Definition
Casual poor refers to indigent persons who lack a settled legal residence or "settlement" in any particular parish or locality, and who therefore fall outside the ordinary framework of parish-based poor relief. The term captures two overlapping categories: (1) individuals who are transient or itinerant and have never acquired legal settlement in the place where they are found, and (2) persons who, though ordinarily self-sufficient, have been suddenly rendered destitute by illness, accident, or other unexpected misfortune while away from their home parish. In either case, the defining characteristic is that the poor person has no established claim on the local relief authority — they are, in a word, strangers to the parish system.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No established entry. "Casual" in ordinary modern usage means informal, occasional, or without regularity; "poor" means lacking money or resources.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Casual" — occurring without regularity; accidental; fortuitous. "Poor" — lacking material possessions; needy.
The ordinary combination of these two words would suggest simply "occasionally poor" or "accidentally impoverished." The legal meaning is more precise and structural: it describes a specific administrative category within the English poor law system, defined not merely by poverty but by the absence of legal settlement. A person could be desperately poor and still not be "casual poor" in the legal sense if they held settlement in the parish. Conversely, a relatively able-bodied traveler temporarily incapacitated might qualify. The legal term is a term of classification, not of degree.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost entirely to the English poor law tradition and its colonial and early American echoes. Researchers encountering it in legal documents, statutes, or local records should bear several points in mind.
First, the concept is inseparable from the law of settlement and removal. The entire English poor law system from the Act of Settlement (1662) onward divided paupers by whether they had acquired legal settlement — through birth, parentage, apprenticeship, service, or other means — in a given parish. Casual poor were those who had not, and local authorities had both obligations and options with respect to them that differed from those owed to the settled poor. Researching casual poor without also researching the settlement system will produce an incomplete picture.
Second, the term appears in early American state and territorial records, particularly in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, where poor law structures modeled on English practice persisted well into the nineteenth century. The New Jersey citation in Black's (17 N.J. Law, 405) is a reminder that American courts actively interpreted these categories. Researchers working in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and similar jurisdictions should expect to find the term in township and county records, overseers of the poor documentation, and early appellate decisions.
Third, the term fades from legal usage as the poor law framework was dismantled and replaced by state welfare systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its absence from modern legal materials is not an accident — it is a marker of an entire administrative structure that has disappeared. A researcher finding "casual poor" in a document is almost certainly looking at a pre-twentieth-century source, and should read that source against the background of the settlement and removal regime.
Fourth, Bouvier's entry is essentially a cross-reference stub ("See POOR"), which signals that Bouvier treated the term as subordinate to the broader law of the poor. Researchers using Bouvier should consult that parent entry for the fuller treatment of poor law categories.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Bouvier's together offer a thin but coherent picture. Black's provides the substantive content: two distinct applications of the term, one administrative (the unsettled poor generally) and one situational (the traveler or stranger suddenly struck by misfortune). The New Jersey citation in Black's grounds the term in American judicial usage and confirms it was not merely an English import that died at the water's edge. Bouvier's cross-reference to POOR reflects that compiler's organizational preference for treating the poor law as a unified field rather than parsing its subcategories individually.
Neither dictionary engages the historical evolution of the term across the centuries of English poor law development, from the Elizabethan poor law statutes through the major reforms of 1834. For that depth, researchers will need to turn to treatises on English poor law — Burn's Justice of the Peace was a standard reference for practicing overseers — and to the secondary literature on the history of poverty and relief administration.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is primarily English in origin and most densely documented in English ecclesiastical and parish records, quarter sessions records, and English legal treatises. Its use in American law is concentrated in states that inherited English poor law frameworks, particularly in the colonial and early national periods. It is largely absent from Southern and Western American legal materials, where different relief structures or later settlement patterns meant the English parish model had less purchase.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Poor Laws; Settlement and Removal; Parish Relief Administration