Each step imposed an additional cost on the litigant (around £4, or approximately $1401 today) and a plethora of fees for pleadings, copying documents, summons, joinder, discovery, or collection of evidence.
Despite the incomplete evidence that remains on legal costs in Early Modern England, the surviving accounts reveal that normal litigation was a relatively expensive undertaking.
In the seventeenth century, English courts for the poor emphasized the following practices: "[N]o man [can] be admitted to sue in forma pauperis unless he bring[s] a testimony of credit that he hath just cause to complain; otherwise the court will be filled with clamours and vexatious suits of poor people living in remote parts.
"[3] After filing the petition or making the request in court, litigants sometimes strengthened their claims of poverty through the provision of a certificate from one or multiple well-respected members of their communities, such as a parish priest, a neighbour, or a gentleman who could confirm their financial situation.
The last step was to swear an oath that the litigant was not worth more than £5,88 excluding his or her clothing, nor owned land that produced a profit of more than forty shillings per year.
These petitions reveal the diverse range of litigants who sought in forma pauperis status in equity courts, suggesting that it was a widely known and relatively accessible mechanism.
The litigants represented a large swath of society, including prisoners, widows, former soldiers, immigrants, and labourers.
For other women in Early Modern England, simply filing suit, let alone gaining in forma pauperis status, presented a unique set of challenges.
Men were responsible for paying any debts their wives accumulated and for serving as the defendant in any suits brought against them, excepting treason and murder.
[7] Today, potential critiques of a uniform and comprehensive in forma pauperis standard include the unpredictability of federal funding to finance fee waivers, an uptick in false claims of poverty, and the inappropriateness of applying a national standard across states where costs of living vary.
Data collected over this time period show that there are over 700 million less extremely poor people in the world today than there were 30 years ago.
[8] The "visible poor" is a term primarily used to talk about persons who do not have stable and adequate housing, i.e. the homeless.
These people are consequently forced to live and sleep outside, on the streets, in parks and other public spaces of cities and towns.
Because of this, professional football player Marcus Rashford led a campaign to raise national awareness of the effects of child food poverty.
[9] The COVID-19 pandemic, together with the consequences of conflict and climate change, led to a slowdown in decreasing the number of extremely poor people.
Low-income households were hardest hit by the general decline in economic activity, which led to job losses and work stoppages.
However, unlike in the case of earlier periods of high inflation, government budgets are constrained because of various fiscal measures taken in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
Quite the opposite, they typically spend a considerable amount of their earnings on products such as alcohol and tobacco, as well as on various forms on entertainment.