ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

‘Maimed Soldier, Entitled to Charitable Treatment’: Disability Pensions for the Seventeenth-Century English Army

• In Event: Disability's Conscription in British History

English Abstract

How was disability perceived and experienced within the context of the early modern English army, particularly during the fraught period of the mid-century civil wars? Unlike the system of naval pensions for physical disabilities acquired while in service (the Chatham Chest), which became increasingly standardized over the course of the seventeenth century, the military pensions for disability were handled primarily at the parish level and were therefore rather more heterogenous in nature. They were assessed and disbursed at a local level, and the social structures of the village and church were central to the determination of eligibility. The military disability pensions were fundamentally created by and governed by the poor law system and therefore had some overlap, but also significant differences, with the system of charity relief administered by the churchwardens and overseers of the poor for non-service-related disabilities and conditions. This conference paper will examine the language being used by both individuals and institutional bodies to refer to physical impairments acquired in land military service in seventeenth-century England, and the social and institutional supports being developed particularly in the mid-century civil war context, as distinct from those developing for the English navy at the same moment. I will use a combination of military petitions, leave forms, pension disbursement accounts, churchwardens and overseers of the poor account books, and parish quarter sessions books to interrogate the role and importance of various institutional structures for formations of identity and systems of support for acquired disability in seventeenth-century England.

Author

• Annastasia Conner, University of Chicago