Visualisations

Exploratory visualisations to accompany/supplement my paper for the Cultures of Exclusion conference, May 2017

The visualisations use two sources:

The sources are described in more detail in the link above, which also includes links to download the datasets (Creative Commons-licensed) for re-use. The summary data used for the visualisations and the underlying Rmarkdown code can also be downloaded from my github repository.

St Clement Danes and St Botolph Aldgate

The differences between the two series of examinations were quite surprising and raise a few caveats for quantitative analysis. The two series are very similar physically, bound volumes rather than loose files from which papers might easily go astray. But could there be missing volumes? Or not all examinations were copied into the books?

When St Clement Danes examinations are broken down by examination type it’s clear that the vast majority were settlement examinations. About 10% were bastardy examinations; vagrancy examinations were a tiny number (<20). (Vagrancy examinations were recorded separately, often on pre-printed forms.)

The vast majority of exams in this series were settlement exams (green); bastardy exams (red) account for about 10% of the total. The vagrancy category is tiny. Vagrancy examinations were most often recorded on pre-printed forms and not copied into these records.

St Clement Danes Removal Orders

Settlement examinations survive in vast numbers in archives. Records of removal orders, however, are much less common and they enable more systematic analysis of decision-making that followed an examination.

(Removal was only one possible outcome of a settlement examination, though; the pauper might establish they had a settlement in the parish (and therefore they may well turn up in later poor relief records), or they might be able to produce a settlement certificate from their own parish.)

For the period 1753-92, then, there are 5046 examinations and 2479 orders, of which 2357 could be linked to at least one exam. (Conversely, 2365 exams could be linked to at least one removal order.)

The purpose of bastardy examinations was to establish paternity rather than being concerned with settlement, so very few resulted (directly) in removals. (However, some mothers were also examined concerning their settlements and may have been removed at a later date.)

There are two types of removal order in the register: non-specific orders I’m simply calling ‘pauper removals’ and vagrant removals (sometimes called passes, as the vagrants were “passed” to their destinations). Most of the orders that couldn’t be linked to examinations were vagrant removals, but this graph shows a striking proportion of settlement exams ultimately resulted in vagrant removal orders, highlighting the fuzzy boundaries between the poor laws and vagrancy laws.

Gender and examinations/removals

The following charts exclude bastardy examinations and a small number of examinations with both male and female examinants.

Women (as in other studies) were the overwhelming majority of examinants even once bastardy examinations are excluded, around 75%, and in most years this percentage did not vary greatly.