IDENTIFYING AND PROVIDING FOR THE MENTALLY DISABLED IN EARLY MODERN LONDON
INTRODUCTION
Historians have often emphasised how the mentally ill and disabled1 must have been a familiar sight in early modern society. Rarely placed under constraints or confined in institutions, the insane and idiotic tended to be maintained in their domiciles, or roamed the highways and byways as vagabonds. Typically, referring to the freedom to be abroad of the ‘village idiot’ and ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’,2 or to the importance of the ‘fool’ in the social and cultural landscape of early modern times,3 historians have, however, tended to differ as to the meaning and extent of this apparent spatial legitimacy. Did this represent a genuine tolerance extended to the mentally disabled, or was it instead symptomatic of the insignificance and neglect of mental disability as a problem? Furthermore, to what extent were the considerable freedoms and tolerance of former times being gradually eroded during this period? How far were new, or more emphatic, demarcations of deviance placing the mentally disabled – either epistemologically or ontologically – behind bars?4
One fundamental problem in addressing such questions has been that the enigma of ‘idiocy’ has tended to be left out, or removed to the margins, of the analysis. Too often it has been treated as a social and medical issue virtually synonymous with that of lunacy, or dealt with as a subordinate corollary to madness, rather than as a subject in itself.5 Historians are only just beginning to enquire more deeply as to how far the mentally disabled shared in these putative historical developments. Recently, for example, some historians have seriously questioned the authenticity of the ‘village idiot’, arguing that this characterisation says more about the stigmatising by the educated, urban élite of the ill-educated and gauche country bumpkin, than it does about the experiential realities of the mentally disabled.6 Indeed, as the ensuing study will indicate, idiots appear no less conspicuously in the records of early modern metropolitan parishes than in those of rural parishes. On the other hand, the relative freedom enjoyed by the idiotic, or at least the rarity of evidence that they were being placed under restraint, is a striking feature of early modern parish records and a significant contrast to the types of treatment meted out to the insane.
We still know very little about the lives of the mentally disabled and the nature of provision for them in this period, particularly within their local and domiciliary settings. This is partly owing to the fact that scholarship has remained so preoccupied with the literary figure of the ‘fool’ and the cultural meanings of ‘folly’, tending to eschew hard analysis of the social problems of the mentally disabled. This chapter will be devoted to redressing these deficiencies in one important respect, that of parochial provision for the pauper mentally disabled. In doing so, I hope it will not underestimate the manifold problems in treating mental disability as a subject separate from that of mental illness in this period, when contemporaries themselves were often so ambiguous in distinguishing one category from the other. My intention is not to advocate even the feasibility, let alone the need, of divorcing an analysis of idiocy from lunacy. My concern is rather to shift the focus of the analysis.
This survey will concentrate pre-eminently on the records of London parishes, and in particular those of: Allhallows the Great, during the periods 1650–90 and 1710–50; St Botolph without Aldersgate, during 1726–40; St Botolph Bishopsgate, during 1625–1721; St Brides during 1634–1755; St Stephen Coleman Street, during 1663–1785; St Dionis Backchurch, during 1639–1769; St Dunstan in the West, during 1700–23; and St Sepulchres Holborn, London, during 1648–86. I will not be greatly concerned with regional variations between parishes, for, given the paucity of existing research, general conclusions on such matters would be premature. Beginning with the question of contemporary definitions, I shall argue for the meaningfulness and coherence in practice of early modern distinctions between types of mental disablement and mental illness – in particular, in so far as the former was recognised as a condition beginning at, or soon after, infancy. I shall proceed to discuss the numbers of mentally disabled being relieved, and the range of provisions and expedients available for, and arrived at in, the care of idiots. This section will suggest just how scanty, if not exceptional, relief was for the mentally disabled, but will emphasise the difficulty of estimating the real proportions being relieved in this period. While examples of long-term parochial aid will be given, overall this chapter will stress how transient were the forms of such provision, often comprising arrangements, for example, to see mentally disabled children through infancy. Some of the rationales underlying decision-making as to appropriate types of relief, as well as to the recipients of relief, will then be explored. This section will look in particular at the precipitators behind idiots falling upon the care of the parish, and at what factors influenced one type of provision over another. I shall also examine the demographic and family profiles of recipients, and emphasise the importance of influences such as the age, household structure, employment, and life-cycle crisis points of mentally disabled individuals and their families, which propelled them to seek aid and provoked the authorities to intervene. Finally, I shall investigate the profiles of those who cared for the mentally disabled, underlining the importance, as well as the rather exigency-led nature of the network of care available through parish nursing. It shall be argued that most of these nurses were temporary operators, and took in a wide range of sick and disabled poor.
Sadly, the early modern idiot is an elusive subject of enquiry. Only in a minority of cases are idiots found within early modern institutions catering for the mentally affected, which tended to exclude them from admission. Idiots are also less conspicuous in parochial records, which were apt to say much more about the characteristically more dangerous and florid cases of lunatics with their heavier implications for domestic management, medical treatment, public order and the parish coffers. There is no escaping the fact that contemporaries spent more time, more money and more energy on providing for and writing about those deemed to be lunatics than on the merely idiotic. While this disparity is a clear reflection of the disproportionate place the two states were accorded as a public concern, it makes the job of the historian of idiocy commensurably more difficult. Furthermore, the historian’s problems are multiform when it comes to actually identifying the mentally disabled amongst the ranks of all those described as having some sort of mental defect or affliction.7
DEFINING MENTAL DISABILITY
The starting-point when addressing the problem of idiocy, as indeed it was for contemporaries too, must be this very question as to how individuals were identified as idiots and what criteria were utilised for this end. Historians like Foucault and Doerner stressed the fluidity of early modern definitions, arguing that the failure to distinguish the insane and the mentally disabled from each other and from other categories of deviance partly explains the failure to provide separate, specialist institutions for them.8 Vice versa, recognising the need for, and drawing up, clearer demarcations of deviance has been pointed to as one explanation for the opposite trend, of establishing increasingly exclusive, purpose-built carceral provision. There is much evidence to support this thesis. Recently, however, other historians, better versed in the more mundane records of local medical men, officials and families, have on the contrary drawn attention to the meaningfulness of contemporary language about mental disability in its own context, and the coherence of the distinctions made between various groups amongst the disorderly poor.9
My own studies of parochial, institutional and juridical records would tend to lend support to the latter position. Parish records are notable for the precision, rather than the vagueness, with which individuals are referred to as mentally disabled. Descriptions of parishioners as ‘idiots’ or ‘fools’ tended to carry a specific meaning, distinguishing their behaviour and appearance from the more serious matter of insanity. Terms such as ‘idiot’, ‘stupid’, ‘innocent’, ‘natural’, are commonly employed in parish records as distinct from terms such as ‘mad’, ‘lunatic’, ‘distracted’, ‘crazie/ey’. Rarely, at least after the mid-seventeenth century, are they merged or interchanged once applied to individual cases, with an ‘idiot’ parishioner later being referred to by a churchwarden as a ‘lunatic’. This must surely suggest some degree of consistency in ascriptions of mental disability by local officials, and by the families and fellow parishioners of the disabled. In general, terms seem to be applied much more definitively in parish records than in literary accounts of the ‘witless’. As the period wears on, some more ambiguous terms disappear almost altogether from the language of vestry minutes and churchwardens’ and overseers’ accounts.
‘Innocent’ is especially interesting in this connection. Late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century literature often spoke of the ‘brain-sicke bedlam and … innocent’ as one and the same.10 More commonly and increasingly, as time went on, however, it was the fool, or the idiot, who was accorded the stamp of ‘innocence’, rather than the insane.11 Parish records seem to have employed the term ‘innocent’ even more specifically, to identify a mentally disabled child, or someone mentally disabled since birth. But this term vanishes almost completely from metropolitan parochial accounts from the end of the seventeenth century. These trends probably have less to do with any initial appropriation, or subsequent loss, of ‘innocence’ on behalf of the mentally disabled, than with changing ideas about folly in general and madness in particular, and the virulence of Augustan stigmatising of unreason.12 The increasing preference for more distinct terms like ‘idiot’ and ‘lunatic’ to more metaphorical terms like ‘innocent’ in parish records may also reflect a generalised trend towards greater uniformity and formalism in administrative documents, and the impact of new standards of literacy and education amongst metropolitan parish officers.
In literary texts throughout the early modern period idiots were often bracketed together with lunatics under the indiscriminate umbrella of folly, or witlessness.13 The popularity in literature of equivocal terms like ‘wit’, however, was not extended to the language of officialdom. Indeed, less was to be gained in administrative documents by retaining such ambiguities. The meaning of parochial, legal and governmental records often depended on distinguishing between types of the deserving poor. Richard Neugebauer’s examination of the problems of guardianship, and the Court of Wards’ dealings with the mentally disabled, has demonstrated how important were legal distinctions between the insane and the idiotic.14 In the pragmatic terms of local and familial economy too, it made sense to differentiate in some degree between the lunatic and the idiotic.
This is not to assert that the distinctions between the mentally ill and the mentally disabled were tight, or uniformly upheld, even on the legal, institutional and local administrative levels. The mad were not identified according to vagrancy laws as a separate group from the general mass of rootless and masterless poor before the passing of the 1714 Act. Even then, they were not distinguished from idiots. Furthermore, there is only limited evidence that early modern institutions attempted to maintain internal segregation between the mad and the idiotic. Contemporaries clearly distinguished even less between different types of stupidity. It might be argued that medical, legal and philosophical definitions of lunacy and idiocy allowed ample grounds for confusion. Contemporary scrutiny of the mentally abnormal often focused on rather restricted questions of defective faculties or cognition, and, to a lesser degree, on physical symptoms, which could be shared by the mentally ill and the mentally disabled alike. Examinations of idiots characteristically tested subjects’ basic arithmetical aptitude, their ability to remember the most elementary aspects of identity, and their powers to reason from simple first principles.15 Indeed, the available criteria developed little over the course of the period to assist contemporaries in distinguishing one condition from the other.
Yet, there were a number of relatively coherent and precise formulations that seem to have held emphatic sway during this period. Perhaps the most fundamental and workable was the distinction between those disabled since birth, or early childhood (i.e. ‘idiots’), and those whose faculties had been lost or impaired subsequently (i.e. ‘lunatics’). This was a conception of mental disability that retained currency in legal and medical texts throughout the period,16 and that is clearly reflected on the parochial level by the frequency with which idiots and fools were identified in parish accounts when young children. Apart from this ‘pure’17 conception of idiocy, idiots might also be recognised by the permanency of their mental defects, the lack of any lucid intervals, as well as by their odd physical appearance, especially the size of their heads, deformities, or enlargement in their features, and vacuousness in their expressions.18 Most contemporaries also recognised an ‘acquired’ type of stupidity, embracing individuals ‘that by … accident’, or ‘disease’, ‘wholly’ lose their ‘memory and understanding’.19 It was a well-established orthodoxy of contemporary medical treatises, that lunacy often degenerated into a form of ‘idiocy’, or ‘fatuity’ – particularly if long established and indulged, or else neglected or abused by medicine.20
Early modern writers made little distinction between idiocy and chronically progressed conditions of mental enfeeblement. Identification of a number of elderly parishioners as ‘foolish’, or ‘idiotic’, in metropolitan parish records also suggests the importance of this conflation. In 1662, for example, St Brides paid for the committal of one James Pratt to Bethlem, at that time and subsequent to his discharge referring to him as a ‘Madman’, or as ‘distracted’. The last time his actual condition was specified, however, in 1667 (once Pratt was removed to the country), he was referred to as an ‘Ideott’.21 Cases like Pratt’s, where an ascription of lunacy gave way to one of idiocy, were highly comprehensible according to such models of acquired mental disablement. The proximity between perceptions of senile mental disorders and idiocy is further evidenced by the tendency of both states to be compared with that of the child. For example, the elderly Elizabeth Eccles of St Botolph Bishopsgate, was referred to in parish accounts as ‘childish’, or ‘very aged allmost Childish’, or ‘very aged and helpless’.22 As in Eccles’ case, it seems to have been the weak, vulnerable, dependent state of some elderly and mentally-disabled parishioners that manifested their kinship with children to contemporaries.
Other cases, nevertheless, seem only to be comprehensible in the context of equivocal terminology. For example, Mary or Ann Low/Lole of Bishopsgate was described and relieved initially, during 1699–1706, as ‘Lunatissime’ and ‘Crasie’, but once was described as ‘fooleish’ and seems to have been in the prime of life, being married, with a small child.23 Clearly, in parish records as in common parlance, ‘foolish’ had a more ambivalent meaning than the term ‘idiot’. While widely employed as a synonym for idiocy,24 ‘foolish’ was often employed quite loosely to denote a weakness of intellect, less serious than that of idiocy, or to identify some ridiculous or unreasonable aspect of an individual’s behaviour. The influential seventeenth-century physician, Thomas Willis, defined ‘foolishness’ as emphatically a stage above the more abject mental defect of the idiot. Parochial officials, on the other hand, while evidently using the term more casually than that of ‘idiot’, more often used both terms interchangeably. Significantly, furthermore, they seem to have used ‘foolish’ with a degree of gender bias, characterising the intellectual frailties of female parishioners thus more often than those of males.
‘Distracted’ and ‘Lunatike’, on the other hand, were terms which seem generally to have been confined by metropolitan parishes to serious cases of mental disturbance, and not infrequently to those cases committed to madhouses. Yet they were terms which were occasionally applied to young children too, possibly suggesting some sort of congenital mental defect (although autism and behavioural problems cannot be discounted). In 1674–5, for example, the Bishopsgate churchwarden recorded a payment of 4s ‘to Roberts that dyed in Bedlam [i.e. the residential district surrounding the hospital] leaveing behind him 3 children in want one being distracted’.25 In the case of another young child, Mary (Magdalen) Browne, relieved by the same parish during 1683–7, who was spoken of variously, as ‘a kind of A naturall and sicke’, ‘allmost A naturall’, ‘A Lunaticke’ and ‘Lunaticke sicke’, there was clearly an element of doubt in the terminology adopted, although she was most often referred to as ‘A naturall’.26 Very occasionally, the term ‘changeling’ was applied in parish accounts to mentally disabled children.27 This term could be synonymous with that of ‘idiot’, but could also be used to describe the lunatic and the physically disabled.28 More importantly, it tended to be reserved for children whose abnormal physical or mental characteristics appeared to contradict natural law, and bore little or no resemblance to the characteristics of their parents or relations.29
Despite the evident existence and operation of significant criteria distinguishing certain ‘idiotic’ and ‘foolish’ types of mental abnormality from other ‘lunatic’ types, the fact remains that parish records tell us very little about how the distinctions rooted in such terminology were arrived at. More might be hoped for, as Fessler, Rushton and Suzuki have demonstrated,30 by combining the study of parochial records with an examination of the records of quarter sessions and other courts. Unfortunately, out of twenty-nine lunatic or mentally disabled cases located so far in London Sessions records spread unevenly over the period 1662–1704, the case of Sarah Howard discussed below represents the only ‘idiot’ to be found.
As Fessler and others have shown, it was common when doubt or argument arose as to the issue of responsibility for the mentally ill or disabled that cases tended to enter the province of Courts of Sessions. Typically, as in Sarah Howard’s case, brought before the London Sessions in 1674, witnesses were summoned to establish not only that mentally disabled individuals had no family or friends able (or willing) to provide, but also that they could not sustain, or contribute to, their own maintenance. Sarah was described as ‘an Ideott … soe sottish and void of reason that shee is not able to gett her liveing’.31 Indeed, this case would tend to support Fessler’s evidence that, on the ground level, when decisions needed to be made as to how a mentally disabled individual was to be supported, more pragmatic considerations as to the severity of the disablement were often called into play – considerations such as the individual’s ability to work and amenability to being managed within the domestic context.
The overwhelming significance of such purely economic considerations when it came to determining appropriate provision for the mentally disabled, must itself have mitigated the need to distinguish between types of disablement – except in terms of degree, or trouble-someness. On the other hand, the long-term implications for care associated with chronic conditions like mental disability, as against the prospects of remission entertained in cases of lunacy, made distinctions more important. Indeed, these realities must sometimes have rendered the type of burden envisaged and actually experienced by those responsible for idiots a much more onerous and worrying undertaking.
NUMBERS OF IDIOTS AND EXTENT OF PAROCHIAL RELIEF
More often than not the mentally disabled are conspicuous by their absence from London’s parish records. Some Poor Law accounts I have examined do not mention the mentally disabled at all, while others mention only one or two such individuals. For example, all of the seventeen mentally affected parishioners recorded as in receipt of relief in the parish records of Allhallows the Great during 1650–90 and 1710–50, were referred to as ‘mad’, ‘distracted’, ‘disordere’d in Senses’, ‘out of their Senses’, or ‘Lunatick’, or else were sent to Bethlem and other madhouses. Similarly, no mentally disabled individuals are identifiable amongst the fifteen ‘distracted’, ‘mad’ and ‘Lunatick’ cases found in the accounts of St Dunstan in the West during 1700–23, while those of St Brides mention only one ‘ideott’ and one ‘Naturall’ amongst seventy-three mentally ill or disabled individuals identified during 1634–1755.
It would be unwise, however, to assume, merely on the basis that no, or little, mention is made of ‘idiots’, that none, or few, were in receipt of poor relief, let alone that none, or few, were resident in a particular parish. Nor, on this basis alone, given the often summary and unrevealing nature of parochial accounts, and the difficulties in identifying the mentally disabled, is it safe simply to presume that provision for this group of the poor was not an important or recognised part of the responsibilities of parochial authorities. As one example of the problems involved: the ‘fool’ Harry/Henry Southern of Coleman Street is referred to at some length in churchwardens’ accounts, but his actual mental state is only identifiable from a single mention of his case in vestry minutes. It is unlikely that any metropolitan parish was completely free of mental disability during this period, or that parish officers distinguished with the same degree of consistency between the mad and the idiotic. It may appear rather futile, then, to hazard any assessment of the numbers, or proportion, of poor mentally disabled parishioners in the metropolitan localities on the basis of parish records – or even to attempt to focus on provision for one group of the mentally affected at all.
The fact that many parochial officials were evidently making some sort of distinction, however, argues otherwise. Furthermore, for a few parishes, like St Botolph Bishopsgate, there is evidence of provision for a substantial number of ‘idiots’ and ‘fools’, while, even in those parishes where only an isolated case was mentioned, considerable attention was sometimes accorded it by officials. At least nine Bishopsgate parishioners were described as either ‘fooleish’ or ‘a naturall’ during 1625–1721. The existence of such cases, alongside the elliptical nature of parish records and the general tendency towards invisibility of the mentally disabled, warn us that the extent of parochial relief for such individuals was not quite so inadequate as might appear at first glance.
Nevertheless, in many of the same parishes where there is no explicit trace of idiots and fools, the relief of sick, or lunatic parishioners, or of parish children, was spoken of quite explicitly. Even admitting the limitations of the records, there seems scant evidence to challenge the general impression that relief of the poor mentally disabled was extremely scanty. The mentally disabled were and remained the Cinderellas of the deserving poor. Even parish records that do detail provision for idiots more fully suggest that the condition was not regarded as so burdensome and troublesome, financially and socially, to the responsible parties, by comparison with other afflictions. In the majority of cases, and in a notably larger proportion than others identified as ‘lunatic’, the family was relied upon to provide.
TYPES OF RELIEF AVAILABLE: NURSING AND MATERIAL RELIEF IN THE PARISH
Generally, idiots and fools were lodged in their domiciles with relatives and, as such, remain largely invisible within parish records. Elizabethan Poor Law stipulated that it was the kin who should pay for the poor if able, and idiots were no different in this respect. Likewise, if families without financial means had property which might be sold, leased or mortgaged, to help support a disabled member, the parish was entitled to take steps to enable such action. Thus, after the death of a mentally disabled parishioner’s parents, the parish commonly went about selling off their property and goods, in order to defray burial costs and some of the burden of their own, and their family’s, care. For example, St Stephen Coleman Street received a sum of £4 by way of the recently deceased ‘Mr [Richard] Southern for Goods’ in 1719, having taken over the care of his ‘foolish’ son Harry.32
Occasionally, owing to widowhood, hardship, old age, infirmity or sickness, parishioners might receive alms, or a pension, from the parish to help them support a mentally disabled individual. The ‘foolish’ Martha Stock enters the churchwardens’ accounts of St Botolph Bishopsgate when, in 1701, her solitary mother, Alice, begins to receive 6d a fortnight and is described as ‘Aged lame & hath A foolish Girle’.33 Likewise, the young (mentally disabled?) child of Jean/Joan Chees, relieved during 1694–5 as ‘A kind of A Lunaticke’, enters the same parish’s accounts when his ‘very poor’, widowed mother begins to be paid between 6d and 1s per week.34 Sometimes, also, the mentally disabled themselves were paid alms or pensions directly, and/or had their rents met by the parish, suggesting some sort of ability to support themselves. The ‘foleish’ Elizabeth Ratcliffe, passed to Bishopsgate in 1691, ‘sicke’, unemployed and with three small children, for example, was directly relieved for the next seven years or more by the parish, with occasional payments gradually replaced by a regular pension and payment of her rent.35 Latterly, Ratcliffe’s relief became an occasional item again. The extent of the parish’s preparedness to pay pensions and rents for such individuals is difficult to chart, as records were often only irregularly kept. In the case of the ‘foelish’ Elizabeth Bright of Bishopsgate, her nursing was ‘put upon the Penssion Booke’ in 1697, and, in the absence of this record, one can only assume that the parish continued to pay as before until her death three years later. Larger-scale and long-term relief for the mentally disabled, including incarceration, was quite a singular phenomenon, unless no family member was forthcoming, or individuals proved especially difficult to manage in a domestic setting.
Apart from occasional alms, or regular pensions, parochial aid for idiots and fools might also take the form of financing nursing and lodging within, or without, the family domicile, either with parish nurses, with landlords and landladies, or some other parishioner. This was the standard form in which parochial relief of the mentally disabled outside of their domiciles was dispensed. It could be provided either short or long term, either inside or outside of the parish. The ‘foelish’ Mary Browne of St Botolph Bishopsgate was nursed for at least two years in the 1680s, while Dorcas Popkins, ‘a Natural’ of the same parish, was nursed for a few weeks during 1702.36 Anne Tweedle, a St Sepulchres’ ‘ideot’, was nursed for a period of about twenty weeks in 1660–61.37 Often, as apparently in these cases, nursing was provided as a temporary arrangement to help mentally disabled children through their infancy, until some means could be found of getting them removed from the parish charge. In other cases, nursing was more long term. St Sepulchres seem to have paid for ‘keeping’ the ‘innocent’, Thomas Walker, for a period of about five years during 1649–53. Over the next twelve years, only one very small payment for ‘keeping’ was recorded, although substantial amounts were expended intermittently for his clothing.38 The ‘foleish’ Elizabeth Bright was nursed at Bishopsgate’s charge for over six years until her death in 1700.39
That terms such as ‘keeping’ and ‘lodging’ were employed as frequently as terms like ‘nursing’ and ‘attendance’ to describe the care of mentally disabled persons may reflect a genuine recognition of difference between a basic form of providing accommodation and meeting needs, and a more caring, experienced role. Those referred to as ‘nurses’, or as ‘nursing’, were often individuals from within the locale called on quite regularly by the parish to care for the sick and distressed poor. The use of such terminology also seems to have carried a loose gender distinction, in that female parishioners tended more often to be referred to as ‘nurses’, and male parishioners as providing ‘keeping’ or ‘lodging’. Sometimes, however, such terms were applied to both sexes and, in practice, there may often have been little distinguishing the type of attendance provided by one from the other. Some parishes even employed hybrid terms like ‘nursekeeper’. The persistent use of terms like ‘keeping’ was also some reflection of the pragmatic, containment concerns of parochial provision. While clearly less of an issue when it came to the mentally disabled, literary accounts of vulnerable, lascivious she-fools, needing to be locked away to prevent them being ‘pepper’d’, imply the existence of genuine concern about containment.40 Notably, parochial records rarely record nurses and others being paid to house ‘idiots’ concurrently with parishioners of the opposite sex. Institutions, too, attempted to maintain segregation between the sexes.
Payments for nursing the mentally disabled generally also embraced feeding and cleaning, although less basic necessities, such as ‘shaving’ or ‘snuff’, might be itemised as additional luxuries. The rarity as much as the itemising of such provision in parish accounts reflect the rudimentary level at which relief was being furnished. Often, however, parish records are simply not detailed enough to make precise conclusions about what was, or was not, being provided, or for how long. The ‘shaving’ of Harry Southern while being nursed was mentioned only twice in the accounts of St Stephen Coleman Street during 1719–31, but this does not mean that he was not being shaved at other times. In the event of the death of a poor mentally disabled parishioner, the parish might also pay for the burial and funeral.
Often payments included, or took the exclusive form of, clothing allowances. Clothing might not merely protect poor parishioners from inclement weather and sickness.41 Clothing was also an important symbol of dignity and humanity for the pauper. The shirt on a pauper’s back could also be a last, desperate source of income at the pawn shop. Contrariwise, dishevelment, dirt and nakedness appear to be germane to prevailing perceptions of the poor mentally affected in this period. Parish records reveal that lunatics and idiots were not infrequently ‘naked’ (a term often connoting poorly clothed, rather than stark naked) at the time clothes were actually provided by the parish.42 Yet, these records also emphasise that this was not a circumstance peculiar to the insane and the idiotic. The sick and vagrant poor, too, sometimes appeared in the same condition, even as late as the 1740s.43
Obtaining any exact calculation as to the extent of parochial clothing allowances to the mentally disabled is rendered virtually impossible by the fact that it was frequently unspecified, recorded in lump sums to a group of parishioners, or obscured for other reasons. Clearly, nevertheless, clothing provision was very basic in this period. Bishopsgate appears to have spent no more than 13s on clothing Mary Browne during 1683–7, including two frocks and some linen, while another four payments totalling 10s 1d were made on behalf of Elizabeth Bright during 1695–6 for ‘two Sheifts’ and three pairs ‘of Stockings’.44 Clothing allowances for the mentally disabled may seem rather more meagre than they actually were, however. Clothing was less expensive and perhaps less necessary for very young children. Furthermore, in some individual cases parochial provision was plainly more generous. During 1719–31, the Coleman Street ‘fool’, Harry Southern, received at least 3 strong coats, 6 waistcoats, 14 shirts, 10 aprons, 10 pairs of breeches (or drawers), 15 pairs of stockings, and had his shoes replaced or repaired at least eighteen times, with additional sums spent for unspecified ‘goods’, ‘provision’ and ‘clothing’.45 Out of a total of over £32 expended during 1649–65 on the ‘innocent’, Thomas Walker, St Sepulchres, Holborn, spent over £5 simply on clothing him. The vestry explicitly instructed the churchwarden at times to ‘take care to provide Cloathes for Walker the Innocent’.46
On the whole, nevertheless, Poor Law accounts suggest an extremely rudimentary form of care being offered to the mentally disabled at this time. The sums of relief involved tended to be very small, and markedly smaller than those afforded to parishioners deemed to be mad. In total, St Botolph Bishopsgate appears to have spent no more than £1 10d during 1687 on parishioners and ‘strangers’ (i.e. individuals from outside of the parish) described as ‘naturals’, ‘idiots’ or ‘fools’. During the same year, on parishioners deemed to be ‘mad’ etc. (six of whom were in Bethlem), it spent more than sixty times this amount.47
Often a mentally disabled child was relieved as just one of a number of children in a poor, distressed family. The aforementioned ‘naturall’, Mary Browne of Bishopsgate, seems to have been the youngest of as many as five children named Browne orphaned and falling to the parish’s responsibility during the 1680s. After apprenticing two of the Brownes, in 1688, the Bishopsgate churchwardens paid to ‘take’ all three remaining Brownes, including Mary, ‘of[f] the p[ar]ish Charge’, paying £5 to a Henry Harris for Mary and George Browne, and another £5 to a John Bussby for Prudence.48 Judging by the sums agreed and the fact that Bussby also paid 1s 6d ‘for A bond to put forth Prudence Browne’, these agreements may only have entailed Prudence’s apprenticeship. Most formal apprenticeship terms did not begin until the age of 14.49 As the work of Pelling and others on early modern child care have stressed, however, informal apprenticeships were regularly arranged between poor families, parishes and employers, throughout the early modern period.50 As a weaver, Harris probably intended informally to bring the children up in the trade. Pelling has underlined how ‘useful and even essential’ was the work of young children ‘for the survival of the household’.51 Mentally disabled children were, on the whole, however, a rather inevitable exception to this rule. Indeed (unless one counts Browne’s case), I have come across no explicit reference to the apprenticeship of simple-minded parishioners in parish records. Nevertheless, Browne’s is one of many cases highlighting the problems in using parish records, both in confidently identifying the mentally disabled and their relations, and in conclusively divining how and why they were being catered for. What emerges clearly from such accounts is that parishes were quite prepared to pay more in the short term so as to remove the burden of a pauper from the rates in the long term. Furthermore, little seems to have distinguished provision for the mentally disabled from that made for ordinary poor, sick or orphaned children, in like social circumstances.
Clearly, not all fools or idiots were, or were regarded as, incapable of work. Within institutions, the tractability of the simple-minded and their ability to work might provide a rationale for preferring them over lunatics. Similar dynamics must have prevailed upon parishioners themselves within the locales. Unemployment might be a significant grounds for the parish actually providing a simple-minded individual with relief. Elizabeth Ratcliffe, for example, was relieved for much of 1692–4 and occasionally thereafter by St Botolph Bishopsgate, not merely because she was ‘foolish’ and ‘very poor’, but also because of her having ‘little or no worke’.52 Money earned weekly by the ‘foolish’ Elizabeth Bright in her ‘work’, while she was being kept by a parish nurse, amounted to an impressive total of £1 3s 4d when it was received by the parish in 1696.53 However, parish records are very unrevealing as to exactly what the work and activities performed by fools and idiots within their locales entailed.
In circumstances such as those outlined above, it should be stressed, poor, unemployed idiots were plainly being relieved as much because of their poverty as because of their mental disability. How far provision for individuals as poor should be, or can be, distinguished from provision for individuals as mentally disabled in a study of Poor Law records is open to question, however, when local officials were neither accustomed, nor could have seen much point, in separating these two matters.
UNDERLYING RATIONALES FOR RELIEF
Social and economic pressures were clearly pre-eminent in determining the type of relief available to the poor mentally disabled, as well as whether, when and to what extent the parish intervened in a case. The parish had no obligation to provide for idiots with means of their own, or with families capable of supporting them. Typically, it was some life-cycle crisis, some vital reversal in a family’s economic circumstances, or some other circumstance entailing the encumbrance, incapacitation, or elimination of one or other of the family members maintaining an idiot that provoked an application for relief and parochial intercession. Seldom, unless no family members were available, or an idiot proved unruly, or else was apprehended abroad as a vagrant, does the initiative appear to have come from the parish itself. Unfortunately, petitions for relief seldom survive for metropolitan parishes, and the ways in which parishioners actually negotiated for relief almost invariably remain hidden from the historian.
Commonly, parochial aid was sought and granted following the death or illness of a family member. Parochial provision for the fool’, Harry Southern, of Coleman Street, for instance, commenced only after the death of his elderly father, Richard, in the almshouse. Rarely, furthermore, was the death of just one parent or family member sufficient to warrant the parish taking over the support of an idiot if another was capable of providing. The appearance of the case of Sarah Howard before the London Sessions in 1674 was brought about by the death of her last surviving parent, her mother Martha. Although relieved by Bishopsgate for a brief period around the time of her father’s death, the ‘naturall’, Mary Browne, was only provided with lodging and nursing after the death of her widowed mother, in May 1687.54 The sickness of simple-minded parishioners, or of their carers, might also be a significant factor in warranting parochial aid. It was not only because Mary Browne was an orphaned ‘naturall’ that parish nursing was afforded her, but also because she was ‘sicke’. Mary Jessup, ‘a poor foelish Geirle’, also enters the same parish’s accounts only when her mother Alice becomes ‘sicke’ and again after Alice dies.55 Alternatively (as in Martha Stock’s case), the desertion or widowing of married women might provoke them to seek parochial aid for a disabled child. The significance of parental death, sickness and abandonment in provoking the intervention of the parish in the case of the mentally disabled, and the evident absence of support from other relations, also lend weight to the arguments of revisionist historians as to the narrowness of kinship ties when it came to providing for the indigent and sick.56
In addition, a new birth in a family, particularly if that family was already large and in receipt of parochial relief, or close to the poverty line, might also precipitate a relief application, or admission to an institution. Emphasis on the size of an afflicted individual’s family is a striking feature of lunatic cases discussed at Sessions, and of extant petitions for parochial relief and for admission to Bethlem. This circumstance was likewise often cited in the decisions declared by administrative bodies. On the other hand, as recent work on nineteenth-century idiocy has underlined, large families might actually find it easier to cope, for example through sharing strategies, easing the burdens of the disabled on productive family members. David Wright’s work suggests a more significant interface between the age ranks of mentally disabled family members and the point of vulnerability in families’ life cycles provoking the decision to cast out that member.57 It would be surprising if a similar dynamic was not discernible in early modern provision for the mentally disabled. Unfortunately, no sustained research of this nature has yet been attempted.
From only a cursory examination of parochial records, it is clear that the majority of those identified as idiots were very young children. This was obviously encouraged by the bias in contemporary definitions of ‘pure’ idiocy outlined above. The only two parishioners described as ‘naturalls’ by the parish officers of St Botolph Bishopsgate during 1627–1721, were both very young children. One, when spoken of for the first time, was just four years old, having been born in 1683. Of course, the mentally disabled were much less likely to survive to adulthood in early modern times than they are today, a grim reality underlined in medical textbooks and literary sources which observed the low life-expectancy of idiots as a truism.58 Even so, some idiotic parishioners (including Harry Southern) clearly survived into maturity, while other parishioners developed into states resembling ‘idiocy’ in later life, and became the concern of parish officers.
It was not just the age of mentally disabled members and their positions within the structure of households that might matter, it was also the relative ages of those responsible for them. While young and vigorous parents or relatives might be less likely (as, by definition, members of the ‘able poor’) to receive a helping hand from the parish, elderly relations, more often infirm, and lacking income from employment, obviously had a better claim. Old age and poverty were not sufficient on their own of course, as is indicated by cases like the 39-year-old ‘ideott’ Sarah Howard, whose ‘poor’, elderly parents do not appear to have received any assistance.
That parishes and individuals were prepared to spend time and money going to court to argue a case, and thus avoid the burden entailed by the support of an idiot, is a sign of how expensive such a burden might be, and how seriously and reluctantly it might be regarded. The rarity of those instances when parishes and families went to Sessions to free themselves from an idiot’s maintenance, however, may suggest something rather different. First, it must be some reflection of a recognition on the parish’s part that they had a responsibility towards idiots. Some disputes as to an individual’s place of settlement were clearly resolved without contest, either out of court, or (as in Sarah Howard’s case) because no representative from one or other parish turned up to offer a defence, implying a readiness to be pragmatic in recognising lost causes. The exceptional nature of such disputes must also be some reflection of the exceptional nature of parochial provision for idiots per se, as against the preparedness to provide for lunacy or physical illness. It may also suggest that parish officials were tending to define idiocy much more narrowly than lunacy.
Some Poor Law historians have sought to place increased stress on evidence in parish records manifesting a ‘genuine humanitarian understanding of local needs’.59 Undoubtedly, ‘humane consideration’ was an important dimension of parochial provision for the mentally disabled too. Legacies and benefactions, donated to the care of parish poor, were occasionally devoted in some small part to the care of the mentally disabled – as in 1688–99, when 3s 6d of Roger Drakes’ £5 legacy to the poor of Bishopsgate was laid out on ‘Alice Jessup And [her] fooleish daughter’.60 In some cases, mentally disabled parishioners are referred to in parish records as ‘poor’ so and so, possibly reflecting some degree of sympathy for their plight, as well as their poverty.61 The language in which Elizabeth Bright of Bishopsgate was described, ‘a foleish Crature Troubled with sad fitts’, seems even more redolent of the sympathetic side of Poor Law provision.62
Help afforded to the deserving poor clearly accorded with prevailing notions of ‘good neighbourhood’, an aspect of local government emphasised by numerous historians from Emmison to Boulton.63 The Bishopsgate churchwardens accounts record a number of payments made for, and to secure, ‘help’ and even ‘kindness’ for lunatic parishioners.64 One finds such payments and language more customarily employed on behalf of the insane in parish accounts as a form of expedition, or bribery, with institutions and their servants. While such language was more rarely applied to the poor mentally disabled, a similar ethos presumably prevailed. Nevertheless, quite apart from the sympathetic concerns of ‘neighbourliness’, the role of parochial officers in disciplining the poor, and upholding the boundaries of neighbourly propriety, has also been underlined by historians.65
KEEPERS AND NURSES
The identities of the carers of simple-minded parishioners within the locales is just as difficult and neglected a subject as are the identities of the simple-minded themselves. The stalwart of parochial medical provision in the early modern capital was the female parish nurse. It was these nurses who predominated in caring for the sick in mind and body beyond the home, and who took in mentally disabled children as well as the unweaned, the orphaned, the sick and the distracted. Even when men appear in parish accounts in a proprietorial role, receiving payment and signing receipts for the maintenance of the mentally disabled, this often conceals the fact that it was women who did the caring. Local, as well as rural, nurses were preferred by city parochial authorities, less, no doubt, because they were women, than because they offered the cheapest form of care outside of the family. Rarely, unlike more specialist or large-scale contractors, did they require any more for the manageable mentally disabled than they did for the ordinary sick and infirm. Goody Graunt charged the Bishopsgate churchwardens just 6d per week ‘for lookeing to’ and ‘lodgeing’ one ‘natural’, Mary Browne, in the 1680s, while Mary Dowle was paid between 6d and 1s per week by the same parish during 1702 for the ‘natural’, Dorcas Popkins.66 Dorothy Bayley charged St Sepulchres about 1s per week for attendance on the ‘ideot’, Ann Tweedle during 1660–61 – apparently the same rate as she charged for attending two other parishioners, one being sick and the other blind.67 Occasionally, if a mentally disabled parishioner was more trouble, nurses might charge more. Possibly it was the epilepsy suffered by the ‘foelish’ Elizabeth Bright that justified her nurse, Mrs Gregory, receiving 3s per week for her during the 1690s.68
This is not to say that men did not also figure prominently in caring for the mentally disabled. Yet, on the whole, male attendants and proprietors were most conspicuous when it came to more bothersome lunatic cases where security and strong-arm tactics were at a greater premium. Apparently men tended to charge more than women for their trouble. St Sepulchres Holborn, for example, paid a John Shustock of Wapping 2s 6d per week from 1649–53 ‘for keeping’ the ‘Innocent’, Thomas Walker, with extra amounts for ‘clothing’ and other ‘necessaries’.69 The ‘keeping’ of James Pratt (regarded as ‘an Ideott’ towards the end of his life) by Robert Izard at Walton/Waltham in the 1660s cost St Brides parish 4s per week.70
Often parish nurses were elderly women, or widows, seeking to supplement their income, including widow Graunt of Bishopsgate who cared for ‘the naturall’, Mary Browne in the 1680s – a feature found in other surveys of Poor Law medical provision.71 Almost as often, however, parish nurses seem to have been women of middle age or in their prime – such as ‘goody Hester Rooksby’, who briefly took on Mary’s care after widow Graunt. Regularly, one mentally disabled parishioner was cared for by a variety of different individuals, implying perhaps problems for the parish in securing long-term arrangements for care, and a reluctance on the part of carers to endure the burden of the mentally disabled for long. Mary Browne seems to have been looked after at parish expense by a total of four persons during the short time-span 1683–8: widow Graunt, a nurse Harris, goody Hester Rooksby and a nurse Hatherell. Elizabeth Bright was ‘kept’ by ‘nurss’ or ‘Mrs’ Elizabeth Gregory at Angell Alley, where a good deal of poor children and parishioners seem to have been relieved and/or lodged at parish expense. For a brief and temporary period in 1695, however, Bright was apparently transferred to the care of ‘nurss’ Elizabeth Yorke.
Nurses, as was Mrs Gregory, were normally required to supply their mentally disabled charges with ‘necessaries’. Often, however, parish accounts fail to specify exactly what was comprised by such ‘necessaries’. Carers tended to be paid for supplying clothing restrospectively by the parish. Occasionally, parish nurses seem to have made the clothing themselves, presumably with a mind to increasing their profits. Nurse Harris was paid directly in 1685 so she could buy a coat and linen for Mary Browne, but the following year was given 1s by the Bishopsgate churchwardens ‘towards makeing some Cloathes’ for her.72 Often, as in this case, however, one simply cannot be sure exactly when, by whom, or how much clothing was provided.
The role of parish nurses might not only involve clothing, feeding, cleaning and washing, but very occasionally saw them procuring medical treatment for their mentally disabled charges. When medicine was deemed appropriate, nurses were either paid in advance, or billed the parish retrospectively. In the 1690s, for example, nurse Yorke was paid 3d ‘to bie something at the Apothecaries for Elizabeth Bright’, while nurse Gregory subsequently received 1s to ‘get her let blood’.73 Although it is rarely clear exactly who took the initiative in ordering medical treatment, it is just as likely to have come from carers as from busy parochial officers with hundreds of cases to oversee. Only in the eventuality of an extended and expensive course of treatment does vestry approval of expenditure seem to have been required.
Sometimes, parish nurses seem to have been recognised as possessing a degree of specialist skill, and very occasionally they appear to have specialised in caring for the mentally disabled. Nevertheless, I have failed to find a single instance of a parish nurse evolving into a private madhouse keeper in the way suggested some time ago by Parry-Jones.74 More often than not, these nurses catered for a whole range of the poor: children, the pregnant, the sick and the physically disabled, as well as the mentally disabled. During 1660–61, for example, Dorothy Bayley of St Sepulchres Holborn was paid ‘to attend Anne Gibbs in her sicknesse, Anne Tweedle an Ideot and Elizabeth Kesterson a blind woman five weekes’ concurrently, and continued to attend Tweedle and Kesterson for a further sixteen weeks.75 Likewise, Elizabeth Yorke, the one-time nurse to the ‘foelish’ Elizabeth Bright, was paid by Bishopsgate throughout the 1690s ‘for lookeing to severall Sicke And lame’ parishioners, as well as taking in the odd ‘Lunatissme’.76
A continuity in the arrangements for the care of mentally disabled parishioners, particularly if cheap, was encouraged by the relative constancy of their mental states, as well as the parish’s own concerns for expedience and economy. Nurses who had already provided such services to a family and parish were obviously in a good position to continue to do so. Nurse Gregory, for example, who looked after the ‘foolish’ Elizabeth Bright in the 1690s, was later called upon by the parish to keep the mad Abraham Byard and William Bodley.77 In Harry Southern’s case, Lovett, the same individual whom the parish had paid to nurse his parents before their deaths, continued to nurse the foolish son at parish expense, apparently, for another three years.78
CONCLUSION
This chapter began by arguing essentially for the coherence and consistency of early modern definitions of idiocy, as enshrined in the records of parochial and institutional authorities. This was especially the case in so far as idiots were identified (and identifiable) as those whose mental disability dated from birth, or early childhood. It seems to have been this conceptualisation that granted contemporaries their most viable and meaningful resource for identifying the mentally disabled and distinguishing them from the insane. At the local level, I have asserted, this criterion was not only relatively workable, but sustained a broad consensus in its application by parochial officials and families – reflected in the preponderance of mentally disabled parishioners who first appear in parish records when young children. In addition, complementary formulations of idiocy as, for example, an acquired state, if less definitive, also offered contemporaries a way of understanding acquired or progressive mental defects as idiocy.
None the less, I have striven not to underemphasise the vital areas of imprecision and equivocation in contemporary notions of mental disability. This ambiguity, particularly marked in literary discourse, is also evidenced in institutional and parochial records by the occasional liability of distinctions to flux or collapse. Furthermore, the apparent coherence of categories like idiot and natural seems to owe a great deal to the narrowness with which they were often applied in practice – partly as a result of the prejudicial status of the mentally disabled in terms of their claim on social and legal privileges. Despite these manifold problems of identifying idiots, however, parish records testify that, generally, contemporaries were strikingly consistent in distinguishing between the insane and the idiotic, that different labels carried different meanings, and that officials and parishioners knew what they meant. Institutions, furthermore, applied such distinctions from early on in the seventeenth century, and despite some laxity, seem to have evolved relatively stringent and uniformly applied procedures for differentiation.
The second part of this survey has focused almost exclusively on information about the mentally disabled contained in parish records. In a recent article on Elizabethan parochial accounts, J. S. Craig spoke of the current popularity of churchwardens’ accounts for social historians. He also stressed, however, historians’ ‘apparent lack of interest’ in such sources ‘within the broader context of debates on early modern society’.79 My own analysis of parish records has highlighted how useful they can be for the study of local solutions to the problems posed by mental disability in early modern England. In addition, however, I have been at pains to point out the problematic nature of these records, owing to their elliptical and summary content, and the fact that they were designed to register expenditure rather than to record the rationales on which expenditure was based.
What emerges quite clearly, as Rushton also concluded in his survey of north-east England parishes, is that metropolitan parish officials ‘were experienced, if not enthusiastic, in dealing with cases of mental disability’ and ‘reacted to the problems in a coherent manner within the structure of limited resources’.80 Unfortunately, a tendency to relegate idiocy as a medical, legal and social issue of lesser importance, meant a rather woeful lack of provision outside the context of both the parochial community and the family domicile. It was clearly ‘the most serious cases [of lunacy and mental disability which] were considered appropriate for the asylum’ and other institutions, although not just, as Rushton avers, during the last third of the eighteenth century, but for much of the period.81 The costs of institutional care were prohibitive, particularly for those adjudged to be merely idiotic or foolish, who might easily and considerably more cheaply be kept at home. The general perception of the mentally disabled as harmless, manageable and irredeemable gave families and parish officers little incentive to make extravagant arrangements for their care. Specialist institutions tended anyway to exclude such cases.
Idiocy was clearly, and not surprisingly, conceived of as less immediate a problem than lunacy, requiring parochial and other authorities to assume lesser responsibilities. As a more positive, if indirect consequence of this, however, enforcement of family responsibility seems to have been less of a difficulty for parishes than in cases of insanity. Nevertheless, it would be ‘foolish’ to underestimate the considerable responsiveness of local officials and people to the problems posed by idiocy. Indeed, my analysis would support the contention of Rushton and others that the social strategies for dealing with even these more ‘minor’ problems were quite varied, well worked out and evidently quite broadly accepted. Those identified and relieved as ‘idiots’ and ‘fools’ within the locales tended to be children born to very poor families, whose parents had died, or else were sick or otherwise incapacitated – emphasising the limited, exigency-led nature of parochial provision for the mentally disabled. If economic rationales tended to have primacy in parochial relief, then it has also been necessary to acknowledge how inclined parish records are by their very nature to over-stress such influences on decision-making. As this study has demonstrated, furthermore, these records indicate the coexistence and significance of compassionate and responsible attitudes towards idiots. Assistance, occasionally of a relatively substantial nature, was granted and justified within the wider spectrum of neighbourly values.
This survey has also endorsed the striking continuity of responses during this period, a point also highlighted by Rushton’s and Suzuki’s studies. Nevertheless, given the considerable expansion of institutional provision for mental disability and illness during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and how much more advanced these trends appear to have been in the metropolitan region, more research needs to be done on the inroads being gradually made into traditional local patterns of care for these groups. If customary tolerance for the foolish and idiotic proved more resilient to Augustan stigmatising of the empire of folly and madness than they did in the case of the insane, the reception of idiots into new institutions, like St Patrick’s Hospital, and the slow influx of a few mentally disabled cases into workhouses and madhouses, argue that times were changing for the idiot as well.82
NOTES
I am grateful to Peter Bartlett, Chris Goodey, Malcolm Nicholson, Roy Porter, Akihito Suzuki and David Wright for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
1 I shall be employing the terms ‘mentally disabled’ and ‘idiot’ here to differentiate all those individuals categorised by contemporaries as ‘idiots’, ‘fools’, ‘naturals’, etc., from those defined as ‘lunatics’, the ‘mad’ etc. I find the use of the term ‘mentally disabled’ by some social historians to embrace both lunatics and idiots, misleading and insensitive to contemporary semantics. ‘Disability’ tended to be defined as a more permanent, incurable affliction than mere ‘illness’.
2 M. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, London, 1971, trans. and abr. from Histoire de la Folie à l’âge classique, Paris, 1961; N. Hattori, ‘“The pleasure of your Bedlam”: the theatre of madness in the Renaissance’, History of Psychiatry, 1995, vol. 6, pp. 283–308; A. Suzuki, ‘Lunacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England: Analysis of Quarter Sessions records’, Pts I and II, History of Psychiatry, 1991, vol. 2, pp. 437–56 and 1992, vol. 3, pp. 29–44; M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge, 1981, p. 70, pp. 121–2 and pp. 140–41; G. Rosen, Madness in Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness, London, 1968.
3 For example C. Hill, The World Turned Upside-Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, London, 1972; E. Welsford, The Fool. His Social and Literary History, London, 1935; P. U. A. Williams (ed.) The Fool and the Trickster: Studies in Honour of Enid Welsford, Cambridge, 1979; W. Willeford, The Fool and his Sceptre: A Study of Clowns and Jesters and their Audience, London, 1969; B. Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, New York, 1976; S. Billington, The Social History of the Fool, Brighton, 1984; Foucault, Madness and Civilisation.
4 See for example Foucault, Madness and Civilisation; Hill, The World Turned Upside-Down; MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 70; D. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, Boston, 1971, and Welsford, The Fool.
5 For example while MacDonald found a total of over 200 cases who manifested symptoms described by Napier as ‘witless’, ‘sottish’ or ‘senseless’, he was more concerned with the more acute symptomatology of lunacy and barely discussed the issue of mental disability. More recently, Allan Ingram’s The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century, London and New York, 1991, has treated mad and idiotic language as virtual equivalents. Other early modern historians have likewise tended to discuss all forms of mental illness and disability together. See E.G. Thomas ‘The Mentally Defective’: ‘The Old Poor Law and Medicine’, Medical History, 1980, vol. 24, pp. 1–19. This issue was explored recently by C. Goodey: ‘Why is the History of Idiocy Unsuitable for Historians of Psychiatry?’, unpublished paper delivered at European Congress for the History of Psychiatry, London, 1993.
6 For example C. Goodey, ‘Intelligence Levels as Criteria of Abnormality: The Pre-history of Intelligence Testing’, in B. Mayall (ed.) Family Life and Social Control: Discourses on Normality, Social Science Research Unit, London University Institute of Education, 1993.
7 Compare, also, the problems of identifying the elderly in parish records: M. Pelling, ‘Old Age, Poverty, and Disability in Early Modern Norwich: Work, Marriage and Other Expedients’, in M. Pelling and R. Smith (eds), Life, Death, and the Elderly, London, 1991, pp. 74–101, esp. pp. 76–80.
8 Foucault, Madness and Civilisation’, K. Doerner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry, Oxford, 1981, trans. from the original Bürger und Ire, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1960.
9 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam; 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. 901–7; P. Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots: Mental Disability, the Community and the Poor Law in North-East England’, Medical History, 1988, vol. 32, pp. 34–50, for example.
10 For example T. Nashe, Have With You To Saffron-Walden, London, 1596, in Works of Thomas Nashe, London, 1910, vol. 3, pp. 100–1.
11 For the association of madness with ‘innocence’, see for example M. A. Screech, ‘Good Madness in Christendom’, in W. F. Bynum, R. Porter and M. Shepherd (eds) The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry vol. 1, London and New York, 1985, pp. 25–39; Erasmus, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly, London, 1988.
12 M. Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, Columbia, 1974; M. V. Deporte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne and Augustan Ideas of Madness, San Marino, California, 1974; L. Feder, Madness and Literature, Princeton, 1980.
13 See for example T. Dekker, Northwood Ho, Pt IV, iii, pp. 51–2, 72, 130–31, 175–6, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, Cambridge, 1955, vol. ii; T. Dekker, The Honest Whore, Pt I, IV, iv, pp. 102–3, in The Dramatic Works, vol. ii; T. Middleton and W. Rowley, The Changeling, N. W. Bawcutt (ed.), London, 1958, Pt I, ii, pp. 79–80.
14 R. Neugebauer, ‘Mental Illness and Government Policy in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England’, unpublished PhD, Columbia University, 1976; ‘Treatment of the Mentally Ill in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 1978, vol. 14, pp. 158–69, and ‘Medieval and Early Modern Theories of Mental Illness’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 1979, vol. 36, pp. 477–83.
15 See for example J. Brydall, Non Compos Mentis …, London, 1700, facs. repr. of 1st edition, New York and London, 1979; Fitzherbert, Natura Brevium, 1652, p. 583; quoted in J. C. Bucknill and D. H. Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine, London, 1858, p. 94.
16 Lord Coke, Coke’s Lyttleton, p. 247a, quoted in Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, p. 94; Brydall, Non Compos Mentis, p. 6; Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765–9, Oxford, 1765–9, 4 vols, 1783 edition, i, pp. 292–5; D. H. Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles, London, 1882, pp. 286–91; T. Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man, London: 1683, trans. S. Pordage from De Anima Brutorum, p. 210.
17 ‘Purus idiota’ was a legal term, tending to connote, as it did in Blackstone’s Commentaries, a congenital absence of understanding.
18 See J. Andrews ‘Begging the Question of Idiocy: Definitions and Epistemologies of Idiocy in Early Modern Britain’, forthcoming in History of Psychiatry.
19 T. Willis, Concerning the Soul of Brutes, p. 211; Lord Coke, Coke’s Lyttleton, p. 247a, quoted in Bucknill and Tuke, Psychological Medicine, p. 94.
20 T. Sydenham, Processus Integri, in The Works of Thomas Sydenham M.D., trans. R. G. Latham, London, 1850, 2 vols, ii, pp. 290–1; W. Battie, A Treatise on Madness, London, 1758, R. Hunter and I. Macalpine (eds), London, 1962, pp. 98–9; P. Pinel, Traité Medico-philosophique sur l’Aliénation Mentale, Paris, 1806, translated as A Treatise on Insanity …, D.D. Davis, Sheffield, 1806, pp. 252, 165.
21 Guildhall Library, London (henceforth Ghall) MS 6552/1, Churchwardens’ Accounts 1639–78, 6/5/1662–22/5/1671.
22 Ghall MSS 4525/21, fols 84–5, 18/6/1700 and 25/6/1700, 4455/22, fols 101–2, 25/8/1701, 1/9/1701, for example.
23 For example Ghall MSS 4525/20, fols 80–9, 15 May-17 July 1699; 4525/25, fols 84–108, 125 and 182–8, 20 May 1704–15 January 1705. See, also, case of Elizabeth Ratcliffe, described as ‘A Lunatick’ when removed to the same parish with her three children, but thereafter was referred to as ‘foleish’; Ghall MSS 4525/13, fol. 61, cJune and 16 September 1691; 4525/14, fols 55, 65, 72, 81 and 88–107, 13 April 1692–12 April 1693, etc. until 4525/19, fols 84, 87, 90 and 102, 28 July, 18 August, 8 September and 1 December 1698.
24 For example S. Johnson, Dictionary, London, 1755; J. Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language, Edinburgh, 1830; 1st edn, 1792.
25 Ghall MS 4525/5, 1674–5.
26 Ghall MSS 4525/7b, fol. 92, cDecember 1683; 4525/8, fols 147 and 151–2, 14 May–1 October 1684; 4525/9, fol. 91, 20 December 1686; 4525/7, fols 77–89, 136, 175 and 178, 20 June–14 September 1687, and 4525/10, fols 191 and 236, 4 May 1688.
27 For the only reference I have found in parish accounts so far, see Ghall MS 4525/15, fol. 95, 26 February 1694.
28 See for example Walker, Dictionary, under ‘changling’ and ‘idiot’.
29 See for example Goodey, ‘Intelligence levels’, especially pp. 53–4.
30 Fessler, ‘The Management of Lunacy’; Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots’; Suzuki, ‘Quarter Sessions’.
31 Corporation of London Record Office (henceforth CLRO) SM44, 12 October 1674.
32 Ghall MS 4457/5, 22 October 1719.
33 Ghall MS 4525/22, fols 89, 90 etc., 2 June 1701 onwards.
34 Ghall MSS 4525/16, fols 65–76, 5 June–17 August 1694, and 4525/17, fols 97–119, 4 November 1695–11 April 1696. See also pension granted to James Cole of St Bride’s on account of ‘his Sonne a Naturall’, Ghall MS 6554/2, 25 May 1685.
35 Ghall MSS 4525/13, fol. 61, cJune and 16 September 1691; 4525/14, fols 55, 65, 72, 81 and 88–107, 13 April, 23 June, 12 August and 11 October 1692, and 30 November 1692–12 April 1693; 4525/15, fols 52–101, April 1693-April 1694; 4525/16, fols 59 and 61, 23 April and 8 May 1694; 4525/17, fol. 209, 25 June 1695; etc., until 4525/19, 84, 87, 90 and 102, 28 July, 18 August, 8 September and 1 December 1698.
36 Ghall MSS 4525/7b, fol. 92, cDecember 1683; 4525/8, fols 147 and 151–2, 14 May–1 October 1684; 4525/9, fol. 91, 20 December 1686; 4525/7, fols 77–89, 136, 175 and 178, 20 June–14 September 1687; 4525/10, fols 191 and 236, 4 May 1688, and 4525/23, fols 74, 76–7, 2, 17, 23 and 30 July, and 6 August 1702.
37 Ghall MS 3146/1, 1660–61.
38 Ghall MS 3146/1, 1659–65; 3149/2, fol. 23, 8 April 1663.
39 Ghall MSS 4525/15, fols 50–61, 24 April–9 August 1693; 4525/16, fols 149–51, 23 April, 23 May and 18 June 1694; 4525/17, fol. 167, 1 May 1695; 4525/18, fol. 147, 16 April 1697; 4525/19, fols 73, 16 May 1698 and 4525/20, fols 152 and 183, 31 January and 2 February 1700.
40 For example F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher’s The Pilgrim (1621/2), in F. Bowers (ed.) The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Cambridge, 1966, 7 vols, vi, pp. 111–224 and III, vii, pp. 25–7.
41 In the late seventeenth century, some poor metropolitan parishioners received their allowances seasonally from the parish under the rubric of ‘winter clothes’ – a clear sign of the inadequate, but significantly need-led nature of parochial relief.
42 For example case of Abraham Byard, Ghall MS 4525/17, fol. 137, 9 September 1695, provided with a waistcoat when ‘Lunaticke in Bethelem Howse [and] quite naked’. See, also, Andrews, ‘Bedlam Revisited: A History of Bethlem Hospital c. 1634–c. 1770’ unpublished PhD, University of London, 1991, ch. 3, pp. 138–53.
43 Ghall MS 4457/5, 30 April 1740 and 16 January 1747, cases of Coshaw and Timbrell of St Stephen Coleman Street.
44 Ghall MSS 4525/7, fols 77–89, 136, 175 and 178, 20 June–14 September 1687; 4525/17, fols 139, 156 and 157, 25 September 1695, 9 April and 15 May 1696. The ‘foelish’ Mary Jessup received just two payments totalling 10/7 in the 1690s and 1700s, including 7/1 for ‘A Gowne & Petticoate’; Ghall MSS 4525/19, fol. 230, 1698–99 and 4525/25, fol. 146, 22 September 1704.
45 Ghall MS 4457/5, 13 May 1719–14 December 1731.
46 Ghall MS 3146/1, 1659–65; 3149/2, fol. 23, 8 April 1663.
47 Ghall MS 4525/7.
48 Ghall MSS 4525/9, fol. 160, 9 July 1687 and 4525/10, fol. 236, 3 and 4 May 1688.
49 See for example J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1760, London, 1987, p. 209.
50 M. Pelling, ‘Child Health as a Social Value in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 1988, vol. 1, 2, pp. 135–64; L. Schwartz, ‘London Apprentices in the Seventeenth Century’, Local Population Studies, 1987, vol. 38, pp. 18–22; O. Jocelyn Dunlop and R. D. Denman, English Apprenticeship and Child Labour: A History, London, 1912; M.G. Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship: A Study in Applied Mercantilism, Cambridge, Mass., 1956.
51 Pelling, ‘Child Health’; Pelling, ‘Old Age’, pp. 85–7.
52 Ghall MSS 4525/14, for example fols 65, 72 and 100; 20 June and 12 August 1692 and 22 February 1693; 4525/15, fols 52–101, 8 May 1693–9 April 1694; 4525/17, fols 59, 61, 23 April and 8 May 1694, and 4525/17, fol. 99, 20 November 1695.
53 Ghall MS 4525/17, fol. 64, 20 April 1696. Searches through the parish’s records have been unable to uncover the nature of this work.
54 See, also, case of the ‘foelish’ Martha Stock, whose old, lame and solitary mother, Alice, received occasional relief and a pension from 1700. Only following her mother’s death was Martha provided with a nurse by the parish. Ghall MSS 4525/21, fol. 78, 7 May 1700; 4525/22, fols 89 and 182, 2 June 1701 and 23 March 1702.
55 Ghall MS 4525/19, fol. 230 and 4525/25, fol. 146. See, also, Elizabeth Bright’s case, ref. 58.
56 For example Pelling, ‘Old Age’, pp. 75, 85–7; R. M. Smith, ‘Fertility, Economy, and Household Formation in England Over Three Centuries’, Population and Development Review, 1981, vol. 7, p. 606; Suzuki, ‘Quarter Sessions’.
57 D. Wright, ‘The National Asylum for Idiots, Earlswood, 1847–1886’. unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1993, ch. 2.
58 For example E. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, Philadelphia, 1845, p. 446. See, also, G. White, Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, 1789, pp. 143–4, quoted in R. Porter, The Faber Book of Madness, London and Boston, 1991, p. 99.
59 Thomas, ‘The Old Poor Law and Medicine’, pp. 1, 3, etc.
60 Ghall MS 4525/19, fol. 230, 1698–99.
61 The ‘foolish’ Harry Southern of Coleman Street was referred to in this way only during the last ten months of his life, while Mary Jessup of Bishopsgate was described as ‘a poor foelish Geirle her mother Deceased’. Ghall MSS 4458/1, 12 May and 10 November 1730 and 4525/25, fol. 146, 22 September 1704.
62 Ghall MSS 4525/15, fols 50–61, 24 April–9 August 1693; 4525/16, fols 149–51, 23 April 1694–29 March 1695; 4525/17, fols 139–40 and 157, 25 September and 12 August 1695, 12 May 1696, etc.
63 See F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts, Chelmsford, 1973, and J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, 1987.
64 For example Ghall MSS 4525/23, fol. 25, 25 March 1702; 4525/29, fol. 8, 10 September 1707.
65 For example A. Tindal-Hart, The Man in the Pew 1558–1660, London, 1966.
66 Ghall MSS 4525/23, fols 74, 76–77, 2, 17, 23 and 30 July, and 6 August 1702.
67 For Browne’s case see previous refs. For Tweedle, see Ghall MS 3146/1, 1660–61.
68 Ghall MSS 4525/17, fol. 167, 1 May 1695; 4525/18, fol. 147, 16 April 1697; 4525/19, fols 73, 16 May 1698 and 4525/20, fols 152 and 183, 31 January and 2 February 1700.
69 Ghall MS 3146/1, 1659–65; 3149/2, fol. 23, 8 April 1663.
70 Ghall MS 6552/1, 6 May 1662–22 May 1671. St Stephen Coleman Street paid a man named Lovett/Lovell 1/ per week (excluding clothing and other necessaries) for keeping the ‘fool’, Harry Southern, during cl719–26, raised subsequently (during and after Harry’s sickness, when his care was taken over by a man named Bucknall), to 2/ per week. Ghall MSS 4457/5, 4 December 1718–11 March 1731; 4458/1, fols 753 and 757, 28 May and 25 September 1719.
71 For example Pelling emphasised the extensive utilisation of elderly women in roles tending to the sick by the Norwich authorities in the late sixteenth century; Pelling, ‘Old Age’, in Pelling and Smith (eds) Life, Death and the Elderly, p. 84.
72 Ghall MSS 4525/8, fols 147 and 152, 14 May and 1 October 1684; 4525/9, fol. 91, 20 December 1686. See, also, 4525/26, fol. 150, 26 September 1705.
73 Ghall MS 4525/19, fol. 73, 16 May 1698.
74 W.Li, Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: A Study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, London, 1972
75 Ghall MS 3146/1, 1660–61.
76 See for example Ghall MS 4525/15, fol. 51, 3 May 1693.
77 See for example Ghall MSS 4525/26, fol. 224, 10 May 1705 and 4525/27, fol. 189, 5 November 1706.
78 Ghall MSS 4458/5, 4 December 1718–24 October 1726; 4458/1
79 J.S. Craig, ‘Co-operation and Initiatives: Elizabethan Churchwardens and the Parish Accounts of Mildenhall’, Social History, 1993, vol. 18, 3, pp. 357–80.
80 Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots’, p. 34, and chapter in this volume.
81 Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots’, p. 48.
82 See Elizabeth Malcolm, Swifts Hospital, A History of St. Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin, 1746–1989, Dublin, 1989, esp. pp. 20, 52–55, 83 and 92–3.