Blog post written by Mark Iten (05 June 2020)
On this day, June 5th, in 1827, Margret Sorah composed a letter asking for monetary relief. Contrary to most other letters found within the pauper petition corpus, however, this letter is not addressed to the overseers of Sorah’s parish in Beverley, Yorkshire. Instead, she writes to a “Dear frend” who remains unnamed throughout the letter, while the greeting formula itself – “Dear frend” – appears four times in its two and a half pages.
The reason for this unusual addressee is given by Sorah herself, as she wants to “inform [the addressee] how Beverley parish has behaved to [her]”. According to her, the parish has not granted the family any relief due to Sorah’s child not belonging to the parish in question. Because of her peculiar situation she has not been taken “into the [work]house” and neither has the parish given her any other kind of support nor have they “let him [the child?] go too seech [seek] work”.
Sorah continues her letter by pointing out the distressing situation that she finds herself in, arguing that she has not had any meat to eat in three days and is therefore “very neear hungrid to death”. At the same time, the family has not been able to find “but one weeks Worke” since they have moved to the new parish. Sorah therefore asks her “Dear frend” to act quickly by sending her some money. Towards the end of the letter, she asks the addressee to “give [her] cind love to [her] father” and also to “tell him that [she] doo not think that evr he will see [her] a live again in this world”, once again in order to point out that relief is very much needed at that point in time. Another difference from the majority of the pauper petitions in the corpus, however, is that Sorah does not specify what the money is needed for apart from mentioning a lack of food and also not how much money she is asking for. Other petitioners, for example, often mention the need for money in order to pay off their debts, pay their rent or buy new work supplies and clothes.
This letter is an example that shows that not all petitioners finally got from the parishes what they were asking for. They were therefore forced to look for additional ways in order to find the necessary relief. While letters such as the one by Margret Sorah cannot be considered as proper pauper petitions, they nonetheless can paint a picture of the social and linguistic situation of the laboring poor in Late Modern England. Limiting the corpus to actual pauper petitions sent to the parishes in England only shows one part of the pauper system, but other types of letters can give us an overview of what was happening outside of the involvement of the parishes. They can give us more information on what could happen once an initial petition had been sent or if applying for relief to a parish just was not an option for a specific pauper.