‘A single Man according to his labour.
‘A Man and his Wife not less than 6s. a week.
‘A Man and his Wife with one or two Small Children, not less than 7s. a week.
‘And for every additional Child not less than 1s. a week.’ This regulation was to be sent to all overseers within the county.[303]
But the Speenhamland magistrates had drawn up a table which became a convenient standard, and other magistrates found it the simplest course to accept the table as it stood. The tables passed rapidly from county to county. The allowance system spread like a fever, for while it is true to say that the northern counties took it much later and in a milder form, there were only two counties still free from it in 1834—Northumberland and Durham.
To complete our picture of the new system we must remember the results of Gilbert’s Act. It had been the practice in those parishes that adopted the Act to reserve the workhouse for the infirm and to find work outside for the unemployed, the parish receiving the wages of such employment and providing maintenance. This outside employment had spread to other parishes, and the way in which it had been worked may be illustrated by cases mentioned by Eden, writing in the summer and autumn of 1795. At Kibworth-Beauchamp in Leicestershire, ‘in the winter, and at other times, when a man is out of work, he applies to the overseer, who sends him from house to house to get employ: the housekeeper, who employs him, is obliged to give him victuals, and 6d. a day; and the parish adds 4d.; (total 10d. a day;) for the support of his family: persons working in this manner are called rounds-men, from their going round the village or township for employ.’[304] At Yardley Goben, in Northamptonshire, every person who paid more than £20 rent was bound in his turn to employ a man for a day and to pay him a shilling.[305] At Maids Morton the roundsman got 6d. from the employer and 6d. or 9d. from the parish.[306] At Winslow in Bucks the system was more fully developed. ‘There seems to be here a great want of employment: most labourers are (as it is termed,) on the Rounds; that is, they go to work from one house to another round the parish. In winter, sometimes 40 persons are on the rounds. They are wholly paid by the parish, unless the householders choose to employ them; and from these circumstances, labourers often become very lazy, and imperious. Children, about ten years old, are put on the rounds, and receive from the parish from 1s. 6d. to 3s. a week.’[307] The Speenhamland systematised scale was easily grafted on to these arrangements. ‘During the late dear season, the Poor of the parish went in a body to the Justices, to complain of their want of bread. The Magistrates sent orders to the parish officers to raise the earnings of labourers, to certain weekly sums, according to the number of their children; a circumstance that should invariably be attended to in apportioning parochial relief. These sums were from 7s. to 19s.; and were to be reduced, proportionably with the price of bread.’[308]
The Speenhamland system did not then spring Athene-like out of the heads of the justices and other discreet persons whose place of meeting has given the system its name. Neither was the unemployment policy thereafter adopted a sudden inspiration of the Parliament of 1796. The importance of these years is that though the governing classes did not then introduce a new principle, they applied to the normal case methods of relief and treatment that had hitherto been reserved for the exceptions. The Poor Law which had once been the hospital became now the prison of the poor. Designed to relieve his necessities, it was now his bondage. If a labourer was in private employment, the difference between the wage his master chose to give him and the recognised minimum was made up by the parish. Those labourers who could not find private employment were either shared out among the ratepayers, or else their labour was sold by the parish to employers, at a low rate, the parish contributing what was needed to bring the labourers’ receipts up to scale. Crabbe has described the roundsman system:
‘Alternate Masters now their Slave command,
Urge the weak efforts of his feeble hand,
And when his age attempts its task in vain,