3.3 Paupers and Pauperism, 1780-1834

• Parishes adopted developed and amended over time several different ways of providing relief to the poor outside workhouses and poorhouses
• Speenhamland system


  A way of providing relief by subsidising low wages, established a formal relationship between the price of bread and the number of dependants in a family
• How parishes provided relief


  • Giving flour to make up the wages of the parish able-bodied paupers (Newton Valance, Hampshire)
  • Considering each child in determining the relief given
  • Not increasing relief until there were more than a certain number of children in a family
• The Speenhamland system and its variations were widely adopted in the south and east of Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, generally used only in the slack times during the agricultural year
• Allowance systems were rarely, if ever, used in rural areas in the north where livestock farming usually provided full employment throughout the year
• Roundsman system


  A way of making sure that, in parishes where there were too many paupers for the work available, at least some work was found for each able-bodied pauper
• Roundsman system


  1. Able-bodied pauper labourers sent in rotation to local farmers

  2. Farmer provides work, either genuinely needed or invented for the purpose

  3. Pauper's wages paid partly by farmer and partly by parish

  4. Overseer makes up difference from poor rates
• Over time the proportion of a Roundsman's wage paid by the parish increased as farmers took advantage of a system that did not require them to pay a set proportion of the wages of the paupers they employed
• Settlement


  Determining which parish was responsible for providing relief to an individual
• The Elizabethan Poor Law stated that a person claiming relief had to be returned to the place of their birth in order to receive it, or if the place of birth was not known, to a place where he or she had lived for a year or more, or to the last parish through which the person had passed without getting into trouble with the law
• Settlement Act 1662


  Legal settlement was by birth, marriage, apprenticeship or inheritance
• Strangers staying in a parish could be removed, if they were not working, within 40 days and the overseers considered they were likely to end up claiming poor relief
• Settlement legislation was further tightened up in 1607, when strangers could be barred from entering a parish and finding work there unless they could produce a settlement certificate issued by their home parish
• Overseers and paupers became skilled at using the settlement system to their advantage
• The Settlement Laws were intended to ensure that the burden of providing for the poor did not overwhelm some parishes, but they were not applied consistently over time or from place to place
• Overseers were always mindful of the burden of the Poor Rate levied on their own parish property owners, and were anxious to keep their own Poor Rate as low as possible
• The struggles of overseers to prevent paupers from becoming a charge on their particular parish took up a considerable amount of time and were not always necessarily in the best interests of the paupers themselves
• The Settlement Laws were, in the end, unable to prevent a mobile population creating the growing cities of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, because so many thousands of people were on the move that local overseers of the poor and the magistrates simply couldn't keep up with issuing and carrying out settlement orders
• Labour Rate


  A different way of providing relief that avoided the pitfalls of the Roundsman system
• Labour Rate


  1. Agreement between parishioners to establish a labour rate in addition to the usual Poor Rate

  2. Total parish labour bill worked out according to the going market rate

  3. Ratepayers who employed pauper labourers and paid them at the rate set by the parish were exempt from paying poor rates

  4. Those who did not pay the going rate had to pay the difference between the wages they were paying and the going rate into the Poor Rate 'pot
• Labour Rate


  • Prevented the most obvious abuse of the Roundsman system, whereby wages became nominal and for most of each pauper's wages to be paid by the parish, with an obvious impact on the poor rates
• The popularity of the Labour Rate system is not clear, but it does seem that, by 1832, about one parish in five was operating some sort of Labour Rate
• 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
• Elizabethan Poor Law


  • Boned the more obvious sorts of earlier repression in favour of assistance and correction
  • The impotent poor were to be looked after in poorhouses or almshouses (receiving what was known as indoor relief)
  • The able-bodied poor who wanted relief were to be set to work in a 'workhouse' while they continued to live at home
  • Those who refused work and continued a life of begging and general vagrancy were to be punished in a 'house of correction'
  • Pauper children were to be apprenticed to a trade so that they could support themselves when they grew up
• The initial division of institutions for the giving of relief into 'poorhouses', 'workhouses' and 'houses of correction' never really worked in practice
• It simply was not cost effective for each parish to provide for paupers in this way
• Experimental approaches aimed at making poor relief more cost effective


  1. Driven by humanitarian motives to ameliorate the lot of the poor

  2. Driven by the desire to reduce the burden on the ratepayers
• By 1780, there were some 2,000 workhouses throughout England and Wales providing around 90,000 places for paupers
• Outdoor relief, whereby paupers remained in their own homes, remained the most common way of giving them help
• Gilbert's Act 1782


  Overhaul of the local administrative system of relief
• Gilbert's Act


  1. Parishes could combine in Poor Law unions for the purpose of building and maintaining a workhouse if two-thirds of the major landowners and ratepayers voted in favour

  2. Voting was weighted according to the rateable value of the voters' property

  3. Overseers were to be replaced by paid guardians, appointed by local magistrates chosen from a list supplied by ratepayers

  4. Able-bodied workers were to be excluded from Gilbert Union workhouses, which were to be solely for the aged, the sick and children

  5. The parish guardian was to find work for the able-bodied worker, only if this could not be found could outdoor relief be provided
• Gilbert's Act was a permissive Act, despite Gilbert's attempts in 1786 to make it a mandatory Act
• Overseers were required to submit annual returns of Poor Law expenditure, thus providing hard evidence of the cost of poor relief that was to be used by later reformers
• Ministers and churchwardens were required to provide information about local charities that mirrored, or supplemented the support given by the Poor Law
• 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 or 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
• Sturges-Bourne Acts, 1818 and 1819


  1. Tie the landowners, gentry and well-to-do more firmly into the administration of the poor laws

  2. First Act laid down how voting was to be managed when electing men to the parish select vestries

  3. Those occupying land worth less than 50 rateable value had one vote for every further £25 a man had another vote up to a maximum of six

  4. Second Act added a resident clergyman to the members of the vestry

  5. Vestries were instructed to take account of an applicant's character and circumstances, distinguishing between the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor when considering who should receive relief
• By 1825, a total of 46 select vestries had been formed, and many experienced a remarkable drop in the cost of relief
• Nationally, the reduction after the first year of administering relief via a select vestry was in the order of nine percent
• Reductions of this size must have been at the expense of the destitute: not all those who were refused relief were scroungers and thousands must have been genuinely destitute and remained destitute
• Towards the end of the 18th century, there were various reasons why the attention of parliament was drawn to a more formal reform of the poor laws