‘It is impossible for our Vestry to judge his case into perfection from here’: Managing the Distance Dimensions of Poor Relief, 1800–40

Rural History ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEVE KING
Keyword(s):  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Trust And Reputation ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Relief System ◽  
Parish System ◽  
The Way

This article addresses the way in which officials in the last decades of the Old Poor Law thought about and addressed the problems posed to the poor relief process by the migration of paupers. Focusing on the so called out-parish relief system, the article uses rich overseer correspondence and supplementary pauper letters from the northwest of England to explore several key themes in the period 1800–1840: the nature of money transmission where allowances had to be paid at a distance, issues of administrative competence and incompetence, the nature of relationships between parishes and between parishes and their distant poor under the out-parish relief system, and issues of trust and reputation between parishes and between parishes and paupers. The article will show that the out-parish system was vital to the stability of the Old Poor Law and that its apparent fragility and susceptibility to fraud and mistrust is to some extent belied by the fact that robust and long term relationships developed between parishes under the out-parish system.

Locke and the Fundamental Right to Preservation: on the Convergence of Charity and Property Rights

2015 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-215
Author(s):  
Juliana Udi
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Principle Of Charity ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Relief System

AbstractLooking to the relatively recent “religious turn” in Locke scholarship, this paper argues for an interpretation that reconciles two apparently contradictory aspects of his thought: on the one hand, property rights, thought absolute by many of Locke's readers; on the other hand, Locke's notion of duties of charity. On the basis of a rereading of the “Essay on the Poor Law,” I argue that Lockean charity may ground coercively enforceable distributive obligations. Nevertheless, I contend that the redistributive poor-relief system grounded on the principle of charity does not infringe property rights. The reason for this is that the right to charity and the right to property are both based on Locke's theological commitment to the right of each man to the means of preservation.

Making sense of diversity

2018 ◽  
pp. 320-333
Author(s):  
Steven King
Keyword(s):  
Medical Service ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Way

This chapter brings together the arguments which are core to the book. It argues that the sick poor became the totemic group of paupers in the last decades of the Old Poor Law and that medical welfare became the most insistent part of poor law spending. By 1834, the Old Poor Law was well on the way to becoming a proto medical service. This and the fact that the poor and officials expected the sick to negotiate their relief, has fundamental consequences for the stability and purpose of the post-1834 New Poor Law.

Punishing paupers? Control, discipline and mental health in the Southwell workhouse (1836–71)

Rural History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (02) ◽  
pp. 161-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Carter ◽  
Jeff James ◽  
Steve King
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
National Archives ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article focuses on the way that staff and guardians in the rural Nottinghamshire workhouse of Southwell sought to exert control and containment over pauper inmates. Fusing together local and central records for the period 1834–71, including locally held punishment books and correspondence at The National Archives, Kew (TNA), we argue that the notional power of the workhouse authorities was heavily shaded. Most paupers most of the time did not find their behaviour heavily and clumsily controlled. Rather, staff focused their attention in terms of detecting and punishing disorderly behaviour on a small group of long-term and often mentally ill paupers whose actions might create enmities or spiral into larger conflicts and dissent in the workhouse setting. Both inmates and those under threat of workhouse admission would have seen or heard about punishment of ‘the usual characters’. This has important implications for how we understand the intent and experience of the New Poor Law up to the formation of the Local Government Board (LGB) in 1871.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF POOR RELIEF IN LANCASHIRE, c. 1598–1680

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN HEALEY
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor

ABSTRACTThe development of the poor law has formed a key element of recent discussions of ‘state formation’ in early modern England. There are, however, still few local studies of how formal poor relief, stipulated in the great Tudor statutes, was implemented on the ground. This article offers such a study, focusing on Lancashire, an economically marginal county, far from Westminster. It argues that the poor law developed in Lancashire surprisingly quickly in the early seventeenth century, despite the fact that there is almost no evidence of implementation of statutory relief before 1598, and formal relief mechanisms were essentially in place before the Civil War even if the numbers on relief remained small. After a brief hiatus during the conflict, the poor law was quickly revived in the 1650s. The role of the magistracy is emphasized as a crucial driving force, not just in the enforcement of the statutes, but also in setting relief policy. The thousands of petitions to JPs by paupers, parishes, and townships that survive in the county archives suggests that magistrates were crucial players in the ‘politics of the parish’.

Economies and Strategies of the Northern Rural Poor: the Mitigation of Poverty in a West Riding Township in the Nineteenth Century

Rural History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
GRAHAM RAWSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Economic Strategies ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Northern Community

Abstract:In the agricultural township of Rigton, ten miles north of Leeds, three-quarters of labouring households had recourse to poor relief at some stage between 1815 and 1861. The chronology of this microhistory straddles the end of the French Wars, the Sturges Bourne reforms, and, due to the existence of the country's largest Gilbert Unions, the region's laggardly application of the Poor Law Amendment Act. It seeks, by source linkage, to establish the contexts of labour, welfare and the life cycle within a northern community, and place the poor and their experiences of, and strategies against, poverty within that community. A demographic overview introduces the contexts of labouring families' lives, whilst a commentary on expositions of biographical reconstitutions of two generations of a labouring family, forms a major part of this exploration. This argues that whilst relationships with, and mitigation against, poverty were fluid and complex, as the century progressed labouring families had a decreasing interface with the Poor Law, and adopted and developed new economic strategies to add to their portfolio of makeshifts.1

scholarly journals Parsimony and Pauperism: Poor Relief in England, Scotland and Wales in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Harris
Keyword(s):  
The Elderly ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Welfare Spending ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Different Levels

As the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws noted in 1909, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the Poor Law (Scotland) Act of 1845 sprang from rather different motives. Whereas the first Act aimed to restrict the provision of poor relief, the second was designed to enhance it. However, despite these aims, it is generally accepted that Scotland's Poor Law continued to relieve a smaller proportion of its population and to spend less money on them. This paper revisits the evidence on which these claims are based. Although the gap between the two Poor Laws was less than previously supposed, it was nevertheless substantial. The paper also explores the links between the size of Scottish parishes and welfare spending, and demonstrates that the main reasons for the persistence of the spending gap were related to different levels of investment in poorhouses and workhouses, and support for the elderly.

Plague and Poor Relief in Cambridge, 1665-1666

2020 ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Samantha Williams
Keyword(s):  
Local Communities ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Economic Costs ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Mixed Economy ◽  
The Poor

Plague and the poor law were inextricably entwined, yet there has been little research into the extent to which poor relief contributed to the economic costs of plague epidemics. While much of the huge expense plague represented to local communities was met largely by special plague rates, fasts and fines, and income from charitable briefs, poor relief was a part of this mixed economy of funds. Through a microhistory of the parish of St Benedict in Cambridge in the town's worst outbreak of plague in 1665–1666, this article indicates that poor relief supported a substantial number of families and paid for their burials. The costs met by overseers represented around one month's additional parish spending. If this was scaled up proportionately to all fourteen parishes this would represent a significant sum of money.

Heinrich Bullinger

2021 ◽  
pp. 81-111
Author(s):  
Esther Chung-Kim
Keyword(s):  
Church History ◽  
City Council ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Church Leader ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The People ◽  
Chief Minister ◽  
Relief System ◽  
The City

Although Ulrich Zwingli started the Swiss Reformation in Zürich, his successor Heinrich Bullinger was the main stabilizer for the reform movement during his forty-plus years as chief minister from 1532 to 1575. Bullinger’s advocacy through his sermons and speeches (Fürträge) before the city council regularly reminded the politicians of their duty to care for the poor. Although the Zurich council circumscribed the role of ministers to spiritual matters, Bullinger believed that ensuring a proper poor relief system was an important part of the pastors’ ministry to the people. Because church funds were in secular control, Bullinger’s involvement in poor relief emerged from his development as a church leader in which he justified his social-political critiques against the lack of effective poor relief based on Scripture, church history, Christian ethics, and socioeconomic needs. His persistence urged the Zürich council to reconsider and revise its poor relief policies to include poverty prevention.

IRISH SOCIAL THOUGHT AND THE RELIEF OF POVERTY, 1847–1880

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 141-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gray
Keyword(s):  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Economic Recovery ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Elite Group ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Land War ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the way in which the ‘problem of poverty’ in Ireland was encountered, constructed and debated by members of the Irish intellectual and political elite in the decades between the Great Famine and the outbreak of the land war in the late 1870s. This period witnessed acute social upheavals in Ireland, from the catastrophic nadir of the Famine, through the much-vaunted economic recovery of the 1850s–1860s, to the near-famine panic of the late 1870s (itself prefigured by a lesser agricultural crisis in 1859–63). The paper focuses on how a particular elite group – the ‘Dublin School’ of political economists and their circle, and most prominently William Neilson Hancock and John Kells Ingram – sought to define and investigate the changing ‘problem’, shape public attitudes towards the legitimacy of welfare interventions and lobby state officials in the making of poor law policy in this period. It suggests that the crisis of 1859–63 played a disproportionate role in the reevaluation of Irish poor relief and in promoting a campaign for an ‘anglicisation’ of poor law measures and practice in Ireland.

Earnings, Poor Relief and the Economy of Makeshifts: Bedfordshire in the Early Years of the New Poor Law

Rural History ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAMANTHA WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Household Income ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Low Incomes ◽  
Agricultural Labourers

It is increasingly recognised by those engaged in the debate concerning the standard of living of workers during industrialisation that all forms of household income need to be assessed, not just male waged work. A more holistic approach also considers women and children's earnings, poor relief, and the wide range of self-provisioning activities and resources available through the ‘economy of makeshifts’. Over one hundred household budgets of agricultural labourers and their families have been analysed from the Ampthill Union, Bedfordshire, just before and during the implementation of the new poor law in order to further explore and quantify all components to the household income of labouring families in this key transition decade. The article finds that poor relief to families was cut in the wake of the Poor Law Amendment Act. It also finds that the low incomes of families necessitated supplementation through making shift. When the makeshift economy is quantified, it becomes clear that such activities could significantly supplement incomes.

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