The village labourer, 1760-1832 / A study in the government of England before the Reform Bill

by J. L. Hammond; Barbara Bradby Hammond

POOR LAW REFORM

Pitt, having secured the rejection of Whitbread’s Minimum Wage Bill in 1796, produced his own alternative: Poor Law Reform. It is necessary to state briefly what were the Poor Law arrangements at the time of his proposals.

The Poor Law system reposed on the great Act of Elizabeth (1601), by which the State had acknowledged and organised the duty to the poor which it had taken over from the Church. The parish was constituted the unit, and overseers, unsalaried and nominated by the J.P.’s, were appointed for administering relief, the necessary funds being obtained by a poor rate. Before 1722 a candidate for relief could apply either to the overseers or to the magistrate. By an Act passed in that year, designed to make the administration stricter, application was to be made first to the overseer. If the overseer rejected the application the claimant could submit his case to a magistrate, and the magistrate, after hearing the overseer’s objection, could order that relief should be given. There were, however, a number of parishes in which applications for relief were made to salaried guardians. These were the parishes that had adopted an Act known as Gilbert’s Act, passed in 1782.[252] In these parishes,[253] joined in incorporations, the parish overseers were not abolished, for they still had the duty of collecting and accounting for the rates, but the distribution was in the hands of paid guardians, one for each parish, appointed by the justices out of a list of names submitted by the parishioners. In each set of incorporated parishes there was a ‘Visitor’ appointed by the justices, who had practically absolute power over the guardians. If the guardians refused relief, the claimant could still appeal, as in the case of the overseers, to the justices.

Such was the parish machinery. The method of giving relief varied greatly, but the main distinction to be drawn is between (1) out relief, or a weekly pension of a shilling or two at home; and (2) indoor relief, or relief in a workhouse, or poorhouse, or house of industry. Out relief was the earlier institution, and it held its own throughout the century, being the only form of relief in many parishes. Down to 1722 parishes that wished to build a workhouse had to get a special Act of Parliament. In that year a great impetus was given to the workhouse movement by an Act[254] which authorised overseers, with the consent of the vestry, to start workhouses, or to farm out the poor, and also authorised parishes to join together for this purpose. If applicants for relief refused to go into the workhouse, they forfeited their title to any relief at all. A great many workhouses were built in consequence of this Act: in 1732 there were stated to be sixty in the country, and about fifty in the metropolis.[255]

Even if the applicant for relief lived in a parish which had built or shared in a workhouse, it did not follow that he was forced into it. He lost his title to receive relief outside, but his fate would depend on the parish officers. In the parishes which had adopted Gilbert’s Act the workhouse was reserved for the aged, for the infirm, and for young children. In most parishes there was out relief as well as indoor relief: in some parishes outdoor relief being allowed to applicants of a certain age or in special circumstances. In some parishes all outdoor relief had stopped by 1795.[256] There is no doubt that in most parishes the workhouse accommodation would have been quite inadequate for the needs of the parish in times of distress. It was quite common to put four persons into a single bed.

The workhouses were dreaded by the poor,[257] not only for the dirt and disease and the devastating fevers that swept through them,[258] but for reasons that are intelligible enough to any one who has read Eden’s descriptions. Those descriptions show that Crabbe’s picture is no exaggeration:—

‘Theirs is yon House that holds the Parish-Poor,

Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;

There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,

And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;—

There Children dwell who know no Parents’ care;

Parents, who know no Children’s love, dwell there!

Heart-broken Matrons on their joyless bed,

Forsaken Wives and Mothers never wed;

Dejected Widows with unheeded tears,

And crippled Age with more than childhood fears;

The Lame, the Blind, and, far the happiest they!

The moping Idiot and the Madman gay.

Here too the Sick their final doom receive,

Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve,

Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow,

Mixt with the clamours of the crowd below;

Here sorrowing, they each kindred sorrow scan,

And the cold charities of man to man:

Whose laws indeed for ruin’d Age provide,

And strong compulsion plucks the scrap from pride;

But still that scrap is bought with many a sigh,

And pride embitters what it can’t deny.’[259]

A good example of this mixture of young and old, virtuous and vicious, whole and sick, sane and mad, is given in Eden’s catalogue of the inmates of Epsom Workhouse in January 1796.[260] There were eleven men, sixteen women, and twenty-three children. We read of J. H., aged forty-three, ‘always ... somewhat of an idiot, he is now become quite a driveller’; of E. E., aged sixty-two, ‘of a sluggish, stupid character’; of A. M., aged twenty-six, ‘afflicted with a leprosy’; of R. M., aged seventy-seven, ‘worn out and paralytic’; of J. R., aged seventeen, who has contracted so many disorderly habits that decent people will not employ him. It is interesting to notice that it was not till 1790 that the Justices of the Peace were given any power of inspecting workhouses.

In 1796, before Pitt’s scheme was brought in, the Act of 1722, which had been introduced to stiffen the administration of the Poor Laws, was relaxed. An Act,[261] of which Sir William Young was the author, abolished the restriction of right to relief to persons willing to enter the workhouse, and provided that claimants could apply for relief directly to a magistrate. The Act declares that the restrictions had been found ‘inconvenient and oppressive.’ It is evidence, of course, of the increasing pressure of poverty.

But to understand the arrangements in force at this time, and also the later developments, we must glance at another feature of the Poor Law system. The Poor Laws were a system of employment as well as a system of relief. The Acts before 1722 are all called Acts for the Relief of the Poor: the Act of 1722 speaks of ‘the Settlement, Employment and Relief.’ That Act empowered parishes to farm out the poor to an employer. Gilbert’s Act of 1782 provided that in the parishes incorporated under that Act the guardians were not to send able-bodied poor to the poorhouse, but to find work for them or maintain them until work was found: the guardian was to take the wage and provide the labourer with a maintenance. Thus there grew up a variety of systems of public employment: direct employment of paupers on parish work: the labour rate system, or the sharing out of the paupers among the ratepayers: the roundsman system by which pauper labour was sold to the farmers.[262]

This was the state of things that Pitt proposed to reform. His general ideas on Poor Law reform were put before the House of Commons in the debate on the second reading of Whitbread’s Bill.[263] He thought that persons with large families should be treated as entitled to relief, that persons without a settlement, falling into want, should not be liable to removal at the caprice of the parish officer, that Friendly Societies should be encouraged, and that Schools of Industry should be established. ‘If any one would take the trouble to compute the amount of all the earnings of the children who are already educated in this manner, he would be surprised, when he came to consider the weight which their support by their own labours took off the country, and the addition which, by the fruits of their toil, and the habits to which they were formed, was made to its internal opulence.’ On 22nd December of that year, in a new Parliament, he asked for leave to bring in a Bill for the better Support and Maintenance of the Poor. He said the subject was too extensive to be discussed at that stage, that he only proposed that the Bill should be read a first and second time and sent to a committee where the blanks could be filled up, and the Bill printed before the holidays, ‘in order that during the interval of Parliament it might be circulated in the country and undergo the most serious investigation.’[264] Sheridan hinted that it was unfortunate for the poor that Pitt had taken the question out of Whitbread’s hands, to which Pitt replied that any delay in bringing forward his Bill was due to the time spent on taking advice. On 28th February of the next year (1797), while strangers were excluded from the Gallery, there occurred what the Parliamentary Register calls ‘a conversation upon the farther consideration of the report of the Poor’s Bill,’ in which nobody but Pitt defended the Bill, and Sheridan and Joliffe attacked it. With this its Parliamentary history ends.

The main features of the Bill were these.[265] Schools of Industry were to be established in every parish or group of parishes. These schools were to serve two purposes. First, the young were to be trained there (this idea came, of course, from Locke). Every poor man with more than two children who were not self-supporting, and every widow with more than one such child, was to be entitled to a weekly allowance in respect of each extra child. Every allowance child who was five years or over was to be sent to the School of Industry, unless his parent could instruct and employ him, and the proceeds of his work was to go towards the upkeep of the school. Secondly, grown-up people were to be employed there. The authorities were to provide ‘a proper stock of hemp, flax, silk, cotton, wool, iron, leather or other materials, and also proper tools and implements for the employment of the poor,’ and they were empowered to carry on all trades under this Act, ‘any law or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.’ Any person lawfully settled in a parish was entitled to be employed in the school; any person residing in a parish, able and willing to be employed at the usual rates, was entitled to be employed there when out of work. Poor persons refusing to be employed there were not to be entitled to relief. The authorities might either pay wages at a rate fixed by the magistrates, or they might let the employed sell their products and merely repay the school for the material, or they might contract to feed them and take a proportion of their receipts. If the wages paid in the school were insufficient, they were to be supplemented out of the rates.

The proposals for outside relief were briefly and chiefly these. A person unable to earn the full rate of wages usually given might contract with his employer to work at an inferior rate, and have the balance between his earnings and an adequate maintenance made up by the parish. Money might be advanced under certain circumstances for the purchase of a cow or other animal, if it seemed likely that such a course would enable the recipient to maintain himself without the help of the parish. The possession of property up to thirty pounds was not to disqualify a person for relief. A parochial insurance fund was to be created, partly from private subscriptions and partly from the rates. No person was to be removed from a parish on account of relief for temporary disability or sickness.

The most celebrated and deadly criticism came from Bentham, who is often supposed to have killed the Bill. Some of his objections are captious and eristical, and he is a good deal less than just to the good elements of the scheme. Pitt deserves credit for one statesmanlike discovery, the discovery that it is bad policy to refuse to help a man until he is ruined. His cow-money proposal was also conceived in the right spirit if its form was impracticable. But the scheme as a whole was confused and incoherent, and it deserved the treatment it received. It was in truth a huge patchwork, on which the ideas of living and dead reformers were thrown together without order or plan. As a consequence, its various parts did not agree. It is surprising that the politician who had attacked Whitbread’s Bill as an interference with wages could have included in his scheme the proposal to pay wages in part out of rates. The whole scheme, though it would have involved a great expenditure, would have produced very much the same result as the Speenhamland system, by virtue of this clause. Pitt showed no more judgment or foresight than the least enlightened of County Justices in introducing into a scheme for providing relief, and dealing with unemployment, a proposal that could only have the effect of reducing wages. The organisation of Schools of Industry as a means of dealing with unemployment has sometimes been represented as quite a new proposal, but it was probably based on the suggestion made by Fielding in 1753 in his paper, ‘A proposal for making an effectual provision for the poor, for amending their morals, and for rendering them useful members of society.’ Fielding proposed the erection of a county workhouse, which was to include a house of correction. He drew up a sharp and drastic code which would have authorised the committal to his County House, not only of vagrants, but of persons of low degree found harbouring in an ale-house after ten o’clock at night. But the workhouse was not merely to be used as a penal settlement, it was to find work for the unemployed. Any person who was unable to find employment in his parish could apply to the minister or churchwardens for a pass, and this pass was to give him the right to claim admission to the County House where he was to be employed. The County House was also to be provided with instructors who could teach native and foreign manufactures to the inmates. Howlett, one of Pitt’s critics, was probably right in thinking that Pitt was reviving this scheme.

The Bill excited general opposition. Bentham’s analysis is the most famous of the criticisms that have survived, but in some senses his opposition was less serious than the dismay of magistrates and ratepayers. Hostile petitions poured into the House of Commons from London and from all parts of the country; among others there were petitions from Shrewsbury, Oswestry, Worcester, Bristol, Lincoln, Carmarthen, Bedford, Chester and Godalming.[266] Howlett attacked the scheme on the ground of the danger of parish jobbery and corruption. Pitt apparently made no attempt to defend his plan, and he surrendered it without a murmur. We are thus left in the curious and disappointing position of having before us a Bill on the most important subject of the day, introduced and abandoned by the Prime Minister without a word or syllable in its defence. Whitbread observed[267] four years later that the Bill was brought in and printed, but never brought under the discussion of the House. Pitt’s excuse is significant: ‘He was, as formerly, convinced of its propriety; but many objections had been started to it by those whose opinion he was bound to respect. Inexperienced himself in country affairs, and in the condition of the poor, he was diffident of his own opinion, and would not press the measure upon the attention of the House.’

Poor Law Reform was thus abandoned, but two attempts were made, at the instance of Pitt, one of them with success, to soften the brutalities of the Law of Settlement. Neither proposal made it any easier to gain a settlement, and Pitt very properly declared that they did not go nearly far enough. Pitt had all Adam Smith’s just hatred of these restrictions, and in opposing Whitbread’s Bill for a minimum wage he pointed to ‘a radical amendment’ of the Law of Settlement as the true remedy. He was not the formal author of the Act of 1795, but it may safely be assumed that he was the chief power behind it. This Act[268] provided that nobody was to be removeable until he or she became actually chargeable to the parish. The preamble throws light on the working of the Settlement laws. It declares that ‘Many industrious poor persons, chargeable to the parish, township, or place where they live, merely from want of work there, would in any other place where sufficient employment is to be had, maintain themselves and families without being burthensome to any parish, township, or place; and such poor persons are for the most part compelled to live in their own parishes, townships, or places, and are not permitted to inhabit elsewhere, under pretence that they are likely to become chargeable to the parish, township, or place into which they go for the purpose of getting employment, although the labour of such poor persons might, in many instances, be very beneficial to such parish, township, or place.’ The granting of certificates is thus admitted to have been ineffectual. The same Act provided that orders of removal were to be suspended in cases where the pauper was dangerously ill, a provision that throws some light on the manner in which these orders had been executed, and that no person should gain a settlement by paying levies or taxes, in respect of any tenement of a yearly value of less than ten pounds.[269]

From this time certificates were unnecessary, and if a labourer moved from Parish A to Parish B he was no longer liable to be sent back at the caprice of Parish B’s officers until he became actually chargeable, but, of course, if from any cause he fell into temporary distress, for example, if he were out of work for a few weeks, unless he could get private aid from ‘the opulent,’ he had to return to his old parish. An attempt was made to remedy this state of things by Mr. Baker who, in March 1800, introduced a Bill[270] to enable overseers to assist the deserving but unsettled poor in cases of temporary distress. He explained that the provisions of the Bill would apply only to men who could usually keep themselves, but from the high cost of provisions had to depend on parochial aid. He found a powerful supporter in Pitt, who argued that if people had enriched a parish with their industry, it was unfair that owing to temporary pressure they should be removed to a place where they were not wanted, and that it was better for a parish to suffer temporary inconvenience than for numbers of industrious men to be rendered unhappy and useless. But in spite of Pitt’s unanswerable case, the Bill, which was denounced by Mr. Buxton as oppressive to the landed interest, by Lord Sheffield as ‘subversive of the whole economy of the country,’ by Mr. Ellison as submerging the middle ranks, and by Sir William Pulteney as being a ‘premium for idleness and extravagance,’ was rejected by thirty votes to twenty-three.[271]