{"id":360,"date":"2020-06-05T08:29:04","date_gmt":"2020-06-05T06:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/?p=360"},"modified":"2020-06-05T08:29:05","modified_gmt":"2020-06-05T06:29:05","slug":"onthisday-in-1827-what-if-relief-has-been-denied","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/2020\/06\/onthisday-in-1827-what-if-relief-has-been-denied\/","title":{"rendered":"#OnThisDay in 1827 \u2013 What If Relief Has Been Denied?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Blog post written by Mark Iten<\/a> (05 June 2020)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s parish in Beverley, Yorkshire. Instead, she writes to a \u201cDear frend\u201d who remains unnamed throughout the letter, while the greeting formula itself \u2013 \u201cDear frend\u201d \u2013 appears four times in its two and a half pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason for this unusual addressee is given by Sorah herself, as she wants to \u201cinform [the addressee] how Beverley parish has behaved to [her]\u201d. According to her, the parish has not granted the family any relief due to Sorah\u2019s child not belonging to the parish in question. Because of her peculiar situation she has not been taken \u201cinto the [work]house\u201d and neither has the parish given her any other kind of support nor have they \u201clet him [the child?] go too seech [seek] work\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cvery neear hungrid to death\u201d. At the same time, the family has not been able to find \u201cbut one weeks Worke\u201d since they have moved to the new parish. Sorah therefore asks her \u201cDear frend\u201d to act quickly by sending her some money. Towards the end of the letter, she asks the addressee to \u201cgive [her] cind love to [her] father\u201d and also to \u201ctell him that [she] doo not think that evr he will see [her] a live again in this world\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1002083,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-360","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1002083"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/lalp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}