This unassuming accessory gave the poor of Tudor England a vital way to survive

Imagine losing your livelihood in 16th-century England. There was no welfare state, no pensions, no hospitals or residential homes for the elderly, and no benefits for the sick. If you were injured, widowed or simply too old to work, you were faced with a life of financial instability at best, or permanent penury at worst.

“What if things had gone wrong, and somehow you didn’t have a patch of land to make a living from?” asks historian Ruth Goodman in episode three of her new HistoryExtra Academy series, Tudor Life.

For most working people, life in Tudor England was precarious. Labourers worked the land for local farmers, often earning just enough to get by. Women and children contributed through spinning, domestic service or working in dairies. In this situation, one bad harvest, a bout of illness, or the loss of a spouse could tip a family into destitution.

“That happened to a lot of people,” says Goodman. “Even if your dad had a patch of land, he might have had seven kids, and by the time it’s divided up there’s next to nothing left. So there were plenty of people who didn’t have enough land to sustain their families, and plenty of people who couldn’t find other skilled work.”

For many, the looming prospect of eventual poverty was an inevitable part of life. The Tudor population was rising faster than its economy could support, prices were soaring due to inflation, and the enclosure of common land (once a lifeline for the poor) was stripping people of access to grazing, wood and food.

Before the 1530s, much of the kingdom’s informal welfare system had been provided by monasteries. Religious houses offered food to the hungry, lodging for travellers, and small pensions for the sick and elderly. But when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries between 1536 and 1540, that network disappeared almost overnight. Centuries of charitable provision were gone, and nothing stood ready to replace them.

• Read more | The dissolution of the monasteries

Unsurprisingly, begging and vagrancy surged. Rebellions broke out in the countryside, often sparked by hunger and enclosure. England had to find new ways to care for its poor, and to maintain order.

How did they do it?

From medieval charity to Tudor law

In medieval England, helping the poor had been seen as a Christian duty, not a state responsibility. Almsgiving was believed to benefit the soul of the giver as well as the receiver. But in the newly Protestant world of the Tudors, this form of salvation was no longer earned through good works.

This theological shift left a vacuum: if the church no longer guaranteed charity, who would?

The answer, gradually, was left to the people of each local parish. Tudor monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I began to pass laws that made poor relief a local civic obligation rather than a purely religious one.

The Statute of 1536, under Henry VIII, allowed parishes to collect voluntary alms; the Act for the Relief of the Poor of 1552, under Edward VI, made it compulsory for each parish to register and oversee the poor. By Elizabeth’s reign, this system had evolved into the first recognisable welfare structure in English history.

The parish poor fund

Eventually, this led to a formalised, but meagre, form of help that someone could access.

Goodman explains: “Legally the parish was supposed to give you a bit of help, and everybody in the parish was supposed to pay a poor rate, a few pence that went into the pot which was to help someone in trouble – somebody newly widowed, for example, or children who’d been orphaned, or somebody really sick who couldn’t carry on with producing the necessary parts of life.”

• Read more | Tudor England had no standing army, but this humble hobby kept its people ready for war

This ‘poor rate’ – a small local tax – was collected by parish officials known as overseers of the poor. The money was distributed to those deemed “deserving”: the sick, elderly and orphaned. It was a fragile safety net, but it still represented a profound shift in thinking. Poverty was now a community’s shared responsibility.

“There was a small part of money that could be distributed to deserving causes,” Goodman adds. “But it was always a very small pot of money, and never really enough to go around.”

This system, established in piecemeal form across the mid-Tudor decades, eventually fed into the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601. Those statutes formally divided the poor into categories: the ‘impotent’ (unable to work), the ‘able-bodied,’ and ‘vagrants’ – and set rules for relief and punishment. It was the foundation of English poor relief for the next two centuries.

A nation of knitters

But charity alone could never meet the scale of need.

Tudor governments believed that idleness wasn’t just wasteful, but dangerous, and that it bred disorder and rebellion. A better solution to charity was to turn the poor into workers.

“There were a couple of initiatives,” Goodman says. “Knitting a hat is something that doesn’t require strength, it doesn’t require any major capital outlay, and it’s a skill that can be learned quite quickly.”

• Read more | Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn: the Tudor queen’s undying love for her mother

So, in 1571, Elizabeth I’s Parliament passed a law requiring people to buy something the poor could make: the knitted woollen cap.

“Every man above the age of six, apart from gentlemen, was required to wear a knitted cap on Sundays,” Goodman explains. “Women were also supposed to wear knitted caps, with exceptions, so a large section of the population were required to wear knitted caps. They get called statute caps, because it was a law.”

It was, arguably, one of the canniest pieces of social lawmaking in Tudor history.

The statute cap law

By mandating that nearly everyone own and wear a knitted cap, the government both guaranteed a steady market for wool and created work for those unable to perform heavy labour – while also creating a more stable market for farmers and others whose work involved wool.

“The idea is to stimulate demand for knitted caps, which a poor person could make a living from. Particularly somebody who was perhaps elderly and infirm, or had had a broken leg for example, or even a young person who hadn’t much strength: this was a way to make a living.”

For those unable to plough, harvest or carry loads, knitting provided an accessible trade. It could be done at home, required little equipment and fit around domestic life. In towns, caps were sold in markets and fairs; in villages, merchants collected them in bulk.

Thousands of poor households suddenly had work.

The parish poor fund, the local poor rate and the statute cap all represented early experiments in welfare and were practical steps toward a society in which the state and communities, not the church alone, shared responsibility for the vulnerable.

Want to step even further into the world of the Tudors? In her brand-new HistoryExtra Academy series, Ruth Goodman takes you inside everyday life in the 16th century — from food and fashion to faith, work, and even love and marriage. All episodes are available now on the HistoryExtra app. Start watching today.

Want to ask Ruth a question? Join our live virtual Q&A on 19 November. Find out more here.