In November 2023 I spoke online as part of Cardiff University’s acknowledgement of UK Disability History Month. The recording is now available here: Disability and Mobility Aids in Britain 1600-1800.
I provided an access copy of the transcript here at the time, so am re-releasing it now for anyone who wants to read along (or in lieu!).
Slide
Thank you for joining me. My name is Dr Emily Cock and I am a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University. For the benefit of anyone just listening to the talk, you can picture me as a white woman with short brown hair and glasses, wearing a green shirt.
The captions should be working, but for anyone who would like to read along I have put an access copy of the talk on my (very inactive) blog: dremilycock.wordpress.com. I’ve put the link in the chat.
Slide
Since 2010, UK Disability History Month has been held annually with a few key foci (I’ve taken them here from the founding document):
- Advocating equality for disabled people.
- Promoting disability equality and inclusion- ‘Nothing About Us, Without Us’.
- Examining the roots of ‘Disabilism’- negative attitudes, harassment and hate crime.
- Celebrating disabled people’s history- struggles for rights, equality and inclusion.
- Challenging and exposing the unequal position of disabled people in our society.
- The Cultural and Artistic portrayal of disabled people.
- Highlighting examples of good disability equality.
Now, full disclosure that I am not disabled myself, and so I recognise that I occupy a specific positionality here. I know the university has been featuring other talks by disabled academics this month on contemporary issues, so I highly recommend checking them out. And, as a real boon this month, actor Mared Jarman is presenting a special series on the history of disability in Wales—yn Gymraeg—on BBC/S4C: Y Frwydr: Stori Anabledd. And that will be on iplayer for a few months yet.
Now, in that series, Jarman starts in the early 19th century. And that is in a sense where the ‘modern’ history of disability starts to take shape, and especially—to take point three here—the negative attitudes and a move toward greater segregation and institutionalisation, as people who did not fit into factory work started to lose forms of support, and what are known as the ‘New Poor Laws’ came into effect.
But tonight I’m going to push us back a bit further, to the Old Poor Law period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now, one of the big reasons that I study history and why I think months like this are important, is that we can demonstrate that things have not always been as they are now. So far, so uncontroversial. But if they haven’t always been as they are now, then they don’t need to remain as they are now. And sometimes, history gives us good practice—including for examples of disability equality or the successes of individuals or groups—as well as errors. So, my job as an historian is to dig around for historical material and disabled voices, and make them useable today, in whatever ways it can help ‘advocate equality for disabled people’.
In my talk today I’m going to focus on a few people from this period with mobility impairments, and see how they managed their lives and what support they received to allow them to continue to work, socialise, go to church, or do whatever else they wanted to have a full life.
Like today, different people had different options, so let’s set up some of our framework first.
SLIDE: Social Model of Disability and History
As an organisation, Disability History Month works from a ‘Social Model/Human Rights’ approach, and this is very useful for historical investigation too. Some of you will be very familiar with this framework, but for those who aren’t, it is essentially a separation of impairment from disability. This comes straight from disability rights groups, going back to the 1960s. It means that whatever is being thought of as ‘different’ about a person’s mind or body—the impairment—is separable from the disabling effects that society then produces around that difference. Now an obvious example—and one I’ll be talking about today—is in built environment: someone who uses a wheelchair or a walking stick will have the impact of that impairment lessened by things like ramps, lifts, and hard surfaces that mean they can get around—whether that be to work, school, shopping, or the beach. But it also incorporates negative ideas and prejudices about disability. Carly Findlay, who is on the screen here, is an Australian author and activist. She puts it nicely here when reflecting on her experiences of living with a skin condition called ichthyosis that leaves her skin very dry and red: “I am disabled by society’s barriers that they put up, but the low expectations of me…. I want to talk about how disabled people need to be better represented in the media… and that employment for disabled people needs to increase. We need ample chances, equal chances to succeed in the workforce, and in society as a whole.”
What I really like here is that Findlay captures how expansive the study of disability—including disability history—has to be. It’s about representation, and employment, and ‘success’—however that is defined in different times, places, and groups—or indeed how a person or group interacts with “society as a whole”. It can include medical aids or treatments, but that is just a tiny dimension of it. And historians come in handy because ‘society’ is an ever-changing thing. By separating a physical or mental difference from the surroundings that render such difference disabling, we see how the disability attached to any impairment changes in different times and places. Not only that, it changes for different people depending on their other identities like gender, education, or class, and even at different times and circumstances for that person.
So, disability history therefore asks how disabling physical and mental differences were in any time, place, or context, as well as exploring the ideas that circulated around them. We can’t presume acceptance or rejection, but as with any historical phenomenon have to investigate on its own terms. Some disabilities of today will barely register in the early modern period: to give an obvious example, the many reasons that people might have trouble with reading and writing, such as dyslexia, would have passed completely unnoticed among the mainly illiterate poor population. Problems with reading, or even more substantial intellectual disabilities, would only be really disabling for middling and elite individuals. Mental illnesses, by contrast, would have been more noticeable at all levels, and the treatment received would have varied by rank, and I can talk about that more in the questions if you like. Similarly, history is full of things that were considered impairments or disabilities at the time and are no longer: you might consider things that have historically been considered mental illnesses, including homosexuality and ‘drapetomia’ which was invented by 19thC American physicians as a disease of enslaved people that explained their totally weird desire to run away.
SLIDE: Managing Mobility in Early Modern Britain
Something I want to put at the top of this discussion is that the physical examples I am able to talk about and especially to show you in photographs today are coming from richer people. That’s not very unusual for historical objects in general: rich people start with better-made objects that are then protected, often within bigger and more secure housing as generations flow on. Looking more broadly there are made-to-last mobility aids, but there are also short-term, borrowed, or repurposed objects. The custom-made and durable is more likely to have been made for the wealthy, where poor individuals might use second-hand tools, adapted tools that are now difficult to identify (such as wheelbarrows standing in for wheelchairs), or less durable materials (e.g wood, fabric, bone). I’ll bring this up again for the case of Francis Calverly, and you can think about how museums might tackle including such evidence in an exhibition.
Disability history and medical history can sometimes intersect, when people seek out (or are forced to undergo) medical interventions. Sometimes this provides evidence of mobility devices. The theme for Disability History Month this year is ‘Disability, Childhood and Youth’, which I am rather failing at with these case studies of adults with acquired mobility impairments. I would give a shout out to a PhD student in our department right now, Théo Riviere, who is writing his dissertation on child disability in the early modern period. There are some terribly sad cases, but he is also finding example of families and communities doing things like organising apprenticeships for children that accommodate their physical needs. So a child with impaired legs would be trained in something he can do sitting down, like shoemaking, so that he will be able to live independently as he gets older.
For my part, I can bring in this nice example from the Science Museum, London. They date these child’s leg supports to the first half of the seventeenth century, probably from France. They are designed to support and perhaps straighten the legs, maybe after a disease like rickets has weakened them. They do look like parts of a suit of armour, with a hole at the bottom for the foot to poke through, a panel that opens and is tied with straps and buckles to allow for getting in and out, and stretching up to just over the knee. They are made of iron, but you’ll note the articulation in the joints, and the air holes over the surface, making them both more practical and a bit more comfortable.
Those would have belonged to a child in a wealthy family, and I want to bring us back to Britain. So we need to look elsewhere for evidence of the most familiar and accessible mobility aid from this period: the crutch. Sometimes with a wooden leg, and often used by artists as a shorthand for a beggar.
SLIDE
Here at the top left, for example, is a black and white chalk drawing, attributed to William Hogarth, of a man almost naked, sitting begging, with two crutches by his side. Or on the right, this figure from the crowd of his ‘Idle Prentice’ series, whose bent knee rests in a stilt while he moves himself about on crutches. Looking into the later eighteenth century, the amputee sailor and soldier becomes a very common figure both in real life and in representation. James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, like Hogarth, used cartoons to critique society and politics. Amputee sailors often appear in their work to undercut the pretentions of political figures who start wars but don’t have to suffer in them. Here, bottom left, for example, a disgruntled sailor makes his will including leaving “my Wooden leg to Sam Bowsprit, as the way he goes on in every engagement he is likely soon to want it… and as to the wide world, I leave it to those that like to live in it.” So quite pessimistic there. Injured sailors could go to live at the Royal Hospital for Seaman at Greenwich from the 1690s, while a soldier who was badly injured might be able to live in or receive a pension from Chelsea Hospital, which was set up after the Civil Wars to support veterans, and is of course still the home of the ‘Chelsea Pensioners’.
SLIDE: Francis Calverley
For my case studies, I’m going to start with another disabled soldier, by the name of Francis Calverley. A colleague of mine, Dr Lloyd Bowen, is part of a big project examining petitions for support made by people after the British Civil Wars. As a reminder, this conflict resulted in Charles I losing his head, and a temporary Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. Many of the petitioners are former soldiers, but they might also be people whose property was destroyed, or injured civilians, and they could be asking for long-term support (such as residence in an alms house, which is an early form of care home), or a one-off or temporary financial help.
For everyone’s benefit I am using the slightly modernised text of the petition, but you can see the original on screen, or a transcript on the website.
To the right hon[oura]ble the Comm[i]ttie for ye County of Nottingham
The humble petic[i]on of nine maimed souldiers
Humbly shewing that ye poore pet[itione]rs were all maimed in the Parliam[en]ts seruice & being sent by Order and good certifficate from the Lords & commons to their frends for their reliefe And being in great want & misery being sleighted by many officers & one of the nine hauing lost both his feete had a litle horse which dying & failing him he is great trouble to ye rest & in great paine to trauill
Their humble requests are therefore yt yo[u]r hon[ou]rs according to yo[u]r accustomed clemency do afford y[ou]r poore pet[itione]rs some fauourable assistance on their Journeyes & to wardes getting them a horse againe for w[hi]ch your poore petic[i]on[e]rs as in duety bound shall eu[e]r pray &c.
Mr Hough, pay to the petition[e]rs the sume of fiue shillings & this shall bee your warrant. Aprill. 22th: 1646.
Nicho[las] Charlton
Gervase Lomax
Now, I haven’t yet found out exactly how much a cheap horse cost in 1646, but having seen medieval averages of 10 shillings I am pretty comfortable saying that 5s would only get you a broken-winded nag at death’s door. So it seems more likely that the horse was being hired, to help the group get home, reducing the ‘trouble to the rest’ and the ‘great pain’ to Francis. Horses were also expensive to maintain, so it would have been a burdensome long-term solution. We can only speculate what he used once he got home—perhaps some combination of support and crutch like the man in the Idle Prenctice print. If you think about the dirt floors and roads of Britain—or, let’s be honest, the mud roads a lot of the time—these are the practical options for a poor country man.
Now, as an added detail this man may be the same Francis Calverley who made another petition in 1675. I need to get to the National Archives to check. But it seems to confirm that it was Francis who had lost his feet at the battle of Brentford in 1642, and that after the war he earned his living as a scribe—which is of course a sitting-down job. In 1675, Calverley petitioned for admission to the almshouse at Peterborough Cathedral because failing eyesight had finally made this work impossible. Peterborough was part of Nottinghamshire at the time, so the geography fits. And as Ian Atherton, Eileen McGrath and Alannah Tomkins point out in their study of these petitions, the application for one of these places was a ‘long and tortuous process’ including petitioning the monarch, so it was lucky that he was literate. Francis would also have been required to physically attend the first petition hearing, and Lloyd Bowen points out that the petitioners were required to perform a delicate mixture of political affiliation, disability, and thwarted industry. The plea certainly suggests that Calverley’s companions were physically assisting—probably carrying—him, into the court room.
Calverley’s case also speaks to the role of politics in creating disability from impairment, because the support available shifted with political conditions. Nottingham was under Parliamentarian control at this point, and through the Interregnum it was only people from the Parliamentarian side who were able to petition for support through this county system. After the Restoration, this flipped to being only Royalist supporters. And this included the cathedral almsmen positions. So if it is the same Francis, he managed to fib about which side of the war he had fought on, or to convince the administrators to look the other way, thirty years down the line. It’s intriguing, but I’ll have to keep you posted.
SLIDE: General/Sir Thomas Fairfax
My second example is also from the Parliamentarian army, but right at the top. This is General/Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–1671). He was commander-in-chief of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army and is remembered as a good general: clever, a ‘lead from the front’ type, and lucky, since he was wounded multiple times and survived. This included having his face cut open with a broadsword at the Battle of Marston Moor (2 July 1644)—you can clearly see a neat scar in this portrait, which here is functioning much like the staff of office and the battle in the background to emphasise his warrior credentials.
Slide: Fairfax’s chair
And here is Fairfax’s wheelchair, which he used from 1664. I saw Fairfax’s chair when I visited the National Civil War Centre, in Newark, in 2018. It dominated a room of an exhibition on civil war medicine, and I think you can get a real sense that this is an impressive object. It is mainly wood and leather, with wheels, breaks, footrest, and padded seat, and the leather backrest has some decoration on it. This isn’t a casual, it’ll-do object: it is a sturdy, comfortable, custom-made one. And the family have kept hold of it for four hundred years, so that speaks to its importance as an heirloom.
The signage at the museum left it a little ambiguous about why he used this wheelchair, leaving the visitor free to believe that it was linked to his many war injuries, rather than the realities of the stone and gout. Gout is extremely painful. But it was particularly associated with rich food and high living, so is a bit antithetical with images of a Cromwellian general.
We do have some evidence of how Fairfax’s family saw him in this period, too. His cousin recalled that Fairfax sat in his wheelchair “like an old Roman, his manly countenance striking Awe and Reverence into all that beheld him, and yet mixed with so much modesty, and meekness, as no figure of a mortal man ever represented more’. He also emphasised that Fairfax spent much of his time reading, especially religious literature (quoted in Hopper, Black Tom, p.124). So his chair is very much not the end of the story. Instead we have an important insight into perceptions of proper disabled masculinity in how he sits in his chair—his demeanour balancing the patrician power of the ‘old Roman’ with a masculine ‘modesty’ and devotion to faith.
Fairfax’s wealth and status are evident in not only the custom construction of the chair, but in its mere fact. A wheelchair is a practical option for Fairfax in a way that it just wouldn’t have been for Calverley. In his earlier life, Fairfax and family had lived in a smaller medieval building, the former Nun Appleton Priory, that the poet Andrew Marvell sought to flatter for its cosiness. (Marvell was a tutor or Fairfax’s daughter at the time). But Fairfax had celebrated his successes by replacing this building with a grand Palladian one, so would have had much better luck—at least on the ground floor—with smooth and firm floors and especially wide doors. Not to mention a household of paid staff available to push him when he needed.
The wheelchairs that we do know about from this early period belong to people at the very top of the social ladder, and it’s the built environment that really is key to their lack of practicality more generally. King Phillip II of Spain used a wheelchair due to gout from about 1595, and a century later Louis XIV did so as he recovered from an operation for an anal fistula. The former was only designed for use inside, while the second was constructed with sturdier wheels to allow Louis to venture into the Versailles gardens. Because of course, being the king, he could make sure that the paths were spacious and sturdy—in other words, wheelchair-friendly. In the book Designing Disability (2017), Elizabeth Guffey discusses these and many other examples in her history of wheelchairs as objects and also as ‘the’ symbol for disability, which I highly recommend. In perhaps my favourite section, she discusses how the city of Bath improved the accessibility of its built environment in the eighteenth century precisely because it was trying to attract health tourism. While wheelchairs might have been rare, people were being carried in an assortment of carriage-like chairs, or making their way with crutches, so smoother streets and less or no stairs became important means of making the city accessible for those coming to take the waters for their health.
SLIDE: Gertrude Saville
One of these Bath visitors was a gentry woman named Gertrude Saville: born 1697, died 1758. She was a member of a gentry family—her brother inherited a baronetcy—but she never married, and her financial and social position remained quite precarious until in a surprise twist a cousin left her enough money and property for her to establish her own household going into her forties. She mainly lived in London, and is remarkable today because she kept a pretty extensive diary from her early twenties until very late in life. We don’t know exact coverage, because not all of it has survived, but we have things like letters and account books that can help to fill in the gaps, too.
I wanted to bring in Gertrude here as an example of someone with fluctuating need for mobility aids throughout her life. Before her inheritance, Gertrude lived with her mother, Barbara, which produced a… tense relationship. And one of the repeating ways this tension manifested was in conflict over whether Gertrude can use her mother’s coach, whether to see friends, run errands, or to visit the bagnio where she undergoes medical treatments like cupping and sweating. Transport is a key means of maintaining health as well as economic and social position. If she doesn’t get to use the coach, she has to stay home, walk or pay for a sedan chair or a Hackney coach (like a taxi). As Gertrude sees it, her mother lets others use the coach, “while I might either stay at home to the distruction of my health or trudg on foot, or be thankfull I had a shilling for a Hackny?”
The brother—trying to mediate—thinks part of the issue is that Barbara is growing both deaf (she uses an ear trumpet) and possibly senile. So he suggests a system of Gertrude writing down when she wants to use the coach, so that her mother can agree and remember. Different kinds of accommodations there to work with the needs of different household members.
We begin to meet gaps in the survival of the diary, so the story has to be picked up ten years later when Gertrude is now head of her own household. In March 1738 she notes that “Ever since September [I] have been very lame of one leg, so that I have not been able to walk.” She goes to Bath for treatment, which goes ok, but the journey back in a carriage takes four days and isn’t very comfortable, so by the time she gets home she is “lame of both leggs, and in great fears for my knee.” But she is not wealthy enough to keep her own carriage yet, so she is still reliant on hiring hackneys if she wants to go out. A decade later still, and now suffering from chronic piles as well as her leg trouble, she finally writes that “My Health suffering much for want of Exersise and my Lameness making me unable to have any but from a coach, I bought a Second Hand one… How thankfull I ought to be for God Almighty’s bounty to make me able to bear this Expence, to allow me so great a benifitt and pleasure.” So her financial position has improved to the extent that she can afford this accommodation, and it is this that she thanks God for—there is no change in her physical state, which someone taking a purely medical approach to disability might expect—but instead we see an adjustment in how she can manage her environment and increase her pleasure. (Although on that point I would like to flag that in her bedbound periods she is directing gardeners out the window and reading the pornographic novel Fanny Hill, so pleasure can of course come from many directions).
SLIDE: Map of London
Later on, Gertrude mentions the death of the Second Duke of Grafton with regret not because he had been a particularly influential politician—as far as I can tell he really wasn’t—but because “He was the chief promoter of a New Road across the fields from Islington to Paddington, and in that, a great bennifactor to me (in perticular)”. That is, he had created what is now Euston Road in order to bypass busy Oxford Street when taking cattle from his estates down to Smithfield Market.
I’ve got part of John Rocque’s 1746 map here, with Oxford Street highlighted in orange, the Thames down in blue, St Pauls cathedral in purple just to get your bearings. And as you can see, north of Oxford Street is still all open fields. For Gertrude, this new smooth, uncrowded road through the countryside gave her a means of going out in her coach without painful bumps—Grafton had inadvertently improved the accessibility of her local transport infrastructure. In the last year of her life, Gertrude counted this access to the outside world as a real marker of her wellbeing: “I bless God I continued so easy, (tho’ very far from well) that I was able to go my usual little Journeys, to dine out.” Given her immobility, we also have to assume that there were people at those ‘dining out’ locations who were on-hand to help her in and out of the coach, up stairs, or into dining rooms. Most were probably paid staff, but there might also be friends making adjustments to ensure that Gertrude could visit them. There’s a lot of visiting people in bedrooms when they are too ill to go out or downstairs, so it’s not too wild to speculate that friends might adjust which rooms or furniture they readied for Gertrude’s visits.
SLIDE: Monarchs
From Gertrude we also have a useful reminder that having transport available doesn’t always fix the problem, and sometimes other accommodations are required. So for my final example, we are zooming to the top of the social pyramid. In 1743, King George II became the last British monarch to accompany an army into battle. But in 1746, Gertrude records in her diary that “The King was so ill of the Piles that his Birth Day coud not be kept in London, nor Himself remove from Kinsington.” In other words, the king was in so much pain from his haemorrhoids that he was unable to travel from Kensington into the City for the grand public celebrations planned for his birthday. George had suffered from piles intermittently throughout his life, so we might think of this as a chronic illness with disabling periods. Three weeks later, Gertrude records that “The King, thank God, being got pretty well again, [was] remov’d from Kinsington to St. James’s; the Birth Day, putt off, was kept in London [on] the 13th”. So, the King travelled, and the party went ahead.
What is worth highlighting here—and coming back to that social model—is the ways and extent to which the disabling effects of the king’s impairment are managed here. If the guy steering the carriage had piles, he would have to work through the pain or lose his job. The king, however, can cancel or postpone his party. And that is no small feat. Firstly, because of the amount of money involved—think of all the food that will have been prepared and wasted. But this was also very soon after the Jacobite rebellion and defeat of Charles Edward Stuart (aka Bonnie Prince Charlie) at the Battle of Culloden in April 1746. The country was in a tense period of forced coming together, with national fast days and compulsory church services of thanksgiving. Celebrating the monarch was strategically very important right now. So, the willingness to wait until George was well enough to travel and attend in person is a marker of how much they were willing to accommodate his health needs when necessary.
As a contemporary resonance here, something that struck me watching Charles III’s coronation this year was the discussion of the Diamond Jubilee State Coach that Charles was going to take the long way to the ceremony, followed by the short route back in the older Gold State Coach. Apparently Queen Elizabeth found the Gold Coach “horrible” to travel in in, “It’s only sprung on leather, not very comfortable.” The new coach, by contrast, which was built in Australia in 2014, has proper suspension, with hydraulic stabilisers to reduce swaying as well as bumps, heating, air conditioning, and comfortable seats, alongside historical details and materials. As the commentators kept emphasising the comfort of the new coach, it became quite clear—to me at least—that these were in essence accessibility measures: the vehicle had been designed so that an elderly woman—and later, an elderly man—would be able to continue to fulfil a job task. In a similar vein, look closely and you will see aids stepping in very subtly to help King Charles stand up from his chair while holding onto the sceptre and orb, lending a lift to his elbow. Again, reasonable workplace accommodations.
Conclusion
But, as I said, I’m a historian, so I’ll step back to my historical figures. What I hope has come across from this brief snapshot is that impairments affecting mobility—whether acquired in battle, through diseases, injuries, or any other means—would be managed in many different ways by different people. Devices that preserved mobility might be bought by wealthy individuals, and their built environments changed to suit them. For people further down the economic ladder, like Francis Calverly, the state might need to provide assistance that is appropriate to that individual’s circumstances, and they may need to be adjusted as their bodies or circumstances change. Particular means of fostering disability inclusion—whether social, economic, familial, or in other aspects—might be quite different now, but they remain as important as ever.
SLIDE
Thank you for joining me.
Facing the Past 