Bringing in a Carer Is Not a Family Failing

Arranging paid help for a parent is often taken as an admission of failure, as though families once managed this between themselves and no longer do. A great many people arrive at the decision convinced that needing help means they have let somebody down. The written record says otherwise, and it says it plainly enough to be worth setting out with the dates and the sources attached.

None of what follows is about Better at Home. It is about how long paying somebody outside the family has been an ordinary arrangement for English households to make.

The clearest single example is a purchase rather than a philosophy. In 1276 Henry Addie and his wife Agnes bought their food for the rest of their lives from Winchcombe Abbey in Gloucestershire, for fifty-five marks. The Victoria County History of Gloucester records it in those terms: “Henry Addie and Agnes his wife purchased a bountiful supply of daily food for life for fifty-five marks.”

A named couple, a named institution, a date and a price. Seven hundred and fifty years ago a married couple paid somebody outside their family to keep them fed for the rest of their lives, and wrote it down.

The Addies were not an oddity. Elaine Clark, working through the manor court rolls of East Anglia, identified 159 maintenance contracts of this kind, the dated cohort beginning in 1258 and running to 1457. Property changed hands, and in return the person handing it over was to be fed, housed, clothed and supported for the rest of their life.

Two qualifications belong with that, and they make the claim smaller and sturdier. These were bargains paid in land and lump sums rather than wages, so they are not evidence of a medieval care profession and nobody in them is a carer in the modern sense. And what the documents specify reliably is food, fuel, housing and clothing. Nursing is spelled out less consistently, so some of what we would now call care is inference rather than record.

The third point is the one that does the work. In around three-quarters of the contracts made after the plague, no parent-and-child tie is stated at all. That does not make them agreements with strangers, and some of the people on the other side were siblings or other kin. What it does mean is that these arrangements were made not only with their children.

The obvious objection is that English law did put the duty on the family, and it did. Clause VII of the 1601 Poor Law, 43 Elizabeth I c.2, required children of sufficient ability to relieve and maintain their parents, on pain of twenty shillings for every month they did not.

Two things sit alongside it. The first is that there is limited evidence the duty was ever enforced. Between 1870 and 1890 a deliberate national campaign had to be mounted to compel families to support their parents, and a policy invented to force something is itself evidence that it was not already the default.

The second is that the same statute built the machinery that paid other people to do the work. From 1601 English parishes paid neighbours and widows, many of them poor themselves, to house, feed and nurse the old. The family duty and the paid arrangement were created together and ran together. They were never alternatives: the families of the elderly poor could not maintain them without substantial support from the community.

The scale of it is easy to miss. Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the old made up between half and four-fifths of everybody receiving parish relief, out of less than a tenth of the population.

The picture behind the guilt is usually three generations under one roof. That household was never the normal one. Only around six per cent of historical English households held three generations, and an older woman was less likely to be living with a married child than with servants, lodgers, boarders or other people she was not related to.

Non-relatives in an old person’s household were the more ordinary arrangement rather than the exception. That is the deepest answer available to the feeling this page exists to address, and it is the one most people have never been told.

None of which makes the decision easy, and none of it is a reason to hurry it. What the record does is take one thing off the table. Paying somebody outside the family to help is not a modern shortcut, and it isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong in a family. It has been a normal thing for English households to arrange for seven hundred years, and there are names, dates and prices to show for it.

What it buys, more often than not, is the chance for a daughter to stop being her mother’s carer and go back to being her daughter, which is usually what everybody involved actually wanted.

• Elaine Clark, “Some Aspects of Social Security in Medieval England”, Journal of Family History 7:4 (1982), pages 307 to 320. The 159 East Anglian maintenance contracts, the cohort from 1258 to 1457, and the post-plague cases with no stated filial tie.
• Victoria County History, Gloucester, volume 2, pages 66 to 72, on British History Online. The 1276 Winchcombe Abbey purchase by Henry Addie and Agnes his wife.
• 43 Elizabeth I c.2 (1601), clause VII, for the statutory duty on children and the twenty shilling penalty.
• Pat Thane, memorandum to the House of Commons Health Committee, October 2009, and Richard Smith of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, for the parish payments to non-relatives, the weakness of enforcement, the campaign between 1870 and 1890, and the elderly share of parish relief.
• Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group, for the share of households that held three generations and for who an older woman was most likely to be living with.

This page sets out the history and names its sources so that anybody who wants to check it can. It is not offered as evidence about Better at Home.