It is not surprising that in the case of another man of independent nature in Cambridgeshire, who had saved money and so could get no work, we are told that the young men pointed at him, and called him a fool for not spending his money at the public-house, ‘adding that then he would get work.’[404] The statesmen who condemned the labourer to this fate had rejected the proposal for a minimum wage, on the ground that it would destroy emulation.
There was one slight alleviation of this vicious system, which the Poor Law Commissioners considered in the very different light of an aggravation. If society was to be reorganised on such a basis as this, it was at any rate better that the men who were made to live on public money should not be grateful to the ratepayers. The Commissioners were pained by the insolence of the paupers. ‘The parish money,’ said a Sussex labourer, ‘is now chucked to us like as to a dog,’[405] but the labourers did not lick the hand that threw it. All through the Report we read complaints of the ‘insolent, discontented, surly pauper,’ who talks of ‘right’ and ‘income,’ and who will soon fight for these supposed rights and income ‘unless some step is taken to arrest his progress to open violence.’ The poor emphasised this view by the terms they applied to their rate subsidies, which they sometimes called ‘their reglars,’ sometimes ‘the county allowance,’ and sometimes ‘The Act of Parliament allowance.’ Old dusty rentbooks of receipts and old dirty indentures of apprenticeship were handed down from father to son with as much care as if they had been deeds of freehold property, as documentary evidence to their right to a share in the rates of a particular parish.[406] Of course there was not a uniform administration, and the Commissioners reported that whilst in some districts men were disqualified for relief if they had any wages, in others there was no inquiry into circumstances, and non-necessitous persons dipped like the rest into the till. In many cases only the wages received during the last week or fortnight were taken into account, and thus the allowance would be paid to some persons who at particular periods received wages in excess of the scale. This accounts for the fact stated by Thorold Rogers from his own experience that there were labourers who actually saved considerable sums out of the system.
The most obvious and immediate effect was the effect which had been foreseen without misgiving in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The married man was employed in preference to the bachelor, and his income rose with the birth of each child. But there was one thing better than to marry and have a family, and that was to marry a mother of bastards, for bastards were more profitable than legitimate children, since the parish guaranteed the contribution for which the putative father was legally liable. It was easier to manage with a family than with a single child. As one young woman of twenty-four with four bastard children put it, ‘If she had one more she should be very comfortable.’[407] Women with bastard children were thus very eligible wives. The effect of the whole system on village morals was striking and widespread, and a witness from a parish which was overwhelmed with this sudden deluge of population said to the Commission, ‘the eighteen-penny children will eat up this parish in ten years more, unless some relief be afforded us.’[408] Before this period, if we are to believe Cobbett, it had been rare for a woman to be with child at the time of her marriage; in these days of demoralisation and distress it became the habit.
The effects produced by this system on the recipients of relief were all of them such as might have been anticipated, and in this respect the Report of the Commissioners contained no surprises. It merely illustrated the generalisations that had been made by all Poor Law Reformers during the last fifteen years. But the discovery of the extent of the corruption which the system had bred in local government and administration was probably a revelation to most people. It demoralised not only those who received but those who gave. A network of tangled interests spread over local life, and employers and tradesmen were faced with innumerable temptations and opportunities for fraud. To take the case of the overseer first. Suppose him to be a tradesman: he was liable to suffer in his custom if he refused to relieve the friends, or it might be the workmen of his customers. It would require a man of almost superhuman rigidity of principle to be willing not only to lose time and money in serving a troublesome and unprofitable office, but to lose custom as well.[409] From the resolve not to lose custom he might gradually slip down to the determination to reimburse himself for ‘the vexatious demands’ on his time, till a state of affairs like that in Slaugham came about.
‘Population, 740. Expenditure, £1706. The above large sum of money is expended principally in orders on the village shops for flour, clothes, butter, cheese, etc.: the tradesmen serve the office of overseer by turns; the two last could neither read nor write.’[410]
If the overseer were a farmer there were temptations to pay part of the wages of his own and his friends’ labourers out of parish money, or to supply the workhouse with his own produce. The same temptations beset the members of vestries, whether they were open or select. ‘Each vestryman, so far as he is an immediate employer of labour, is interested in keeping down the rate of wages, and in throwing part of their payment on others, and, above all, on the principal object of parochial fraud, the tithe-owner: if he is the owner of cottages, he endeavours to get their rent paid by the parish; if he keeps a shop, he struggles to get allowance for his customers or debtors; if he deals in articles used in the workhouse, he tries to increase the workhouse consumption; if he is in humble circumstances, his own relations or friends may be among the applicants.’[411] Mr. Drummond, a magistrate for Hants and Surrey, said to the Committee on Labourers’ Wages in 1824, that part of the poor-rate expenditure was returned to farmers and landowners in exorbitant cottage rents, and that the farmers always opposed a poor man who wished to build himself a cottage on the waste.
In the case of what was known as the ‘labour rate’ system, the members of one class combined together to impose the burden of maintaining the poor on the shoulders of the other classes. By this system, instead of the labourer’s wages being made up to a fixed amount by the parish, each ratepayer was bound to employ, and to pay at a certain rate, a certain number of labourers, whether he wanted them or not. The number depended sometimes on his assessment to the poor rate, sometimes on the amount of acres he occupied (of the use to which the land was put no notice was taken, a sheep-walk counting for as much as arable fields): when the occupiers of land had employed a fixed number of labourers, the surplus labourers were divided amongst all the ratepayers according to their rental. This plan was superficially fair, but as a matter of fact it worked out to the advantage of the big farmers with much arable land, and pressed hard on the small ones who cultivated their holdings by their own and their children’s labour, and, in cases where they were liable to the rate, on the tradesmen who had no employment at which to set an agricultural labourer. After 1832 (2 and 3 William IV. c. 96) the agreement of three-fourths of the ratepayers to such a system was binding on all, and the large farmers often banded together to impose it on their fellow ratepayers by intimidation or other equally unscrupulous means: thus at Kelvedon in Essex we read: ‘There was no occasion in this parish, nor would it have been done but for a junto of powerful landholders, putting down opposition by exempting a sufficient number, to give themselves the means of a majority.’[412]
Landlords in some cases resorted to Machiavellian tactics in order to escape their burdens.
‘Several instances have been mentioned to us, of parishes nearly depopulated, in which almost all the labour is performed by persons settled in the neighbouring villages or towns; drawing from them, as allowance, the greater part of their subsistence.’[413] This method is described more at length in the following passage:—
‘When a parish is in the hands of only one proprietor, or of proprietors so few in number as to be able to act, and to compel their tenants to act, in unison, and adjoins to parishes in which property is much divided, they may pull down every cottage as it becomes vacant, and prevent the building of new ones. By a small immediate outlay they may enable and induce a considerable portion of those who have settlements in their parish to obtain settlements in the adjoining parishes: by hiring their labourers for periods less than a year, they may prevent the acquisition of new settlements in their own. They may thus depopulate their own estates, and cultivate them by means of the surplus population of the surrounding district.’[414] A clergyman in Reading[415] said that he had between ten and twenty families living in his parish and working for the farmers in their original parish, whose cottages had been pulled down over their heads. Occasionally a big proprietor of parish A, in order to lessen the poor rates, would, with unscrupulous ingenuity, take a farm in parish B, and there hire for the year a batch of labourers from A: these at the end of their term he would turn off on to the mercies of parish B which was now responsible for them, whilst he sent for a fresh consignment from parish A.[416]