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

英格兰和威尔士的《旧济贫法》（Old Poor Law）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、前现代的救济体系。在这个过程中，它还为提供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《旧济贫法》的影响。我们对助产士、裁缝、济贫院女主人、屠夫和其他为教区服务的人知之甚少，而这项研究将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一遗漏。监督员的代金券是一种短暂的手写文件，通常在教区发生债务时生成。这些代金券在一些特定的教区保留了大量，比如斯塔福德郡科尔维奇的2063。它们提供了那些为穷人提供商品和服务的人的身份信息，也揭示了通过代表教区工作而获得的收入规模。此外，这些凭证暴露了从交易中获益的交易员网络，以及这些关系的长期存在。穷人和非穷人之间形成的社会和经济纽带在这些日常来源中以最细微的规模得到充分反映。长期以来，人们一直承认教区收藏品中存在代金券，但由于使用代金券的重大技术挑战，它们对历史研究的效用一直被完全忽视。在留存下来的地方，凭证可能折叠得很紧，也可能叠得很乱，格式各异，易读性也不尽相同，这给单独的调查人员带来了不确定的回报。然而，正如斯塔福德郡的一项试点研究所表明的那样，与学者一起工作的志愿者研究人员有能力在身体和智力上解开凭证。与志愿者的合作为研究《旧济贫法》的历史学家提供了一个新的机会，可以将代金券的内容融入穷人的历史，并更充分地证明贫困之外的普通人的生活。这项工作将生成商人、行政人员、乞丐和工人的部分传记，这些人在其他历史记录中没有以一致的方式出现。这些传记将由志愿者和项目工作人员撰写。这些产出并不总是模仿《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对人们的生命历程进行从摇篮到坟墓的确定。他们要做的是利用凭证和同一地点的可用家谱材料，勾勒出从这些顽固的教区来源中可靠地看到的生活部分。部分传记的价值已经通过esrc资助的伦敦生活网站上有限的数量得到了证明。这项工作将扩大该模型的地理范围，通过将代金券置于实践的核心来发展方法，并纳入志愿研究人员的编辑选择和写作。在资助项目完成后，收集的词典将包含来自坎布里亚郡、斯塔福德郡和东苏塞克斯郡的至少1000人的生活；项目数据集将包括至少5万行数据，反映出类似数量的代金券。

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.