The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

For if the rich have by their laws made a mess of the alehouse, what about the other public-house—the workhouse? When you have no money to enable you to take your ease at your inn the only other hostelry open for you and your wife and children is the Poor House.

If there is one subject that has a more confused melancholy legal history than another it is the story of the workhouse. No doubt much has been done and something is doing, but it is difficult to see the real metal of the reformer’s work for the great heaps of Poor Law dirt that our forefathers have left for us to clear away. For years the great English General Mixed Workhouse has been looking for trouble. It has not a friend even in the Local Government Board Office, and it has been condemned by all right-minded men and women time out of mind as an abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Yet there it is. A blockhouse, invented, built, and governed by blockheads, or at least beings with wooden blocks instead of human hearts. It is mournful to read the Poor Law history of the last eighty years and to learn how little we have done to dry the tears of the widows and orphans who become, through folly, misfortune, or ill-regulated industry, the wards of the State.

And to understand how such an institution came into our midst, it is necessary to look back a bit upon the natural history of our Poor Law.

Whatever our failings may be as practical statesmen capable of translating philanthropic theory into practical statutory right action, no one can deny we are a great people for ideals. And the ideal of our Poor Law has from earliest days been excellent. Coke in his Institutes tells us that it was ordained by Kings before the Conquest that the poor should be sustained by parsons, rectors, and parishioners, “so that no one should die from lack of sustenance.” That was, and still is, the ideal. No citizen is to die from lack of sustenance, and yet surely since the Conquest, and even recently in our own time, some perverse person has escaped the careful eyes of the parsons, rectors, and parishioners, and crept away to an obscure corner there to die of hunger against the ordinance of Kings in that case made and provided.

Coke got this phrase from Andrew Horn, the author or editor of that excellent treatise “La Somme appelle Mirroir des Justices,” which he must have compiled somewhere before 1328, though it was first printed in 1624. Horn’s “Mirror of Justices,” is not, I believe, regarded with great reverence by the learned as a law-book, but Coke enjoyed it and quoted it with approval, and whether or not some of its phrases were ever sound law I dare not express an opinion, but I will vouch for the excellence of Andrew’s sympathies.

In writing of the criminal law he tells us that “the poor man who to escape starvation takes victuals to sustain his life, or a garment to prevent death by cold, is not to be adjudged to death if he had no power to buy or to borrow, for such things are warranted by the law natural.”

I suppose it is doubtful if this was ever good common law to be acted upon in all criminal courts, but one admires old Andrew for setting it down and is glad to learn that even in the beginning of the fourteenth century there were writers on law who were trying to mitigate the rigour of the law in favour of the poor. They may not have actually stated what the law exactly was, but they had shrewd ideas at the back of their minds as to what it ought to be. If they confused the two themselves at times, and this confused other learned ones in after times, maybe no one has been much the worse for it. And when Horn laid down in his quaint dog French that “Les povres fusent sustenuz par les persones rectours des eglises e par les paroisiens,” I fear he was writing of what ought to be rather than what was the existing common law of the relief of the poor.

I am not at all sure that leaving the matter in the hands of parsons and parishioners has not been the cause of most of the failure of the Poor Law. If you have studied parsons and parishioners as a class, you do not find them peculiarly desirous of providing sustenance for others. Queen Elizabeth—a very practical lady, much thought of by parsons and parishioners—was evidently of the opinion that you were asking too much for the poor when you said that they should have sustenance for nothing. She it was who enacted that in return for the ideal Saxon sustenance, which was apparently to be freely given, the poor person was now to give his work. Churchwardens and overseers, instead of giving free relief had power to set to work children whose parents could not maintain them, and make their parents work too if necessary. This was the beginning of the system that made you chargeable on the parish, and gave the parish a right to make you work off some of your chargeability.

In the eighteenth century came the interesting and disastrous experiment of indiscriminate out-door relief. The farmer parishioner discovered he could get a cheaper labourer by making his fellow parishioners pay some of the wages in out-door relief. A pauper was a better tenant to have, since the rent was paid out of the poor rates, a bastard child was an asset in a household, and in 1821 overseers are known to have shared out the pauper labourers among themselves and their friends and paid for the labour wholly out of the poor-rate.

The scandals that had arisen led to the reform of the Poor Law in 1834, which placed the administration in the hands of Commissioners who were to see that the law was carried out, and by a natural swing of the pendulum they turned from an indiscriminate doling out of rates to favoured paupers to a system whereby the labourer was to find that the parish was his hardest taskmaster so as to induce him to keep away from the overseers and make parish relief his last and not his first resource. The ideal that the Commissioners stood out for was that no relief whatever was to be given to able-bodied persons or to their families otherwise than in well-regulated workhouses. This was the beginning of the workhouse system which really made the workhouse a kind of prison for those who could not find work outside.