n the parish books of last century!--was
"Old Nib" short of capital for carrying on his business of buying
doctors' bottles? If so, a small instalment was forthcoming from the
Chancellor of the Exchequer. Had even the respectable journeyman
carpenter cut his finger? Then he too got a grant upon signing a
promissory note. In this way the casual disbursements of the Overseer
amounted to a considerable sum, and covered the greatest variety of
claims for help--from paying a person's rent, or taking clothes out of
pawn, to mending leather breeches or supplying cabbage plants for the
paupers' gardens!

The comparative isolation of the rural folk was aggravated by the old
laws of settlement. To nine men and women out of ten, and to
ninety-nine children out of a hundred, the world was bounded almost by
the parish, and the parish a man belonged to was an important
consideration in those days. Indeed, Sir Mordaunt Martin, a kind of
Canon Blackley of the last century, proposed a scheme for fining a
farmer a half-penny a day for every man he employed not belonging to
{43} the parish! also that all males above 18 in default of paying 2d.,
and females 3/4d. or 1d. a week for a rainy day, should be committed to
prison. Then, a man could not leave his parish and go to live, or even
lodge while at work, in another parish without a licence; that is to
say a certificate setting forth the parish to which he legally
belonged. If he did he was liable to be taken before a magistrate by
the Overseers and Churchwardens, and if a man "intruded" (that is the
word used in the old informations) in this way into a parish not his
own, he was liable to be taken back again, not because he was a pauper,
but simply on the ground that he was "likely to become chargeable."
Not half a bad way of keeping out objectionable characters!

Cases are entered in the Royston Parish books of young men working at
Cambridge having to come to the parish officers at Royston for their
certificates before they could remain and lodge in Cambridge! A common
resolution by parish vestries was one directing the Overseers to
inquire if there were any persons in the parish not belonging to such
parish and without certificates. In many parishes, as at Barkway, old
lists are still preserved of persons licensed, so to speak, to come
into or go out of the parish to live. In this way the old parish
authorities always had a hold upon a man or woman instead of waiting,
as i