IDIOCY, THE FAMILY AND THE COMMUNITY IN EARLY MODERN NORTH-EAST ENGLAND
In the early modern period people with mental disabilities were the focus of both theoretical discourse and practical action. There was a detailed legal framework of concepts describing the nature of conditions such as ‘idiocy’ and, in the decisions of welfare and judicial authorities, a developing tradition of policies responding to the various social problems they presented.1 While there is therefore much evidence of both the ideas and practices of the time, connections between the two are sometimes unclear. Some sources, particularly the rather cryptic administrative records of the Poor Law, are the products of a direct exercise of local power and rarely reflect a thoughtful or theoretical concern with those in need. Nevertheless, this managerial style of welfare can be revealing, for as has been pointed out, the reality of a discourse is often revealed through the ‘content of the judgements’ as much as in the logic of its theoretical arguments.2 At this local level cases of people with what we might term learning disabilities were widely known and understood. Within the framework of the parish Poor Law, petitions because of illness, disability and poverty were common. Most of the officially accepted medical reasons for poverty concerned physical weakness, of course, the natural result of injury or ageing; but mental disabilities were understood to render people incapable of a normal economic and social life, making them equally dependent on others. In a typical request, Mary Jordan, of Corbridge in Northumberland, pleaded in 1711 with the local magistrates for assistance on the grounds that her husband had been known to them, and, she continued,
now I am almost blinde and very hard of hearing, so I humbly entreate you to do something for me. I have two girls that’s my grandchildren and the youngest is about thirty years of age and neither of them can tell to twenty … I am somewhat burthened with them because they are not capeable of service.3
The aim in this chapter is to examine cases of apparent learning disability like this as a means of exploring both the attitudes of families and communities and the policies which they and their governing authorities adopted.
The recent work on the English Poor Law has been provocative in its interpretation of welfare in the early modern period. One striking feature seemingly well demonstrated was the key role of the local community in maintaining the elderly, the sick and the disabled (of various kinds). Public aid for these categories of need seems to have been relatively unquestioned if not generous. Unemployed men, by contrast, seem to have suffered at different historical periods from a more fickle official sympathy, as the usual victims in recurrent attempts at cutting costs and forcing them back to work.4 Interpretations of the Poor Law have consequently attempted to combine an examination of the lives of the poor and the role played by public relief in ensuring them a minimum of comfort, with an exploration of the apparent theoretical and political context of official policies. Most modern studies have concluded that the nineteenth-century accusations of arbitrary generosity and irrational self-defeating subsidy of a pauperised underclass (as we would express it today) were not valid for the early modern period, but neither was there an uncaring dark age of welfare. The overwhelming evidence suggests that there existed much more careful and organised policies of relief than has hitherto been recognised.5 The issue which tends to dominate much discussion of the early modern elderly or physically disabled is one which is redolent of modern concern, that is, whether the family or the local community was the more crucial source of both financial and practical care. With cases of the different types of mental disability, too, this is the question central to much of the analysis of the evidence provided by the Poor Law, together with the additional problem of the role of specialised caring institutions in the eighteenth century. Most studies suggest that with those deemed mad, local authorities were willing to resort to expensive incarceration in gaols, houses of correction, workhouses, or other safe places. But this was not an exclusive or uniform policy, with many ‘lunatics’ as well as idiots left in the community, usually with their families, with or without public financial support. Institutions such as Bethlem, supplemented by private asylums, played a part in providing specialised care, and were better managed than their later reputations suggested. The growing asylum framework seems to have provided a licence for the separation of the ‘mad’ from the ‘bad’, and their founders usually specifically forbade the presence of idiots. The impression from most studies is that the local officials attempted to diagnose the nature of the mental disabilities consistently and carefully, but because of the huge number of managing authorities (more than 10,000 parishes), we have no clear overall national picture of the situation before 1800.6
The sources on particular individuals in need fall into two categories: those provided by the parish and its officials on the one hand, and those court records left by the county magistrates when the responsibility for care had become subject to dispute between either individuals or parishes. The basic information at parish level, of levels of relief, and of its recipients and purpose, is supplemented by legal discussions of responsibility when the family or the parish abrogated their duties. In this process supervision of all the mentally disabled was in fact ultimately accountable to the justices long before they had a formal requirement to be specifically responsible for the custody of lunatics.7 The first task, therefore, before examining the details of many individual cases, is to place the local practice within the contemporary legal framework. As has been frequently noted, the early modern English population was both intensely litigious and remarkably legalistic in its behaviour, to the point where law may indeed have been a far greater force for social integration than religion. Yet the letter of the law may be a poor guide to actual decisions and principles, for a divided society may be compelled to allow rival interpretations of the same statutes. The legal framework therefore provides an important starting-point for any examination of the policies directed towards the mentally disabled, but should not be taken as the final word. Coherence in theory does not necessarily imply consistency in policy.8
THE ORIGINS OF THE LAW ON IDIOCY
It would be very odd to begin a history of the legal definition of the mentally disabled with the suggestion that, on the whole, there is no history to consider. Yet in some ways this might be a tenable view, for when the first detailed handbooks were produced in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to aid justices and others to administer the law, they embodied almost unchanged a simple dichotomy between the idiot and the lunatic which had shaped medieval law since the thirteenth century. Since this also provided the intellectual background to the developing medical and welfare policies after 1600, this language, used to diagnose, treat or otherwise deal with those who displayed unusual mental functioning remained virtually unchanged for centuries. In law, philosophy, and policies of poor relief, the distinction between idiocy, an irrecoverable condition, and lunacy, a temporary illness, was a recurrent dichotomy.
The legal implications of these definitions were serious, involving potential loss of legal rights to property, compulsory incarceration, both private and public, and general reduction in social rights. For example, in the thirteenth century, among those forbidden from becoming judges were ‘Women … serfs, and those under the age of twenty-one, open lepers, idiots, attorneys, lunatics, deaf mutes, those excommunicated by a bishop, criminal persons’. This dichotomy between genetic and temporary disabilities remains strong today, as recurrent Mental Health Acts testify. Whereas the Middle Ages dealt with ‘lepers, lunatics and idiots’, the eighteenth century with ‘lunaticks, ideots and drunkards’, the modern police are advised against handling the ‘mentally handicapped’ and ‘mentally ill’ (and juveniles) without outside assistance. This could suggest, to the jaundiced eye, that the only change that has occurred since 1300 is that suspected juvenile delinquents have replaced lepers and drunks in the ranks of the untouchables.9
This consistency down the centuries in basic terminology and definitions of mental disability is extraordinary. Yet the circumstances of application, have, of course, changed considerably. The legal theory was further elaborated in textbooks designed for a national (that is, English and Welsh) educated public in the early modern period, and at the same time definitions of mental competence became subject to an increasing philosophical as well as medical concern. By the eighteenth century, therefore, there was a background of ready-made concepts and tested legal policies towards those deemed lunatic or idiot. Moreover, there was also a limited growth of acknowledged expertise in dealing with awkward individuals which, though it did not amount to the equivalent of a modern profession, was nevertheless essential to local communities. While, therefore, there were no real ‘experts’ in mental disabilities before the eighteenth-century asylums, there were many constables, gaolers and keepers of workhouses and houses of correction who were trusted to deal with the persons allocated to them. In villages and families, too, there may have been those with accepted skill.
The deep-rooted character of these concepts is perhaps surprising, but may indicate a thorough penetration of early modern popular culture with the language of the law courts. As Michael MacDonald points out, mental conditions that had become problematic socially or legally were initially discovered by the neighbours or family of the afflicted, and only then was their judgement validated by official legal authority. This process will be discussed later in this chapter, but it is interesting to note that few examples exist to suggest that popular ideas differed radically from those of the legal culture.10
EARLY MODERN LEGAL THEORY
The essential concepts were thus apparently fixed before the end of the thirteenth century, but the methods by which the distinction was established in practice in this period were imprecise. Neugebauer’s astonishing figures from the Court of Wards (80 per cent of cases before 1540 comprised allegations of idiocy) suggest a serious confusion in reality if not theory. Examiners had to investigate whether the condition had persisted since nativity or if not, when it had developed or struck. Neugebauer suggests they were conflating many postnatal conditions into one concept of idiocy, and even talked of ‘lucid intervals’, which theoretically were the quality of the mad. It is possible that the relative clarity of the methods of testing for idiocy resulted in the neglect of the potentially more difficult lunacy cases, or, perhaps, the courts simply found ‘idiocy’ the easier judgement to reach.11
In the early modern period, however, when magistrates bore the brunt of most decision-making about all the mentally disabled, the concepts were apparently clearly outlined for them in legal handbooks, and the impression is that the distinction between lunatics and idiots was generally maintained consistently. By this time, among the cases of mental abnormality, problems of lunacy dominated the local courts statistically, as far more allegations about madness or ‘distraction’ were heard than imputations of idiocy. Commentators in the seventeenth century such as Michael Dalton provided a clear and detailed scheme to assist magistrates and others, proposing three kinds of people classifiable as non compos mentis:
[1] A fool natural, who is so (a nativitate) from his birth; and in such a one there is no hope of recovery.
[2] He who was once of good and sound memory, and after (by sickness, hurt or other accident, or visitation of God) loseth his memory.
[3] A Lunatick, who enjoys lucid intervals, and sometimes is of good understanding and memory, and sometimes is non compos mentis.12
The second category seems to have been deliberately vague, suggesting that loss of memory could be both physical and mental, a state perhaps midway between idiocy and madness, and may in practice have been conflated with straightforward lunacy. A similar tendency to complicate the medieval dichotomy with intermediate categories is displayed by Swinburne, whose work on the validity of wills also included a discussion of those unfit to make them. Even if a ‘fool’ made an intelligible testament, his will was not acceptable, for ‘a naturall foole doth not understand what he saith, although he seeme to speake wisely’. But also, even if a man was not an idiot, ‘yet if he be so simple that there is but small oddes betwixt him and a natural foole, such a person cannot make a testament’. But nevertheless Swinburne in apparent self-contradiction concedes the remote possibility of idiots making wills, for, he says, ‘a fooles Testament wisely conceived is sometimes good in law’. This kind of careful legalistic vagueness implies that much was still left to the court to decide.13
More than a century later, Blackstone repeated much the same definitions, observing that with regard to criminal prosecutions ‘a total idiocy, or absolute insanity, excuses from the guilt, and of course from the punishment’. The lawyers thus talked constantly of temporary loss of memory when discussing lunacy, but seemed to regard idiocy as simply failure to learn: ‘the idiot is one that hath no understanding from his nativity’. In other areas of congenital disability, too, legal thinking supposed no possibility of learning. Blackstone, displaying the influence of Locke’s psychology, propounded that
A man is not an idiot if he hath any glimmering of reason so that he can tell his parents, his age or the like common matters. But a man who is born deaf dumb, and blind, is looked upon by the law as in the same state with an idiot; he being supposed incapable of understanding, as wanting those senses which furnish the human mind with ideas.14
Swinburne, however, asserted that anyone who could make a sign of intelligent intention, whatever their disabilities, could make a will. By the early modern period, therefore, in legal circles at least, idiocy, failure to become a normally learned adult, together with the other forms of mental unreason, seem to have been seen as an involuntary loss of judgement, an ‘involuntary ignorance’ in contrast to faults such as drunkenness which was regarded as inexcusable behaviour because it was ‘voluntary’.15 Nevertheless the law (at least as embodied in the advice in legal textbooks) was not concerned with the origins of the disability unless it was the outcome of a criminal act, but only with the fact of its existence. Where it occurred, learning disability, whether of physical or mental origin, debarred people from legal responsibility.
ANIMALITY AND HUMANITY
This basic framework of ideas remained apparently unaffected by philosophical or medical questioning. Indeed, Locke merely provides an extended gloss on the pre-existing legal concepts rather than a critical challenge to them. Lunatics, he thought, lacked none of the basic mental skills, but applied them wrongly, ‘for they do not appear to me to have lost the Faculty of Reasoning: but having joined together some Ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for Truths’. But he speculates inconclusively about whether idiots and beasts are of the same species, since both share a complete lack of intellectual faculties.16
This association of animality and abnormality, was, as Keith Thomas notes in a very Foucauldian manner, common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in connection with vagrants, lunatics and the Irish. This element of revulsion may have justified the use of severe restraints and punishments, for example imprisoning lunatics in barns and having to have their quarters ‘cleaned out’ like horses’ stables. There are some indications that idiots were popularly supposed to be closer to animals in the way that, in north-east England and elsewhere, parents reported the uncontrollable physical appetites of their children. In 1720, 23-year-old William Batey was described by his mother Jane as ‘an idiott and has been so from his Birth, and never able to putt on his own cloaths … and is always very glutinous and desirous of meat’.17 In a later account, this time from early nineteenth-century Somerset, John Skinner came across a group of gypsies,
with a little child which was tied to the back of an ass, surrounded by a variety of tent equipage, being very clamorous, … On enquiring of its mother whether it ailed anything, its chief cries were so piercing, she replied that it ailed nothing more than it had always done from the time of its birth, as it was unfortunately an idiot, and although seven years old was not near so large as its brother who was not four; that it was accustomed to make that horrid yelling, and was so importunate for food it would regularly eat a small loaf a day and not be satisfied.18
Apparently, in these instances a healthy appetite was confirmation of a lack of self-control, perhaps of animal greed, rather than an indication of normal childlike needs.
Interestingly, there are no accounts of a dangerously uncontrolled sexual appetite associated with idiocy, even among mature and adult victims. Some literary images seem to dwell on the possibility of enhanced sexual appetite among ‘fools’, but one legal authority felt that the capacity to have (actually to ‘beget’) children was proof of normality rather than idiocy.19
TESTS AND DIAGNOSES OF REASON AND KNOWLEDGE
The medieval period had developed tests for the central courts that were to dominate discussions of ‘idiocy’ for the next three centuries. Even today, Walker comments, the tests do not seem unreasonable, if rather crude. They followed the legal definition of idiocy in exploring whether the individuals had developed the socially necessary skills of numeracy and everyday language use. People were asked to add up sums of money, describe objects or animals, and count numbers forwards or backwards. One fourteenth-century victim was asked if she preferred twenty groats to forty pence (a groat was a fourpence piece), and in a famous case Henry Roberts in the early eighteenth century was asked what a lamb and a calf were called at one, two and three years old. Normality was defined in terms of someone who knows ‘what shall be for his Profit or what for his Loss’, a calculative rationality that any competent person could exercise in a highly monetarised and increasingly capitalist society. In addition, the competent person was supposed to have everyday knowledge: as Swinburne put it at the end of the sixteenth century,
An Idiot, or a naturall foole is he, who notwithstanding he bee of lawfull age, yet he is so witless, that he can not knoweth who is his father, or mother, nor is able to answer any such easie question.20
Lunacy, by contrast, was viewed far less as the loss of a technical expertise and seems to have lacked any comprehensive tests except the public opinion of specially convened juries in both criminal and civil trials. In such trials the juries do not seem to have received any instructions as to how to proceed.
However, there are few instances of this kind of testing for the conditions of idiocy outside the central courts at any time in the early modern period. Blackstone assumed that only in civil cases would the issue of idiocy have required testing or examination by a jury, for neither type of the mentally disabled could be prosecuted in criminal law. In civil courts, if a plaintiffs idiocy could be established by the defendant, the suit could be dismissed. On these occasions, as in allegations of lunacy, the everyday knowledge of normal mental states was thought sufficient to diagnose the abnormal, suggesting that, as Neugebauer notes, those manifesting these signs, to the popular mind, ‘lived next door’ and were part of ordinary acquaintance. The use of friends and neighbours as witnesses suggests that a general popular reputation was taken as evidence in many instances. There was certainly nothing resembling the Lord Chancellor’s testing of Henry Roberts, who wrote a bitterly resentful pamphlet about his investigation. There were no cases of panels or even taking of ‘expert’ opinion, although magistrates and Poor Law officials made frequent use of doctors to treat the poor from the 1720s onwards, and in the cities for many decades before.21
PETITIONERS AND POOR RELIEF
How did cases come to official notice, and what shaped the response? The evidence here is largely derived from north-east England, with glances at the data from published sources from elsewhere. Some cases derived entirely from disputes between parishes over their responsibilities to care and pay for people’s welfare. Here, the cases appear as typical Poor Law disputes over maintenance or removal, a parish objecting to a payment imposed by the court, or demanding the removal of the recipient to another parish entirely. Most recipients, of course, would never have been the subject of a court hearing, though widely known in their parishes where the patchy survival of records makes them hard to trace. ‘It should be borne in mind that the court naturally took no cognizance of those cases where no dispute arose.’22 But local records are even more cursory when giving precise details about the nature of those receiving poor relief. Even comprehensive listings of the poor, such as those for Elizabethan Ipswich and Norwich, can provide only tantalising glimpses of the mental condition of the poor: interestingly, only Ipswich lists ‘innocents’ amongst its recipients, while Norwich, with a far larger survey, found none. Consequently, two-thirds of the cases known in north-east England appear in the quarter sessions disputes or pleas rather than in the parish records. We have too few regional studies yet to know if this is typical of the evidence available.23
There is something very suspect about the kinds of people recorded. The majority were male (four-fifths, 25 male to 6 female) and, where the age is known or implied, adult (11 out of 18): the oldest was 50 years old. This suggests that a disproportionate amount of attention was paid to those who should in ‘normal’ life be independent and caring for others rather than dependent and cared for. As Suzuki suggests in his study of lunacy cases in a similar context, the failure of the mature male was the occasion of much greater anxiety and public attention: patriarchy depends on men being at the very least reliable. However, idiots may not have been regarded as being completely incapable of earning a living: one Ipswich man in the 1597 census of the poor was regarded as ‘abell’ to work, though in want. Both Suzuki and Andrews stress that this was also a factor in the policies adopted in some instances. In several of these Elizabethan urban surveys the presence of a mentally disabled person is a recognised element in the family’s poverty. The failures deemed more important than employability may have been managerial in nature, concentrating attention on men who were not able to perform with masculine authority. One Northumberland wife described her husband as ‘a simple man, and not in a capacity to manage their concerns, and to order and take care of their husbandry’. Significantly, her parents-in-law had married him to her, their servant girl, to ensure a steadier future for the whole household, a plan that disintegrated when the young woman was disabled (physically) in an accident. She was ejected from the house, and consequently petitioning for relief.24 It is also an interesting aspect of these cases that while, in law, the individuals were usually defined as idiots, the language of the petitioners showed much greater variety of terms, possibly reflecting a heightened sensitivity or tact. The most commonly used alternative term was ‘innocent’, as in one heartfelt plea by Margaret Williamson to the Northumberland justices in 1702:
She hath an innocent son twelve yeares of age uncapable of knowing any by name or face, yea his own mother (your petitioner) that bore him is a stranger unto him. And further this her innocent is so unruly and past Government that without a continuall eye had unto him she is in daily fear of some ill to be done either to her, himselfe or some others.
The neighbours had asked her to watch him carefully, and her husband, the child’s stepfather, whose own disability had not allowed her to be ‘idle’, was nevertheless willing to become her ‘fellow helper’ in this caring task.25 The word ‘innocent’ or ‘simple’ occurs in a quarter of the north-east cases, especially in the parish lists (in 8 of the 33). It may be significant that all the Elizabethan cases in published sources use the term, but archival research may revise this.26
In the eighteenth century, by contrast, one elderly petitioner tried for credibility in court by using legal jargon, describing her daughter as ‘non comptis mentis (sic) worse than an Idiot’, and another petition for aid attracted the footnote from the clerk that ‘the said James Twizell was borne a foole. which is the cause of his poverty’. The law perhaps encouraged a more determined bluntness in dealing with these social problems, aided by the published handbooks discussed earlier that became popular guides by the end of the seventeenth century.27
The character of petitioners, and their reasons for coming to court, reveal much of the dilemmas of the individuals in need. Petitioners’ identities are not always known, but, where recorded, they are overwhelmingly family – mostly parents, siblings (or siblings-in-law) or spouses.28 The majority were women, the largest category being mothers of the needy persons. Their reason for requesting aid was largely their own poverty, frequently the result of age or injury. One friend, for example, petitioned on behalf of Julian Mauther in 1708, ‘who, lame and not able to goe abroad and beg bread, has an innocent to her daughter who is twenty years old, yet cannot put on her cloaths or stirr out’. One father was described as ‘a poor infirm man’, and a mother (of William Batey, above), said ‘she is become old and very failed and not able (as she used to do) to maintaine either herselfe or him’. In one instance there was a curious distinction drawn between husband and wife: ‘to James Hedley’s wife for his innocent son, two shillings’, as though it was recognised by the parish that the woman, who presumably was not the mother of the child, was the actual carer in practice. In other cases, the substitutes for deceased parents were, at least initially, refused help: Matthew Robinson petitioned for help in looking after James Twizell, ‘the said James relations dying but his sister, wife to your petitioner, was forced to take him and hath kept and maintained him for the space of forty years without being burthensome to any person’. But, ‘being old’, he and his wife had to petition twice for help, the second time to force the parish to pay the one shilling and sixpence per week ordered by the court.29
It is worth noting that this couple had no legal obligation to care for a sibling under the Poor Law of 1601, but were ‘forced’ to do so. Probably the justices encouraged, or enforced, this kind of familial support, especially where male relatives had money, as a couple of North Riding cases suggest. In one, a Helmsley man was paid one shilling a week to care for his son-in-law, ‘an ideot … incapable of providing for himself, while in an order of very dubious legality, three brothers (one in fact probably a brother-in-law) had to pay three pounds a year between them for the care of Richard Wardell, an ‘impotent ideot’. The absence of legal justification was sometimes challenged by these male relatives, but it may be that, in the seventeenth century at least, magistrates took a wider view of family obligations than the narrow span of linear duties (parents, children and grandchildren, but not siblings or grandparents or in-laws) specified in the law. Possibly siblings were compelled to care: in a long case in the Essex quarter sessions of 1660–1, a brother was forced to provide for his sister with his ‘competent sum of money’ after he had abandoned her in a conveniently empty cottage in Cold Norton. After five parishes had become involved, and the woman removed to two of them where she had been at various times or had family connections, she was sent back to Cold Norton to be maintained by her brother. It is notable that there are no instances of the transference of family property from the victim to the kin who would finance the care: it seems likely that the strict letter of the law was followed and idiots, once defined, did not inherit or accumulate property, unlike many lunatics. So, in the absence of an available female carer, the magistrates were seeking specifically male relatives in the family network with sufficient resources and close enough in kinship to justify the imposition of a considerable burden. Probably local opinion had already concluded that this was the right policy, and they merely were reaffirming this in court orders.30
In other cases the practical care was provided from outside the family entirely. George Bell in 1711 was receiving one shilling a week from the parish for maintaining ‘an innocent child of one Richard Thompson deceased’, and in 1727 Jacob Grieve was being paid for keeping an ‘innocent’. The use of men as guardians has an interesting parallel in their role in assessing and looking after lunatics, where men thought to be mad were often watched over by male relatives or friends. This could be dangerous: one man in 1792, afraid to sleep by himself, murdered one of the two men who joined him at night. With parish care of idiots, the substitute for the family is sometimes not specified, as in 1735 when the ‘inhabitants of Wingates’ had agreed to receive and maintain Peter Mather. Only one apparently professional carer, a man, with whom an infant had been ‘tabled’ (that is, boarded at parish expense) some distance from her home, appeared in court in the North East complaining because the promised payments from her family had not been forthcoming – fourteen pounds having been left for her ‘diet’. But in one sense these are not exceptions, for in a society where the primary care was familial or communal, the problems only came to the notice of the county officialdom when the private caring system disintegrated, through death or poverty.31
The petitions suggest that many parishes resented the orders to pay for this kind of care: about a third were brought to enforce payments previously ordered, suggesting that parish overseers had ignored orders from the previous hearings of the court. Whether local officials were more likely to try and avoid their responsibilities in this kind of case compared with those involving more routine Poor Law candidates, it is impossible to say. On occasion, the courts did not allow any debate about the responsibilities to obstruct the provision of care: in a Durham case, it was ordered that:
the inhabitants of West Herrington and the Inhabitants of Offerton be summoned to appear at the next sessions to show cause who ought to maintaine Robert Childon an Ideot and in the interim the ideot to be kept by the whole parish.
Eventually the people of Houghton-le-Spring were allocated responsibility, and had to reimburse the other parishes. But this parochial reluctance may have been based on a realistic assessment of the time such care might go on. Some parishes paid for the mentally abnormal year after year. Corbridge, for example, found funds from its special charity for five years for Matthew Rowell after 1714, and Gateshead in 1815 listed Deborah Cloughton among its ‘out-poor’ (receiving relief outside the workhouse), having commenced receipt thirty-five years earlier in 1780. It is therefore not surprising to find both initial requests for aid and subsequent petitions for increased help resisted or, at least, obstructed, by parish officials who could appeal against the allocation of responsibility to their parish or, more rarely, request removal to another.32
These efforts resulted in a situation where, to judge from the quarter sessions cases, the majority of individuals in north-east England were cared for by their families, with or without assistance, but a minority were looked after by the parish in the homes of neighbours. The information in the parish lists is more vague, as the majority of individuals are just listed as recipients of their own relief, ‘out of the house’, as Matthew Montrose of Berwick was in 1763, but the contexts of care were probably similar. Some were clearly on their own, as John Forster was in 1745, when his parish awarded him one shilling and sixpence a week after the death of his mother.33 Unlike other parts of the country, the North East does not seem to have adopted institutional care for idiots, in marked contrast to the pattern found for lunatics. This does not mean that institutions did not maintain idiots: at least one was on the lists of ordinary recipients of relief from Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Holy Jesus Hospital at the end of the seventeenth century, but does not seem to have been resident. Elsewhere, in London in particular, there is evidence that in workhouses idiots were sometimes lodged and employed around the house.34 Also, in other urban areas idiots were maintained in institutions, as for example in Elizabethan Ipswich where two appear in the lists of the inhabitants of Christ’s Hospital between 1578 and 1580, together with costs of their clothes and shoes. They were under the charge of the resident ‘guider’, John Frysell, who was charged with the duty of caring for the aged, the young and the sick, providing ‘washinge, nourishinge and other attendance’. Those in this kind of care were clearly distinguished from the ‘vagrants and idlers’ who had to work in a separate part of the same institution. This kind of provision seems to have been rare at any time, but may have been an occasional resort of hard-pressed officials in the absence of familial alternatives. It was probably impracticable outside well-organised towns. All recent studies agree that the new lunatic asylums of the eighteenth century followed Bethlem in specifically excluding idiots, though this does not mean that they were completely absent. The Norwich Bethel, for example, expelled several inmates because they had become disabled, though presumably only after they had recovered from their lunacy; one of the disablements was described as ‘idiotism’ or a ‘state of idiocy’, suggesting a rare diagnosis of an acquired or developmental, rather than an ascribed, deficiency. But nowhere is there any hint of the establishment of ‘fool houses’ or ‘idiot houses’, despite occasional half-serious published proposals.35
In the framework of the Poor Law, therefore, there was great scope for argument about need and responsibility, and about the balance between private and public provision. The justices had an essential role in enforcing obligations under the Poor Law and, while being dependent on the parish officials and their parishioners, the courts were able to redefine the problem in a way that might conflict with the priorities of the parishes or families. They confined their attentions to the Poor Law problems, responding to requests from carers for ‘serious consideration in this their great necessity’, as one phrased it. Nowhere is there any sign of a judicial challenge to the definitions of the states of individuals’ minds. For example, the panel of justices might appoint one of their number, as the North Riding quarter sessions did in 1655, ‘to inquire of the condition of a woman of Helmsley alleadged to be a poor impotent innocent and to give order for her present relief’,36 but there was little debate about her mental disability. This explains why there is little courtroom discussion of the categorisation of people under investigation, since most petitions and reports to the court were made, or vetted, by magistrates who had already made up their minds. Nor does the category of developmental idiocy or lunacy, well established in the textbooks (such as Dalton’s above – the condition supposedly arising from injury), have any practical application here: all idiocy cases seem to have been defined either as congenital or, at least, irrevocable. By contrast, justices often regarded physical disabilities with scepticism – too many vagrants had pretended to be ‘dumb’. The newspapers reported with great satisfaction the detection of the frauds, when the claimants suddenly rediscovered their powers of speech once they had begun hard labour in the workhouses: there were no hints of this in cases of mental abnormality. It seems that the nature of mental problems was defined by the ordinary people asking for help and was rarely questioned by validating authorities: certainly no parish tried to shirk its responsibilities by debating the nature of the mental disability, questioning only the familial or residential situation of the person in need.37
CONCLUSION
The striking feature of early modern discussions, therefore, is that, at the local level at least, little public notice was paid to ‘idiots’ outside the official structures of the Poor Law and magistrates’ courts. No public prurience about idiocy was fostered by the local newspapers, who reported sympathetically on the distressed mental state of suicides or, more dramatically, on wandering madmen, such as a lunatic who in 1749 was rumoured to be living wild in the woods north of Newcastle attracting curious tourists from across the Scottish Border. No one ever seems to have advertised to recover a wandering idiot, as they did for lunatics: one Elizabeth Wilson, aged about 60, had left Wensley, North Yorkshire, seven months earlier and had not been heard of since, reported one Newcastle newspaper seventy miles away. Yet at least one Northumberland idiot was picked up wandering as a ‘rogue’ (an official term providing probable legal justification for his apprehension) in Durham and incarcerated in the house of correction before being returned home fifteen miles away to his mother and father-in-law (strictly his stepfather – his father in ecclesiastical law).38 Yet the picture that emerges from the Poor Law evidence is not a simple one of non-institutionalised private care devoid of outside interference, of idiots being unstintingly maintained within their family framework. Such a view was popular much later, when it acquired the sentimental glow of hindsight. William Farr in 1837, for example, supposed that
In Wales, and remote villages, the idiot lodges in a cottage, and, supported by the parish, is the qualified butt, and of course the favourite, of the neighbourhood: in towns, he would have more difficulty to survive the nursing in a workhouse.
In its portrait of pre-industrial integration, this seems an early version of the sentimentality, also found in Wordsworth’s The Idiot Boy (and his mother, ‘Him whom she loves, her idiot boy’), or Marx’s more caustic description of the rural past as ‘rustic idiocy’. It also perpetuates a myth that in idiots early modern society found its entertaining fools. Such an image resembles Peter Laslett’s ‘informal existent dogmatic theory’ about the aged, that there was a before and an after in the history of their relationships and social status. In the before, ‘ageing was an accepted part of the system of belief, and the aged themselves were both entitled to respect and were usually accorded it’; in the after, ‘society tends to proceed as if the aged did not exist, or as if it would be better if they did not exist’.39
The elements of an equivalent dogmatic theory of pre-industrial paradise for idiocy could be extracted from their context easily enough: the ‘idiot’ was a familiar social identity; the person was cared for within an accepted framework of familial or communal obligations, or was left relatively independent within certain bounds; there were no serious misgivings about the costs, personal or financial, of care. Such a view (deliberately exaggerated, admittedly) has its attractions, but misses the key problem of the limitations of our data. The picture that emerges from the cases and the legal framework within which they were handled is that early modern society was clear in its policy towards those it designated ‘idiots’: they were a familial responsibility, first and foremost, supported or enforced by the local state. As a last resort, substitute families would be found and financed by the parishes or distant relatives; this did not entirely exclude the possibility of institutional care outside the early asylums in places such as workhouses. Such institutions in any case were often modelled on families, to provide the re-training appropriate for the inmates.40 To later observers this apparently idyllic situation seemed admirable, and may have fed the growth of sentimental nostalgia. But the fact that early modern authorities had both a concept and a welfare strategy to deal with problems of idiocy does not indicate complete social integration. The presence of these court orders enforcing payments suggests that in many instances care and costs were not provided by communities with uninhibited generosity. A bureaucratic device is, therefore, no proof of social acceptance: the family care sanctioned and financed by local authorities might have been an official method of live burial. On the other hand, there is little sign of the wholesale cruel neglect from which nineteenth-century reformers suggested the mentally disabled needed rescuing. Bureaucracy legitimised the family burden by providing the minimum allowed to any poor person, but official compassion hardly ever extended to replacing the family as the primary source of care. In this, the early modern period is not untypical of British welfare traditions: today’s carers for the elderly or disabled find that there is little assistance or guidance in doing their family duty, short of their collapse under the burden. Only at that moment is care transferred completely to the state. The family therefore remains, not just at the heart of political sentimental ideology, but at the centre of the state-enforced system of care.41
NOTES
1 ‘Idiot’ was perhaps the commonest word used to describe people with learning disabilities in all sources before the nineteenth century, and will be followed here in a non-pejorative sense to refer to those so defined by their contemporaries. We can say little about the reality of their condition, as modern medical or educational theory might define it – there is no acceptable way of ‘correcting’ history here, to reveal the ‘real’ problems, as is shown by the unsatisfactory attempt by G. Howells and N.L. Osborn, ‘The Incidence of Emotional Disorder in a Seventeenth-Century Medical Practice’, Medical History, 1970, vol. 14, pp. 19–28.
2 M. Cousins and A. Hussain, Michel Foucault, London, 1984, p. 111.
3 Northumberland County Record Office (NCRO) QSB, 34, Midsummer 1771, f.18.
4 D. Thomson, ‘The Welfare of the Elderly in the Past: A Family or Community Responsibility?’, in M. Pelling and R. M. Smith (eds) Life, Death and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives, London, 1991, p. 214.
5 For the traditional history see Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Poor Law History, vol. 1, London, 1963, and E.M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, Cambridge, 1900. More recent work is that by P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England, London, 1988; W. Newman Brown, ‘The Receipt of Poor Relief and Family Situation: Aldenham, Hertfordshire, 1630–90’, and T. Wales, ‘Poverty, Poor Relief and the Life-Cycle: Some Evidence from Seventeenth-Century Norfolk’, both in R.M. Smith (ed.) Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 405–22 and pp. 351–404. A critical assessment of historians’ myths is D. Thomson, ‘Welfare and the Historians’, in L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith and K. Wrightson (eds) The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, Oxford, 1986, pp. 355–78. More recent work on the aggregate picture of poverty is by M. Pelling, ‘Old Age, Poverty, and Disability in Early Modern Norwich: Work, Remarriage and Other Expedients’, in Pelling and Smith, Life, Death and the Elderly, pp. 74–101.
6 P. Allderidge, ‘Bedlam: Fact or Fantasy?’, in W. F. Bynum, R. Porter and M. Shepherd (eds) The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. 2, London, 1985, pp. 17–33; P. Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots: Mental Disability, The Community and the Poor Law in North-East England, 1600–1800’, Medical History, 1988, vol. 32, pp. 34–50; A. Suzuki, ‘Lunacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England: Analysis of Quarter Sessions Records’, Parts 1 and 2, History of Psychiatry, 1991, vol. 2, pp. 437–456, and 1992, vol. 3, pp. 29–44; R. Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency, 1987, London, esp. ch. 3; and Jonathan Andrews in this volume.
7 For the legal framework as it developed with regard to lunacy, see K. Jones, Lunacy, Law and Conscience, 1744–1845, London, 1955.
8 J.A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760, London, 1987, pp. 116–17, and K. Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds) An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, London, 1980, pp. 21–46. Religious attitudes to mental disability have been neglected here, as was kindly pointed out when an earlier version of this chapter was given at the Society for the Social History of Medicine conference in 1992: it remains an area in need of further work.
9 A. Horn, from The Mirror of Justices, Selden Society, J. Whittaker (ed.), London, 1895, quoted by D. Pannick, Judges, Oxford, 1987, p. 49; N. Walker, Crime and Insanity in England, Edinburgh, 1968, vol. 2, pp. 68–9; F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, Cambridge, 1968 (originally 1895), vol. 1, p. 481; R. Burn, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, 6th edition, London, 1758, vol. 2, p. 224, ‘Ideots: see Lunaticks’, and pp. 370–2; W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, London, 1769, vol. 4, p. 24; Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (s.66): Codes of Practice, London, 1991, pp. 37–9, 42, 60.
10 M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge, 1981, p. 113; and his ‘Popular Beliefs about Mental Disorder in Early Modern England’, in W. Eckart and J. Geyer-Kordesch (eds) Heilberufe und Kranke im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert: die Quellen und Forschungssituation, Münster, Münstersche Beiträge zur Geschichte und Theorie der Medizin, 1982, p. 148.
11 See B. Clark, Mental Disorder in Early Britain: Explanatory Studies, Cardiff, 1975, p. 58, compared with Dalton below; R.Neugebauer, ‘Treatment of the Mentally Ill in Medieval and Early Modern England: a Reappraisal’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 1978, vol. 14, pp. 161–2.
12 M. Dalton, The Countrey Justice: containing the Practice of the Justices of the Peace as well as out of their Sessions etc., 1666 edition, London, p. 284.
13 H. Swinburne, A Brief Treatise of Testaments and Last Wills, London, 1635, originally 1590, pp. 68–9. See Pelling, ‘Old Age, Poverty and Disability’, in Pelling and Smith, Life, Death and the Elderly, p. 74.
14 Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 4, p. 25; vol. 1, pp. 292–3.
15 Swinburne, Brief Treatise on Testaments, p. 90; A. Fessler, ‘The Management of Lunacy in Seventeenth-Century England. An Investigation of Quarter-Sessions Records’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1956, vol. 49, pp. 904–5.
16 J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by P. Nidditch, Oxford, 1975, p. 160.
17 K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800, Harmondsworth, p. 44; P. Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots’, p. 44, case from Houghton-le-Spring, County Durham; NCRO, QSB 53, Midsummer 1720, f.57.
18 J. Skinner, Journal of a Somerset Rector, 1803–34, edited by Howard and Peter Coombs, Oxford, 1984, p. 125.
19 See Jonathan Andrews’ reference to a ‘lascivious she-fool’ who had to be locked up to avoid her becoming pregnant; for a contrary view, J. Cowell, A Law Dictionary, or the Interpreter of Words and Terms Used Either in the Common or Statute Laws of Great Britain …, London, 1727 (originally 1607), unpaginated, under alphabetical entry for ‘ideot’.
20 Walker, Crime and Insanity, p. 36, and pp. 26–7, quoting A. Fitzherbert, 1524; Neugebauer, ‘Treatment of the Mentally Ill’, p. 161; Swinburne, Brief Treatise of Testaments, p. 68. For currency, see J. Richardson, The Local Historian’s Encyclopaedia, New Barnet, 1974, pp. 218–21.
21 Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 3, p. 333 and vol. 4, pp. 24–5; R. Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, pp. 112–13, 122–4; Walker, Crime and Insanity, pp. 36–7 for Roberts; R. Neugebauer, ‘Mental Illness and Government Policy in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England’, unpublished PhD, Columbia University, 1976, p. 292; MacDonald, ‘Popular Beliefs about Mental Disorder’, p. 148; P. Rushton, ‘The Poor Law, the Parish and the Community in North-East England’, Northern History, vol. 25, for doctors and parishes, p. 146.
22 D.H. Allen, Essex Quarter Sessions Order Book, 1652–1661, Colchester, Essex County Council Records Office Publication no. 65, 1974, p. xxvi.
23 The statistics are thirty-three actual or probable cases of idiocy, 1665–1800, in a population approaching 300,000; there seems to have been terrible under-recording, with only one case from Newcastle.
24 A. Suzuki, ‘Lunacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England’, pt.1, 1991, pp. 442–4; J. Webb, Poor Relief in Elizabethan Ipswich, Ipswich, Suffolk Record Society, vol. 9, 1966, p. 138, an innocent ‘wants’ an eighteen pence allowance; see Salisbury evidence, P. Slack, Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury, Devizes, Wiltshire Record Society, vol. 31, 1975, p. 78; for Norwich, see J.F. Pound, The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570, Norwich, Norfolk Record Society, vol. 40, 1971, and Pelling, ‘Old Age, Poverty and Disability’; Ralph Bell, 1699, NCRO, QSB, 11, Easter 1699, f.53.
25 NCRO, QSB, 17, Midsummer 1702, f.17.
26 See Jonathan Andrews’ study in this volume: Londoners used the word ‘idiot’ more freely. Was this a sign of their greater acceptance of legal categories?
27 Ann Tindall, NCRO, QSB, 59, Midsummer 1723, f.48; QSB, 9, Easter 1697, f.15.
28 The figures are nine parents, two brothers or brothers-in-law, one wife, one probable friend, and one ‘tabler’ (that is, person who is paid for giving board and lodging).
29 NCRO, QSB, 27, Christmas 1707, f.10, Mauther; QSO, 6, p. 146, George Potts, 1721; QSB, 53, Midsummer 1720, f.57, Batey 1720; EP. 151/1, pp. 42–3, 45–6, 50 and 65, Hedley, parish of Hartburn 1713; QSB, 9, Easter 1697, f.15, QSB, 10, Easter 1698, QSB, 12, Michaelmas 1699, f.28, Twizell.
30 Quarter Sessions Records, North Riding Record Society, edited by J.C. Atkinson (NRQS), vol. 6, 1888, pp. 195 and 235, 1673 and 1675: the two brothers had to pay twenty and fifteen shillings, while the probable brother-in-law (Robert Clarke) only five; vol. 7, 1889, p. 2, a son-in-law successfully overthrew an order, 1677; D. Thomson, ‘“I am not my father’s keeper“’, note 5 above, p. 269; Allen, Essex Quarter Sessions, pp. 151, 155, 167, 174.
31 NCRO, QSO, 5, pp. 72 and 75, Bell; EP./10, unpaginated, annual list 1727, Grieve; Mark Selby, deemed lunatic by the assizes, 1792, Public Records Office (PRO), ASSI 45/37/3/193, and see much earlier example of a friend coming to share a bed with one thought mad, in Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots’, p. 38, n.15; QSO, 7, p. 255, Mather; CDCRO, Q/S/OB, 3 and 5, p. 249, Jane Carlson.
32 CDCRO, Q/S/OB, 7, pp. 525 and 533, 1678; NCRO, EP. 57/25 unpaginated, Easter accounts of John Cooke’s charity, 1714–19; Account of the Out-poor of the Parish of Gateshead, Taken in March 1815 …, printed J. Akenhead, Newcastle. The petitions were: fourteen requests for maintenance or increases; six for enforcement of pre-existing orders; one appeal against a court order; and only one removal request.
33 Care when specified was provided as follows: fifteen by the family, four by the parish, one shared between family and parish; NCRO, EP. 38/57, unpaginated 17 February 1763, Montrose; QSO, 8, p. 140, John Forster.
34 Samuel Starth, 1698, Tyne and Wear Archives Service, 595/49, f.7; in general on this issue, see Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots’; Andrews in this volume and A. Suzuki, ‘Lunacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England’, pt.2, pp. 43–4, in particular the latter’s key argument that the relative employability of idiots among others, when contrasted with the intractability of the mad, led to lunatics being the major problem for segregated control in the second half of the eighteenth century. At least one lunatic, when threatened with the house of correction, was confident that he could do the task required, of beating sand, but may have killed himself because of the threat, PRO ASSI 44/115 pt.3, lunacy and post-mortem inquisitions for Northumberland, 1800.
35 Webb, Poor Relief in Elizabethan Ipswich, pp. 15–16, 52, 53, 58; M. Winston, ‘The Bethel at Norwich: an Eighteenth-Century Hospital for Lunatics’, Medical History, vol. 38, 1994, p. 48; K. Doerner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry, translated by J. Neugroschel and J. Steinberg, Oxford, p. 31; Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 121. Whether the Continental private system of incarceration at a family’s request also included people with learning disabilities is unclear, though P. Spierenberg suggests the possibility in his discussion of beterhuizen in The Prison Experience. Disciplinary Institutions and their Inmates in Early Modern Europe, New Brunswick, 1990, p. 226–7.
36 NRQS, vol. 5, 1887, p. 178.
37 See Rushton, ‘The Poor Law, the Parish and the Community’; NCRO, QSB, 59, Midsummer 1723, f.48; NRQS, vol. 5, 1887, p. 178; Newcastle Journal, no. 677, 28 March 1752.
38 Newcastle Journal, no. 541, 19 August 1749; Newcastle Courant, no. 107, 13 August 1727; William Turner, 1770, County Durham County Record Office (CDCRO), Q/S/OB, 13, p. 305.
39 Quoted in M. Donnelly, Managing the Mind: A Study of Medical Psychology in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, 1983, London, p. 89; S. Gill (ed.) William Wordsworth, Oxford, 1984, pp. 67–80; W. Willeford, The Fool and his Sceptre: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and their Audience, London, 1969, p. 133; P. Laslett, ‘Societal Development and Aging’, in R.H. Binstock and E. Shanas (eds) A Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, New York, 1976, pp. 89–90.
40 See P. Spierenberg, The Prison Experience, ch. 6.
41 C. Ungerson, Policy is Personal: Sex, Gender and Informal Care, London, 1987 and J. Lewis and B. Meredith, Daughters who Care: Daughters Caring for Mothers at Home, London, 1980.