The poor and disabled in early eighteenth-century Russian towns.

Pre-industrial Europe recognized two basic categories of impoverishment. The first group - the disabled, those who endured serious chronic or acute disease, the insane, the aged, and the orphan - had always earned the pity and charity of those who were better off. Sometimes called the "structural" poor, these unfortunates were incapable of earning a living, and therefore wholly dependent upon begging and charity. The second group (the "conjunctural" poor) included the able-bodied who had fallen into penury through some crisis, whether meteorologic, epidemic, or economic. Members of this second group, whose numbers grew significantly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, did not owe their poverty to obvious causes; caught up in the changing economies of proto-industrialization, they simply could not find work.(1)

The apparent clarity of this taxonomy of poverty notwithstanding, the historian encounters considerable difficulty in determining who was poor. For one thing, until relatively recent times, the poor themselves left scant trace in the historical record, for as long as charity was predominantly personal and face-to-face - as it was until the bureaucratization of charity and government social aid - no parchment or paper preserved a record of the gift, let alone a description or enumeration of the recipients. The sixteenth-century Russian book of advice on household administration, Domostroi, urges generosity toward the poor, emphasizing personal contact: "Bring the poor into your home, offer them food and drink, warm them with clothing, giving with love and a pure conscience.... Invite the poor, the helpless, the impoverished, the suffering, the stranger to your house. According to your means, feed them and give them drink, warm them, and give them alms accrued through your own righteous labors."(2) The very intimacy and privacy of the act precluded it finding a place on paper, so that it is impossible to know how many received, let alone deserved, this charity.

Even those gifts that were recorded - such as testaments or pre-obit donations - provide no more than a glimpse into the life of the donor. A will might prescribe a dole for the poor who attended a funeral, or might endow a meal for the poor, thereby entering into the historical record the donor. But those who benefited from charity remained out of view and anonymous. Only with the creation of central institutions of charity and, later, with the state's growing interest in the resources of its population did more or less systematic records of the poor appear.

The registers with which city and state authorities in early modern Europe attempted to assess the taxability of their subjects bring into view the world of the have-nots in early modern Europe. Detailing both the occupants of each household and their financial and physical well-being, these sources present detailed pictures of the poor, and how their circumstances compared to those who enjoyed prosperity. But population and tax inventories are far from ideal means by which to discover the character and dimensions of poverty; as comparisons with other nominal lists of the poor show, tax and population lists regularly understated the dimensions of impoverishment in early modern Europe by omitting the homeless and migrant poor. Furthermore, cadasters from different locales, even if compiled at the same time under the same instructions, reveal substantial variance in the number of the poor - the result, no doubt, of the different criteria of poverty applied by different persons.

As the reform of charity carried out almost everywhere in Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrates, still other factors influenced public perceptions of who was poor. Margaret Pelling has pointed out that the primary emphasis of urban charity in sixteenth-century Norwich was to rescue the public purse. The reformers intended to get the able poor, who "myght well labour if they were hoole," off the dole and out to work; those enduring chronic illness, or who were too weak or too old to work enjoyed more sympathy, and were dealt with separately. How one made these distinctions, however, was far from obvious. Elsewhere, the appearance of epidemics and famines not only inflated the number of the poor, and therefore the claimants to charity, but also catalyzed local authorities to discriminate among different categories of the impoverished. John Walter found that throughout English towns in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries "harvest failure prompted a more restrictive definition of eligibility for relief," and therefore a corresponding downward pressure on the censuses of the poor.(3)

Paul Slack's study of Salisbury demonstrates just how elastic might be the definition of poverty, and how external vectors could influence the numbers of persons registered as deserving aid. Women, children, and the aged dominated the "impotent" poor in Salisbury who in 1625 accounted for about 4 percent of the town's population of 6,500. The number of "impudent" poor - vagabonds, beggars, and the able-bodied - increased geometrically, especially on the heels of plague and harvest disasters. Consequently, although those receiving alms in Salisbury in 1635 accounted for no more than about 5 percent of the population, the number of persons who, by a more generous definition, might be regarded as poor represented almost a third of the population.

Different censuses might thus reveal different classes and different numbers of poor in urban communities. The poor might be narrowly or broadly defined. A census concentrating on those receiving relief would include a high proportion of elderly people, and a large number of households with widowed or unmarried heads, usually women. But a more comprehensive survey, including "honest labourers and poor householders" as well as the exceptional cases of the very poor, would contain more people of middle age and more married couples.... Within this spectrum, the poor who normally received alms were a readily distinguishable group of exceptional cases; but the "poor" generally shaded much more easily into the population as a whole, and when they began to be included among those on relief, there seemed no clear limit to the size of the problem.(4)

In these circumstances, then, it is hardly surprising that counts of the poor all across early modern Europe varied widely.

Identifying The Poor

In sixteenth-century Coventry, for example, almost half the population avoided tax liability because of poverty, while in other English towns of the time about a third of all potential taxpayers were freed from taxes.(5) In Lubeck late in the fifteenth century fiscal agents regarded more than half the population as poor, and in a series of Wurttemberger villages in 1544 "those people permanently dependent upon others for their subsistence constituted at least 65% of the population...." In Memmingen in 1521 the "Have-nots" identified on tax registers amounted to 55 percent of the total population, and, according to one study, "Much of South Germany [late in the sixteenth century] had in fact become a land of paupers."(6) In 1558, when famine and sickness visited Toledo, about 20 percent of the city's population was in need of assistance; the proportion in individual parishes was even greater.(7) Cissie Fairchilds looked to the Committee on Mendicity of the Constituent Assembly for a definition of poverty in eighteenth-century France; by its measure "perhaps one-half of the French population of the Old Regime lived in poverty."(8) Carlo Cipolla employed a less formal device to determine that an even larger proportion of the population of Europe might have been poor: "one can venture to say that three fourths to four fifths of the population suffered from severe nutritional deficiencies, poor clothing, and miserable housing facilities."(9)

Sources: Urban Censuses from the Early Eighteenth Century

Although in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Muscovite officials included poor householders in their tax registers, the systematic identification of the poor in the towns of Russia only began in the reign of Peter the Great (1689-1725). As part of his reorganization of the state, the sovereign ordered the compilation of the first censuses which were to include everyone, both male and female, regardless of age. Instructions guaranteeing complete coverage threatened death to anyone who overlooked, "even a single child."(10) Fulfillment of this goal seems to have eluded officials charged with carrying out the count, but the inventories nevertheless provide valuable insight into the composition of Russian urban populations early in the eighteenth century.

The present study depends upon twelve published censuses of ten central Russian towns inventoried by Peter's agents between the years of 1710 and 1720 (see Table 1).(11) Moving from household to household, Peter's officials recorded the name, age, and social station of each resident. Census-takers regularly identified the disabled, often providing a specific characterization of the disability, and simultaneously noted who in the population merited tax-exempt status. Of course, Russian agents were no more successful than their peers elsewhere in Europe in including within their inventories the migrant poor, and therefore almost certainly underestimated seriously the number of poor. All the same, the censuses provide a detailed, if incomplete, representation of the poor in early eighteenth-century urban Russia.

Table 1

Urban Household Inventories Employed

Town               Date of Inventory    Population No.    Households

Belev                    1718                4110            841
Borovsk                  1719                2399            335
Maloiaroslavets          1715                 976            156
Riazan'                  1718                1589            220
Toropets                 1710                3674            839
Tula                     1715                5309            916
Tula                     1720                3022            502
Uglich                   1717                5089            877
Ustiuzhna                1713                2277            417
Viatka                   1710                4368            724
Viatka                   1717                2387            394
Zaraisk                  1715                2980            498

TOTALS                                      38180           6719

SOURCE: Population inventories (see fn. 11).

As elsewhere in Europe, the censuses of Petrine Russian towns betray substantial differences in evaluating poverty (see Table 2). The 1718 count in Belev, for example, found almost no indigent households; on the other hand, fiscal agents in Ustiuzhna and Uglich determined that about a fifth of all households were poor and tax-exempt; the overall average for the ten towns was 12.9 percent. Inhabitants of poor and tax-exempt households (4,109 persons) accounted for more than a tenth of the total population tallied in the twelve inventories.

[TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 2 OMITTED]

In the ten years during which these twelve censuses took place Russia seems not to have experienced any natural calamities like those that occasioned elsewhere a mushrooming of poverty - and a restriction on relief. Although there is evidence of serious famine in 1690, 1696, and 1704, the next decade, when the censuses under investigation here were conducted, was relatively peaceful for the Russian economy. There were reports of flooding from a severe winter in 1709, and another "mild famine" in 1716 caused by excessive rainfall, but until 1721-24 Russia seems not to have experienced the combination of disease and poor harvest that might have placed a strain on relief resources, and consequently caused a more strict definition of poverty. And although we can only guess at population dynamics in Russia of this era, there is little evidence for rapid population gains like those which elsewhere helped inaugurate more conservative definitions of poverty to spare the public purse.(12)

But if Petrine Russia endured no great dearth in this decade, there was more or less constant war until the Peace of Nystadt was signed in 1721. By some accounts the war put Peter constantly on the lookout for revenues with which to feed and provision his army and soldiers with which to staff it. Over and above the military, additional ambitions - such as building St. Petersburg, his new capital - fueled Peter's vision of the new Russian state, and all these dreams required income and labor.(13) In this context, it seems likely that Petrine imperatives to increase taxation and the number of men eligible to serve in the imperial army played their part in depressing the number of residents labeled as poor. According to one calculation, Peter's recruitments between 1705 and 1713 accounted for about 11 percent of the males eligible to serve, and for the period between 1719 and 1745 levies may have attracted as much as 6 percent of the male population of the Russian Empire. With human resources like this at stake, Peter's government had to be mindful of the impact of too generous a policy of exemption.(14)

Consequently, because of the demands of policy if not personal scruple, Peter found it difficult to tolerate the poor. Like his sixteenth-century predecessor, Ivan IV, Peter thought the poor the source of much social mischief, and he suspected that many who masqueraded as poor did so in order to avoid state obligations.(15) But even before Peter came to power, churchmen fretted about the inadequate network of charitable institutions in Muscovy. Despite hints of the existence of poorhouses in the sixteenth century, the church council of 1681/82 called for founding new institutions, not so much out of an obvious pity for the unfortunate as to guarantee "that the poor would not wander around without supervision, and the lazy, having healthy bodies, would be put to work."(16)

Legislation gave substance to these sentiments. Accusing the poor of self-mutilation to make themselves appear more pitiable, the law gave no quarter to, and called for the arrest of, beggars who were then to be sent back to their places of origin where, one presumes, they could be entered on the tax rolls. Should they be captured begging again, they were to be beaten and sent to Siberia.(17) Subsequent legislation demonstrated even less patience with the poor, and repeated injunctions of an earlier time that had evidently not been implemented successfully. A statute of January 21, 1712 provided that the itinerant poor caught begging were to be forcibly interned in poorhouses; the Monastery Chancellery was enjoined to observe carefully those places which beggars frequented so that they could arrest violators of the law. Should beggars be caught at their games again, they were to be subjected to "harsh punishment" and sent back to the places from which they had come.(18) A 1718 law went further, and provided that any poor caught in Moscow who beg "along the trading stalls or in the streets, or who sit at intersections, begging" were to be arrested and brought to the Monastery Chancellery where they were to be beaten; money found on beggars was to be given to the persons who captured them. The law also prohibited the private distribution of alms, suggesting that charity be given directly to the poorhouses instead; persons who continued to dole out alms in violation of the law were to be fined.(19)

That Peter was not joking is evident from a 1723 report, which begins by observing that since 1701 the state had attempted to keep the authentically poor from begging on the street, at bridges, and in the market. But the effort had so far not met with success. An investigation of the Moscow poorhouses found some eighty persons who

did not live in the poorhouses, despite receiving alms, and lived [instead] with their kin or in rented quarters; some did not even live in Moscow. There were some elderly, aged 70 or 75, who were nevertheless quite fit ... and there were some aged 20-40, and even a 16-year-old, who were not ill at all. Several had their own houses or engaged in trade or a craft.... There were even some who had no handicap except a cataract [and thus, by implication, were unfairly receiving alms]. There were people who had spent their whole lives in begging, and who had not borne any service to society, teaching such a life to their children.

"Those who have their strength, are healthy, and are not of advanced age are to be thrown out of the poorhouses," the report notes, so that only the deserving - as few as possible - would inhabit the institutions of charity. Everyone else ought to work.(20)

These principles - that the deserving poor represented only a part of those claiming to be poor, that charity therefore had to be channeled through official institutions, and that the able ought to work - governed all subsequent Petrine legislation.(21) A 1720 attempt to inventory the poor throughout the Russian Empire (except in Siberia) reveals the government's definition of the deserving poor; officials were to go "wherever there are the aged, ill, and maimed poor and orphans, both male and female, who are in poorhouses and hospitals, and above that, those who are ill and disabled who cannot feed themselves and are not entered on the registers...."(22) A 1721 regulation called for an inventory of the poorhouses to make certain that these shelters accepted only those meriting care, namely "those who are of advanced age, senile, so ill that they can do no work, and likewise those who have no kin or other relations at all...." Those who had kin did not deserve the poorhouse, as a 1710 regulation makes clear: in prescribing a monthly examination of the inhabitants of Moscow's poorhouses, the law decreed that those who had "wives, children, crafts, or who live in their own houses ought not be in a poorhouse."(23) A measure of April 6, 1722 called for attentive supervision of the streets so that all beggars would be captured promptly and brought to the Police Chancellery where the able-bodied would be found work: the young were to be sent to projects undertaken by the treasury, while the aged would be sent to the hospital (another innovation in Petrine Russia) where it could be determined if they could work and with whom they were living.(24)

Peter's own perception of the deserving and authentic poor was even narrower than these regulations suggest. Surviving legislation indicates that the sovereign thought the most deserving poor were those soldiers and officers who had been disabled during service in the army or navy. A 1710 decree, for example, provided that wounded and maimed officers and soldiers should be assigned to poorhouses; in 1719 and again in 1720 new laws obliged monasteries to receive and shelter soldiers who, because of age, senility, or wounds, could no longer serve in the military, and who, without their state service, had no means of support. Four years later Peter repeated this prescription, calling on monasteries to shelter "retired soldiers who cannot work and other genuinely poor."(25)

All these regulations illustrate vividly that Peter's government looked on the poor with suspicion, seeing in them not so much an object of pity as an obstacle to accomplishing the great military and administrative reforms on which Peter had embarked. As one historian has noted, another regulation of about the same time (1722) had provided that "all village and town idiots as well as 'the blind, and the badly crippled and the senile'" were to pay the head tax. Those not able to pay taxes or perform military service had to reside in poorhouses "only so that ... there be none without occupation and in idleness." A 1724 law assigned "beggars, the poor, the sick, the crippled ..., widows, orphans, and strangers" not to the care of churchmen or charitable institutions but to the police, indicative of the prejudice with which Peter viewed the poor.(26)

These and other measures of the era cannot have escaped the attention of government officials sent out to count the population of Russian towns. Consequently, even if visitors to Russia marveled at the number of beggars and poor, Peter's census takers entered in their books only the names of those whose claim to poverty and relief was beyond challenge.(27)

The Disabled

Since at least the Middle Ages, depictions of poverty had always featured the disabled, and, despite the growing repertoire of poor types, well into the early modern period the disabled continued to enjoy more sympathy and resources than their able-bodied parallels.(28) As one historian has noted, "Prolonged illness or physical disability could, more than anything else, push an individual or family over the narrow boundary between poverty and indigence."(29) But to judge only from tax inventories of the early eighteenth century, Russian towns gave evidence of relatively few persons who were seriously disabled. In the ten towns whose records are used here, less than I percent (320) of the total population of more than 38,000 were described as disabled. Not only is the total lower than one might expect, but even among the various inventories one notices wide differences which suggest that the records do not reflect a complete and accurate count of the disabled in these towns.(30)

Fully one-third of all those identified as handicapped suffered a physical disability severe enough to limit their mobility (see Table 3). The largest group of these had ailments that affected their legs: some the record simply described as "lame" (khrom) without providing any further details;(31) others had lost their legs or had withered legs; still others the inventories identify as crippled or maimed (uvechen, though this term may well include loss of limbs other than legs).(32) Another sizable group had lost the use of hands or arms. The loss of a limb is always serious, but in a preindustrial world this disability could well have been decisive, especially if the victim were a household head, which may explain why the inventory takers seem to have paid special attention to such ailments among men: of the 115 persons identified as having lost a limb or having some other serious motor disability, only fifteen are female, a division which is unlikely to reflect natural frequencies.(33)

Table 3

Numbers and Types of Disabilities, Early Eighteenth-Century Russian Towns

Disability                     No. Males   No. Females   Total No.

Mobility impairment

lame (khrom)                       16           4           20
lost, withered legs                29           8           37
lost, withered hands               28           1           29
crippled, maimed                   20           1           21
hunchback                           6           1            7
other                               1           0            1
Total                             100          15          115

Vision impairment

blind                              34          22           56
"poor-sighted"                     13           6           19
"one-eyed" (kriv)                   8           2           10
other                               1           1            2
Total                              56          31           87

Speech impairment

"dumb"                              9           7           16
"tongue-tied," etc.                 3           1            4
Total                              12           8           20

Hearing impairment

deaf                                7           4           11
Total                               7           4           11

Mental impairment

"weak-witted" (maloumen)           14           4           18
senile (driakhl)                   10           1           11
"simple" (prostoum)                 5           0            5
other                               3           1            4
Total                              32           6           38

Other

epilepsy (paduchaia bolezn')       10           1           11
"sick" (skorben)                   14           2           16
"weak"                              4           3            7
"ill" (khvor)                       4           1            5
"disfigured" (urodlivyi)            1           2            3
other                               6           1            7
Total                              39          10           49

GRAND TOTAL                       246          74          320

SOURCE: Population inventories (see fn. 11).

The visually impaired constituted another large proportion of the disabled in the towns of early eighteenth-century Russia: the household counts identify eighty-seven persons - more than a quarter of all those identified in the records as disabled - who had one or another form of vision disability. Most the records simply list as "blind," but the inventories also describe a sizable group of persons who had "poor sight" (ochmi/glazami nishch, or maloviden). Commentators have noted that vision impairment was probably widespread in early modern Europe, perhaps a consequence of vitamin deprivation; whether dietary deficiencies account for vision disability in Petrine Russia remains to be demonstrated.(34) Enumerators found evidence of blindness and poor vision among both men and women, but vision-disabled men slightly outnumbered women by a ratio of about three to two. More pronouncedly associated with men, however, was the condition of having an eye gouged out (kriv): eight of the ten persons so identified were men, perhaps a reflection of the rough world that made up city life in Peter's Russia.

The urban censuses also make note of mental illness. Inventory takers employed a variety of terms, none very precise, to designate this handicap. The "weak-witted" (maloumen) seem most numerous, though exactly how they might be differentiated from the "simple-minded" (prostoum) is impossible to know. Some others the records know as "out of their minds" (vne uma), possessed by demons (besnovaniem), or simply "poor of mind" (umom plokh). A separate category altogether were the senile (driakhl), almost all of whom were men. Very little is known about the circumstances in which the mentally disabled carried out their lives in early modern Russia, but the censuses suggest that only rarely did they enter an institution; indeed, the only poorhouse occupant whom the records describe as mentally ill is the widow Irina Anisimova, who, though only twenty-five in 1710, was interned in a poorhouse in Viatka. The others all dwelt in their own or others' homes, but what their treatment might have been we do not know.(35)

Another large group reflected in these sources are those with speech impairments. The inventory taken recorded most simply as "dumb" (nem), and there were about as many men as women so identified in the record. Others, however, received a more detailed description; some were "tongue-tied" (kosen iazykom), others were reported as having been "without a tongue" (bez iazyka).(36) The censuses detected even fewer town dwellers who suffered from hearing impairment. The record takers described as deaf (glukh) only eleven persons out of a total of 38,000 identified in these records. We may reasonably doubt the diagnostic ability of the government servants who reported on this condition, as well as their special interest in it. Unlike vision impairment, which was more obvious and interfered more directly with manual labor, hearing disabilities were easier to disguise, and played a smaller role in affecting household income, which circumstances may explain the relatively small numbers of victims of this handicap that appear in the inventories. On the other hand, as Richard Hellie has suggested, the sound environment of eighteenth-century Russia no doubt caused fewer traumas to the human ear than does the urban world of the late twentieth century.(37)

A wide variety of additional illnesses appears in the city censuses, although most are difficult to decipher, given the vague terms used to describe them. Perhaps easiest to make out are those who suffered from "falling sickness" (paduchaia bolezn'), almost certainly an allusion to epilepsy.(38) Other illnesses avoided specific description: some victims the record reports simply as "sick" (skorben) or "ill" (khvor), while others were declared to be "in weakened condition" (v rozslablenii).(39) Three persons the records describe as "disfigured" (urodlivye), although they offer no comment on whether the condition was the result of birth or accident. Most of the rest suffered from ailments which, if the diagnosis was unsure, left visible signs which the inventory takers duly noted: the Riazan' resident, Timofei Prokof'ev syn Iur'ev, for example, though only twenty-one years old, was disabled by some kind of back malady (uvechen na spine skorb); a six-year-old Tula boy, Koz'ma Lukutin, suffered from a hernia (uvechen gryz'iu).(40) Other illnesses were less obvious, and must have depended upon self-reporting from the victims: for example, both Nikita Antonov syn Panov and one of his sons, residents of Tula, were reported to have had some kind of stomach disorder (uvechen zhivotnoiu skorbiiu); Vasilei Ievlev endured consumption; and the retired soldier Ivan Stepanov syn Trukov complained of a debilitating but vague "illness" (uvechen nedugom), perhaps simply the function of old age (Trukov was seventy).(41)

According to reports of the time, in nineteenth-century Russia the "permanent beggars" included "... cripples, blind people, imbeciles, and village fools."(42) Despite traditional conceptions of the poor and the definitions of the poor embedded in legislation of the era, it comes as some surprise that most of the disabled in Petrine-era towns were not counted among the impoverished who merited exemption from taxation or some other form of relief.(43) Certainly one finds the handicapped among the poor of Petrine society. For example, the Tula inventory recognized Nikifor Savel'ev syn Zalotorev as poor. Zalotorev was 49 in 1715, but, more importantly, he was blind, so his 37-year-old wife and three minor children shared his poverty. Vasilei Larin was also poor, but in addition he was 62 and senile, so he and his wife depended upon charity. Varfolomei Artem'ev syn Iurishchev was young (26), but he was tongue-tied and "weak-witted." As a result, he, his 20-year-old wife, their infant child, his lame brother, and his brother's wife were unable to bear their full share of the community's burden.(44) These households demonstrate that some disabled persons in Petrine Russia did belong to the poor. But such cases account for only a small fraction of all those described as poor. Several of the censuses fail to identify a single poor householder as disabled, and even among those that do, the disabled are not prominent. Overall, the disabled headed less than 5 percent of all poor households in the twelve censuses.

For the most part, those who endured physical or mental disability in Petrine Russia occupied their places in households which cared for them and made up for their lost labor.(45) For example, Fedor Artem'ev syn Kuplin, 50, and his wife Evdokeia, 35, who traded livestock in Belev, had plenty to worry about in 1718. In addition to their two-week-old twins, they also took care of a goddaughter who was six years old. But their biggest burden, no doubt, came from the orphan whom they had taken into their household: Evdokeia Markova doch' was 30, maimed (her right ann was dysfunctional), and mentally retarded. Nevertheless, the Kuplins were able to cope: not only did they have their own house, but they also enjoyed their own bathhouse as well as a stall in the butcher's row of the Belev market, and paid taxes like everyone else.(46) Another Belev resident, Grigorei Bezsonov, appeared in the records as a head-of-household. But at age 80 and blind, Grigorei had to depend upon his son Ivan, aged 45, and his family, which included a wife and two boys. In spite of the burden, the Bezsonovs prospered: they, too, had their own bathhouse, and operated a stall in the city market where they peddled paints and oils successfully enough to oblige them to pay more than six rubles' tax in 1718.(47) As these examples confirm, the disabled depended for the most part on the able-bodied, especially close kin.

All the same, the able-bodied must sometimes have struggled under the burden laid on them by aged and infirm kin. In Toropets few of the disabled escaped liability for taxation, but the case of Ivan Danilov syn Poletov's household was more serious than most. When the census takers arrived in 1710, Poletov reported himself as 80 years old and his wife as 85. One son, Matvei, aged 35, was lame, and cannot have contributed much to the household's income, which the remaining three brothers had to generate largely on their own by manual labor (chernaia rabota). Whether they were helped or further dragged down by the presence of a cousin, Stepan (45), and his family of a wife and two little children is unclear. Despite the unfavorable ratio of mouths to able hands, this household paid more than four rubles' tax.(48)

But most of those whom the government's agents recorded as "poor," and therefore exempt from taxes, did not earn their exemption by virtue of any physical disability. Their poverty had other explanations.

Age and Poverty

Many of those whom the population registers described as poor were elderly. What counted as old age in early modern Europe is a matter of some debate. Dante had asserted that old age began at 45, but Henry Cuffe, a seventeenth-century Englishman, judged old age to begin at 50. Richard Trexler, commenting on poor relief in Renaissance Florence, suggests that anyone over 40 was old.(49) In eighteenth-century France, increasing numbers of men and women were living past sixty, a phenomenon which helps explain the growing tolerance for the aged that David Troyansky found.(50)

We still have little firm evidence on life expectancy in early modern Russia, but it seems likely that contemporaries of Peter the Great could not have expected lives much longer than those enjoyed by their contemporaries in preindustrial Europe. In England, for example, for most of three centuries life expectancy at birth seems to have hovered at around 40 years. Nevertheless, a significant percentage of the population survived to age 60 or beyond; between 6.8 and 8.5 percent of the pre-modern English population was 60 or above, and in eighteenth-century France 7.2 percent was aged 60 or above; in Eguilles in 1810, nearly 11 percent of the population was at least sixty years of age.(51) A similar demographic regime prevailed in preindustrial Russia. Although detailed confirmation is still lacking, it seems likely that the men and women of Petrine Russia who made it past age 20 might expect on average another 30 or so years of life, like the nineteenth-century Russian serfs whom Steven Hoch has studied.(52) By this standard, any townsfolk who lived past 50 in eighteenth-century Russia had achieved old age.(53)

Many of the householders whom Petrine census agents classified as poor fell within, or came very close to, this age (see Table 4). The mean age for all poor and tax-exempt household heads in the twelve inventories was 50.2 years, with almost no difference registered between men and women. In individual towns, the mean age for males or females sometimes dipped below this threshold, but not by much. To be sure, some poor householders were very young indeed. Rodivon Larionov syn, for example, was only 15, but he was married, and, though he had no children, he did have at home his 14-year-old sister and another woman, who was blind.(54) Similarly, the orphaned children of Stepan Iur'ev syn Molosnikov maintained a household with the eldest, Natal'ia (18), at their head.(55) But such cases are unusual. Although the census evidence demonstrates that eighteenth-century Russians did not usually have a very firm grip on their age, in general the poor in eighteenth-century Russian towns were older than the population at large.(56)

Some of the elderly indigent resided in poorhouses (bogadel'ni).(57) The history of poorhouses in preindustrial Russia is not well-known. For some time, church institutions, especially monasteries and convents, had provided shelter for the poor, but there was still no comprehensive system when churchmen addressed the subject in council in the mid-sixteenth century.(58) A century later poorhouses of any sort were still rare. Although Russian tsars regularly and prominently engaged in face-to-face almsgiving, the Muscovite diplomat, A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, was among the first to endow a hospital for the poor in Pskov in the 1650s. Prince D. M. Pozharskii founded a poorhouse at about the same time, as did Prince Ofonasii Ivanovich Lobanov-Rostovskii. Even a well-off peasant, Vasilii Vasil'evich Muromtsev, established a poorhouse near Nizhnii Novgorod in the 1660s.(59) Soon thereafter a government bureau came into being to build almshouses; by 1680 a handful of poorhouses were in operation in Moscow, sheltering about 400 inmates, but their numbers soon multiplied rapidly. Patriarch Ioakim, who seems to have taken a very active interest in the poor, required all churches to send an annual fee to the Patriarch's treasury for the construction of Moscow poorhouses and to feed their inmates. The initiative paid off handsomely: in 1712 Moscow could boast ninety-eight poorhouses in which almost 3,000 individuals lived and received alms. A decade later Peter attempted to compel all churches to build poorhouses, each so far as local means would allow.(60)

Table 4

Mean Age of Heads of Household (HOH), Poor and Tax-Exempt
Households,(*) Early Eighteenth-Century Russian Towns

Town                Male HOH     Female HOH     All HOH

Belev                 45.6          37.0         42.8
Borovsk               52.1          52.7         52.4
Maloiaroslavets       46.0          57.2         54.0
Riazan'               43.9          61.8         46.4
Toropets              47.9          49.5         48.5
Tula 1715             51.0          48.0         49.0
Tula 1720             56.9          50.0         56.1
Uglich                50.6          48.8         50.1
Ustiuzhna             51.7          53.4         52.2
Viatka 1710           46.1          51.9         48.9
Viatka 1717           53.3          49.3         50.8
Zaraisk               53.9          53.9         53.9

OVERALL MEAN          50.2          50.3         50.2

* Does not include poorhouses (bogadel'ni).

SOURCE: Population inventories (see fn. 11).

These institutions seem to have functioned as a shelter mainly for the aged, the orphaned, the disabled, spinsters and widows. A 1701 law mentions the poorhouses in the Patriarch's court for "the sick and aged who cannot walk to collect alms."(61) A surviving inventory of the poorhouse in early eighteenth-century Uglich confirms that Petrine poorhouses catered to the sick and elderly. The Uglich inventory counts fifty-seven inmates, almost two-thirds of whom were female, most of advanced age or seriously ill. Gavrilo Alekseev syn Solokin was eighty, and took shelter in the poorhouse because of his age (za starostiiu). The widow Ustin'ia Selivertova was fifty-five, but had lived in the poorhouse for ten years because of some undefined illness of the head. Six-year-old Andrei Fedorov they took in became "his mother [had] died."(62)

Even without identifying why individuals were housed in the urban poorhouses, census data confirm that poorhouses served mainly women, the elderly, and orphans. The 1710 Viatka census, for example, reports that in the town's single poorhouse there lived 50 widows, 21 children brought into the poorhouse by their mothers, and 5 maidens.(63) The age data for Viatka are not very reliable, especially for females in the oldest cohorts, but it is clear nonetheless that most women entered the poorhouse because of advanced age: 29 of the widows laid claim to being 50 or more years old, 19 of them over 60.(64) When census takers returned to Viatka a few years later, they found fewer residents in the poorhouse: only 42 women and 3 small children. Perhaps as many as 9 of the women are described as blind, but advanced age was the most widely-shared characteristic.(65) The average age of the whole group was 55, but the presence of several women in their 20s significantly affected the mean age. The oldest resident, Dar'ia, reported her age as 100; 5 others are listed as having been in their 80s, and 8 were in their 70s. Alone, aged, and almost all probably widowed (the record specifically identifies one inmate as a "maiden," implying that none of the others was), these women depended upon the poorhouse for survival.(66)

Zaraisk boasted a similar institution, although it catered to men. The inventory reports that outside the city walls there stood a place for the poor, fashioned, it would seem, out of individual huts (izby bogadelennykh). A family of four lodged in one such hut, but fifteen men occupied the remaining places; a few, like Ivan Osipov, aged 16, were young, but most were of advanced age, as the mean age (51) indicates. Ivan Pavlov was the eldest at 90, but Davyd Petrov (88) kept him company, as did Fedor Ivanov (80) and Kostentin Alekseev (70).(67)

Whatever their value to the aged and ill citizens of Petrine Russia, the poorhouses of the time could not have accommodated all who needed them. By the time that Peter died Russia could boast fewer than 100 poorhouses, mostly in Moscow and Petersburg, that served 4,411 persons. These institutions of relief must have sunk from view in an empire whose inhabitants at the time numbered between fifteen and eighteen million.(68)

Women and Poverty

It is sometimes said that poverty is sex-selective, that women far more often than men fall into its clutches.(69) Sixteenth-century surveys of the poor and impotent" in western European communities consistently featured more than twice as many women as men, a ratio that overwhelmed the numerical advantage that women held over men in the oldest age cohorts.(70) The census of the poor taken in 1570 in Norwich, for example, found substantially more women than men, and fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florentine charities normally served many more females than males.(71) In early eighteenth-century France, women who entered charitable institutions occasionally "outnumbered men by as much as twenty to one, though in the majority of institutions the figure was closer to four or five to three."(72)

In the towns of early modern Russia, too, women were more numerous than men, as the sex ratios show: the ten inventoried towns held about nine men for every ten women. Of course, the ratios were not the same everywhere; in places like Toropets, a frontier town where soldiers were based, men and women accounted for almost identical shares of the total, but in Viatka, far from the center and without a garrison, there were only about four-fifths as many men as women.(73) Consequently, if poverty afflicted men and women at about the same rates, the ratio should hold steady. In fact, however, not only do poor women outnumber poor men in these towns, but they do so in proportions which indicate that in Petrine Russia, too, impecuniousness was more likely to be a woman's fate than a man's (see Table 5). Despite the obviously different criteria applied in various towns by government officials, more than 55 percent of all persons whom the censuses describe as "poor" were female.(74) And if the overall sex ratio in the ten towns represented 90 males for every 100 females, among those whom the inventories called "poor," the frequency of men was even lower - about 80 males for every 100 females.(75) Consequently, even if women's share in poverty in Petrine Russia did not match the swollen proportions reported in towns elsewhere in early modern Europe, Russian townswomen early in the eighteenth century did feel the heavy hand of poverty more often than did men.

One category of the poor seemed apparent to most of the inventory takers in these central Russian towns - widowed heads of household, especially if they had minor children at hand. As Daniel Scott Smith observed, "women who were particularly likely to head households in preindustrial England and America also were disproportionately prone to be impoverished."(76) For the most part, widows were the outliers in patriarchal society, and did not own enough property to sustain households on their own.(77) Consequently, almost everywhere in early modern Europe, households headed by widows constituted a sizable proportion of all poor households. In sixteenth-century Lyon, for example, about a fifth of the households receiving charity were headed by widows; similar percentages prevailed in Norfolk communities a century later, and in one English parish in the seventeenth century, the proportion of widow-headed households rose dramatically throughout the century, so that by 1700 more than 40 percent of all households on relief had widows at their head.(78) In short, women - especially widows - represented a disproportionately large share of the poor in early modern Europe.(79)

Table 5

Occupants of Poor Households by Sex, Early Eighteenth-Century
Russian Towns

Town                Male     Female

Belev                 20       22
Borovsk              100      130
Maloiaroslavets        5       16
Riazan'               89       81
Toropets             217      230
Tula 1715            204      273
Tula 1720             72       87
Uglich               642      802
Ustiuzhna            171      196
Viatka 1710          187      298
Viatka 1717           87       92
Zaraisk               40       48

TOTALS              1834     2275 (55.4%)

SOURCE: Population inventories (see fn. 11).

The widow's lot was not an easy one in Russia either. Although far from helpless, a widow at the head of a household, especially if minor children were still resident there, might encounter real hardship if no kin - her husband's or her own - offered help.(80) Evidence culled from the Petrine urban population counts confirms that widows often fell into poverty (see Table 6). In Toropets, for example, widowed female heads of household accounted for almost 40 percent of all poor households, but more than half of poor households among the trading and craft population. The 1717 count in Viatka identified relatively few households as impoverished, but widows headed more than half of them. Inasmuch as a large number of additional widows resided in the poorhouse there, even this figure significantly understates widows' share in Viatka's poverty. In Borovsk and Zaraisk widows headed nearly half the poor households. Overall, almost a third of all poor households in these ten towns had widows at their head.

Examining the particular households that widows superintended reveals some contours of their plight. Matrena Stepanova doch' Nechaeva, for example, was widowed and already in old age (74) when the census-takers came to Borovsk in 1718. Her household was surprisingly large, including a total of eight persons: Nechaeva, her widowed daughter-in-law, Akulina, Akulina's three minor children, and three other children, also minors and apparently the offspring of a deceased child. Excepting the widow and her 31-year-old daughter-in-law, the average age in the household was about seven, no doubt, explaining why Nechaeva paid no taxes.(81) The situation of another widow was even more compelling. Irina Stepanova doch' Zeleishikova was 60 at the time of the 1710 Viatkainventory. Her household numbered nine persons, most of them her disabled children. Five of her adult children lived with her, but four of them were "deaf and dumb": three sons, aged 42, 40, and 23, and a daughter aged 22. One of the disabled sons was married to an 18-year-old; another daughter, apparently not impaired like the others, lived at home, her husband being away in military service (soldatka), but her two children probably limited her contribution to the household income. The widow was in dire straits.(82)

Table 6

Poor Households Headed by Widows, Early Eighteenth-Century Russian
Towns

Town               Total No. Poor    No. Poor Households    Percent
                   Households(*)     Headed by Widows(#)

Belev                   12                     2              16.7
Borovsk                 50                    22              44.0
Maloiaroslavets          7                     5              71.4
Riazan'                 33                     5              15.2
Toropets               124                    47              37.9
Tula 1715              110                    34              30.9
Tula 1720               35                     3               8.6
Uglich                 278                    79              28.4
Ustiuzhna               87                    19              21.8
Viatka 1710             81                    31              38.3
Viatka 1717             29                    16              55.2
Zaraisk                 24                    10              41.7

TOTAL                  870                   273              31.4

* Total does not include poorhouses (bogadel'ni).

# Includes only those women specifically identified in the record as
widow (vdova), although each town included households headed by
women who might have been widowed but whom the record does not
specifically note as having been widowed.

SOURCE: Population inventories (see fn. 11).

Mar'ia Eliseeva doch' Kutavina, however, was more typical of those to whom the authorities showed mercy. Exempt from paying taxes in Borovsk, where she lived in someone else's house, the 49-year-old woman, whom the records recognized as "poor," had lost her husband, and was obliged to provide for her six-year-old son, Vasilei, and two minor daughters, Tat'iana, aged 11, and Ustin'ia, aged 8. In Russia's patriarchal culture, Kutavina had slim hopes of gaining the income necessary to support her offspring, and evidently had no kin to take in her and her children. Her only hope lay in charity.(83)

Sometimes widows had to devise innovative living arrangements. Ulita Semenova doch' Bogomolova, for instance, shared a household with another widow, Mar'ia Trefilova doch' Labzina; although Labzina lived in a separate widow, Mar'ia Trefilova doch' Labzina; although Labzina lived in a separate hut, each woman had four children. The two widows together, therefore, had to answer for a total of eight children, the oldest of which was fifteen. Their circumstance gained them exemption from taxation, but living together no doubt helped as well.(84) The household of Mar'ia Vasil'eva doch' illustrates another dimension of the problem. Never married and old herself, Mar'ia Vasil'eva shared her household with a widow to whom she was apparently not related, but who had no one else to turn to. Although the two women were healthy and had no minors to feed and care for, they nevertheless could not avoid impoverishment, and combined their resources.(85)

Widows also sometimes took refuge in other persons' households. Katerina Pavlova, for example, moved into the Viatka household of Sergei Ivanov syn Isupov. Just thirty-three in 1710, Isupov was nevertheless able to offer shelter to many: over and above his wife, three minor children and the widow, he welcomed a nephew, a sister, and a cousin. Furthermore, Isupov had a servant in his employ; although the census cannot prove it, it may be that the pauper Katerina Pavlova shared the domestic labor with the servant as compensation for her room and board.(86) Another Viatka widow fell into a similar situation: Fetin'ia Afanas'eva doch' and her 14-year-old son joined a multiple-family household of sixteen. Iakov Ivanov syn Khokhriakov shared his household with two grown sons, each of whom had a full family. Like Isupov, Khokhriakov also had a servant girl living with his family in addition to the poor widow.(87) Though hardly an ideal arrangement, a large, prosperous household did offer indigent widows shelter and at least partial protection from their financial troubles.

By no means did all urban widows live in such populous circumstances, however. Among Zaraisk townsfolk most widows who fell into poverty lived alone, and had no claim on kin for assistance, nor did they have any dependents to worry about. Mavra Semenova doch' Koliagina, for example, was seventy, impoverished, and lived alone. Other widows in Zaraisk had also entered advanced age, having outlived spouses, offspring, and probably more distant kin as well.(88) Such women, isolated from their natal families and deprived of mates and children, had few alternatives to life alone if no institutional care was at hand.(89)

Occasionally, however, kin did step forward to provide assistance. Aleksei Plotnikov was a musketeer stationed in Toropets. In 1710, Plotnikov was on service and not at home when the census officials arrived at his house. His year-old wife greeted the men, and proceeded to identify among the household residents her husband's 90-year-old, widowed mother, Mar'ia, whom the record simply designates as "poor".(90) Another Toropets musketeer shouldered an even heavier load. Dmitrii Men'shoi Rubakin was also on service, and therefore absent when the government's agents knocked on his door. He, too, was caring for his mother, Praskov'ia, whom the census identifies as 60 and "poor." In addition, Rubakin provided a roof for his 70-year-old father and his 12-year-old sister. His home was a refuge, then, for the poor, both young and old.(91)

Semen Fedorov syn Skorlygin, a cobbler in Toropets, also stepped forward with help. Skorlygin was not especially prosperous, as his modest taxes indicate. Still, even though he had his own family to care for - a wife and a baby daughter who was just six months old in 1710 - he sheltered other kin, both his own and his wife's. Among his household one finds Skorlygin's brother-in-law, his widowed mother-in-law (aged sixty), and her aged brother, together with his own elder sister, "dumb, deaf and poor," as the record points out.(92) No doubt some of these burdens were accepted with less enthusiasm than others, but at least all residents of this household shared some kinship link, which might explain why Skorlygin was feeding them. The same consideration may have motivated Demid Ivanov syn Seletskoi, sixty, to accept into his already rather large household (which included his wife, his son and five grandchildren) his widowed sister Avdot'ia. Skorlygin and Seletskoi were both responding to claims of kinship in sheltering aged and disabled relatives, especially widowed and elderly women kin.(93)

Orphans

Traditional definitions of poverty regularly featured orphans, but the Petrine urban population surveys contain only the faintest traces of poor orphans.(94) As noted above, the church had earlier made some attempt to shelter illegitimate children. There is even evidence that Metropolitan Iov of Novgorod in the seventeenth century founded a home for orphans, but the size and effectiveness of this first venture into orphan relief are not clear. The greatest impact of Iov's initiative seems to have been on the consciousness of the young sovereign and his government. When some years later Peter issued new legislation which only in passing called for the founding of homes for illegitimate children, he made specific reference to "the example of the bishop of Novgorod." Subsequent decrees of 1712, 1714, and 1715 repeated the sovereign's intentions, reflecting perhaps his intense interest in the subject - or his inability to get this project off the ground.(95)

With one exception, the laws were brief and short on the means by which localities might fund such institutions, so that it is hardly surprising that their immediate impact seems to have been slight. In the decades after Peter's death in 1725, from time to time the state encountered anew the problem of orphaned and illegitimate children, ultimately declining to accept the mandate that Peter had imposed on the state to care for them. By the 1740s, state care facilities were formally freed from caring for illegitimates and orphans, and only in 1764 did Russia establish an authentic foundling home to receive orphans.(96)

Whether the state cared for them or not, orphans were a fact of life in early eighteenth-century Russia, and, as noted above, they appear in the population inventories undertaken between 1710 and 1720. Population simulations indicate that in a high mortality environment like that of early modern Russia, "Kinship cannot have been a finally reliable resource for those in trouble ..., if only because there were always cases when no kin at all existed in a crucial category." But other evidence suggests that even if some categories of kinship - such as parents or brothers and sisters - were subject to the ravages of high mortality, a high fertility environment will produce large numbers of kin, especially cousins, aunts and uncles.(97) In this context, the question becomes not so much demographic as economic and moral: would relatives take orphans in?

The Russian population inventories confirm that at least occasionally orphans, like the maimed and retarded Evdokeia Markova doch', did find shelter with relatives. A few others, like the six-year-old Andrei Fedorov who had lost his mother in Uglich, ended up in poorhouses, obliged, no doubt, to live there because no kin survived or none could or would extend any help. If the orphans were of sufficient age and means, they might join forces to run their own household, as the children of Stepan Molosnikov evidently did. All these occasions appear in examples already cited above.(98)

But the censuses give other hints about the fate of orphans in early modern Russia. Ivan and Anton Ivanovy deti Grudinkiny were hide tanners in Toropets, and paid a healthy tax of more than ten rubles per annum. Each had a relatively young and apparently able wife, and Ivan had two young children - a son just seven weeks old and a daughter who was three. Over and above these six, however, the Grudinkins also sheltered their widowed mother, aged sixty, as other householders sometimes did. What distinguished the Grudinkin household was that it also included someone else's child, probably an orphan. They had taken in four-year-old Gerasim, evidently as a charitable gesture (vziat' u nikh Boga radi Gerasim).(99) Il'ia Grigor'ev syn Novinskoi, eighty years old and widowed, lived in Toropets with his two sons, their wives, and children; altogether, eight persons lived in this household, one of whom was elderly and three children of whom were less than five years old. All the same, Novinskoi accepted into his household Osip, a ten-year-old who apparently had no kin relationship with him (Khrista radi vziat' Osip).(100) Matvei Vasil'ev Telegin, on the other hand, found a place for his kinsman. Although he had his own family to care for, this Toropets householder nevertheless accepted into his home his orphaned nephew (Boga radi zhivet plemiannik).(101)

But these are only faint traces of the destinies to which orphans in these towns were subject. To the Petrine census takers, orphans apparently did not belong to or did not represent a significant proportion of the poor.

Conclusion

The population inventories of these ten Russian towns confirm that government officials took a distinctive, if familiar, view of poverty. Although past generations had grown accustomed to consigning cripples, the insane, and the chronically ill to the poor, the disabled in these towns accounted for but a small fraction of those whom the censuses regarded as poor. For the most part, Russian townsfolk of this era seem to have accepted into their households their disabled elders or offspring, and absorbed the financial and labor loss implicit in that decision. The aged, however, often had no kin to whom to turn. In an era of high mortality which no doubt claimed staggering numbers of the young, the elderly lived an increasingly isolated life.(102) Whether they took their charity in poorhouses or received a dole at home or on the streets, the aged dominated the demography of poverty as revealed in these censuses.

Women, too, endured more than their share of penury. In these towns, poor women outnumbered poor men by about five to four, a proportion which significantly exceeds the overall sex ratio. Although the evidence is not yet in hand, it seems likely that women's longer life expectancy combined with their inferior economic and legal standing to expose them more often to the vagaries of poverty.(103) In widowhood, they felt the full force of their situation, and it is scarcely to be wondered at that widows headed nearly a third of all poor households. The censuses confirm that occasionally a widow sought relief by combining resources with another widow; still others joined themselves to rich households where they probably had to work for their shelter. Where no other options were available, elderly women might enter poorhouses, there becoming subject to a new regime of charity. All these permutations of women's poverty Petrine officials were willing to recognize.

Orphans, too, played their part in this drama. Their role is more difficult to discern from the population surveys, which make only bare allusions to them taking refuge in institutions or in the homes of the healthy and wealthy. It seems likely that, like the disabled and widowed, those deprived of parents had to depend for the most part upon kin who would take them in as an act of charity. Even if uncles or other relatives exploited orphans for their labor, as some kinsfolk no doubt did, there were few alternatives in a world in which charity remained relatively unorganized.

In the main, therefore, it is the "structural" poor - whose claim to assistance the Petrine state was willing to recognize - who dominate the pictures that emerge from these censuses: the aged, women, and the orphaned. The disabled, however, do not represent a very important proportion of the poor in Russia, government asseverations about protecting them notwithstanding. Peter I and his government did not find it convenient to expand the ranks of the poor, and the disabled, consequently, were not immune to the government's call to service - to forced labor if not to war. Even abandoned children awakened official solicitude more for their potential labor than for the unfortunate condition in which they found themselves.(104) One can hardly wonder, then, at the relatively low proportion of the urban populations that the censuses characterized as poor.

Despite these prejudices, the urban populations of this era also contained other poor whose route to penury remains difficult to ascertain. Able-bodied, supported by spouse or others, young and healthy, these poor seem to have entered poverty almost by accident. No doubt war affected many households in this age, and perhaps other vectors of impoverishment were also at work. But the population inventories by themselves cannot explain why those who were young, healthy, and burdened by few dependents became impoverished. Roman Afanas'ev syn Provatorov, for example, was twenty and apparently healthy in 1718, and he had a 21-year-old wife, who also gave evidence of no disability; there were no children or aged dependents to consume Provatorov's income; all the same, he was deemed poor.(105) Roman Provatorov evidently belonged to that other group of poor who were not chronically and irretrievably impoverished, but were temporarily disadvantaged by forces over which they had no control. Their misfortune was that their numbers increased in this era, and everywhere, including certainly Russia, governments directed increasing attention to them as they struggled to control expenditures by reforming charity.

Department of History Grinnell, IA 50112-0806

ENDNOTES

I presented earlier versions of this paper at the Fifth World Congress for Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, August 6-11, 1995, and at a colloquium for the Department of History, University of California, Riverside, March 13, 1996. My thanks to both audiences for their suggestions and comments, and particularly to Paul Dukes, Richard Hellie, Valerie Kivelson, and Cathy Potter for detailed comments.

1. Stuart Woolf, The Poor in Western Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London, 1986), 6-39; Anat Feinberg, "The Representation of the Poor in Elizabethan and Stuart Drama," Literature and History 12 (1986): 152-53; Lee Palmer Wandel, Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli's Zurich (Cambridge, 1990), 150-52. John Henderson offers a slightly different series of distinctions: endemic, epidemic, and episodic poverty (Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence [Oxford, 1994], 245-46). For some promising, though challenging, proposals for better defining the poor in the late medieval and early modern era, see W. P. Blockmans and W. Prevenier, "Poverty in Flanders and Brabant from the Fourteenth to the Mid-Sixteenth Century: Sources and Problems," Acta Historiae Neerlandicae 10 (1978): 20-39; and Wim Blockmans, "Circumscribing the Concept of Poverty," in Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe, ed. Thomas Riis (Sijthoff, 1981), 39-45. See also Paola Subacchi, "Conjunctural Poor and Structural Poor: Some Preliminary Considerations on Poverty, the Life-Cycle and Economic Crisis in Early-Nineteenth-Century Italy," Continuity and Change 8 (1993): 65-86; and John Henderson and Richard Wall, "Introduction," in Poor Women and Children in the European Past, eds. John Henderson and Richard Wall (London, 1994), 3-4. On the history of poverty, see Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, 1986); Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolokowska (Oxford, 1994); Robert Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994); and, for a slightly later time, Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France 1750-1789 (Oxford, 1974). On the connection of poverty to economic change, see especially Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe, trans. James Coonan (Atlantic Highlands, 1979).

2. The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, ed., trans. Carolyn Johnston Pouncy (Ithaca, 1994), 70, 179; Domostroi, ed. V. V. Kolosov (Moscow, 1990), 39, 105.

3. Pelling, "Healing the Sick Poor: Social Policy and Disability in Norwich 15501640," Medical History 29(1985): 117, 136-37; Walter, "The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England," in Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, eds. John Walter, Roger Schofield (Cambridge, 1989), 126.

4. "Poverty and Politics in Salisbury 1597-1666," in Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500-1700, eds. Peter Clark and Paul Slack (Toronto, 1972), 165-77; see also Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), 4, 37-40.

5. Joyce Youings, Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1984), 75. For reports of other towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Paul A. Slack, "The Reactions of the Poor to Poverty in England c. 1500-1750," in Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe II, ed. Thomas Riis, Odense University Studies in History and Social Sciences 100 (1986): 25. Keith Wrightson and David Levine report that in seventeenth-century Essex about a third of all households were exempted from taxes because of chronic poverty (Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 [New York, 1979], 34).

6. Wandel, Always Among Us, 11; Thomas Robisheaux, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1989), 72.

7. Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo (Cambridge, 1983), 113-14.

8. Cissie C. Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 1640-1789 (Baltimore, 1976), ix. Jean Meyer finds even larger percentages of the Breton urban populations of the time as poor ("Pauvrete et assistance dans les villes bretonnes de l'ancien regime," Actes du 97e congres national des societes savantes , vol. 1: Assistance et assistes de 1610 a nos jours [Paris, 1977], 448-49, 451, 459), but in Lille the average was close to 50 percent (Louis Trenard, "Pauvrete, charite, assistance a Lille 1708-1790," ibid., 475).

9. Carlo M. Cipolla, "Economic Fluctuations, the Poor, and Public Policy (Italy, 16th and 17th Centuries)," in Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe, 65-73. Determining the number of poor is not, of course, equal to the number who received assistance of some kind. Davis observes that studies of different locales in early modern Europe all demonstrate that something like 5 percent of the urban population was receiving relief (Natalie Zemon Davis, "Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy," in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France [Stanford, 1975], 63-64); Fairchilds reports that in Aix about 20 percent received some form of public assistance (Poverty, 13).

10. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii (hereafter PSZ), 45 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1830), vol. 4, no. 2253.

11. For a detailed description of the sources and full bibliographic references, see Daniel H. Kaiser, "Urban Household Composition in Early Modern Russia," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1992-93): 44-58. For an analysis of some other aspects of the data reported in these censuses, see Daniel H. Kaiser and Peyton Engel, "Time- and Age-Awareness in Early Modern Russia," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993): 824-39; D. Kaizer (Kaiser), "Vozrast pri brake i raznitsa v vozraste suprugov v gorodakh Rossii v nachale XVIII v.," in Sosloviia i gosudarstwennaia vlast' v Rossii. XV - seredina XIX vv., 2 pts. (Moscow, 1994), 2: 225-37.

12. Arcadius Kahan, "Natural Calamities and Their Effect upon the Food Supply in Russia (An Introduction to a Catalogue)," Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas n.s. 16 (1968): 372; Davis, "Poor Relief," 59.

13. For a classic, if hostile, assessment of this aspect of Peter's reign, see Vasili Klyuchevsky, Peter the Great, trans. Liliana Archibald (NY, 1958), 157-80.

14. David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, 1988), 21.

15. Ivan IV, addressing the 1550-51 Church Council, maintained that while the genuinely poor suffered, "men and women who are only slightly infirm are purchasing their admission [to poorhouses], while the poor, the crippled, the feeble and the aged suffer in wretchedness from hunger, cold, heat, nakedness and every sort of affliction, have no place to lay their heads" (as translated by Jack Kollmann, "The Moscow Stoglav ["Hundred Chapters"]Church Council of 1551," Ph.D. dissertation, 2 vols., University of Michigan, 1978, vol. 1, p. 561). Resulting resolutions demanded the registration of all poorhouse inmates, and all who were able to work were to be obliged to labor (Stoglav [St. Petersburg, 1863; reprint ed., Letchworth, 1971], 46-47, 226-27). See also I. Prythov, Nishchie na sviatoi Rusi, 2d ed. (Kazan', 1913), 51-53; reprinted in idem, 26 Moskovskikh prorokov, iurodivykh, dur i durakov i drugie trudy po russkoi istorii i emografii (St. Petersburg- Moscow, 1996), 135-136; and Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1996), 28.

16. As translated by Cathy Jean Potter, "The Russian Church and the Politics of Reform in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century," Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1993, p. 352. See also Lindenmeyr, Poverty, 29.

17. PSZ, vol. 3, no. 1424; Pryzhov, Nishchie, 53-54; idem, 26 Moskovskikh prorokov, 136. In 1694 Peter reissued this law, altered to include clerics who sought alms. To improve compliance, Peter demanded that the decree be circulated among all the Moscow troops, be written into the city guards' book, and announced publicly throughout Moscow's streets (PSZ, vol. 3, no. 1489). In fact, foreigners in Muscovy in the seventeenth century reported that self-mutilation was common among beggars who hoped thereby to improve their take. Some beggars combined this ruse with kidnapping. Once having stolen a child, they proceeded to break an arm or leg, or else gouge out an eye; those who survived these torments the beggars then took with them in pursuit of handouts, hoping that the disfigured children would increase the alms they collected ("Puteshestvie v Moskoviiu Barona Avgustina Maierberga ... v 1661 godu," Chteniia v obshcheswe istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete, 1873, bk. 3, 92-93). My thanks to Marshall Poe for pointing out this reference to me.

18. PSZ, vol. 4, no. 2470.

19. PSZ, vol. 5, no. 3172. S. M. Solov'ev unaccountably relates this measure to December, 1705 (Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 15 vols. [Moscow, 1962-66], vol. 8, 319). See also PSZ, vol. 6, no. 3676. As Lindenmeyr points out, the Russian tradition of generous charity collided with Petrine law (Poverty, 18-21). For illustrations of Russian charity, see Pryzhov, Nishchie, 47-50; idem, 26 Moskovskikh prorokov, 132-34; and I. E. Zabelin, Domashnii byt russkikh tsarits v XVI i XVII stoletiiakh (Novosibirsk, 1992), 147-149.

20. Opisanie dokumentov i del khraniashchikhsia v arkhive sviateishego pravitel'stvuiushchego Sinoda, 30 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1868-1917) (hereafter ODD), vol. 1, no. 612. Lindenmeyr, in surveying Petrine policy toward the poor, attributes these measures to the influence of mercantilism on state policy (Poverty, 27-31). One finds similar hostility toward begging elsewhere, including early eighteenth-century Hamburg, where the Rat in 1725 attempted to eliminate "dangerous beggars" from the city and reserve alms only for the truly needy; the rest were to be assigned work (Mary Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg, 1712-1830 [New York, 1990], 83). Likewise, a 1716 Piedmont law proscribed begging and almsgiving in Turin, and ordered the poor to present themselves at the Ospedale di Carita where they were to be examined on their worthiness of relief; anyone subsequently found begging could be punished (Sandra Cavallo, "Patterns of Poor Relief and Patterns of Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Evidence of the Turin Ospedale di Carita," Continuity and Change 5 [1990]: 67).

21. Ivan Pososhkov publicized these same views in his "Book on Poverty and Wealth," calling on the government to put idlers to work, teaching them spinning, bleaching, etc. (I. T. Pososhkov, Kniga o skudosti i bogatstve i drugie sochineniia [Moscow, 1951], 105109, 146-47). A 1718 provision that regulated city life, including provision for guards, fire-fighting capacity, and more, also decreed that local authorities should interrogate wanderers and the poor, and those who could labor were to be put to work. Another law from that same year, always excluding the aged and maimed who were supposed to be institutionalized in poorhouses, called for collecting able-bodied beggars, and sending them back home; there they could expect food and clothing from the families, their lords, etc., but in return they were to work (PSZ, vol. 5, nos. 3203, 3213).

22. PSZ, vol. 7, no. 4522, as translated in Evgenii V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great. Progress Through Coercion in Russia, trans. John T. Alexander (Armonk, 1993), 229. I am not aware that the results of this inquiry survive.

23. Polnoe sobranie postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii po vedomstvu pravoslavnogo ispovedaniia Rossiiskoi imperii, 14 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1872-1916) (hereafter PSP), vol. 1, no. 282; PSZ, vol. 4, no. 2249. See also ODD, vol. 1, no. 612.

24. PSZ, vol. 6, no. 3945. These measures had been anticipated in the 1721 Statute on Town Administration, which had entrusted to the new magistracy "the poor, the ill, the maimed, and other have-nots ... widows, orphans, and foreigners" (ibid., no. 3708). A series of laws had appeared between 1712 and 1720 to give shape to the newly-decreed hospitals. In 1712 Peter had required the construction of hospitals in all the provinces of Russia for "the most seriously maimed who can no longer work nor care for themselves and [also] for the aged" and illegitimate children (PSZ, vol. 4, nos. 2467, 2477). Within two years, Peter embroidered on his original decrees, this time requiring churches to build hospitals for illegitimates and their mothers (ibid., vol. 5, nos. 2856, 2953). A 1720 law repeated this requirement specifically for Moscow (ibid., vol. 6, no. 3502).

25. PSZ, vol. 4, no. 2249; ibid., vol. 5, no. 3409; ibid., vol. 6, no. 3576; ibid., vol. 7, no. 4450. These regulations appear not to have had complete and instantaneous enforcement. For example, although early in the seventeenth century the Uspenskii monastery in Staritsa had cells for six poor persons who lived off the monastery's generosity, only beginning in 1731 did the monastery begin to receive military invalids, to whom the clerics continued to minister until 1764 when the state seized the monastery's land (Arsenii Zavialov, Istoricheskoe opisanie staritskogo uspenskogo monastyria [Tver', 1896], 58, 70; my thanks to Ann Kleimola for pointing out this reference to me). Similarly, a measure of 1758 provided for 119 retired soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and corporals to be sent to poorhouses (Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv goroda Moskvy, f. 203, op. 753, d. 1112; my thanks to Elise Wirtschafter for sharing this material with me).

26. Anisimov, Reforms, 227-28.

27. On foreigners' reports about the widespread poverty of Petrine Russia, see L. N. Semenova, Ocherki istorii byta i kul'turnoi zhizni Rossii. Pervaia polovina XVIII v. (Leningrad, 1982), 244. In contemporary Hamburg, where a similarly draconian war on beggary was underway, only 3.2 percent of the population belonged to the registered poor (Lindemann, Hamburg, 84).

28. Wandel, Always Among Us, 77-123; Fairchilds, Poverty, 113-15; Jutte, Poverty, 2, 14.

29. Jutte, Poverty, 23. Margaret Pelling found in sixteenth-century Norwich "a consistent level of disability among the poor throughout adult life" ("Illness Among the Poor in an Early Modern English Town: The Norwich Census of 1570," in Charity and the Poor in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, special issue of Continuity and Change 3:2 [1988]: 282).

30. For example, the 1715 census of Tula found that 7.3 percent of all households held at least one person who was seriously disabled, whereas five years later inventory-takers identified only 2 percent of Tula's households as including anyone with a serious disability. Counts of other towns include similar variations. Few studies of poverty report the percentage of the disabled, so it is difficult to know how exceptional the Russian figures are. Margaret Pelling points out that in late sixteenth-century Norwich the disabled poor constituted about 1.5 percent of the English population of that city (Pelling, "Illness," 278-83), although this figure does not include the non-poor disabled; elsewhere she notes that about 9 percent of the adult poor (16 years of age and older) in Norwich were sick and disabled, and another 1.5 percent were "past work" ("Healing," 120). But in late eighteenth-century Amiens, a third or more of poor heads of household were seriously disabled, and a quarter of the adult poor had some significant handicap (Charles Engrand, "Pauperisme et condition ouvriere dans la seconde moitie du XVIIIe siecle: L'exemple Amienois," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 29 [1982]: 399).

31. "Lame" was also the most common term employed in identifying the disabled poor in Norwich (Pelling, "Illness," 281). In eighteenth-century Amiens, injuries of the arm and leg were almost as usual, both of them together accounting for about as many cases as those simply judged "infirme" (Engrand, "Pauperisme," 400).

32. Seventeenth-century Muscovite law punished a wide array of criminal offenses with maiming. For example, a slave who plotted the homicide of his lord might have his hand amputated, as would a scribe who feloniously altered a trial transcript (The Muscovite Law Code [Ulozhenie] of 1649, part 1: Text and Translation, trans., ed. Richard Hellie [Irvine, 1988], 22.8 [p. 220], 10.12 [p. 25]); numerous other offenses might earn the amputation of a hand or arm (ibid., 3.4, 5, 9 [pp. 8-9], 7.29 [p. 17], 10.106, 199, 251 [pp. 37, 65, 77-78]). Similarly, military servitors often complained of maiming as reason for not reporting to service (ibid., 7.17 [p. 14]), so it is not difficult to believe that Muscovite urban populations included many persons missing a limb.

33. Of course, there is no reason to think that males in Muscovy were at greater risk of congenital impairments than were females. Although extant records document the generous abuse - including maiming - to which women were subject within their households, in patriarchal Muscovy, where violence was common, women likely experienced street and community violence less often than did men. Robert Garland reports that among excavated Greek skeletons that exhibit fractures, four out of five belong to males (The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World [Ithaca, 1995], 19).

34. Pelling notes that the blind and "almost" blind comprised a minute proportion of all the poor in Norwich - just 10 out of 2,359 ("Healing," 120), but Charles Engrand found that in eighteenth-century Amiens the blind and those with serious vision problems constituted about a quarter of all the disabled and about 7 percent of the poor, although the weaving trades of Amiens probably increased the number of vision problems ("Pauperisme," 399-400). Jutte, who specially examined diets of the poor in early modern western Europe, raised the possibility of avitiminosis as a cause of blindness, but was unable to prove the connection between blindness and diet in that era (Poverty, 24, 72-77; idem, "Diets in Welfare Institutions and in Outdoor Poor Relief in Early Modern Western Europe," Ethnologia Europaea 16, no. 2 [1988]: 117-35).

35. Viatka. Materialy dlia istorii goroda XVII i XVIII stoletii (Moscow, 1887), 60. Julie V. Brown provides a brief survey of mental illness and its treatment in Russia, devoting the great bulk of her attention to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ("Society Responses to Mental Disorders in Prerevolutionary Russia," in The Disabled in the Soviet Union: Past and Present, Theory and Practice, eds. William O. McCagg and Lewis Siegelbaum [Pittsburgh, 1989],13-37). By the end of the sixteenth century in Norwich, the insane were regularly institutionalized, often to share quarters with lepers and epileptics, also regarded as incurable (Pelling, "Healing," 132).

36. Muscovite criminal law provided that perjurers be punished by having their tongues cut out (Muscovite Law Code, 14.10 [pp. 99- 100)]). Sectarians sometimes had their tongues removed as well ("The Life of Archpriest Avvakum By Himself," in Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, rev. ed., ed. Serge A. Zenkovsky [New York, 1974], 445).

37. Personal communication, July 8, 1995. However, Margaret Pelling found that in sixteenth-century Norwich blindness was about twice as usual as deafness, indicating perhaps that the Russian data, according to which vision impairments were eight times as usual as hearing disabilities, are defective ("Illness," 281). The 1769 count in Amiens found only a single case of deafness among the 277 persons identified with a serious physical disability (Engrand, "Pauperisme," 400).

38. "Falling sickness" was also common among the poor in sixteenth-century Norwich (Pelling, "Illness," 281).

39. In Norwich, too, about a third of the sick poor were described simply as "sick, sickly, or very sick" (Pelling, "Healing," 120).

40. Riazan'. Materialy dlia istorii goroda XVI-XVIII stoletii (Moscow, 1884), 130; Tula. Materialy dlia istorii goroda XVI-XVIII stoletii (Moscow, 1884), 141. The term gryz' has several meanings, hernia the most specific of them. It may be that the boy simply suffered from an unspecified pain or colic; the context makes it impossible to know for certain (Slovar russkogo iazyka XI-XVII vv., 23 vols. to date [Moscow, 1975-), 4: 148; see also Slovar' russkikh narodnskh govorov, 31 vols. to date [Moscow-Leningrad, 1965-], 7: 180).

41. Tula, 144, 126.

42. Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, ed. David L. Ransel (Bloomington, 1993), 108. Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt, who arrived on his Smolensk estate in exile in the early 1870s, reported that there too "The beggar usually is a cripple, a sick man, a man not capable of work, a weak old man, a fool" (Letters from the Country, 1872-1887, trans., ed. Cathy A. Frierson [New York, 1993], 30).

43. The 1570 Norwich Census of the Poor also reported that some very ill individuals continued to work, or at least lived independently, despite their illness (Pelling, "Healing," 120).

44. Tula, 148-49.

45. "In old Russia, as in most traditional societies, primary responsibility for both the mentally and the physically handicapped rested with the family and the local community" (Brown, "Society Responses," 14).

46. Belev. Materialy dlia istorii goroda XVII i XVIII stoletii (Moscow, 1885), 42.

47. Ibid., 44.

48. Toropets. Materialy dlia istorii goroda XVII i XVIII stoletii (Moscow, 1883), 36. Poletov and his wife clearly exaggerated their age, a not uncommon practice among the elderly (Steven R. Smith, "Growing Old in an Age of Transition," in Old Age in Preindustrial Society, ed. Peter N. Stearns [New York, 1982], 165).

49. David Herlihy, "Growing Old in the Quattrocento," in Old Age in Preindustrial Society, 104; Richard C. Trexler, "A Widows' Asylum of the Renaissance: The Orbatello of Florence," ibid., 127; Smith, "Growing Old," 195-96. More recently Joel T. Rosenthal reports that in medieval England those who survived infancy might expect another 45-53 years of life (Old Age in Late Medieval England [Philadelphia, 1996], 6).

50. David G. Troyansky, Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1989), 13, passim.

51. Peter Laslett, "Necessary Knowledge: Age and Aging in the Societies of the Past," in Aging in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age, eds. David I. Kertzer and Peter Laslett (Berkeley, 1995), 19-21; Troyansky, Old Age, 8-9, 137. Edward Bever, in surveying population data for several early modern European communities, observed that people over sixty made up between 5 and 10 percent of the population ("Old Age and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe," in Old Age in Preindustrial Society, 165).

52. Steven Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov (Chicago, 1986), 68-69.

53. In eighteenth-century Turin, the youngest age identified as justification for admission to the charity hospital was 50. However, since the authorities required documentation of an inability to work before granting requests for admission, most of those admitted because of old age were older than 50 (Cavallo, "Patterns," 82). At the Lyon Hopital de la Charite the minimum age for admission was 70 (Troyansky, Old Age, 167), while in Blois about half of all the aged inmates of the Hopital were between 65 and 75 years old; fewer than a fifth were younger than 65 (Marie-Claude Dinet-Lecomte, "Vieillir et mourir a l'Hopital de Blois au XVIIIe siecle," Annales de demographie historique 1985: 90-91). In 1782 at age 60 the Russian infantryman Kozma Rezvikov received a discharge from the army because of "old age and illness," but it was not until 1798, when he was 76, that he requested a place in a state poorhouse because of "extreme old age" (Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, "Social Misfits: Veterans and Soldiers' Families in Servile Russia," The Journal of Military History 59 [1995]: 225-26; my thanks to Elise Wirtschafter for pointing this case out to me).

54. Borovsk. Materialy dlia istorii goroda XVII i XVIII stoletii (Moscow, 1888), 136.

55. Uglich. Materialy dlia istorii goroda XVII i XVIII stoletii (Moscow, 1887), 47.

56. Kaiser and Engel, "Time- and Age-Awareness." There is no space to detail the specifics here, but, as in many preindustrial communities, nearly halt the population of these towns was under twenty years of age.

57. On the term, see Slovar' russkogo iazyka XI-XVII vv., 1:255-56 (s.v. "bogadeil'nyi," "bogadel'nyi," "bogadel'nia").

58. On the early history of poorhouses in Russia, see A. E. Ianovskii, "Bogadel'nia," Entsildopodicheskii slovar', eds. F. A. Brokgauz, I. A. Efron, 82 vols. (St. Petersburg, 18901904), 7: 141-43; idem, Novyi entsildopedicheskii slovar', eds. F. A. Brokgauz, I. A. Efron, 29 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1911-16), 7:21-22; Pryzhov, Nishchie, 44-46; L. N. Semenova, Ocherki istorii byta i kul'turnoi zhizni Rossii. Pervaia polovina XVIII v. (Leningrad, 1982), 244-51; and Lindenmeyr, Poverty, 27.

59. T. N. Kopreeva, "'Vedomstvo zhelatel'nym liudem' (Iz avtobiograficheskikh materialov A. L. Ordina-Nashchokina)," Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 1964 god (Moscow, 1965): 334 (my thanks to Cathy Potter for pointing out this title to me); I. S. Beliaev, "Dom kniazia Dmitriia Mikhailovicha Pozharskago na Lubianke," in Staraia Moskva (Moscow, 1993): 46; Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia 1450-1725 (Chicago, 1982), 704; N. F. Filatov, "Genealogiia Nizhegorodskikh krest'ian XVII v.," Vspomogatel nye istoricheskie distsipliny 24 (1993): 277-78.

60. PSZ, 2, no. 956; Akty sobrannye v bibliotekakh i arkhivakh Rossiiskoi imperii arkheograficheskoiu ekspeditsieiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1836-58), vol. 4, no. 228; Lindenmeyr, Poverty, 28-29; and Ivan Zabelin, Materialy dlia istorii, arkheologii i statistiki goroda Moskvy, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1883-91), vol. 1, pp. 1084-1102; PSP, vol. 1, no. 12.

61. PSZ, 4, no. 1856. In a rare show of sympathy for the poor, Peter provided that for every ten disabled persons there should be one healthy person "who could act in behalf of the sick and render them every assistance." The law also established healers (lekari) to treat the sick, and provided them with pay for their trouble.

62. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv laroslavskoi oblasti (hereafter GAIaO), f. 582, op. 5, ed. khr. 1638, fols. 8v., 7v., 4 v.

63. Adele Lindenmeyr reports that the nineteenth-century poorhouses were primarily old-age homes that catered to aged women; according to the 1897 census, almost three-quarters of all residents of poorhouses and other charitable institutions were women ("Work, Charity, and the Elderly in Late-Nineteenth-Century Russia," in Old Age in Preindustrial Society, 238).

64. Viatka, 60. On the reliability of age data, see Kaiser, "Urban Household Composition," 53-55.

65. The reason that I cannot establish exactly how many were blind is that in one part of the record the officials, who normally added the adjective "blind" in the feminine singular (slepa) immediately after a person's name if she were blind, in this case listed several women before adding the adjective in the plural (Viatka, 95-96). Exactly how many of the women previously named were blind is impossible to know.

66. Viatka, 96.

67. Zaraisk. Materialy dlia istorii goroda XVI-XVIII stoletii (Moscow, 1883), 69.

68. PSP, vol. 1, no. 282; Ia. E. Vodarskii, Naselenie Rossii za 400 let (XVI-nachalo XX vv.) (1973), 53-55.

69. One especially graphic indication of women's unequal share in poverty is the differential in height between men and women which grows greater in periods of famine (John Coatsworth, "Presidential Address: Welfare," American Historical Review 101 [1996]: 7).

70. Alan D. Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (Leicester, 1973), 166. Almost exactly two thirds of all requests for poor relief in eighteenth-century Turin came from women (Cavallo, "Poverty," 83). Sixteenth-century Toledo was "man-poor," and widows there represented overall 20 percent of the population. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that women received the greatest share of poor relief, even if men outnumbered women in hospitals where the "less honorably, less established, but equally impoverished" sought refuge (Martz, Poverty and Welfare, 104-105, 206-208).

71. Margaret Pelling, "Old People and Poverty in Early Modern Towns," The Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin 34 (1984): 42, 45; Henderson, Piety, 260-63, 28891, 322-253, 340-42, 383-84; idem, "The Parish and the Poor in Florence at the Time of the Black Death: The Case of S. Frediano," Charity and the Poor, 264; idem, "Women, Children and Poverty in Florence at the Time of the Black Death," in Poor Women and Children, 165-75; Charles-M. de la Ronciere, "Pauvres et pauvrete a Florence au XIVe siecle, Etudes sur l'histoire de la pauvrete, 2 vols., ed. Michel Mollat (Paris, 1974), 2:691.

72. Robert M. Schwartz, Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, 1988), 100. However, among vagrants and beggars women constituted only a minority - one woman for every five or six men (Jean-Pierre Gutton, "Les pauvres face a leur pauvrete: le cas francais 1500-1800," in Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe II, 97), and at Aix men accounted for more than 70 percent of the beggars received into public charities in 1724 (Fairchilds, Poverty, 110). But see Trenard, "Pauvrete," 481, who notes that by the end of the eighteenth century in Lille, women accounted for nearly as many vagrant beggars as did men.

73. Kaiser, "Urban Household Composition," 49-51.

74. Actually, it is likely that females made up an even larger percentage of the poor. The present figure depends upon households described as poor, but in most towns one also finds the poor - sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other family members - in regular, tax-paying households.

75. In the north Italian town of Piacenza early in the nineteenth century, the sex ratio among the poor was almost exactly the same as that reported here, 78 males to 100 females (Subacchi, "Conjunctural poor," 71). The Russian figures may nevertheless serve as indirect confirmation that Peter s census-takers intentionally depressed the number of males counted as poor with a view to increasing the pool of potential military recruits.

76. "Female Householding in Late Eighteenth-Century America and the Problem of Poverty," journal of Social History 28 (1994-95): 83. See also Henderson and Wall, "Introduction," in Poor Women and Children, 13. Barbara Diefendorf, however, notes that in sixteenth-century Paris, "There were proportionately more female-headed households at the top than at the bottom of the [economic] scale" ("Widowhood and Remarriage in Sixteenth-Century Paris," Journal of Family History 7 [1982]: 381). In eighteenth-century Italian cities, widows accounted for 14-24 percent of all heads of household, and although some were well-off, most were clustered in the poorest parts of town (Maura Palazzi, "Female Solitude and Patrilineage: Unmarried Women and Widows During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Journal of Family History 15 [1990]: 453-54).

77. Julie Hardwick, "Widowhood and Patriarchy in Seventeenth-Century France," Journal of Social History 24 (1992): 133-34.

78. Davis, "Poor Relief," 22 Slack, "Reactions," 26; Tim Wales, "Poverty, Poor Relief and the Life-Cycle: Some Evidence from Seventeenth-Century Norfolk," in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, ed. Richard M. Smith (Cambridge, 1984), 360-61, 380-81. Also see W. Newman Brown, "The Receipt of Poor Relief and Family Situation: Aldenham, Hertfordshire 1630-90," in ibid., 412; and David Vassberg, "The Status of Widows in Sixteenth-Century Rural Castile," in Poor Women and Children, 183-86. Sokoll reports that although widow-headed households constituted a significant share of all pauper households in Braintree, in Ardleigh they seem not to have earned special attention (Household and Family among the Poor: The Case of Two Essex Communities in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries [Bochum, 1993], 159, 248).

79. Jutte, Poverty, 40-41. Jeremy Boulton has demonstrated exactly how sex ratios can affect the numbers of widows and, consequently, the number of women dependent upon charity ("London Widowhood Revisited: The Decline of Female Remarriage in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," Continuity and Change 5 [1990]: 323-55).

80. Isabelle Chabot rightly connects the widows' difficulties with marriage systems ("Widowhood and Poverty in kate Medieval Florence," in Charity and the Poor, 291, 297). On the position of widows in nineteenth-century Russian peasant society, see Rodney D. Bohac, "Widows and the Russian Serf Community," in Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, eds. Barbara Evans Clements et al. (Berkeley, 1991), 95-112.

81. Borovsk, 141.

82. Viatka, 77.

83. Borovsk, 130.

84. Borovsk, 139. On "clustering," see Olwen Hufton, "Women Without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century," in Between Poverty and the Pyre: Moments in the History of Widowhood, eds. Jan Bremmer and Lourens van den Bosch (London, 1995), 129-31.

85. Zaraisk, 68. Thomas Sokoll notes that in Braintree early in the nineteenth century, "Most solitary widows in primary poverty lived together with other widows or single women who were also poor" in order to save on expenses ("The Household Position of Elderly Widows in Poverty: Evidence from two English Communities in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," in Poor Women and Children, 217-18). Antoine Marchini found the practice also popular in a Corsican community late in the eighteenth century ("Poverty, the Life Cycle of the Household and Female Life Course in Eighteenth-Century Corsica," ibid., 231). Such a pattern is unusual among men, but not uncommon among women, and may therefore be a function of gender-based socialization (Sara Arber and Jay Ginn, Gender and Later Life: A Sociological Analysis of Resources and Constraints [London, 1991], 167-69).

86. Viatka, 89-90.

87. Viatka, 57-58.

88. Zaraisk, 68.

89. Richard Wall found that elderly women in England and Wales were less likely than elderly men to live with a spouse or to live with an unmarried child and were much more likely to live with a nonrelative ("Elderly Persons and Members of Their Households in England and Wales from Preindustrial Times to the Present," in Aging in the Past, 90; "Woman Alone in English Society," Annales de demographie historique [1981]: 312).

90. Toropets, 44. Thomas Sokoll discovered that in eighteenth-century Ardleigh, too, children often took in their impoverished parents, especially widowed mothers ("The Household Position," 214).

91. Toropets, 43. Again, the ages of the elder generation in this example are probably not accurate.

92. Toropets, 33.

93. Toropets, 20.

94. For example, the sixteenth-century writer, William Harrison began his classification of poverty with the "impotent" poor, first among whom was "the fatherless child." Children, especially orphaned children, regularly appear in the lists of those given shelter or financial relief in early modern Europe (Jutte, Poverty, 11, 37-40).

95. Ransel, Mothers, 26; Lindenmeyr, Poverty, 31; PSZ, vol. 4, nos. 2467, 2477; ibid., vol. 5, nos. 2856, 2953.

96. Ransel, Mothers, 28-29, 41-50.

97. Peter Laslett, "Family, Kinship and Collectivity as Systems of Support in PreIndustrial Europe: A Consideration of the 'Nuclear-Hardship Hypothesis,'" in Charity and the Poor, 162; Herve Le Bras, "Evolution des liens de famille au cours de l'existence: Une comparaison entre la France actuelle et la France du XVIIIe siecle," in Les Ages de la vie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1982), vol. 1, 27-39. Steven Hoch has observed that in the early marriage, high-fertility, high-mortality regime of Petrovskoe in nineteenth-century Russia, "the likelihood that a minor would be left with no related adult workers in the household was small. . . . Orphans, in almost all cases, continued to live with grandparents, aunts, or uncles" (Serfdom, 79). The available evidence, slight though it is, indicates that marriage in these Petrine-era towns did not take place at so early an age as it did in nineteenth-century Russian villages, nor were households so large as peasant Russian households were (Kaiser, "Vozrast," 228-229, 232; idem, "Urban Household Composition," 59). Both factors, if confirmed, would discount the likelihood of ascendant relatives surviving, but laterals might well survive, just as Le Bras has shown for eighteenth-century France.

98. GAIaO, f. 582, op. 5, ed. khr. 1638, fol. 4 v.; Belev, 42; Uglich, 47.

99. Toropets, 19.

100. Toropets, 21. Elsewhere in early modern Europe, it sometimes happened that local authorities placed able-bodied orphans in foster households both to aid the disabled and poor, but also to get one of their charges off their hands (Pelling, "Old People," 44-45).

101. Toropets, 25.

102. Le Bras, however, found a relatively small difference in the number of surviving relatives for the young and aged in preindustrial France. The aged, of course, might find among their surviving kin more descendants than would the young; both could expect to enjoy relatively large numbers of surviving laterals. The key question may have been, therefore, not the number of survivors, but whether the aged were as likely to find refuge in a relative's household as was a child (Le Bras, "Evolution," 35).

103. Troyansky, citing Yves Blayo, reports that in eighteenth-century France, women's life expectancy rose significantly (Old Age, 11). Whether the same occurred in Russia cannot yet be demonstrated, but it is likely that the demographic regimes of the two preindustrial societies were roughly similar.

104. "The sight of potentially productive subjects exposed and dying in the streets must have struck [Peter] as intolerable" (Ransel, Mothers, 27).

105. Borovsk, 134.