A Different Kind of Speenhamland: Nonresident Relief in the Industrial Revolution

1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Stephen Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Migration ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Work Force ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Welfare Benefits ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family

“Speenhamland” is a word popularized by late nineteenth-century historians as a derogatory term for the systematic subsidization of laborers' wages by allowances paid from the poor rates. This system was thought to have flourished in southern and agrarian England in the early nineteenth century, the size of the allowances determined by the size of the family and the price of bread. The unwitting “villains” were the Berkshire justices who met at the Pelican Inn, located in a tithing of Speen Parish. Moved by corn dearth and a terrible winter, the justices on May 6, 1795, set in train the fatal hemorrhaging of the Old Poor Law that, in turn, led to the draconian Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.Myth this may largely be, and it has been explored elsewhere; however, no one questions that subsidizing the employed from the poor rates, including allowances in aid of wages, occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is in this sense that “Speenhamland” is used here, but to suggest a radically different and mainly constructive consequence for British economic and social development.For subsidizing the employed poor, when it took the form of nonresident relief, could function as a kind of “Industrial Speenhamland” (freshly coined), to wit: a system of parochially funded labor migration that promoted a work force for expanding industries. This subsidization could include allowances in aid of wages as well as other welfare benefits in times of sickness and unemployment—all at the expense of the home parish or township, not of the places in which the factories and industrial workshops were located.

Negotiating medical welfare

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-104
Author(s):  
Steven King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Hazard ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Core Business ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Poor

This chapter foregrounds the concept of pauper agency. Using the largest corpus of letters by or about the poor ever assembled, it argues that sickness was the core business of the Old Poor Law by the early nineteenth century. Rather than paupers being simply subject to the whim and treatment of the parish, the chapter argues that they had considerable agency. Despite problems of moral hazard and the idea that sickness could be faked, paupers and officials agreed that ill health and its treatment was an area of acceptable contestation.

Social Pretensions in Architecture and Ancestry: Hall House, Sawbridge, Warwickshire and the Andrewe Family

1996 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
N. W. Alcock ◽  
C. T. Paul Woodfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Architectural Analysis ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status ◽  
Country Houses ◽  
Social Importance

That architecture makes social statements is obvious in grand buildings from Norman castles to country houses. In smaller houses, such statements are often muted by our ignorance of their historical context and their date. This paper examines a small but sophisticated medieval house in which the combination of precise dating and informative documentation surmounts simple architectural analysis, to reveal something of its social importance to the family who built it. In the early nineteenth century, the status of Hall House, Sawbridge, was the lowest possible. It belonged to the Sawbridge Overseers of the Poor and was rented to families receiving parish support; later it became farm labourers' cottages. Most of the stages in the decline of the elegant medieval house to this lowly state can be documented, and links established to the only family in fifteenth-century Sawbridge with pretensions to sophistication. These clues lead to the identification of John Andrewe as the builder of Hall House in 1449, and to the recognition of it as a concrete expression of a family pride that was also being fostered by the invention of a distinguished ancestry.

Sickness, medical welfare and the English poor, 1750-1834

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Large Dataset ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor

This book explores the welfare experiences of the sick poor between the 1750s and through the so-called crisis of the Old Poor Law ending in the 1830s. It brings together a large dataset of accounts, vestry minutes, bills, contracts and letters by or about the poor to provide a comprehensive and colourful overview of the nature, scale and negotiation of medical welfare. At its core stand the words and lives of the poor themselves, reconstructed in painstaking detail to show that medical welfare became a totemic issue for parochial authorities by the 1830s. The book suggests that the Old Poor Law confronted a rising tide of sickness by the early nineteenth century. While there are spectacular instances of parsimony and neglect in response to such rising need, in most places and at most times, parish officers seem to have felt a moral obligation to the sick. Indeed, we might by and large construct their responses as considerate and generous. To some extent this reflected Christian paternalism, but we also see other factors at play. These include a growing sense that illness, even illness amongst the poor, was and should be remediable and a shared territory of negotiation between paupers, advocates and officials. The result was a canvas of medical welfare with extraordinary colour and depth. By the 1820s, more of the ill-health of ordinary people was captured by the poor law and being doctored or sojourning in an institution became part of pauper and parochial expectation. These trends are brought to vivid life in the words of the poor and their advocates, such that the book genuinely offers a re-interpretation of the Old Poor Law in it slater phases form the bottom up.

scholarly journals “We Might be Trusted”: Female Poor Law Guardians and the Development of the New Poor Law: The Case of Bolton, England, 1880–1906

2004 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
High Social Status

This article uses the only surviving working diary of an English female Poor Law guardian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explore two interrelated bodies of historiography. First, it engages with an historiography of the New Poor Law which has by and large seen the late nineteenth century as a period of atrophication. Second, it engages with a literature on female Poor Law guardians which has on balance questioned their achievements and seen such women as subject to all sorts of conflict and discrimination. The article argues that both perspectives may be questioned where we focus on local Poor Law policies and local women. Using the example of Bolton, in England, it is argued that the boards of Poor Law unions were riven by fracture lines more important than gender. Within this context, women of relatively high social status were able to manipulate the Poor Law agenda to make substantial changes to the policy and fabric of the late Victorian Poor Law. Rather than conflict, we often see a warm appreciation of the pioneering work of female Poor Law guardians.

The Dependent Poor? (Re)constructing The Lives of Individuals ‘On the Parish’ in Rural Dorset, 1800–1832

Rural History ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAMANTHA A. SHAVE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Demographic Data ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family

AbstractSocial commentators in the early decades of the nineteenth century considered the ‘poor classes’ to be a homogenous sub-group of society dependent on parish poor relief. Whilst in recent decades studies of the Old Poor Law have added much to our understandings of the complexity of poor relief practices, the concept of dependency has proved remarkably durable. This article challenges this central assumption by focusing upon the very individuals who constituted this supposedly homogenous dependent group. The relief histories of eight individuals from two cohorts who resided in the Dorset parish of Motcombe are (re)constructed and linked to demographic data to produce detailed biographies. On the basis of these biographies it is argued that even in north Dorset, where opportunities for employment and alternative forms of subsistence were few, ‘the poor’ experienced complex fluctuations of dependence on, and independence from, poor relief. It is also shown that traditional assumptions about the factors prompting relief, including the expansion of the family, did not have a uniform impact on all individuals. Such a methodology also makes it possible to explore how the parish managed to respond to the differing and similar needs of individuals. It is thus stressed that instead of following one policy for all, parish officials applied and tailored relief to suit each individual.

Navigating the Old English Poor Law

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
National Context ◽  
Postal Service ◽  
General Reader ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Emotional Landscape

This edition of 599 letters written by, for or about the poor to the early nineteenth century Cumbrian town of Kirkby Lonsdale provides a unique window onto the experiences, views and conditions of a much neglected group in English social history. The letters provide a sense of the emotional landscape of people who have so far largely escaped our attention, telling the intensely human stories of their hardships and the efforts they made to survive, often against considerable odds. However, they also give a real sense of the agency of the poor and their advocates, demonstrating time and again that they were willing and able – indeed, that they saw it as their right – to challenge those who administered welfare locally in an attempt to shape a system which (notionally, at least) afforded them no power at all. The letters are framed by a scholarly introduction which explains the structural conditions under which they were produced and gives essential local and national context for readers wishing to understand them better. The volume as a whole will be of interest to students and scholars of the Old Poor Law and the history of welfare. It will equally appeal to the general reader with an interest in local and national social history, covering at is does everything from the history of literacy or clothing through to histories of health, disability and the postal service.

scholarly journals Urbanisation, Elite Attitudes and Philanthropy: Cardiff, 1850–1914

1982 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Evans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
The Poor

How did philanthropy adjust to the transformation of society in the nineteenth century? What was its role in social relations and in relieving poverty? Recent writers studying these issues have suggested the need for detailed studies at local level, and in studying some English towns and cities in the earlier part of the nineteenth century they have come to varying conclusions. Roger Smith's study of Nottingham shows that philanthropy added insignificantly to the amount of relief available through the Poor Law. By contrast Peter Searby's study of Coventry shows that philanthropic funds were quite abundant and after some reforms in the 1830's even applied to the relief of the poor! Professor McCord's articles on the North-East of England in the early nineteenth century seek to establish the more ambitious claim “that nineteenth-century philanthropy provided increasing resources and extended machinery with which to diminish the undesirable effects of that period's social problems”.

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