This article dealt primarily with social welfare in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and how far scholars have come since Lawrence Stone's original ideas on the subject in 1977. Poor people often had to petition for financial relief and support from the parish. Even though it was easier for the elderly and the widows, obtaining this support was difficult and resulted in minimal finances.
Hindle uses the example of one Ann Bowman to demonstrate just how the system worked. Bowman lived in the small English farming town of Kirkoswald, and spent about twenty years as a widow with five living children. In fact, Ann's husband Robert was still alive when she was first put on the parish weekly pension roles in 1690. The parish took Ann off the roles several times over the years, claiming that she had a daughter who could support her and thus spare the doners' money. Ann always appealed, claiming that she could not work, that her daughter who lived with her did not make enough to support her, and that she lived too far from anybody else to live off of begging for neighborly charity. It is worth noting that neighbors were often more responsible for providing charity to poor households than extended family. Widows were expected to either work or beg into old age. Ann fought this and claimed that she couldn't because of her oldest son's mental illness and "increasing disability" (page 155).
Tensions were obviously strong between the parish and "moochers" like Ann who were believed to still be able to find ways of providing for themselves. Some people, such as Ann, stood up for themselves and persisted in fighting for 'fair' weekly pensions.
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I think that the description on how an individual would petition for and receive financial relief us an important ideas perpetuated in the argument, but I also think that a very important aspect of this article is that, as Hindle said, “[that] Anne Bowman inadvertently revealed not only the family circumstances that had contributed to their indigence but also the survival strategies through which they had made…until the point where they could no longer support themselves [was reached] (page 155). This is an important aspect because it added to the description of a poor widow trying to gain financial support so that she can continue to live, and further described both how she reached her current predicament and what she has attempted to solve it. The process that Anne Bowman went through to keep herself alive, (“co-residence with her child, selling things, begging, and relying on charity) illustrates that the poor did actively seek ways in which they could improve themselves and their lives. In essence, this article helps to reveal what other things, besides reliance on the parishes, the poor would do to improve their economic standing.
However, I would disagree with the observation that the relationships between parishes and the poor to contain very strong tensions. I do not think this was the case. I think that the restrictions on providing provisions from for the poor did not come from a desire to exercise control over an individual, but rather a desire to ensure that the poor truly needed the money and that they would not be able to go into the community and obtain it either by work or begging. Thus the need for proof of an inability to earn a living was to ensure that the parish would have enough money to provide for the economic wellbeing of those that truly needed help and not to those who just wished to avoid working.
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