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Overseers and Collectioners in Late-Seventeenth-Century England: Chilvers Coton (Warwickshire), c.1680-1720
| This paper analyses the extraordinarily rich parish and estate archives of Chilvers Coton (Warwickshire), especially its census-type listing of 1684, to reconstruct the life-histories of both overseers and collectioners in a late seventeenth-century rural community. In several respects—the gradual supplementation (perhaps even displacement) of testamentary charity by formal poor relief; the rapid inflation of welfare costs; the assiduous policing of settlement; the marking out of the poor as a separate and dependant class—the parish economy of welfare in Chilvers Coton sits very comfortably alongside those of other late seventeenth-century rural communities. Only in the very close personal interest taken in the charitable distribution of resources by its landlord does Chilvers Coton seem exceptional. But precisely because of Newdigate’s extraordinary attention to detail, it is possible in the case of this particular parish to map the social topography of poverty, and especially the identity of, and relationship between, its overseers and collectioners. Indeed in the context of a historiography which has arguably been less interested in the concerns of overseers than of those whom they relieved, the Chilvers Coton listing and associated maps provide an unparalleled opportunity to reconstruct the perspective of the parish officers. Overseers were, after all, caught on the horns of a particularly uncomfortable dilemma, confronted on the one hand with the desire of their fellow ratepayers to prevent the unnecessary inflation of welfare costs and on the other with genuine cases of human misery and despair.
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