Almshouse Residency in Nineteenth Century England: An Interim Report

Abstract

This article presents some preliminary findings from the FACHRS almshouse project. Led by Anne Langley and advised by Nigel Goose, a substantial team of volunteers has set out to trace and record pertinent information on almshouses during the period 1500 to 1914 in an attempt to create the first academic history of the institution. The project is envisaged to develop in three strands. Firstly, the creation of a comprehensive gazetteer of Britain's historical almshouses, which will not only be a valuable research tool and a building block for the rest of the project, but will allow for a very simple, yet important, mode of analysis. The data regarding the number of almshouses in a given county, their date of formation, capacity and founder can immediately give us an infinitely better idea of the temporal and spatial distribution of almshouses than is possible at present. Indeed, even for the later 20th century the geography of charity remains obscure (Bryson, McGuiness and Ford 2002: 48–58). After locating these institutions, the second phase of the project will involve the identification and extraction of details on almshouse residents. This will allow for a much more nuanced analysis of the characteristics of almshouse residents, examining age, occupation, gender, marital status and family composition. Finally, having identified areas of the country which are particularly ripe for comparison, the records of individual almshouses will be analysed in an attempt to develop a much deeper understanding of the ways in which almshouses were run, what rules their residents lived by and what life might have been like in these institutions.