Dr Jonathan Healey: List of publications

The ‘nuclear hardship hypothesis’, argued by Peter Laslett in 1988, holds that that the prevalence of the nuclear household in early modern England, and the apparent weakness of kinship interactions outside it, left the burden of caring for the vulnerable squarely on the ‘collectivity’, most obviously in the form of the Elizabethan poor law. But recent studies of family and kinship in English society have questioned the idea of the autonomous nuclear household, challenging us to reconsider this notion from the perspective of the early modern poor. This article uses a largely untapped set of sources, pauper petitions, to look for qualitative evidence of kinship support among the seventeenth‐century English poor. Focusing on the county of Lancashire, this article mines petitions for references to kinship support, to the forms it took, and to what it ‘meant’ to recipients. It argues that kinship support was not uncommon, and indeed was the expected social norm where it was physically available. But it had clear limits, and might only be a temporary expedient; moreover, most recorded examples saw support flowing between former members of the same nuclear household.

<p>On 14 September 1534, two men fought on a meadow outside the town of Weymouth, Dorset, watched by a crowd of their neighbours. Learning of the fight, one of the town constables charged between the men, and killed one of them, leading to his prosecution and subsequent appeal to the court of Star Chamber. The investigation by that court left several thousand words of testimony, making it one of the best documented fights in the sixteenth century. This article offers a microhistory of the fight. In particular, it asks what such an event can tell us about the nature of government in the early Tudor period. It suggests that at this time such flashpoints were crucial moments where the state was expected to play a dramatic role. But this in turn depended on participants performing their role as state actors. That could be very dangerous, but detailed reconstructions can also show how state actors, though lacking the visual symbolic apparatus we expect of the modern state, might deploy oral performances to signify their official role.</p>

The first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century: the first century of welfare.

Despite plenty of work on enclosure and the riots against it, the ‘political culture’ of common lands remains obscure, despite considerable interest amongst social historians in ‘everyday politics’ and ‘weapons of the weak’. This article attempts to recover something of that culture, asking what political meaning was ascribed to certain actions, events and landscape features, and what tactics commoners used to further their micro-political ends. Using a systematic study of interrogatories and depositions in the equity Court of Exchequer, it finds a complex array of political weaponry deployed in commoning disputes, from gossip, threats and animal-maiming to interpersonal violence. In addition, it shows that the need to establish precedent, or ‘long-usage’, meant that certain physical acts and features were imbued with political meaning: acts of use, perambulations, old ridge-and-furrow, speech, even dying whispers, could all mean something in the politics of the commons. Moreover, commoners could be subject to moral scrutiny as neighbours; with antisocial behaviour liable to be used against them in disputes. All in all, it is argued that we are only just beginning to recover the politics of the English commons, and that there was much more to them than enclosure rioting.