Ordinary People in Stuart England
Maurice Ashley describes how, divided by a vast gulf from the prospering gentry, seventeenth-century cottagers and labourers lived a poor and harsh life. After 1660, their standard of welfare seems to have declined.
The ordinary people who made up most of the population of Stuart England—labouring people and out-servants, cottagers, paupers and vagabonds, common seamen and soldiers, according to the categories of the statistician, Gregory King—are too often forgotten. They lived on an extremely low level of income and a vast gulf divided them from the prospering gentry. On the whole, their standard of welfare seems actually to have declined after 1660. The paternalism of the early Stuart period was no longer practised by the post-Restoration governments.
The total burden of the poor rate rose to an exceptionally high figure at the end of the seventeenth century. In Devonshire one-fifth of the population was on poor relief; in Cambridgeshire statutory wages rarely met the needs of a large family. John Bellers, a Quaker, who is considered by some to have been one of the earliest English authors to propound socialist ideas, drew attention in 1699 to disturbances by silk weavers in London and to corn riots in other parts of the country.
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