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‘Furiously Mad’: Vagrancy Law and a Sub-Group of the Disorderly Poor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2013

AUDREY ECCLES
AUDREY ECCLES*
Affiliation:
Audrey.eccles@ntlworld.com
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Abstract:

Madness has been a social problem from time immemorial. Wealthy lunatics were made royal wards so that their estates would be looked after, and the common law very early admitted madness and idiocy as conditions justifying the exemption of the sufferer from punishments for crime. But the vast majority of lunatics have never been either criminal or wealthy, and many wandered about begging, unwelcome in any settled community. Finally, in the eighteenth century, the law made some attempt to determine a course of action which would protect the public and theoretically also the lunatic. This legislation and its application in practice to protect the public, contain the lunatic, and deal with the nuisance caused by those ‘disordered in their senses’, form the subject of this article. Much has been written about the development of psychiatry, mainly from contemporary medical texts, and about the treatment of lunatics in institutions, chiefly from nineteenth-century sources, but much remains to be discovered from archival sources about the practicalities of dealing with lunatics at parish level, particularly how they were defined as lunatics, who made such decisions, and how they were treated in homes and workhouses.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 24 , Special Issue 1: Poverty and Mobility in England, 1600–1850 , April 2013 , pp. 25 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

Notes

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2. 12 Anne stat. 2 c.23.

3. The evolution of vagrancy law and the passing system are discussed in detail in Eccles, Vagrancy, chapters 1 and 2.

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41. 14 George III c.59.

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52. Cambridgeshire Archives, QS rolls Easter 1740; Q/SO/5 Michaelmas 1754.

53. Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots’, pp. 46–48.

54. Cambridgeshire Archives, Q/S0/6 Easter 1766.

55. Cumbria Record Office, Kendal, WQ/O/13 Michaelmas 1817.

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57. Dorset History Centre, QS roll Michaelmas 1763.

58. The Scots and Irish were excluded from the provisions of the old poor law unless they had managed to gain a settlement in one of several possible ways.

59. London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1774/07/076.

60. Cambridgeshire Archives, Q/SO/8 Michaelmas 1784.

61. London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1778/09/111.

62. London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1780/10/014.

63. London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1777/07/040.

64. London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1780/12/042.

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66. Dorset History Centre, QS rolls Epiphany and Easter 1763; QSM3/8, QFA/1 and /2 passim.

67. Dorset History Centre, QFA/2 Michaelmas 1791, 1793–4, 1796, 1799.

68. London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1795/01/070ii.

69. Howard, J.. The State of the Prisons, 2nd ed. (Warrington, 1784), p. 8Google Scholar; Rushton, ‘Lunatics and Idiots’, p. 45.

70. I base this on the surgeons’ reports at London Metropolitan Archives and Dorset History Centre. Medical bills too rarely link items charged to particular patients.