Poor Relief in Sixteenth Century England

The amount of charitable provision administered by the monasteries of the later Middle Ages has long received the attention of historians exploring pre-industrial social-welfare systems. Most nineteenth-century commentators remained skeptical about the value of monastic poor relief: The charity distributed by the monks . . . was to a great extent unorganized and indiscriminate and did nearly as much to increase beggars as to relieve them. No systematic study of monastic charity was carried out, however, until Savine’s analysis in 1909. Using the national Church tax assessment of 1535, known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus (hereinafter Valor), Savine calculated that the average proportion of monastic national gross income spent on poor relief was c. 2.5 percent -- a figure that remained influential on historiography until as recently as 1998. Among those who revised this interpretation, Harvey outlined the provision of the sixteenth-century Westminster Abbey where the monks distributed the large sum of £400 per annum -- about 10 percent of the Abbey’s gross income -- in various forms of relief to the poorer inhabitants of Westminster and London.

Demography’s theory and approach: (how) has the view from the margins changed?

Around the time that Population Studies celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1996, Susan Greenhalgh published ‘An intellectual, institutional, and political history of twentieth-century demography’. Her contribution described a discipline that, when viewed from its margins, prompted scholars in other disciplines to ask the following questions: ‘Why is the field still wedded to many of the assumptions of mid-century modernization theory and why are there no critical … perspectives in the discipline?’ (Greenhalgh 1996, p. 27). Those questions still arise today. Similarly, Greenhalgh’s observation that ‘neither the global political economies of the 1970s, nor the postmodernisms and postcolonialities of the 1980s and 1990s, nor the feminisms of any decade have had much perceptible impact on the field’ (pp. 27–8), remains a fairly accurate depiction of research published in Population Studies and other demography journals. In this contribution, focusing predominantly on feminist research and insights, I discuss how little has changed since 1996 and explain why the continued lack of engagement concerns me. Demographers still often fail to appreciate the impossibility of atheoretical ‘just descriptive’ research. Our methods carry assumptions and so rely on (often) implicit theoretical frameworks. Not making frameworks explicit does not mean they do not exert an important influence. I end by proposing that the training of research students should be part of a strategy to effect change

An exploration of childhood antecedents of female adult malaise in two British birth cohorts: Combining Bayesian model averaging and recursive partitioning

We use information from two prospective British birth cohort studies to explore the antecedents of adult malaise, an indicator of incipient depression. These studies include a wealth of information on childhood circumstances, behaviour, test scores and family background, measured several times during childhood. We are concerned both with incorporating model uncertainty and using a person-centred approach. We explore associations in both cohorts using two separate approaches: Bayesian model averaging (BMA) and recursive trees. The first approach permits us to assess model uncertainty, necessary because many childhood antecedents are highly correlated. BMA also aims to produce more robust results for extrapolation to other data sets through averaging over the range of plausible models. The second approach is concerned with partitioning the sample, through a series of binary splits, into groups of people who are as alike as possible. One advantage is that the approach is person-centred in that it retains real groups of respondents. We compare and contrast the insights obtained from the two approaches and use the results from each to inform the other and thus refine our understanding further. Moreover, we explore the claimed added robustness for extrapolation by using a split-sample for the 1970 cohort. The consistency of results across methods and cohorts is discussed throughout.well-being, cohort, Bayesian Model Averaging, recursive trees

Intergenerational and Life-Course Transmission of Social Exclusion in the 1970 British Cohort Study

This study used data from the British Cohort Study to examine the relationships between childhood background experiences and a variety of indicators of adult well-being. Similar to an earlier study that analyses the National Child Development Study, we use a rich array of childhood background information and examine the associations for men and women separately. Similar to findings for the earlier cohort, there is evidence of inter-generational transmission of certain outcomes. Cohort members who lived in social housing as children are more likely to live in social housing as adults. Those with fathers who were manually employed are more likely to be manually employed themselves, and those whose families were poor are more likely to have low incomes. Academic test scores and parental housing tenure stand out as two of the strongest and most consistent correlates of adult disadvantage. For males, in particular, evidence of childhood aggression is also a consistent and fairly strong predictor of poor outcomes.Disadvantage, social exclusion, longitudinal, inter-generational

England and Wales: Stable fertility and pronounced social status differences

For nearly three decades, the total fertility rate in England and Wales has remained high relative to other European countries, and stable at about 1.7 births per woman. In this chapter, we examine trends in both period and cohort fertility throughout the twentieth century, and demonstrate some important differences across demographic and social groups in the timing and quantum of fertility. Breaking with a market-oriented and laissez-faire approach to work and family issues, the last 10 years have seen the introduction of new social and economic policies aimed at providing greater support to families with children. However, the effect of the changes is likely to be limited to families on the lower end of the income scale. Rather than facilitating work and parenthood, some policies create incentives for a traditional gendered division of labour. Fertility appears to have remained stable despite, rather than because of, government actions.England, Europe, fertility, Wales

England and Wales: stable fertility and pronounced social status differences.

For nearly three decades, the total fertility rate in England and Wales has remained high relative to other European countries, and stable at about 1.7 births per woman. In this chapter, we examine trends in both period and cohort fertility throughout the twentieth century, and demonstrate some important differences across demographic and social groups in the timing and quantum of fertility. Breaking with a market-oriented and laissez-faire approach to work and family issues, the last 10 years have seen the introduction of new social and economic policies aimed at providing greater support to families with children. However, the effect of the changes is likely to be limited to families on the lower end of the income scale. Rather than facilitating work and parenthood, some policies create incentives for a traditional gendered division of labour. Fertility appears to have remained stable despite, rather than because of, government actions.

Family gaps in income: A cross-national comparison

Using data on nine countries from the Luxembourg Income Study database, we estimate trajectories in gross and disposable family incomes for families following one of several stylized life-courses: marrying or partnering at age 24 but not having children; partnering at age 24 and having one child at age 27; partnering at age 24 and having two children, at ages 25 and 27; and partnering at age 24, having two children at ages 25 and 27, and then living without a partner from ages 30 to 39. Focusing mainly on women with a medium level of education, the majority of women in most of our countries, we find a clear clustering of countries. In general, family gaps in both gross and disposable family income are smallest in the Nordic countries, intermediate in the Anglo-American countries, and largest in the continental European countries. This clustering is very similar to patterns observed in the literature on family gaps in women's earnings and suggests that differences in earnings between women with different family histories are the major driver in the family gaps in gross and disposable incomes that we observe here

Cross-national comparisons: a missing link in the relationship between policies and fertility? A comparative study of fertility decision making of Polish nationals in Poland and UK

Our findings suggest that a framework to research fertility in contemporary societies in which cross-national comparisons are considered may contribute new and useful knowledge, however more research is needed to test the influence of cross-national comparisons on actual behavioural outcomes

Research Brief No. 16 - The Effects of Age and Background on the Fertility Patterns of Child Migrants

This paper challenges the common notion that immigrants have more children than the native-born population. More specifically, immigrants who arrived in Canada, England or France at an early age have about the same number of children as the native-born. By examining child immigrants, the paper is able to attribute this finding to the hypothesis that, with time, immigrants adopt the destination country’s norms. The results also show that the relationship between age at migration and number of children differs for immigrants from certain countries. Likewise, the fertility patterns of child migrants also depend on their destination country