Small Bills and Petty Finance
- 1. Keele University
- 2. Sussex University
- 3. Independent Scholar
Description
This dataset makes accessible the overseers’ vouchers transcribed by the project Small Bills and Petty Finance: co-creating the history of the Old Poor Law which was funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council 2018-2021. Vouchers are drawn from parishes in three English counties, namely Cumbria, East Sussex, and Staffordshire. Modern Cumbria includes parishes formerly allocated to Westmorland, and East Sussex is exclusively represented by East Hoathly, located in the historic county of Sussex. Additional vouchers beyond this database exist in each county; and in East Sussex the sheer volume of surviving vouchers has necessitated transcribing a single parish - East Hoathly - rather than a wider selection of parishes as in Cumbria and Staffordshire. The data includes a variety of details about goods and services paid for from poor-rate income 1700-1840 such as date, commodity type and cost, payer, and payee. Additional features can comprise commodity quantities and quality, the names of pauper beneficiaries, and signatures of traders or their deputies. Where possible, the archival data has been augmented such as by the addition of occupational categories and geolocations. Additional information about some of the people and themes occurring in this data, and alternative online access to the dataset, can be found at www.thepoorlaw.org Each of the 41549 entries has up to sixty columns of data, all of which are described in the additional notes. The original vouchers were generated by a large cohort of traders, professionals, and local-government officers, each with different levels of literacy and accounting competency. Spellings have not been standardised. The dataset was created by project staff and a team of archival volunteers between May 2018 and March 2021. The results are neither consistent nor error-free but do aim to give a clear and comprehensive account of voucher contents line by line.
Notes
Files
Small Bill and Petty Finance final dataset.csv
Files
(24.3 MB)
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Additional details
Funding
- Small bills and petty finance: co-creating the history of the Old Poor Law AH/R003246/1
- UK Research and Innovation