Poverty and Environment in Early Modern England

This chapter examines the relationships between poverty and environment in early modern England. It explores the lived environments of poverty at three scales (the climate, the landscape and the body) where the impact of environmental forces was registered, and on which poverty and inequality operated. The experience of poverty constituted a set of particular environmental experiences which ranged from being exposed to hazards or being rendered vulnerable to disaster, to exercising customary rights to forage and defending lifeways from large-scale landscape change. The chapter considers the material, social and ideological nature of the lived environment and argues that poverty needs to be understood in its environmental contexts in order to more fully grasp the lived experience of the poor.