Poor women and parish public health in sixteenth‐century London

Abstract

While there is much excellent scholarship on the topics of poor relief and plague management in England, less attention has been paid to how they function together, especially given that they were housed in the same administrative unit of the parish. This article focuses on one key area of overlap: the medical labour performed by poor women as nurses or ‘keepers’ for their neighbours and as ‘searchers’ for epidemiological purposes in the period 1560–1600. Examining primarily parish records, such as churchwardens’ account books and vestry minutes, I make a three‐fold argument: first, women's labour became systematized as part of charitable parish care, as keeping duties rose to the level of visible economic exchange; second, the labour of keeping provided the foundation for the development of women's roles as plague searchers; and third, together those roles indicate a deliberate structure implemented in London to confront issues of public health (poverty, vagrancy, epidemics) that is worth considering in its own right.

How England first managed a national infection crisis: Implementation of the Plague Orders of 1578 compared with COVID-19 Lockdown March to May 2020

“…The poor who were sick with plague and qualified for care funded by the parish would have received those ministrations from other poor women, the equivalent of our modern-day, underpaid front line care workers. Monkhoff narrates a report dated 1582 of such women of one parish declining to look after plague victims, although it meant losing that income, and then one of them, Goody Henchpoole, changing her mind [ 48 ]. She was appointed a ‘visitor’ of quarantined houses – after 1593 she would have to swear an oath, for persons so appointed could order the quarantining of a house, and the punishment for failing to carry out their duties in a solemn manner was the more stringent for a sworn official – and a searcher of the dead who had to verify the cause of death of those in her care who had expired.…”