Small bills and petty finance: co-creating the history of the Old Poor Law

英格兰和威尔士的旧穷人法由当地教区管理，向穷人发放福利，提供了一种独特的全面的、前现代的救济制度。在此过程中，它还为供应和管理该系统的人提供了创业或就业机会。这个项目将调查不同社会阶层的人的经历，他们的生活受到了旧贫穷法的影响。人们对助产士、裁缝、济贫院情妇、屠夫和其他为教区提供服务的人知之甚少，这项研究旨在通过利用一类很少使用的资源和志愿者研究人员的集体支持来纠正这种疏漏。监督凭单是指当教区发生债务时通常产生的短暂的手写文件。这些代金券在选定的教区大量保留，例如斯塔福德郡科尔维奇的2063年代金券。它们提供了那些为穷人购买商品和服务而获得报酬的人的身份信息，并揭示了代表教区工作将获得的收入规模。此外，这些代金券还暴露了从这项业务中受益的交易员网络--以及那些没有受益的交易员--以及这些关系的持久性。穷人和非穷人之间建立的社会和经济纽带在这些日常来源中得到了最细微的反映。教区收藏中存在的代金券早已得到承认，但由于使用它们存在重大的技术挑战，它们在历史研究中的作用一直被完全忽视。在他们生存的地方，凭单可能被紧紧或杂乱无章地折叠，格式多样，可读性不同，为单独的调查人员提供不确定的回报。然而，正如斯塔福德郡的一项试点研究所表明的那样，与学者们一起工作的志愿者研究人员有机会在身体上和智力上拆开优惠券。与志愿者的合作为研究旧贫穷法的历史学家提供了一个新的机会，将代金券的内容整合到穷人的历史中，并更充分地证明贫困以外普通人的生活。这项工作将以一致的方式生成部分商人、行政人员、穷人和工人的传记，这些人在历史记录中没有出现在其他地方。传记将由志愿者和项目工作人员撰写。这些输出不会总是模仿牛津国家传记词典所要求的完整记录，因为来源的性质不允许关于人们的人生历程从摇篮到坟墓的确定性。他们将做的是利用凭单和相同地点的可用家谱材料，勾勒出从这些顽固的教区来源可以可靠地看到的生活部分。部分传记的价值已经从ESRC资助的伦敦生活网站上提供的有限数量中得到了证明。这项工作将扩大模式的地域范围，通过将凭单放在工作的核心来制定方法，并纳入志愿研究人员的编辑选择和写作。在资助的项目完成后，收集的词典将包含坎布里亚县、斯塔福德郡和东苏塞克斯县的至少1000条生命；项目数据集将包括至少50,000行数据，反映出类似数量的凭单。

The Old Poor Law in England and Wales, administered by the local parish, dispensed benefits to paupers providing a uniquely comprehensive, pre-modern system of relief. In the process, it also offered entrepreneurial or employment opportunities to the people who supplied and administered the system. This project will investigate the experiences of people across the social spectrum whose lives were touched by the Old Poor Law. Very little is known about the midwives, tailors, workhouse mistresses, butchers and others who serviced the parish, and this research sets out to redress this omission by drawing on a class of little-used sources and on the collective support of volunteer researchers.Overseers' vouchers are the ephemeral, handwritten papers typically generated whenever the parish incurred a debt. These vouchers survive in very large numbers for selected parishes, such as the 2063 for Colwich in Staffordshire. They provide information about the identities of those who were paid for goods and services for the poor, and also reveal the scale of income to be gained by working on behalf of the parish. Additionally, these vouchers expose the networks of traders who benefitted from the business - and those who did not - and the longevity of these relationships. The social and economic bonds forged between the poor and the non-poor are fully reflected at the most granular scale in these quotidian sources. The presence of vouchers in parish collections has long been acknowledged, but their utility for historical research has been wholly disregarded owing to the significant technical challenges of using them. Where they survive vouchers can be tightly or chaotically folded, diverse in format, and of variable legibility, offering uncertain returns for the lone investigator. As a pilot study in Staffordshire has demonstrated, however, volunteer researchers working alongside academics have the scope to unpack vouchers both physically and intellectually. Collaboration with volunteers offers historians of the Old Poor Law a new opportunity to integrate the content of vouchers into histories of the poor and to evidence more fully the lives of ordinary people beyond poverty.This work will generate partial biographies of tradespeople, administrators, paupers, and workers who are not represented elsewhere in the historical record in consistent ways. The biographies will be written by volunteers and project staff. These outputs will not always mimic the complete record required for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since the nature of the sources will not permit cradle-to-grave certainty about people's life courses. What they will do is draw on vouchers and available genealogical material for the same locations to outline those parts of lives that are reliably visible from these recalcitrant parish sources. The value of partial biographies has been demonstrated by the limited number available via the ESRC-funded London Lives website. This work will expand the geographical remit of the model, develop the methodology by placing vouchers at the heart of the exercise, and incorporate the editorial choices and writing of volunteer researchers. At completion of the funded project the collected dictionaries will contain a minimum of 1000 lives from across the counties of Cumbria, Staffordshire and East Sussex; and the project dataset will include at least 50,000 lines of data, reflecting a similar number of vouchers.