But this was only one of the methods in which the Council tried to aid the makers of cloth. Special orders were sent to the justices of Essex to cause adjoining parishes to help the districts where cloth was made, because these parishes were more charged with poor than the rest of the county[349]. Early in May, 1629, directions were given to the Deputy-Lieutenants as well as to the justices of Essex and Suffolk commanding them to see all possible measures were taken to restore order and relieve the poor. It was especially stated that the clothworkers were to be provided with work either in their own trade or in some other good and honest labour, and if that were impossible they were to be otherwise relieved[350].
Already the difficulty was not confined to the eastern counties, and on May 17th, 1629, a proclamation was issued entitled, "A Proclamation commanding the due execution of the Lawes made for setting the poore on work." The regulations for "the reliefe of the indigent and impotent poore, for binding out apprentices, for providing of stockes[351], and for setting the poore on worke," were to be "duely and carefully put in execution." The liability of the parish to provide funds, and afterwards of the hundred and of the county is recapitulated, and means are devised by which the duty may be performed. The "minister, churchwardens and overseers for the poore" were straightway to meet and take these matters into their consideration. They were then to report to the justices of the peace. These latter were to consult together in their several divisions, and at Quarter Sessions the necessary arrangements were to be settled. The judges on their circuits were to find out what had been done and were to make an exact report. Thus the Central Authority set in motion the whole local machinery for the execution of the poor law. The proclamation further ordered that great care should be taken in those places where there either was or should be any special occasion "to provide stocks to set the poor on work[352]."
Special commands again to Suffolk and Essex.
Some of the justices seem to have doubted whether they had legal power to themselves levy a rate for providing employment for the poor. A few days after the proclamation therefore a further letter is sent to the Deputy-Lieutenants and justices of Essex and Suffolk stating that in their part of the country there was special need for care in matters concerning the poor, and therefore the writers again particularly remind them of their duty and let them know "that it is the resolucon of all the judges that by the lawe you have sufficient power and ought to raise meanes out of the severall parishes if they be of abilitie, or otherwise in their defect in their severall hundrethes etc. to sett the poore on worke and to relieve the aged and impotent not able to worke[353]."
Another crisis of the same kind occurred in 1639 near the end of the personal government of Charles I. The same methods are employed; it is the western counties that are suffering most, and letters are written to the justices of Devon and of Exeter urging them to make special efforts to remove the more pressing necessities of the poor ordinarily employed in the cloth trade[354].
Summary.
Thus we see that during this period the Council put pressure on merchants in order that manufacturers might give their men work; a proclamation was drawn up by its advice giving strict orders for the relief and employment of the poor all over the country; and it insisted in several different ways that in the districts most affected work should be found and relief given. We can see by the circumstances of this crisis something of the nature of the difficulty which the Stuart statesmen had to meet. The social organisation was based on the assumption that the conditions were fairly stable; a poor man had the greatest difficulty, as we have seen[355], in going from one part of the country to another, and the apprenticeship laws were fitfully if not rigorously enforced, so that, if a man's own trade failed, there was little prospect of employment in another. In our own time a sudden falling off in trade causes great hardship to the workmen, and in the seventeenth century the hardship was thus far greater. The demand for manufactured goods was essentially unstable; the social organisation was based on an underlying assumption that work was stable. The introduction of manufactures would therefore cause peculiar hardship to the poor employed in them, if exceptional measures of this kind could not be enforced.
There are several other references in the succeeding years which refer chiefly or wholly to the action of the Council in enforcing provision of work for the unemployed[356]. But after January 1631, regulations of this kind formed part of the Book of Orders of that date, and the Register of the Council, so far as it concerns the poor, relates chiefly to the Royal commission, then just appointed, or to the enforcement of the Book of Orders as a whole.
6. The Royal commission and Book of Orders as a whole.