitimate birth, particularly to plebeian women like Ann Durrant, and Jane Sewell, who appeared in the Preface of this book, was especially troubling for the effect it could have on parochial poor rates. The overseers’ vouchers can account for part of this story, but the absences outlined in the Introduction identify points where the vouchers or account books are missing or silent or, more frustratingly, where the recorded details are opaque. But the cost alone does not adequately reflect or explain the complex management of unmarried motherhood, pauper marriages and parochial settlement that underpinned social policy across the eighteenth century. To do so, we need to examine the ‘politics of procreation’ embedded in the day-to-day administration of parochial income in order to explore the workings of power and agency, acted out between neighbours and ratepayers, each with a vested interest.3 By exploring the microhistories of just a few women, caught in negotiation with one of the smallest of English parishes, this chapter will draw on a wider range of sources to argue that the financial implications of unmarried motherhood for a small rural community, in dialogue with the agency employed by prospective parents, substantially shaped the management of illegitimate births in these parishes, and by extension the lives of hundreds of thousands of unmarried mothers caught in the same net of relations.

Research on illegitimacy began to emerge from the wide-scale population studies of the 1970s and 1980s.4 This research examined demographic change across England and identified the ebb and flow of illegitimate births, which largely followed the birth rate. Illegitimacy ratios rose as the population was increasing, and slowed when population growth was stagnant or declining. Thus, as the population grew across the later eighteenth century, so did the ratio of illegitimate first births, particularly from mid-century, and it continued to do so well into the nineteenth century. There were, however, notable disparities both within and between regions, where ratios remained at a largely constant rate.5 Underlying these broad changes, a declining age at marriage and economic fluctuations influenced both national and regional ratios of illegitimacy.6 At the same time, bridal pregnancy increased. It has been calculated that in the period 1750–99 an average of 33 per cent of women gave birth within seven months of marriage. Again, this varied significantly from region to region, with some 20 per cent of women pregnant at marriage in some areas and 40 per cent or more in others.7 Higher rates of prenuptial pregnancy and illegitimacy suggested that sex was a widely accepted part of courtship for the poor. Both Randolph Trumbach and Tim Hitchcock identified these variations with a rise in heterosexual penetrative sex as a precursor to marriage.8 While sexual reputation was part of a wider concern for probity, there was a general acceptance of bridal pregnancy among the poor. Likewise, unmarried motherhood did not prove a barrier to a subsequent marriage with a new partner.9 These early demographic analyses also identified clusters of illegitimate births among specific families. From this, Peter Laslett posited that the propensity to bear illegitimate children was passed from one generation to the next, in what he termed a ‘bastardy prone sub-society’.10 Women who gave birth to more than one illegitimate child were, somewhat pejoratively, termed ‘repeaters’ in this literature. More recent research by Steven King and Barry Reay have successfully unpicked some of the complexities concerning familial ties and illegitimacy to give further context to regional variation.11 While older accounts of illegitimacy and unmarried motherhood have, for the most part, emphasized shame, coerced marriage and the moral judgement of others, the agency of unmarried mothers and the fathers of their children, along with the lived experience of the poor, has only recently formed a subject of sustained scholarship.12

In the eighteenth century, poor women likely to give birth to an illegitimate child were subject to intrusive questioning as part of the legal process of managing unmarried motherhood. It was difficult to compel a woman to reveal intimate details about her relationships or pregnancy but access to financial support could be curtailed if she refused to do so. Formal procedures were initiated by ‘swearing the father’ before a magistrate, known as a ‘bastardy examination’.13 Here, pregnant women or new mothers were ‘examined’ as to the circumstance of their pregnancy and asked to name the father of their child. The examination and resulting document permitted the parish to place financial liability for the infant on a specified man. This man could then either agree to indemnify the parish and make provision for the child by means of a ‘bastardy bond’, a civil agreement contracted with the parish allowing the father to pay costs as they arose, including a weekly sum for the maintenance of the child.14 Alternatively, he could pay, if he was able, an agreed sum to cover the entirety of the expense likely to be incurred by the parish, including the expense of apprenticing the child. In 1733 a new statute clarified legal remedies for recouping monies from fathers. It enabled parochial officers to have the man taken up by warrant or summoned to appear before magistrates at petty sessional hearings, where an order of filiation was granted, provided the magistrates were agreed over the likelihood of the child’s paternity.15 These formal proceedings were underpinned by a welfare system predicated on a pauper’s place of legal settlement.16 This often proved contentious, as it defined which community would pay for the care of the mother and child if they were unable to provide for themselves. An illegitimate child would take the settlement of its place of birth. After 1744 this was widely interpreted as the mother’s place of settlement, although the 1744 statute specifically identified that this applied only to a child born to a vagrant mother.17 The wide-ranging assistance supported by this national system was administered locally and financed by a parish poor rate, thereby making it particularly responsive to local conditions. As the economics of providing for the poor became increasingly important, many communities sought to ameliorate parochial costs to benefit their own ratepayers. The subsequent close management of the settlement system, where paupers were quickly returned to their place of legal settlement, fostered a society in which the petty exclusionary politics of the parish became an important element in the economics of poverty across the eighteenth century, thus creating a vast paper trail of both vouchers and entries in overseers’ or vestry accounts, as parochial officers sought reimbursement for the administrative and legal costs of settlement and removal.¹⁸ In parallel, many thousands of parishes used the flexibility of the welfare system and the confines of the settlement laws to manage illegitimacy or potential illegitimacy in their own communities. But poor men and women directly concerned with a pregnancy were also able to influence those outcomes, sometimes through collusive arrangements, at other times by their sheer intransigence and on occasion by negotiation – not all of which have left readily available traces. By exploring a series of bastardy cases that arose in East Hoathly within just a few months of each other in 1756 and 1757, the details of which were recorded in Thomas Turner’s diary, this chapter illustrates the strategies used in this one small rural community at a point when such births were relatively infrequent. It highlights the approaches and financial pressures at work as the ratio of illegitimate births began to increase much more quickly than previous years, and by extension in many of the 15,000 parishes in England and Wales.19

East Hoathly was a small east Sussex parish of around 350 inhabitants. In the first half of the eighteenth century there was approximately one baptism of an illegitimate first-born child every four years. By the last quarter of the century, approximately one illegitimate first-born child was baptized every year.20 At the annual meeting of the vestry, just after Easter 1756, the parish acquired a new overseer of the poor, Thomas Turner, a man in his late twenties and a relative newcomer to the parish, who, as a shopkeeper, was familiar with small-scale accounting. This made him ideally placed to pay close attention to parochial expenditure. He was extremely assiduous in this regard, leaving bills and receipts for thousands of items supplied to the poor of East Hoathly. As with other parishes, the East Hoathly vestry was keen to keep the poor rate low, but the pregnancy of an unmarried or widowed woman signalled a significant and ongoing expense to the community. There were few legal options. If the putative father was able to marry, it might be enough to keep the woman off the parish. If he had a settlement elsewhere, all the better, as the newly married couple could be removed to the husband’s parish. Where marriage was not a possibility, recovering money from the father became a parochial priority. At the beginning of Turner’s first term as overseer, collecting arrears of maintenance became his first real opportunity to demonstrate his effective management of the poor rate.

The first case to involve Thomas Turner concerned the illegitimate child of Ann Cain, born four years earlier in 1752. When Peter Adams fathered the child, marriage had been out of the question since he already had a wife and nine children. A month after the birth of his illegitimate daughter, Adams entered into a bond with the parish to maintain the child at eighteen pence per week. The arrangement worked well for the first four years. The parish paid Ann Cain her weekly allowance, which was in turn, reimbursed by Adams, but by 1756 the regular maintenance payments made by Adams had become erratic. As Adams’s payments became irregular, the parish came under considerable pressure to continue the maintenance payments for the child (despite Ann’s recent marriage to Thomas Ling). When Turner took over as overseer in April 1756, he consulted other parishioners over the best course of action. At first, Turner obtained a warrant requiring Adams to appear before Mr Justice Poole in Lewes to explain his non-payment, but was reluctant to serve it, feeling that a legal letter would be more persuasive. He continued to pressure Adams into paying but was repeatedly fobbed off with excuses and promises. It soon became clear to Turner, following legal advice, that the bond superseded the bastardy order and the only way to recover the money was by suing at common law. As the weeks and months went by, Turner granted various extensions and favours over the payment of Adams’s arrears. It was not until July 1758 that Adams finally paid the outstanding debt and a sum to cover the maintenance of the child until she was seven, a total of £8 15s 6d.21 The affair dragged on for two years and, although Turner saved the parish the considerable expense of legal fees and recouped the loss, the parish had carried the expense of maintaining the child during that time. In decades when an illegitimate birth in East Hoathly happened only every three to four years, 1757 was about to become an annus horribilis for parochial expenditure on unmarried mothers and their children, leaving parish finances much depleted and the vestry and ratepayers increasingly fractious.

In the late autumn of 1756, the then twenty-one-year-old Ann Durrant was living in Laughton, a small village in east Sussex, where she received a shilling or two a week from the parish.22 By February of the following year Ann was visibly pregnant by George Hyland. In 1733 the law had been changed to protect a woman from intrusive questioning about her pregnancy in the time closest to the birth of her child.23 Overseers and magistrates were prohibited from quizzing her directly about the father of her expected child from a month before the expected birth until a month after the child was born, although of course she could volunteer the information. They were, however, able to question her about her settlement status – her right to live in the parish and to claim financial support there. On Friday, 18 February 1757, Ann Durrant was thus taken the few miles to Uckfield where the magistrate, George Courthope, questioned her as to her legal settlement. It was determined as the neighbouring parish of East Hoathly, the parish of her birth and where, for over a year, she had been employed as a farm servant by Thomas Brazier. Following this adjudication, she was no longer entitled to further assistance from the parish of Laughton and the overseers immediately sought a removal order, requiring the signatures of two magistrates. This document permitted the parish of Laughton to ‘remove’ Ann to her now legally established place of settlement, East Hoathly. Despite Ann being ‘big with child’, she was delivered to the overseer at East Hoathly, Mr Thomas Turner, that same day.

This process was an entirely legitimate method of offloading the considerable expense of the impending birth, together with the ongoing care and maintenance of an illegitimate child, in this instance to an adjacent parish. Although that parish was able to recover some of this money from the father, this was by no means guaranteed.24 Laughton’s overseers and other parochial officers were almost certainly aware that George Hyland was the child’s father and that he was wholly unable to support a family. Indeed, they were already supporting one or possibly two children from his marriage, which had ended on the death of his wife some two years previously. Turner safely received Ann Durrant in East Hoathly, and the following morning he went to see her father, John, who lived locally. Carefully avoiding direct pressure on Ann, Turner confirmed with Ann’s father that she was willing to name the father of her expected child. Therefore, for a second day in a row, Ann was voluntarily despatched to Uckfield to swear a further document in front of the local magistrate. This time the signature of only one magistrate was required. As soon as Ann had named George Hyland from Laughton, Turner acquired a warrant to apprehend him. Two ill-advised attempts failed, tipping off Laughton’s overseers that their parishioner was to be taken up as the father of Ann’s child. A third attempt was then made. A small party of men from East Hoathly set out for Laughton. This time there was more preparation. First, the East Hoathly party ascertained that Hyland was indeed at home. They then visited James Rabson, the Laughton headborough and asked him to serve the warrant. Rabson refused to do this alone, even though Thomas Turner and Robert Hook from East Hoathly volunteered to accompany him and despite Hyland having the use of only one arm. Turner offered Rabson’s son-in-law a shilling to assist but Rabson refused to swear him in. A second individual was proposed and refused; the rather exasperated Turner again pressed Rabson to go alone. This reluctance to cooperate did not go unnoticed. Turner noted in his diary that he had entreated Rabson ‘to serve our warrant and not to use us ill’.25 After extended negotiations, Rabson finally agreed to go and find someone to assist, and landed on Laughton’s overseer, William Goad, who lived half a mile in the opposite direction from Hyland’s house.

These prevarications suggest that the parochial officers of Laughton were entirely aware of East Hoathly’s aim of taking up Hyland as the father of an illegitimate child and of the financial implications if the couple were coerced into marriage. A marriage in this context, dictated by the laws of settlement, would shift the financial burden and the marital home to Laughton. This would not involve a single illegitimate birth but a family with the possibility of several more children, all of whom might require parochial assistance. This exclusionary policing of parochial boundaries using the laws of settlement clearly contributed to the complexity of an already difficult relationship between these parishes.26 As welfare costs rose through the eighteenth century, the management of welfare processes by local communities came under enormous pressure to keep poor rates as low as possible, or at least static. So, while Turner remained deeply suspicious of Rabson’s motives, the men from East Hoathly pressed on.

What followed was a comedy of errors and misdirection. The small party went directly to George Hyland’s house, where he was roused from his bed together with Durrant, who, despite the magistrates’ order, had returned to Laughton and Hyland’s house within days, possibly hours, of her enforced removal. This was clearly an ongoing relationship. The growing band trudged back to East Hoathly together with Durrant and Hyland, where they arrived around midnight. They called on John Watford, a regular attender of the vestry, and proceeded to Jones’s, the local public house, where they remained drinking until at least 2 a.m., charging 3s to the parish account. In the early hours of the morning the group breakfasted at Turner’s house and in typical Turner fashion dined ‘on the remains of yesterday’s dinner’.27 Turner resolved to charge the parish account six shillings for the meal.

The following morning, the Laughton overseers arrived in East Hoathly to make the parish an offer of eighteen pence per week as maintenance for the child and forty shillings for the lying-in. This was declined in the hope that Hyland would marry Durrant, thus entirely removing the problem from East Hoathly since the new family would be required to live in Laughton. Later that day, Turner and a small party travelled to Uckfield to consult the local magistrate, hoping he could broker a resolution. After some discussion, they agreed to return the following day, together with their now prisoner, Hyland. In the early evening, they made their way back to East Hoathly and again assembled at Turner’s house; after a short while, they went on to Jones’s public house. Turner retired to bed exhausted, but he was not left in peace.

During the evening Turner was called on several times to go to Jones’s, where he eventually arrived at around 12.30 a.m. There he discovered that the party would not go to Uckfield the following morning because Hyland had agreed to marry Durrant. Jeremiah French, on behalf of East Hoathly, had agreed that the parish would pay Hyland five pounds, provide a ring to the value of ten shillings and a wedding breakfast, and pay for the marriage licence. Turner, believing that almost everyone was drunk, returned home to bed. He was called on at 7.30 a.m. that same morning and told that if he obtained the licence from Lewes there would be a marriage. Turner immediately set out for Lewes only to return empty-handed because he had not been accompanied by the groom, Hyland. That afternoon, after borrowing a horse and the money for the licence, Turner wearily set out for Lewes, this time with Hyland. They had ridden only a short way along the road before Hyland decided that he would rather be bound in a bastardy bond. The East Hoathly men agreed to send for the overseers of Laughton and to go to Uckfield to swear the bond. When they got to the turnpike Hyland again changed his mind, agreeing that he would only marry after all, for forty shillings more. They turned back for Lewes. where they met with Joseph Fuller junior, a vestryman from East Hoathly, who gave Hyland a note of hand on behalf of the parish for thirty shillings and promised him five stone of beef to be paid on the day he married Durrant. The marriage licence and ring were duly acquired and the completely exasperated Turner concluded his busy day in the Sussex countryside by smoking a pipe of tobacco at, by now his regular haunt, the White Horse in Lewes, where his fellow parishioners were unlikely to bother him.28

By Friday morning, George Hyland had again changed his mind and decided that he would not marry after all. The now familiar parochial party set off for Uckfield to swear a bastardy bond. The infuriated Turner promptly presented himself at the Maiden Head and spent eighteen pence on liquid refreshment charged, properly in his opinion, to the parish account. The following Monday, Hyland decided he would marry if the parish was still in agreement over terms. The party, including the bride and groom, set off at pace to Laughton while Jeremiah French was despatched to collect the Laughton parish clerk. When they arrived at Laughton, however, the curate, the Revd Mr Shenton, was absent, so Thomas Fuller was hurriedly sent to fetch the Revd Porter from East Hoathly to perform the ceremony. Finally, on 28 February 1757 at 11.35 a.m. the marriage took place in Laughton parish church by licence. It was witnessed by Stephen Clinch and Joseph Fuller and the service was performed by the Revd Mr Thomas Porter, all of whom were from East Hoathly. The very next morning French, Watford and Turner accompanied Hyland to Uckfield for him to swear his parish. After this, the removal order for Hyland and his new wife was granted. Later that day Turner and French escorted George and Ann Hyland to Laughton and handed them to William Goad, the overseer.

Ann Durrant and George Hyland were not passive actors in this narrative. Their story identifies the use of financial incentives as an important and largely overlooked factor in that well-trodden narrative of coercive marriage and illegitimacy. The offer of money gave the couple a point of negotiation and a lever with which they were able to assert their agency. Hyland clearly used his on-again off-again agreement to marriage to the maximum, extracting six pounds ten shillings, five stones of beef, a wedding ring, a wedding breakfast and the administrative expenses of his marriage from the parish of East Hoathly. Ann’s role was less immediately obvious, but undoubtedly her knowledge of parochial administration, gained while living with her sister and illegitimate child when she first became pregnant, was invaluable. It is impossible to say if the Hyland’s marriage was a happy one, although it was plainly enduring, since over the next twenty years Ann and George went on to have nine children baptized in Laughton.29 The parish of East Hoathly believed that it had struck both a reasonable and a seemingly pragmatic bargain, although one suspects the parish of Laughton was less happy.30 Turner was rapidly gaining experience in the intricacies of illegitimacy. More cases were to follow fast on the heels of these first two.

In the week or two Turner was busy dealing with the Durrant–Hyland pregnancy and marriage, another case, initially concerning settlement, was beginning to take shape, that of the widow Elizabeth Day and her young daughter, Ann. Elizabeth had a legal settlement in Waldron, an adjacent parish, but lived in East Hoathly on a certificate, which guaranteed Waldron would accept responsibility for her should she require poor relief.31 Elizabeth was born and brought up in East Hoathly, and in late December 1749 she married Thomas Day. When Elizabeth married, she took on the legal settlement of her new husband in Waldron, and within days of her marriage they were removed there by the parish of East Hoathly. A year later their child, Ann, was baptized in Waldron parish church, and the following summer Thomas Day died. After the death of her husband, Elizabeth and her young child returned to her parents in East Hoathly, where they lived very quietly, just getting by. But in January 1757 the parish of East Hoathly resolved to return Elizabeth to Waldron. It is uncertain why East Hoathly wanted Elizabeth to leave but the two parishes agreed over her return, although it seemed that Elizabeth herself was reluctant to go. On 31 January the parish of East Hoathly ensured there was a settlement examination, which identified Elizabeth and her daughter’s place of legal settlement as Waldron. This prepared the way for her formal removal from East Hoathly.32 Some three weeks later, Thomas Turner arrived to escort Elizabeth to Waldron, but she told Turner that she would not ‘go for anyone’.33 Elizabeth was not a young mother. She was almost forty and certainly not easily persuaded. Her refusal to leave East Hoathly prevailed, and again the parish of Waldron provided a certificate to guarantee its support should she require assistance. It is difficult to say whether Elizabeth’s pregnancy was planned or coincidental, and timings are imprecise, but it is clear that she became pregnant around January or possibly February 1757, at the point that she was being pressurized into leaving the parish and her close family.34 The father of this child was Robert Durrant, an unmarried man in his early forties with a settlement in East Hoathly and the elder brother of Ann Durrant. It was not until the following summer that Elizabeth’s pregnancy became known to East Hoathly parish officers. Turner was by then churchwarden rather than overseer of the poor, but he remained very much involved with the management of parochial poor relief. Turner consulted both Justice Courthope in Uckfield and Ed Verral, the justices’ clerk in Lewes on the matter of her removal to her parish of settlement. All were of the opinion that Elizabeth could not be removed since she had not asked for poor relief.35 The only small consolation was that her illegitimate child would not gain a settlement in East Hoathly but must take that of its mother in Waldron.36 East Hoathly settled for the status quo, knowing that as Elizabeth could be removed as soon as she became a burden on the parish. This pragmatic position remained until mid-October, just before Elizabeth was to give birth, when Waldron detained Robert Durrant as the father of Elizabeth’s child. Since the child was to have a settlement in Waldron, the parish would become responsible for its upkeep and this, as the law directed, should be recovered from the father. After some discussion, the parochial officers of Waldron agreed to accept fifteen pence per week for maintenance of the child and forty shillings for the lying-in. This cost initially fell on the parish of East Hoathly, since Robert Durrant was ill and almost certainly unable to pay for this from his own pocket. It would be incumbent on the parish to recover their costs from Durrant when or if he was in a position to pay. Jeremiah French, the overseer of East Hoathly, however, would not agree to the fifteen pence, and expressed himself unwilling to go above twelve pence per week. As a result, East Hoathly had no choice but to have the matter settled at the quarter sessions in Lewes some months later, a case they lost.37 Elizabeth’s illegitimate child, Sarah, was born in early November 1757.

When the child was baptized on 27 November 1757, Elizabeth chose to call her Sarah Durrant Day. This caused Thomas Turner to ‘remark’ on this unusual occurrence in his diary.38 Both parents’ surnames were entered into the baptismal register as part of the child’s name. This strategy publicly identified the father of Elizabeth’s child and emphasized Elizabeth’s own connection with East Hoathly. Her intransigence and assertion that she would not be returned to Waldron, despite it being her place of legal settlement, confirmed her strong sense of belonging to the parish of her childhood and indeed her desire to remain with her aged parents.39 She never remarried but continued to receive payments of eighteen pence per week from the parish of East Hoathly for ‘keeping Robert Durrants girl’.40 She also appeared as a regular recipient of a charitable bequest distributed to the poor of East Hoathly each Christmas, receiving a penny and a draught of beer.41 Nonetheless, Elizabeth managed to get by, piecing together a living from occasional agricultural or domestic work, like the three-quarters of a day spent hop-picking for Thomas Turner in 1764 or the few shillings she was paid to nurse her mother in her last illness.42

Managing the costs of unmarried motherhood and minimizing its impact on the poor rate was part and parcel of the vestry’s and the parish officers’ roles. This included recouping maintenance payments whenever they were able. In 1757, when these costs were exceptionally high, the opportunity to relieve the parish of the regular payment for an illegitimate child was seized upon with great zeal. In April 1755 Sarah Vinal’s illegitimate son, William, was baptized at the parish church. It was generally known that the father of this child was William Tull, a former labourer who had previously worked for both Will Funnel and Richard Guy, both of whom were local brickmakers.43 Tull had neither contributed to the upkeep of the child nor remained in the locality. But in March 1757 Dame Martin, the wife of a local famer, informed Thomas Turner that Tull had called at her house that morning. Turner immediately gathered together some of his fellow vestrymen and they set off in pursuit of Tull. He was eventually caught and returned to Turner’s house in East Hoathly. The following morning Sarah Vinal joined the company for breakfast and Tull agreed to marry her. The necessary arrangements were made, including the acquisition of a marriage licence in Lewes and the purchase of a wedding ring. The marriage took place the day after, on Thursday, 31 March 1757. In the afternoon Tull was taken to Lewes to swear a settlement examination, where he identified his parish to be Thatcham in Berkshire. A second justice of the peace’s signature was sought for the removal order to make it legally binding. In all, this had cost East Hoathly £2 14s 7¾d on the parish account. The next day, Friday, 1 April, the newly married couple, together with their child, were despatched to Thatcham. They were accompanied by four men from East Hoathly to ensure that they completed their journey, all of which added a further five guineas to the parish account. The following Tuesday evening two of those men returned with the bad news that Tull had escaped, thus leaving his newly acquired wife, Sarah Tull, and his two-year-old son, William, to continue on to Thatcham, where they knew no one and had no connection other than an absent husband.44 The parish of East Hoathly, however, seemingly found itself free of the expense of maintaining Sarah Vinal. Nonetheless, in a year that had seen them spend £11 15s 7d on the Durrant–Hyland case, at least £7 19s 7¾d was spent on another illegitimate infant and its mother. Out of a total of less than £133, a significant sum had been expended on just two women and their children. For Sarah and pauper women like her, sexual opportunity did not always align itself with economic benefit. Sarah now found herself deserted and more than 100 miles away from the community she had grown up in. There is some evidence to suggest, however, that her son, William, was returned to East Hoathly to live with her parents and that Richard Vinal, her father, continued to receive eighteen pence per week from the parish to support him.45 Financial amelioration of the situation was largely reserved for a parish and its ratepayers, those willing to enforce the settlement laws. But the strict letter of the law dictated that, despite the child’s parents marrying, because he was born prior to the marriage, William remained illegitimate and the parish was required to recover maintenance from the father. A neat solution for the parish was overlaid with layers of complexity, familial ties and a strong sense of belonging that influenced outcomes for the parish poor.

A final case in this clutch of illegitimate births and parochial machinations came on Sunday, 23 October 1757. While Richard Parkes and Sarah’s sister, Mary Vinal, were at church for the second reading of their banns, a young woman, Anne Stevenson, leapt to her feet, and dramatically denounced the forthcoming marriage. Anne told the rector, Mr Porter, that she had given birth to a child by Parkes some three years previously and that he had ‘many times promised her marriage’.46 In eighteenth-century common law, a proposal was a legally enforceable contract, and despite the unpropitious circumstances, Anne Stevenson was still hopeful of a marriage. The following day Mary Vinal revealed to Turner and Burgess, the parish officers, that, like many young women about to be married, she was pregnant. The notion of shaming a poor woman because of her unmarried motherhood, particularly in a rural parish, had all but vanished by the second half of the eighteenth century. Sexual activity as a precursor to marriage and bridal pregnancy were widely accepted, and when this occasionally failed parishes made pragmatic decisions according to circumstances.47 In this instance, Mary was immediately taken to Uckfield to swear the child to Parkes.48 Turner secured a warrant to apprehend Parkes and early next morning Parkes was taken up. He quickly agreed to the marriage and, together with Thomas Fuller and Thomas Turner, continued on to Lewes to secure a licence. The couple were married in East Hoathly at 11 a.m. that morning. No sooner had they been married than Parkes was taken to Uckfield to be examined as to his parish of settlement, which was discovered to be the nearby Hellingly. By eight o’clock that evening, the newly married couple found themselves delivered to the churchwarden’s house in Hellingly, some six or seven miles away. These two days’ work cost the parish £2 19s 6d, an expenditure both unexpected and impressive in its timely execution, and in Turner’s opinion they ‘made a good days work of it’.49 This entirely pragmatic parochial response from East Hoathly, assisting Parkes and Vinal to marry, left both the parish of Hellingly and Anne Stevenson’s parish to deal with the aftermath of Parkes’s inconstancy. Mary, who was already the mother of an illegitimate child, was now resident in Hellingly together with her new husband, while Anne Stevenson was left to appeal to her own parish of settlement for financial redress.

Table 1.1 East Hoathly’s biannual poor rate, 1757–69

The cases reviewed here offer a brief glimpse of the methods deployed by a small parish in the management of illegitimate births, settlement and marriage. Most required some form of initial parish expenditure to mitigate long-term costs. Like other small communities, East Hoathly used a variety of strategies to manage their finances including passing these costs on to another parish. Even so, the immediate economic impacts of these cases were considerable, especially for a small village of fewer than 400. Between drink, food, travel and legal costs, the single instance of the Hyland–Durrant case cost the parish of East Hoathly at least £11 15s 7d. In the same administrative year, 1756–7, the parish also spent £7 19s 7¾d on the coerced marriage between William Tull and Sarah Vinal. This amounted to a total of £19 15s 2¾d on just two cases concerning illegitimacy or potential illegitimate births. In one of these cases, it was money well spent by the parochial officers seeking to ameliorate a charge on the rates in subsequent years. The coerced marriage between Tull and Vinal however, was much less successful, since the Vinal family retained the eighteen pence per week as maintenance for Sarah’s child paid via the vestry, while William Tull remained beyond their grasp. But £19 15s 2¾d out of a total poor-relief budget of less than £133 was just under 15 per cent and a very substantial sum.50 Although it is worth noting that much of this money remained circulating in the locality, largely spent as cash in support of local businesses.51 The additional £2 19d 6d spent on hurrying the marriage of Richard Parkes and Sarah Vinal fell into the next parochial accounting period and the parish was able to defer the expenditure. The case of the widow Elizabeth Day was somewhat different: she had a settlement elsewhere and, if necessary, East Hoathly might call on that parish to provide financial support should she require it. Yet it remains slightly puzzling that East Hoathly did not remove her to Waldron immediately after her initial settlement examination in January 1757.52 Unlike the Hyland–Durrant case, there was no attempt by East Hoathly to encourage a marriage between Elizabeth Day and Robert Durrant; rather, the economics of the situation allowed them to play the long game. If Elizabeth remained a widow and was to make a claim for poor relief, East Hoathly would be able to return her and her children to Waldron. If Robert Durrant was able to work, he would be liable to make some contribution to the upkeep of his child. Encouraging a marriage, thereby allowing Elizabeth a settlement, would bring the whole of the expense of an impoverished couple with children on East Hoathly.

In most years there was sufficient flexibility in the system of payments made under the Poor Law to maintain the occasional illegitimate child or to cover for poor harvests. By the 1750s these regular outgoings in East Hoathly were relatively small, given that only six parishioners received a regular pension, two of whom were receiving it for an illegitimate child. In addition, one or two parishioners were paid for spinning, carding or twisting yarn. As well as pensions, there were regular deliveries of fuel, flour and meat, together with rental payments, and further ad hoc payments were made for burying the dead, occasional nursing and medicines, clothing and the mending of shoes. However, managing the parochial finances of illegitimacy could be an exceedingly erratic business. At a point when the ratio of illegitimate births was beginning to rise across the country, East Hoathly’s finances were put under considerable stress by a sudden rise in cases of illegitimacy and unmarried motherhood. These tensions became more explicit when, a handful of years later, Turner noted the ‘quarrelling and bickering’ among his fellow vestrymen when they tried to set the annual poor rate so that everyone ‘might pay his just quota’.53 The following year, discussions became more contentious still, when Turner suggested the ‘avaricious views’ of the overseer prevented a rate from being agreed. He went on to suggest that one particular, unnamed, office-holder wished ‘to serve his own private ends and to be assessed lower according to the law than anyone else’.54 When years were particularly difficult with several illegitimate births, like those of 1756–8 in East Hoathly, parishes had to make complex calculations about immediate benefits and longer-term solutions for more lasting benefits – that of lower rates. When such births were occasional, small parishes had the flexibility to commit significant resources to mitigate costs in subsequent years. But, when illegitimacy ratios rose significantly, tensions over poor rates increased. The small amount of slack in the system was reduced, leaving East Hoathly and small parishes like it struggling to manage multiple illegitimate children. The tensions already inherent in the system began to spill over from vestrymen to the wider community, and this played out across thousands of English parishes. The system for managing the financial vagaries of poor relief, however, enabled minor shortfalls to be made up within a year. Thus in small parishes the poor rates were usually set and collected twice yearly.55 Much larger parishes, with far greater expenses, set and collected rates four or more times per year. But smaller agricultural parishes were especially hard hit since the rate base was narrow and the smaller vestry was very much prone to manipulation by one or two stronger voices. The men who made up the East Hoathly vestry, however, were very much embedded in the microeconomics of the parish. Men like Thomas Turner, Robert Hook, Joseph Fuller, Joseph Durrant Sr and John Watford Jr, who were all regular attendees at the vestry meetings during the 1750s and 1760s.56 Most were small businessmen or service providers – variously a shopkeeper, a shoemaker, a butcher, a blacksmith and a small-scale farmer, all of whom submitted bills to the parish. Any increase in spending by or on the poor was invariably spent locally on goods or services supplied by these men. Most of the vestry had an eye to what they themselves might supply, such as Thomas Turner renting a bedpan and candlestick when these were needed by Thomas Woolgar in 1775.57 An increase in the poor rate might be resented by other vestrymen, like Jeremiah French, a wealthy local farmer, who constantly haggled about petty disbursements made by the overseers.58 As with other rural parishes, there was a very fine line to be followed in setting the poor rate, which needed to be sufficient to cover expenses but not so high as to push marginal families into poverty.59

Part of the business of balancing parochial finances was knowledge, and between 1756 and 1758 Thomas Turner appears to have developed a substantial store of it. In a small village, personal relationships, business interactions or gossip might easily influence perceptions about a neighbour’s honesty, their ability to pay or their moral probity. It was the overseer’s duty to begin sifting through this information before further proceedings were initiated. At the end of July 1756 Turner was called to interview Richard Hope’s servant, who was thought to be ‘with child’. Turner was very sceptical about a possible illegitimate pregnancy, writing that he was ‘doubtful there is reason to suspect she is with child’.60 But nonetheless he made enquiries about the woman’s settlement and the parish’s liability to support her. As elsewhere, welfare processes in East Hoathly were largely predicated on this local knowledge and personal trust, together with a great deal of intrusive questioning. When Turner talked to Mary Evenden in 1758, she admitted her pregnancy but would not ‘swear the father’. Tuner wrote in his diary that night, ‘I think according to all circumstances nobody need think of any other person for the father but Mr Hutson’.61 By the 1760s, the by now more experienced Turner had become somewhat cynical, referring to a hurried marriage by licence as a ‘country sort’ of a match where the woman ‘is pregnant if her own word is to be taken for it’.62 And as the only shopkeeper in East Hoathly, Thomas Turner was only too well aware of the importance of maintaining good business relationships across the locality. These relationships included Peter Adams, the father of Ann Cain’s child, who was part of Turner’s wider social circle. In the 1750s Adams, like Turner, attended vestry meetings at Jones’s public house. Turner lent him money and drank with him, and on occasion they dined together. The friendship continued over several years.63 When Adams defaulted on his maintenance payments Turner’s reluctance to involve the full power of the law and his willingness to allow Adams time to pay his arrears, eventually paid off. The parish was able to recoup the money owed to it without recourse to an expensive legal case. It was these social bonds, often between men, that greased the wheels of parochial finances.64 Indeed, at the same time as Turner was attempting to recover these parochial arrears, he was also pursuing Adams for a business debt, which might explain some of his hesitancy in having Adams prosecuted and thus imprisoned for his parish liabilities. Yet, this economic reciprocity, which largely benefited male ratepayers like Peter Adams, was often granted to the detriment of women like Ann Cain and their illegitimate children. When Adams first defaulted on his payments, the parish continued to pay the agreed eighteen pence per week but eventually Turner stopped the payments. In his diary, he noted that Thomas Ling and his new wife, Ann (formerly Cain), were ‘continually harassing me for the money’.65 Men lower down the social scale, or without the necessary economic leverage, were not given the opportunities to prevaricate in quite the same way and relied on personal interventions and reminders of monies ‘owing’ to them. Nonetheless, these persistent requests were effective.

The matter of who would care for the infant and in turn receive the maintenance money was entirely dependent on local conditions. East Hoathly did not possess a workhouse, so family members nominally cared for an illegitimate child, although occasionally a neighbouring family would take the child. A new household was formed only if the couple subsequently married; otherwise, illegitimate children were subsumed into existing households.66 After the birth of her daughter Sarah, the widow Elizabeth Day received the agreed maintenance payments of eighteen pence per week directly from the parish, although she was living with her parents, John and Elizabeth Dann. Richard Vinal, father to both Sarah and Mary Vinal, however, received maintenance payments for ‘keeping Sarah’s boy’ and similarly ‘keeping Ann Thomas Vinal Mary’s daughter’ in April 1762. By this point both Vinal women had married and left the family home to live elsewhere as their new settlements dictated. Keeping an illegitimate child in the parish while they were infants or small children had the advantage of keeping any maintenance money local: small necessities were inevitably purchased close by to the benefit of local traders and shopkeepers.

Women were not just recipients of maintenance payments but also customers spending money in the local economy. As illegitimacy ratios rose, parishes increasingly acknowledged women’s economic responsibility in maintaining their illegitimate offspring. After a mother had ceased nursing an infant, she was expected to return to the workforce. Bastardy bonds began to stipulate financial contributions to be made by mothers. Women like Susannah Eldridge, who gave birth to an illegitimate child in East Hoathly in 1778, were expected to pay sixpence per week for the child, although she was much less likely to be formally pursued for non-payment.67 By the early nineteenth century, pre-printed forms left space for a woman’s contribution for maintenance of her illegitimate child to be noted. This did not mark any substantive change in policy, but it did reflect growing concerns over the financial burdens created by the birth and maintenance of illegitimate children.

As illegitimacy ratios rose across England from the mid eighteenth century onwards, parishes more readily deployed strategies to manage the financial implications of such births. East Hoathly provides a remarkably detailed set of examples, which took place at a point when illegitimacy and unmarried motherhood were beginning to have a powerful effect on both community relationships and the parochial poor rate. This single parish is not indicative of a common approach to parochial management, but there is evidence to suggest that some of these practices were more widespread, particularly offering a financial incentive to affect a marriage. Elaine Saunders has identified petty constables across Hertfordshire who were involved in offering similarly large sums to induce a marriage, particularly when a pregnant woman might be in a position to make a match in an alternative parish.68 In Gnosall, Staffordshire, two cases reflect this same strategy. On 4 November 1740 the vestry minutes recorded that it was ‘agreed at the said Vestry to allow Hannah Parton £3. 8s 0d provided she solemnizes marriage with Richd Worrall’. In a similar manner, in 1780 John Edge managed to agree the sum of five guineas for marrying the pregnant Ann Fox; this, together with various accrued expenses, cost the parish £8 12s 0d.69 Samantha Williams noted the case of Elizabeth Hart and John Darling in the parish of Campton and Shefford in Bedfordshire, where the overseers recorded the sum of £14 paid to secure their marriage.70 Williams, however, did not differentiate a specific sum paid to the couple, quite possibly because it was never recorded separately, but a majority of it almost certainly went to the new family. These cases are particularly difficult to identify in parochial records, as paupers did not issue vouchers for these essentially verbal agreements, although remnants of their agreements sometimes appear in vouchers as parochial officers recouped monies owed from the parish. Occasionally, small traces are left through a bill for a ring or a licence. Much of the detail in the East Hoathly cases, however, is noted in the diary of Thomas Turner. By the 1830s the Poor Law Commissioners reported these marriages as commonplace, particularly as a collusive action between a pregnant woman and her parish of settlement, noting that an opening gambit for a single pregnant woman thrown on the parish was: ‘He’s willing to marry me if he could afford it, and he does not belong to you.’71 The commissioners noted that settlement by marriage had become a ‘fertile source of fraud’, and it remained a significant component of the parish accounts.72

While there was a great deal of common experience shared between paupers in East Hoathly and parishes across rural England, it is important to acknowledge some important differences. There were just over 300 parishes or places in Sussex, and by 1803 about half of them maintained some or all of their poor in a workhouse or had arrangements for contracting out their care. Unlike East Hoathly, these parishes were able to deploy differing strategies in their management of illegitimacy. In some places, pregnant women were admitted to the workhouse as a matter of policy or perhaps of expediency, to give birth and complete a period of lying-in with their infants. The mothers might remain in the workhouse while nursing, sometimes for brief periods, or at other times; the child might be maintained in the workhouse while the mother returned to work. In these cases, overseers would keep any financial contribution made by the father to offset the expenses incurred by the workhouse. After Gilbert’s Act in 1782, parishes were permitted to unite for the purpose of building and administering a workhouse, whereon several were established and operated across west Sussex.73 Between two and twenty adjacent parishes participated in these Sussex unions.74 The necessity of policing the borders between these parishes to manage legal settlements was greatly diminished since multiple parishes were contributing to the same poor relief ‘pot’. Despite the existence of workhouses, many mothers choose to live outside of these institutions and were permitted to do so by local vestries. Making these complex calculations of legal costs and maintenance payments, or being aware of other potential costs to the parish, allowed for a certain flexibility in parochial decision-making. Turner’s pragmatic approach to illegitimacy and that of many like him, enabled women such as Ann Cain, Elizabeth Day and countless others to access financial support when they needed it most. Some fifty years after Turner, following a significant growth in illegitimate births, there was an expectation among the poor that an unmarried mother would receive the local ‘rate’ to support her illegitimate child. By the early nineteenth century, the average payment across rural England for the care and maintenance of an illegitimate child was a little under two shillings per week, albeit the parish might occasionally provide a little more.75 In Sussex, parishes tended to pay maintenance to mothers of illegitimate children, whether or not they had received the money from the father, even though rates of default were high. In Mayfield, less than ten miles from East Hoathly, the parish supported forty-six illegitimate children in the community and six more in the workhouse in the early 1830s. The annual expense of supporting these children was £208, only £85 of which was recovered from fathers.76 The amount awarded as maintenance payments for each illegitimate child created particular community tensions of its own. By the time of the 1834 Poor Law Commissioners’ report, the associated national survey, Rural Queries, identified this as a common grievance of rural respondents. Here, the frequent complaint was that unmarried mothers received a greater sum in maintenance payments than a married couple did for a legitimate child as part of a parochial wage subsidy.77 There was a particular dependence on these family subsidies in Sussex. These small sums of money supplied as maintenance payments circulated from parish to pauper, to providers of goods and services, and thence back again, embedding this exchange in the microeconomics of the parish. Indeed, the circulation of cash in the Old Poor Law system provided pecuniary opportunity for the small-scale trader. In 1832 the overseers in Lewes were described as being

chosen from so low a class of petty tradesmen, that it is notorious that they use the balance of parish money in their hands to carry on their own businesses; being little removed above the paupers, they are not able to resist them, and there is the constant temptation to lavish relief supplied on the articles in which they deal.78

These economic ties played an increasing role in the circulation of cash between and across localities, sometimes generating vouchers and at other times an entry in the account books. In addition, the legal costs associated with illegitimacy were a significant cause for concern, and the fees levied on recovering unpaid money from fathers did not always achieve their end.79 In general, legal fees associated with welfare payment were increasing at a significant rate. By 1785, the fees, including all removal expenses and those incurred by overseers, for Sussex were £2,741 11s 3d. By 1803 this had more than doubled to £5,746 17s 11½d.80 These significant sums, replicated across the country, added to the already contentious burden of supporting unmarried women and their children at higher rates than their married counterparts.

The tiny Sussex parish of East Hoathly displayed an enormous variety of circumstance, epitomizing the pragmatic management of illegitimate births and unmarried motherhood, and the flexibility of the parochial Poor Law system across the long eighteenth century. Much of this management was contingent on maintaining a longer-term financial strategy, with local ratepayers shouldering the financial burden should all else fail, and being willing to invest large sums to avoid a longer-term drain on the parish account. On the whole, management of the Poor Law system was undertaken by men cognizant of the wider implications for the local economy and financial benefits that might accrue to themselves or their near neighbours. This said, the vestry sought to mitigate costs whenever possible, particularly through managing the settlement system to their advantage. A coerced marriage undoubtedly offered a neat solution, but a small financial inducement for such a marriage often produced a more equitable result, with potential pauper parents negotiating and agreeing settlements with the added bonus of significant sums of money remaining in circulation across the locality. But ‘solutions’ of the sort described here remained largely dependent on local knowledge, personal relationships and prudent management of parochial finances. The reality of eighteenth-century illegitimacy, the experience of unmarried motherhood and the management of this particular mini-welfare state emerged from the micro-negotiations of Thomas Turner, Ann Durrant, George Hyland, Sarah Vinal and their fellow parishioners and lovers. This particular parochial annus horribilis did not extend beyond the boundaries of east Sussex, but it exposes the pressures and systems at play across the 15,000 parishes of England and Wales.

1 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Dean K. Worcester, Transcript of Thomas Turner’s diaries, 15 Feb. 1757, p. 408.

2 P. Laslett, ‘Introduction: Comparing illegitimacy over time and between cultures’, in Bastardy and its Comparative History: Studies in the History of Illegitimacy and Marital Nonconformity in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, North America, Jamaica and Japan, ed. P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen and R. M. Smith (London, 1980), pp. 1–68, at pp. 14–15; K. Oosterveen, R. M. Smith and S. Stewart, ‘Family reconstitution and the study of bastardy: evidence from certain English parishes’, in Bastardy, ed. Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, pp. 86–140. For a brief critique of the methodologies used in these papers see A. Levene, T. Nutt and S. Williams (eds), Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920 (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 5–8.

3 N. Tadmor. ‘Where was Mrs Turner? Governance and gender in an eighteenth-century village’, in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 89–112, at p. 98.

4 Oosterveen, Smith and Stewart, ‘Family reconstitution’.

5 E. A. Wrigley, ‘Marriage, fertility and population growth in eighteenth-century England’, in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R. B. Outhwaite (London, 1981), pp. 155–63; E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen and R. S. Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1500–1837 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 421–2; R. Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy, and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1996).

6 For women mean age at marriage fell from 26.4 years in the first half of the 18th century to 23.9 years 100 years later: Laslett, Oosterveen, Smith (eds), Bastardy, p. 21.

7 Laslett, ‘Introduction’, p. 23.

8 T. Hitchcock, ‘Sex and gender: redefining sex in eighteenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal, xli (1996), 72–90; T. Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke, 1997); R. Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, 1998).

9 Kate Gibson notes this contested notion of shame in the current literature: K. Gibson, ‘Experiences of illegitimacy in England, 1660–1834’ (unpublished University of Sheffield PhD thesis, 2018), p. 25.

10 P. Laslett, ‘The bastardy prone sub society’, in Bastardy, ed. Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, pp. 232–8.

11 S. King, ‘The bastardy prone sub-society again: bastards and their fathers and mothers in Lancashire, Wiltshire, and Somerset, 1800–1840’, in Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920, ed. Levene, Nutt and Williams, pp. 66–85; B. Reay, ‘Sexuality in nineteenth-century England: the social context of illegitimacy in rural Kent’, Rural History, i (1990), 219–47.

12 Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy, and Marriage; D. Levine and K. Wrightson, ‘The social context of illegitimacy in early modern England’, in Bastardy, ed. Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, pp. 158–77; A. Macfarlane, ‘Illegitimacy and illegitimates in English history’, in Bastardy, ed. Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, pp. 71–85; Reay, ‘Sexuality in nineteenth-century England’; D. Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day (London, 2013); E. Griffin, ‘Sex, illegitimacy and social change in industrializing Britain’, Social History, xxxviii (2013), 139–61; S. Williams, ‘“‘I was forced to leave my place to hide my shame”: the living arrangements of unmarried mothers in London in the early nineteenth century’, in Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c.1600–1850, ed. J. McEwan and P. Sharpe (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 191–220; Levene, Nutt and Williams (eds), Illegitimacy in Britain.

13 This process should have taken place before two magistrates but in practice there was very often a single magistrate.

14 Failure to keep up payments could mean that the entirety of the bond; perhaps twenty, thirty or even forty pounds or more would become forfeit to the parish. These amounts were well beyond the annual earnings of a labouring man.

15 6 Geo II, c 31, An Act for the Relief of Parishes and Other Places from Such Charges as May Arise from Bastard Children Born within the Same, 1733.

16 Settlement was more often than not the place of a pauper’s birth; a new settlement might be gained by serving an apprenticeship, by employment of more than a year, by serving as a parish officer or by renting a house for more than £10 per annum. By far the simplest way for a woman to acquire a new settlement was to marry, as she would automatically take the settlement of her husband. See T. Hitchcock, S. Howard and R. Shoemaker, ‘Settlement’, London Lives, 1690 to 1800 <https://www.londonlives.org/static/Settlement.jsp> [accessed 20 Mar. 2021].

17 17 Geo II, c 5, s 25, Vagrancy Act, 1744.

18 S. Hindle, On the Parish?: The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 300–60; K. D. M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700-1950 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 81–161.

19 In decades around the mid-eighteenth century the ratio of illegitimate to legitimate births in many parishes began to rise at a much higher rate, creating new financial tensions as parishes sought to manage these additional burdens, though this varied enormously by region: Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy, and Marriage, pp. 110–28.

20 R. Probert (ed.), Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales, 1600–2012 (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 1–9; T. Evans, ‘Unfortunate Objects’: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (Basingstoke, 2005); T. Nutt, ‘The paradox and problems of illegitimate paternity in Old Poor Law Essex’, in Illegitimacy in Britain, ed. Levene, Nutt and Williams, pp. 102–21; S. Williams, ‘“They lived together as Man and Wife”: plebeian cohabitation, illegitimacy, and broken relationships in London, 1700–1840’, in Cohabitation, ed. Probert, pp. 65–79; E. Griffin, ‘Sex, illegitimacy and social change in industrializing Britain’, Social History, xxxviii (2013), 139–61; J. Bailey, ‘“All he wanted was to kill her that he might marry the girl”: broken marriages and cohabitation in the long eighteenth century’, in Cohabitation, ed. Probert, pp. 51–64; A. Muir, ‘Courtship, sex and poverty: illegitimacy in eighteenth-century Wales’, Social History, xlii (2018), 56–80; K. Barclay, ‘Love, care and the illegitimate child in eighteenth-century Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xxix (2019), 105–26.

21 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 3 July 1758, p. 608(2).

22 ESRO, PAR409/31/1/2, Laughton, Account book of disbursements, 1723–60.

23 6 Geo II, c 31, s 4.

24 Thomas Nutt suggests that samples varied from less than 32 per cent of monies recovered in some Essex parishes during the early 19th century to 85 per cent in a similar sample from parishes in the West Riding of Yorkshire: Nutt, ‘Paradox and problems’.

25 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 22 Feb. 1757, p. 414.

26 Hindle, On the Parish?, p. 353.

27 This phrase is used frequently in Thomas Turner’s diary. See D. Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765 (East Hoathly, 1994).

28 Similar vouchers for a licence and ring survive for Sarah Winter, £1 3s 8d (ESRO, PAR378/31/3/26/80, East Hoathly, Overseers’ vouchers, 11 Oct. 1820) and for an unnamed recipient in 1770–1 (ESRO, PAR378/31/3/15/21, East Hoathly, Overseers’ vouchers).

29 There is no compelling evidence for the baptism of the child she was pregnant with at the time of her marriage. The most likely explanation is that the child died during birth or was perhaps miscarried. It seems unlikely that the couple waited two years to baptize their first child, given that subsequent children were baptized within weeks of their birth.

30 The same successful tactic of paying a pauper to marry outside of the parish was used again by the parish officers of East Hoathly when, at the end of 1766, the widow Constance Jarman became pregnant by Daniel Carey from the adjacent parish of Chiddingly. The parish of East Hoathly paid for the church fees, a ring costing 5s 6d, the wedding dinner at four shillings, and a ‘present’ of two guineas to encourage the marriage. Their son, Daniel, was baptized on 10 May 1767: ESRO, PAR378/31/3/1/1, East Hoathly, Overseers’ account book, Jan. 1766.

31 ESRO, PAR 499/31/1, Waldron, Vestry minutes and overseers’ memoranda, 1749–67, with accounts, 1763–66, Feb. 1787–Apr. 1803.

32 ESRO, PAR378/32/1/15, Waldron, Settlement certificate, 31 Jan. 1757.

33 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 22 Feb. 1757, p. 413.

34 Elizabeth Day’s parents, John and Mary Dann, lived in East Hoathly.

35 The law did not formally change until 1795 but it was widely assumed that a pauper could not be removed to their parish of legal settlement until they had asked for relief.

36 R. Burn, The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer, ii (London, 1755), p. 198.

37 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, Feb. 1758, pp. 563, 633(1)–634(1).

38 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 27 Nov. 1757, p. 600. This tactic was also used by Mary Durrant in Laughton when her illegitimate daughter, Lucy Akehurst Durrant, was baptized on 24 Aug. 1765: ESRO, Sussex Family History Group transcript. It was used again when Susannah Eldridge gave birth to an illegitimate son in Aug. 1778, who was named John Cornwell Eldridge.

39 Snell argues this form of ‘parochial pride’ and ‘self-assertiveness’ augmented settlement laws, yet in this instance Elizabeth Day used it to evoke a former settlement. K. D. M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 110.

40 ESRO, PAR378/31/1/1, East Hoathly, Overseers’ account book, 29 June 1765.

41 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 21 Dec. 1757 and 21 Dec 1762, pp. 615(1), 1126.

42 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 15 Sept. 1764, p. 1383. Elizabeth Day’s father, John Dann, was buried on 15 Feb. 1763 in East Hoathly; her mother, Dame/widow [Mary] Dann, was buried on 18 Apr. 1768: ESRO, Sussex Family History Group transcript. Elizabeth Day lived until she was eighty-seven and was buried in East Hoathly on 14 Oct. 1804.

43 It is difficult to determine if this was Richard or his brother David Guy.

44 ESRO, PAR378/31/1/1, East Hoathly, Parochial account book, 1763.

45 ‘To Vinal 3 Weeks for Sarah’s Boy’, ESRO, PAR368/31/1/1, East Hoathly, Account book, 1 Apr. 1761.

46 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 23 Oct. 1757, p. 567.

47 T. Hitchcock, ‘“Unlawfully begotten on her body”: illegitimacy and the parish poor of St Luke’s Chelsea’, in Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840, ed. T. Hitchcock, P. King and P. Sharpe (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 70–86; N. Rogers, ‘Carnal knowledge: illegitimacy in eighteenth-century Westminster’, Journal of Social History, xxiii (1989), 355–75.

48 Mary already had an illegitimate child, Anne Thomas Vinal, baptized in East Hoathly on 24 Mar. 1750/1. The child was ‘put out’ to her mother and Thomas Parkes by East Hoathly at 9d per week in 1762: ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 18 Apr. 1762, p. 1045.

49 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 25 Oct. 1757, p. 572.

50 This is the figure for 1761, which is the closest that can be found for expenditure on poor relief to 1757: ESRO, PAR378/31/1/1, East Hoathly, Account book, 1763.

51 Thomas Turner regularly supplied goods to those in surrounding parishes, including items to the Laughton vestry for the use of the poor.

52 It is entirely possible that East Hoathly allowed Elizabeth Day to remain in the parish to care for her elderly parents, thereby relieving the parish of the expense. Steven King notes the failure to remove some unmarried mothers: S. King, ‘Poor relief settlement and belonging in England, 1780s to 1840s: comparative perspectives’, in Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500–1930s, ed. S. King and A. Winter (London, 2013), pp. 81–101, at pp. 87–8.

53 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 26 Mar. 1763, p. 1161.

54 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 10 Apr. 1764, p. 1298.

55 For an explanation of the rating system and poor rates see S. Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle under the English Poor Law, 1760–1834 (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 69–100.

56 N. Tadmor, ‘Where was Mrs Turner? Governance and gender in an eighteenth-century village’, in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 89–112.

57 See Interlude 1 (J. Irvin, ‘Thomas Woolgar, the mystery man’) after this chapter.

58 For a short description of French see Vaisey (ed.), Diary of Thomas Turner, p. 331.

59 Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle, p. 79.

60 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 31 July 1756, pp. 274–5.

61 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 3 May 1758, pp. 714(1)–715(1). James Hutson, widower, married Mary Evenden on 9 Sept. 1759 at East Hoathly.

62 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 8 Dec. 1763, p. 1243.

63 Vaisey (ed.), Diary of Thomas Turner, p. 326.

64 Naomi Tadmor discusses this form of ‘social alignment’ and Turner’s involvement with the ‘politics of the parish’: N. Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), p. 273.

65 ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Worcester, Transcript, 24 July 1757, p. 268.

66 Ashurst Majendie’s report to the Poor Law Commissioners suggested that payment of cottage rents by vestries in Sussex encouraged the artificial rise in rents generally. There is no indication that this included housing for unmarried mothers, although it did include housing for widowed women and their children: Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws (Parl. Papers 1834), appendix A, no. 8, Report from Ashurst Majendie, p. 165A.

67 John Cornwell Eldridge, illegitimate son of Susannah Eldridge and John Cornwell, baptized on 9 Aug. 1778 at East Hoathly: ESRO, Sussex Family History Group transcript.

68 E. Saunders, ‘“Men of good character, strong, decent and active”: Hertfordshire petty constables, 1730–1799’ (unpublished Open University PhD thesis, 2018), pp. 254–6.

69 Identified in W. E. Tate, The Parish Chest: A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England, 3rd edn (Chichester, 1983), pp. 218–19.

70 Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle, p. 108. Further cases are noted by Keith Snell in Parish and Belonging, pp. 142–3.

71 Report … into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, p. 90.

72 Report … into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, p. 90.

73 S. A. Shave, Pauper Policies: Poor Law Practice in England, 1780–1850 (Manchester, 2017).

74 The ‘hundred houses’ of Suffolk and Norfolk provide a very different landscape, where as many as 200 parishes were incorporated to form a single large workhouse. These incorporations began in the mid 18th century, implementing single policies across large swathes of these counties.

75 Report … into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, p. 93. Analysis by Margaret Lyle suggests that the reported average figure for England was 20s 7d per week, while unmarried mothers in Sussex received a relatively generous 24s 9d per week in 1832: M. E. Lyle, ‘Regionality in the late Old Poor Law: the treatment of chargeable bastards from rural queries’, The Agricultural History Review, liii (2005), 141–57.

76 Lyle, ‘Regionality’, pp. 177–8.

77 These subsidies had become increasingly common during the later 1790s after a series of failed harvests, and continued into the early 19th century during times of extreme economic hardship: K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 15–66.

78 Report … into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, p. 58.

79 See, for example, replies from the parish of Framfield: Report … into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws, appendix B, p. 504.

80 Abstract of Answers and Returns relative to the Expence and Maintenance of the Poor (Parl. Papers, 1803-4 [C.175], xiii), p. 533.