Definitions

• Habeas Corpus: Literally meaning 'you have the body', the Act of 1679 was intended to prevent people from being imprisoned in secret. It's suspension meant that people could be imprisoned without trial for an indefinite period.
• Six Acts 1819: These acts prohibited meetings of more than 50 people, increased stamp duties on newspapers, made the publication of blasphemous and seditious material a transportable offence, forbade military training by civilians, limited the right of an accused person to delay a trail in order to prepare the defence and gave magistrates powers to search private houses for arms.
• Indigence: A term, frequently used in the 19th century, meaning a person's inability to support themselves, so that they became indigent.
• Poor Rate: A tax levied at parish level and used to provide relief for the parish poor.
• Overseer of the poor: Each year every parish appointed one or two overseers of the poor, who were approved by the local magistrates. These overseers were usually churchwardens or landowners. Overseers were responsible for administering poor relief in their parish. They levied a Poor Rate and supervised its distribution.
• Cottage Industry: Paid work that could be done at home, like spinning and weaving before the Industrial Revolution.
• Enclosure: Many large landowners enclosed open fields by putting fences and hedges around them. This enabled the landowners to breed cows and sheep for specific characteristics. Thousands of agricultural labourers were thrown out of work and, if the landowners enclosed common land, they had nowhere to graze the few animals they had.
• Impotent Poor: People, such as the sick, the disabled, the old and children, who could not look after themselves even when times were good, and who were deemed worthy of relief.
• Select Vestry: A vestry (a group of parishioners who meet in the vestry of a church) where members were selected according to specific criteria, usually the amount of property/land they owned. These were different from open vestries, where every ratepayer was entitled to be a member and to decide how poor relief was to be distributed.
• Less eligibility: The principle that conditions inside a workhouse had to be less eligible (less desirable) than those outside.
• Workhouse Test: This tested whether nor not a person's request for relief was genuine. Only the destitute would accept relief on terms of less eligibility.
• Underclass: A segment of a population that occupies a position in the social hierarchy below that of the working class.
• Bound over to keep the peace: Required by a magistrate to be of good behaviour.
• Utilitarianism: A theory that society should be organised so as to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Actions, Acts of Parliament and institutions should be judged according to whether or not they added to this sum total of happiness.