Pauper policies

Poor law practice in England, 1780–1850

Samantha A. Shave

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526106186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

Pauper policies examines how policies under the old and New Poor Laws were conceived, adopted, implemented, developed or abandoned. This fresh perspective reveals significant aspects of poor law history which have been overlooked by scholars. Important new research is presented on the adoption and implementation of 'enabling acts' at the end of the old poor laws; the exchange of knowledge about how best to provide poor relief in the final decades of the old poor law and formative decades of the New; and the impact of national scandals on policy-making in the new Victorian system. Pointing towards a new direction in the study of poor law administration, it examines how people, both those in positions of power and the poor, could shape pauper policies. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in welfare and poverty in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England.

1

A policy process approach to the poor laws

The curtailment of Ann Dunster’s outdoor relief mirrors the experiences of many other claimants after the late eighteenth century when relief provision became subject to different rules and expectations. Foregrounding the experiences of relief recipients has, however, only been a recent trend in poor law studies. The first section of this chapter outlines the recent trend in welfare history to examine the ‘welfare process’; that is, the process by which people negotiated welfare provision, and the agency of those claiming welfare, which includes how they asked for assistance and from whom they sought this help. Although this ‘experiential turn’ in poor law research has resulted in a much greater understanding of the impact of poor law, administrative aspects of the poor laws have become neglected. The chapter then makes a case for a new approach to understanding the poor laws, one informed by the social science concept of the ‘policy process’. After a description of this concept, I apply the ‘policy process’ model to the current, mainly administrative, literature on the poor laws in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This highlights several aspects of poor law administration that are currently not well understood, each one subsequently examined in further chapters in this book. A final section outlines the sources used in order to examine the poor laws according to this policy process approach.

The ‘welfare process’ and agency

In the late 1990s Lyn Hollen Lees argued that ‘[t]‌he heart of the welfare process lay in the contacts between the pauper and administrator’.¹ Both had predetermined aims and desired outcomes and engaged in a negotiation before any poor relief would be offered. This idea served as inspiration for other academics writing about welfare, as it drew the focus away from the welfare outcome – the relief itself – and towards the welfare process. Indeed, the term ‘welfare process’ was adopted by other historians, notably Steve Hindle who, in his research into relief in early modern England, argues that the ‘welfare process’ was embedded in a complex web of interactions ‘between the various participants – the labouring poor, the parish officers, the county magistrates, the itinerant judiciary’. People were not necessarily the passive recipients or administrators of relief, but actively entangled in the ‘micro-politics’ of poor relief provision. As such, we have now learnt that the ‘welfare process’ involved many ‘protracted and often antagonistic negotiations’.² With these understandings, historians started to research and analyse the negotiations between relief recipients and relieving officers.

Research that explored a more active relationship between poor individuals, policy and those in power started to gain attention at the same time that historians became interested in how the poorest in societies got by on an everyday basis. Although the phrase ‘economies of makeshift’ was first coined by Olwen Hufton to describe poor people’s strategies in eighteenth-century France, it has been adopted by historians throughout Europe to capture the ‘disparate nature of income for poor households’ in the past.³ Twenty years ago, a volume entitled Chronicling Poverty brought together different pieces of research into the diverse strategies of the poor in England.⁴ According to its editors, its purpose was to ‘explore an important and little-regarded aspect of social history, contributing to a fuller and more nuanced “history from below”’.⁵ In particular, these analyses have demonstrated that the poor should not be defined solely by their association with statutory forms of relief provision. Indeed, the collection of articles demonstrated an understanding that individuals did claim poor relief, but that they also utilised a variety of other options. The poor mobilised the resources of voluntary organisations, whether large, such as the London Foundling Hospital, or small, such as a parish-based Penny Clothing Club.⁶ Private organisations offered important sources of support for the poor, especially the provision of credit in shops and pawnshops.⁷ The varied ways in which individuals got by were subsequently captured in a further collection of essays entitled The Poor in England, 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts.⁸

This approach has influenced the perspectives taken in more recent studies of the ‘household economy’ of the labouring class. Alannah Tomkins has sought to examine the alternative sources of support beyond the parish relief, such as using charities and pawnbrokers, in eighteenth-century urban England.⁹ Samantha Williams examined household budgets in Bedfordshire to illustrate how proportions of income, parish relief and ‘charity cash’ varied over time during the formative years of the New Poor Law.¹⁰ She also acknowledges more informal inputs into the household economy, such as acting as a costermonger and taking in lodgers.¹¹ Work undertaken by historians such as Tomkins and Williams has, therefore, provided us with a detailed picture of the overlapping practices of statutory relief alongside charity, mutual aid and the private sector.

Although the focus on ‘strategy’ has opened up the alternative forms of welfare the poor used to get by, it has also made poor law historians question the ways in which statutory relief could be used and even manipulated to an individual’s advantage during tough times. Outdoor relief during the old poor laws was more necessary for certain periods of the life-course than others, as my own previous research has shown, as well as the work of Wales, Stapleton, King, Williams and, most recently, French.¹² Demographic factors, especially the number of family members, therefore impacted upon the use of outdoor relief. Because parishes, under the 1662 Settlement Act, only had to provide relief to their own parishioners – as stipulated by various settlement criteria such as birth, marriage, work and tax – a settlement examination, like an interview, would be conducted with people who started claiming relief, or whom the parish believed would start to claim for relief. Snell, in Annals of the Labouring Poor, found that in England men aged about 34 years old with an average of 2.1 or 2.6 children were given a settlement examination between 1700 and 1834. This pinpoints one moment in the life-course when most labouring families needed parish assistance.¹³ But periods of relief receipt and non-relief came at different times for different individuals, as my own research has demonstrated. Combining a microhistorical and biographical approach, I traced eight individuals’ life-courses, detailing their relief receipt and demographic events. Most individuals received outdoor relief to get by during times of hardship, but it was the parish vestry that judged these requests and tailored relief to suit individuals’ circumstances.¹⁴ Of course, the use of the statutory welfare system extended into the realms of indoor relief – it is clear that individuals may not have entered workhouses because of their poverty exclusively. Hitchcock draws our attention towards the functions of London workhouses in the mid eighteenth century, examining how women entered the Chelsea workhouse to receive medical treatment and to give birth. Mothers and fathers also left their children in this workhouse upon accepting an offer of employment.¹⁵ Harley has recently extended this thesis with a case study of the Beaminster workhouse in Dorset. Here he demonstrates how new entrants were able to strategise and therefore negotiate with authority for the safe storage, and even use, of their possessions in the institution.¹⁶

These studies demonstrate that relief claimants were able to assert their own agency, and therefore express their needs, in the ‘welfare process’. They could present their cases to the parish officers in particular ways, and once in receipt of relief they could negotiate for particular types of outdoor relief, use parish relief from a palette of welfare resources and alter the conditions of their indoor relief. Yet, the agency of the poor is only one side of the ‘welfare process’, the negotiation between relief claimants and relief providers. And it was relief providers who had overwhelmingly more power within this negotiation. To ‘get at’ these negotiations, research has turned away from records detailing welfare administration to those containing ‘pauper narratives’. Pauper narratives, i.e. words thought to be written or influenced by the poor, have been found in a vast variety of archives, as Alysa Levene’s five-volume collection of sources, Narratives of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England, illustrates. The collection contains a host of sources hitherto neglected by historians, including pamphlets, short stories, ballads, the notes left with children in London’s Foundling Hospital and a very rich source of information about the lives and negotiations of statutory relief claimants: ‘pauper letters’.¹⁷ Pauper letters are pieces of correspondence written by, or for, individuals and families asking for relief from their parish of settlement when they were unable to make a claim in person. Alannah Tomkins first demonstrated how a series of ‘pauper letters’ from an individual could reveal both the changing circumstances of a relief claimant and how they varied...