The Devon History Society AGM 2026 and Book Awards will be followed by a panel discussion on poverty, vagrancy laws and slums

The DHS AGM will be followed by a panel of three speakers talking on poverty, vagrancy laws and slums

10:30 - 11:00 Devon History Society's AGM

11:00 - 11:15 Break

11:15 - 12:30 Panel: Evie Nash - How the vagrancy laws were used against Quakers in Devon in the 17th century

Shagnick Bhattacharya - How socially vulnerable women would have navigated through parish poor law structures under the old and initial phase of the new poor laws of Devon (c1750-1800)

Julia Neville - Exeter’s West Quarter in the 1920s: in the shadow of slum clearance

About the speakers

Evie Nash is a History PhD student at the University of Warwick examining the persecution of religious dissenters as vagrants across the British Atlantic World in the seventeenth century.

Shagnick Bhattacharya is an incoming Wolfson PhD scholar at the University of Exeter focusing on the economic and social history of empire, labour, migration, criminality and global underground economics.

Julia Neville is a community collaborative historian, leading on behalf of Devon History Society a number of research projects to which historians across the county have contributed. Her personal research interests are mainly in early nineteenth and twentieth century social history, exploring social change in different communities, and most recently on the Devon in the 1920s project.

The Rougemont Room is located in Exeter Library and can accessed via lift.

Description supplied by the event organiser.