In June 1697, at a sitting of the quarter session court in Preston, Lancashire, a widow called Alice Brewer submitted a petition in which she demanded to be paid her due.
Brewer, described as “very poor, old and necessitous”, had been caring for 12 years for a “poor distressed child” called Anne Helme, which entitled her to a small annual payment from the local parish authorities. But the promised 40 shillings a year had dwindled as Anne grew older and had now stopped altogether.
Brewer had previously obtained a court order requiring the local “overseers of the poor” to pay her, but she said they had “contemptuously denied to give any obedience” to it. Her request was referred for further consideration – but two years later she would be back appealing again for the money and saying their failure to support the child had led to Anne becoming “lame”.
Brewer was not the only woman who was paid to look after a destitute child who was not a relative – nor the only one to run into problems with her pay. In fact, according to analysis by a Cambridge University researcher, this historical form of fostering was an established practice among poor women of the time in England and gave them an unusual amount of power in their society.
“These women provided such a vital role, that when they weren’t paid enough or at all, they had enough authority to approach their county justices, powerful men, and successfully argue their case,” said Emily Rhodes, a PhD student at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
Examining the rare Lancashire court records “gives voice to some of the most inaccessible women in history” whose lives may be unrecorded anywhere else, said Rhodes. “They left a very small footprint but they played an important role in society.”
The practice of “boarding” or “tabling” a child with a woman who was not a relative held an ambiguous legal status, but was a crucial element of the ad hoc provision of welfare of the time. Poor laws gave local officials the authority to seek care or apprenticeships for children who would otherwise be destitute, and to place them for a small sum with women who might otherwise need aid themselves – potentially addressing two problems at once. Forty shillings, the most commonly cited annual sum, was equivalent to 22 days’ worth of wages for a skilled tradesman.
Most of these women were illiterate and the domestic circumstances of ordinary women of this class were rarely recorded in this period, said Rhodes. “There really are very few ways that we can can see or hear the voices of really poor or illiterate women in the past.
“The beauty of [legal] petitions is that, whether you were rich or poor, they were scribed documents that someone else has written for you. And so even if these women couldn’t document their own thoughts or opinions, these petitions allow you to get at their experiences.”
One striking finding, said Rhodes, was that these women could approach the court with more authority than birth mothers. “If you look at petitions from birth mothers, they have to prove their worthiness for relief,” she said, adding that by contrast, foster mothers “are mostly just saying: ‘You’re not paying me what you said you would. I need the money.’
“What it attests to is that [while] the system of patriarchy, of course, was extremely oppressive to women, there were ways in which you could create your own little bits of power within the system, in a way that could help when arguing in front of a very masculine court.”
Her research is published in the journal the History of the Family.
