Huguenot poor relief in Hanoverian London : assistance to widows in the period 1735-1750 : a thesis submitted to the Department of History, Massey University for the degree of Master of Arts with Honours
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Date
1997
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Massey University
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Abstract
By the end of the seventeenth century London's French Protestant community numbered over 20,000, constituting some five per cent of the capital's population.¹Robin D. Gwynn Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain (London: Routledge, 1985) p.36 Many had come during the 1680s and 1690s, fleeing from religious persecution in Louis XIV's France and arriving destitute, thus creating extra demands for poor relief.²Poor relief provided to widows of this community (both newly-arrived and longer-established) during the period 1681-1695 has already been the focus of a previous study: Eileen Barrett "Poor Relief Provided to Huguenot Widows, 1681-1695, through the French Church of London: a Preliminary Study" (Unpublished BA Hons research essay, Massey Univ., 1996) The present research investigates what assistance was still needed some two generations later when the community might be thought to have settled down after the turmoil of the refugee period. Little work has so far been done on immigrant populations in eighteenth-century England, and the women of immigrant communities have received even less attention.³Anne Laurence Women in England 1500-1760: a Social History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994) p.25 The category of widows is used as a sample for this study because they form an identifiable group of manageable size within the female Huguenot population. Widows also figure prominently as recipients of poor relief under the old English Poor Laws, so there is a rich store of comparative literature. [From Introduction]
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Some French throughout.
Keywords
London England History, 18th century History, Huguenots, Services for widows, Poor