Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T23:11:28.462Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How dependent were the ‘dependent poor’? Poor relief and the life-course in Terling, Essex, 1762–1834

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2015

HENRY FRENCH
HENRY FRENCH*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Exeter.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite the volume of research on the Old Poor Law, only in the last two decades have detailed local studies begun to assess the impact of relief payments across the life-courses of individuals. Their conclusions have been mixed. While many have found that the rural labouring poor of southern England were increasingly frequent recipients of poor relief after the 1780s, recent studies have indicated that ‘dependence’ on relief was generally intermittent, not permanent. Based on a new dataset for the Essex village of Terling, this study sets individual life-histories within the broader chronology of change to show how young, able-bodied men and women became relief recipients much more often after 1795 than they had before.

Dans quelle mesure les «pauvres à charge» dépendaient-ils de la paroisse ? assistance aux pauvres et parcours de vie à terling, essex, 1762–1834

Malgré le volume des travaux sur l'ancienne Loi des Pauvres, ce n'est que depuis une vingtaine d'années que des études locales et détaillées ont commencé à mesurer l'impact des aides financières sur le parcours de vie des individus. Leurs conclusions sont mitigées. Les chercheurs trouvaient souvent que les travailleurs ruraux pauvres du sud de l'Angleterre, après les années 1780, avaient de plus en plus fréquemment bénéficié de l'aide aux pauvres, mais des études récentes ont démontré que la «dépendance» envers l'aide publique était généralement intermittente, non permanente. Appuyée sur une nouvelle base de données concernant Terling, un village d'Essex, la présente étude replace chronologiquement les histoires de vie individuelle dans le contexte plus large des changements de l’époque, pour montrer à quel point des jeunes, hommes et femmes valides, sont devenus bénéficiaires de l'aide aux pauvres beaucoup plus souvent après 1795 qu'auparavant.

Wie abhängig waren die “abhängigen armen”? armenunterstützung und lebenszyklus in terling, essex, 1762–1834

Trotz des beträchtlichen Umfangs an Forschungen zum Alten Armenrecht hat man erst in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten im Rahmen detaillierter Lokalstudien begonnen, die Auswirkungen von Armenunterstützungsleistungen auf den individuellen Lebenszyklus zu untersuchen, wobei die Schlussfolgerungen unterschiedlich ausfallen. Während viele Untersuchungen zu dem Ergebnis kamen, dass die ‚arbeitenden Armen‘ in den ländlichen Regionen des südlichen Englands nach 1780 in steigendem Maße und immer häufiger Armenunterstützung bezogen, deuten jüngere Studien eher darauf hin, dass die ‚Abhängigkeit‘ von Unterstützungsleistungen grundsätzlich eher zeitweilig als ununterbrochen bestand. Auf der Basis eines neuen Datensatzes für das Dorf Terling in Essex stellt diese Untersuchung individuelle Lebensgeschichten in den größeren historischen Zusammenhang, um zu zeigen, wie junge, arbeitsfähige Männer und Frauen nach 1795 weitaus öfter als zuvor zu Armenunterstützungsempfängern wurden.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , August 2015 , pp. 193 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

ENDNOTES

1 K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the labouring poor: social change and agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985); Horrell, S. and Humphries, J., ‘Women's labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review 48, 1 (1995), 89–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. Humphries, Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution (Cambridge, 2010); Broad, J., ‘Parish economies of welfare, 1650–1834’, Historical Journal 42 (1999), 985–1006CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; N. Verdon, Rural workers in nineteenth-century England: gender, work and wages (Woodbridge, 2002); J. Burnette, Gender, work and wages in industrial revolution Britain (Cambridge, 2007); Williams, S., ‘Poor relief, labourers' households and living standards in rural England, c. 1770–1834: a Bedfordshire case-study’, Economic History Review 58 (2005), 485–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. Williams, Poverty, gender and life-cycle under the English poor law (Woodbridge, 2011); Shepherd, G., ‘Income, domestic economy and the distribution of poverty amongst labouring families in the parish of Cardington, Bedfordshire, in the 1780s and 1850s’, Family and Community History 13, 2 (2010), 128–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 K. Honeyman, Child workers in England, 1780–1820: parish apprentices and the making of the early industrial workforce (Aldershot, 2007); T. Hitchcock, ‘“Unlawfully begotten on her body”: illegitimacy and the parish poor in St. Luke's, Chelsea’, in T. Hitchcock, P. King and P. Sharpe eds., Chronicling poverty. The voices and strategies of the English poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke, 1997), 70–86; Sharpe, P., ‘Poor children as apprentices in Colyton, 1598–1830’, Continuity and Change 6, 2 (1991), 253–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. King, ‘The bastardy-prone sub-society again: bastards and their fathers and mothers in Lancashire, Wiltshire, and Somerset, 1800–40’, in A. Levene, T. Nutt and S. Williams eds., Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke, 2005), 66–85; Nutt, T., ‘Illegitimacy, paternal financial responsibility, and the 1834 Poor Law Commission Report: the myth of the old poor law and the making of the new’, Economic History Review 63, 2 (2010), 335–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levene, A., ‘Family breakdown and the “welfare child” in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain’, History of the Family 11, 2 (2006), 67–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. King, Poverty and welfare in England (Manchester, 2000), 144.

3 T. Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle: some evidence from seventeenth-century Norfolk’, in R. Smith ed., Land, kinship and life-cycle (Cambridge, 1984), 351–404; L. A. Bothelo, Old age and the English poor law, 1500–1700 (Woodbridge, 2004); S. R. Ottaway, The decline of life: old age in eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 2004); T. Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty: the record of Essex pauper letters, 1780–1834’, in Hitchcock, King and Sharpe, Chronicling poverty, 127–54; Goose, Nigel, ‘Poverty, old age and gender in nineteenth-century England: the case of Hertfordshire’, Continuity and Change 20, 3 (2005), 351–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; R. M. Smith, ‘Ageing and well-being in early modern England: pension trends and gender preferences under the English old poor law, c. 1650–1800’, in P. Johnson and P. Thane eds., Old age from antiquity to post-modernity (London, 1998), 64–95; D. Thomson, ‘The welfare of the elderly in the past: a family or community responsibility?’, in M. Pelling and R. M. Smith eds., Life, death and the elderly: historical perspectives (London, 1991), 64–95.

4 S. King, ‘Sickness and old age’, in S. King, T. Nutt and A. Tomkins eds., Narratives of the poor in eighteenth-century England, I (London, 2006); T. Sokoll, Household and family among the poor: the case of two Essex communities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Bochum, 1993); S. Williams, ‘Caring for the sick poor: poor law nurses in Bedfordshire, c. 1770–1834’, in P. Lane, N. Raven and K. D. M. Snell eds., Women, work and wages in England, 1600–1850 (Woodbridge, 2004), 141–69; Miller, E., ‘English pauper lunatics in the era of the old poor law’, History of Psychiatry 23, 2 (2012), 318–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levene, A., Reinarz, J. and Williams, A., ‘Child patients, hospitals and the home in eighteenth-century England’, Family and Community History 15, 1 (2012), 15–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Stapleton, Barry, ‘Inherited poverty and life-cycle poverty: Odiham, Hampshire, 1650–1850’, Social History 18 (1993), 339–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; King, Steve, ‘Reconstructing lives: the poor, the poor law and welfare in Calverley, 1650–1820’, Social History 22 (1997), 318–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; P. Sharpe, Population and society in an East Devon parish. Reproducing Colyton, 1540–1840 (Exeter, 2002), 234–49; Williams, ‘Poor relief’, 485–519; Williams, Poverty; Shave, S. A., ‘The dependent poor? (Re)constructing the lives of individuals “on the parish” in rural Dorset, 1800–1832’, Rural History 20, 1 (2009), 67–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Williams, Poverty, 101–19; Shave, ‘Dependent poor?’, 77–88; Ottaway, Decline of life, 204, has reconstructed the relief histories of a limited number of elderly paupers, in addition to longitudinal surveys in Terling and Puddletown, 1770–1794.

7 Ottaway, Decline of life, 189–220, 221–46.

8 David Eastwood has emphasised 1795 as a pivotal moment in the provision of poor relief nationally; see D. Eastwood, Governing rural England: tradition and transformation in local government 1750–1840 (Oxford, 1994), 121.

9 Williams, Poverty, 56.

10 Williams, Poverty, 58.

11 Williams, Poverty, 102.

12 Williams, Poverty, 101, 107, 114.

13 Williams, Poverty, 119.

14 Williams, Poverty, 130.

15 Shave, ‘Dependent poor?’, 86 (italics in the original).

16 Shave, ‘Dependent poor?’, 85.

17 Shave, ‘Dependent poor?’, 86–7.

18 Shave, ‘Dependent poor?’, 89.

19 K. Williams, From pauperism to poverty (London and Boston, 1981), 41.

20 J. P. Huzel, ‘The labourer and the poor law, 1750–1850’, in G. E. Mingay ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales volume VI 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989), 772.

21 King, Poverty and welfare, 48–77.

22 King, Poverty and welfare, 54–5.

23 K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling, 1525–1700 (New York and London, 1979).

24 Smith, ‘Ageing and well-being’, 64–95; Ottaway, Decline of life, 184–6, 198–202, 207–14, 222–39.

25 Ottaway, Decline of life, 191. The reconstitution extends from 1537 to the mid-nineteenth century, but the quality of marriage and burial data declines after 1788.

26 This is a different methodology from that adopted by Williams, whose cross-sectional analyses focus primarily on recipients of regular weekly payments in Campton and Shefford, because these comprised a larger proportion of total relief than in Terling. This tends to favour ‘pensioner’ groups (the young, lone parents and the elderly) over ‘non-pensioners’ (couple-headed, working-age households). Her qualitative surveys cover a much broader spectrum of relief. Williams, Poverty, 54–66.

27 Ottaway, Decline of life, 235.

28 There were few parish charities in Terling to supplement statutory provision, only clothes supplied by Henry Smith's Charity and two parish almshouses. Ottaway, Decline of life, 213, 215.

29 Rules for nominal linkage were that the identity of each person could be established only if they had two separate familial identifiers between the overseers’ records and the Family Reconstitution Form (FRF) (e.g. reference to spouse of same name, plus children of same name and age range; reference to parent of same name, plus siblings; payments for death of spouse linked to burial register/FRF event, plus remarriage or further named children). This produced positive identifications (1,339) and negative ones (169). The latter (11 per cent of all recipients recorded) formed a residual category where the linkage rules demonstrated that Person B was definitely not Person A. Once identified (positively and negatively), each individual was given a unique serial number linked to their pattern of relief recorded in the Microsoft (MS) Access database.

30 Very occasionally, details of family structure recorded in the overseers’ accounts appear to contradict the CAMPOP reconstitution (for example, by revealing the existence of additional children within a family born outside the parish).

31 See H. R. French, ‘Living in poverty in eighteenth-century Terling’, in S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter eds., Remaking English society. Social relations and social change in early modern England (Woodbridge, 2013), 290–1.

32 Essex Record Office (hereafter ERO) D/P 299/8/4 Terling Parish Vestry Book, 3 March 1824.

33 Williams, Poverty, 91–2, 99–100.

34 ERO D/P 299/8/1 Terling Parish Vestry Book, 1 May 1775; French, ‘Living in poverty’, 291.

35 ERO D/P 299/8/2 Terling Parish Vestry Book, 20 November 1785.

36 ERO D/P 299/8/2 Terling Parish Vestry Book, 25 March, 6 July and 21 July 1795.

37 ERO D/P 299/12/3 Terling Parish Overseers’ Accounts, 31 January 1801; D/P299/8/2 Terling Parish Vestry Book, 14 November 1799.

38 ERO D/P 299/12/4 Terling Parish Overseers’ Accounts, January 1801, 2 October 1803, 4 February 1809; D/P 299/12/5, 27 May and 30 October 1811.

39 ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, surveyors to set unemployed to work, 19 February, 6 May and 23 July 1816; list of labourers out of work to be kept by parish clerk, 1 February 1819.

40 See Shave, S. A., ‘The impact of Sturges Bourne's poor law reforms in rural England’, Historical Journal 56, 2 (2013), 399–429, here 414–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, 5 January, 3 February and 12 February 1824; Karel Williams suggests that the proportion of parishes instituting labour rates in England and Wales may have declined between 1822 and 1834. Williams, Pauperism, 47.

42 ERP D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Book, 26 February 1827; ERO D/P 299/8/5 Terling Vestry Book, 1828–1836.

43 ERO D/P 299/8/5 Terling Vestry Book, 25 March 1835.

44 Horrell and Humphries, ‘Women's labour force participation’, 89–117; Humphries, Childhood and child labour; Broad, ‘Parish economies’, 985–1006; Verdon, Rural workers; Burnette, Gender, work and wages.

45 Sokoll, Household and family, 215.

46 ‘Abstract of the answers and returns made pursuant to an act passed in the 43rd year of His Majesty King George III’ (P.P. 1803–4, XIII.1), 152–171, compared with ‘Census of Great Britain, 1851. Population tables I. numbers of the inhabitants, in the years 1801, 1811, 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 England and Wales, IV Eastern Division' (1852) (P. P. 1852–3, LXXXV.1), 20–1.

47 See C. Ferguson, C. Thornton and A. Wareham eds., ‘The Essex hearth tax return Michaelmas 1670’, The British Record Society Hearth Tax Series Volume VIII (London, 2012), Map 6, 22.

48 Relief levels remained relatively constant, but extremely high, in Braintree after 1800. Sokoll, Household and family, 138, 223; Williams, Poverty, 36–8; Baugh, D. A., ‘The cost of poor relief in south-east England, 1790–1834’, Economic History Review 28, 1 (1975), 50–68Google Scholar, here Figure 6.

49 Figures for the 1760s probably reflect a doubling in total relief levels since 1700. Ottaway found that annual per capita relief levels doubled from 4 shillings between 1700 and 1705 to 8 shillings between 1770 and 1774. Ottaway, Decline of life, 222.

50 Figure 2 charts the total numbers of recipients for each form of relief. It does not discount those who received more than one type of relief per year (i.e. weekly recipients who also received ‘occasional allowances’).

51 See note 8.

52 For an examination of the general trends among all recipients of poor relief in Terling 1762–1834, see French, Henry, ‘An irrevocable shift: detailing the dynamics of rural poverty in southern England, 1762–1834: a case study’, Economic History Review 68 (2015), forthcomingCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 ERO D/P 299/12/4 and 5 Terling Overseers’ Accounts 1801–1809, 1809–1818.

54 ERO D/P 299/12/3 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 1790–1801, ‘Return of the poor inhabitants of the Parish of Terling taken in the month of January 1801’. The high degree of organisation of poor law payments and the detailed surveys of the poor in Terling echo Shave's observations about the effects of Sturges Bourne's act, but they prefigure the Act and Terling only convened a select vestry in January 1824. Shave, ‘Sturges Bourne's poor law reforms’, 414–20; ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, 1815–1827, 29 January 1824.

55 In Ardleigh in 1796, Sokoll found that those in receipt of relief comprised ‘40 per cent of the population’. Sokoll, Household and family, 127. Paupers comprised only 12–17.3 per cent of the population in Shefford between 1801–1803 and 1820–1821. Williams, Poverty, 72.

56 Sokoll, Household and family, 51–89.

57 Ottaway, Decline of life, 184–7.

58 Sokoll, Household and family, 154–81.

59 Sokoll, Household and family, 276.

60 Ottaway, Decline of life, 210; Sokoll, Household and family, 180; Williams, Poverty, 105.

61 Sokoll notes that in Ardleigh in 1790 adult males earned 8 shillings per week in winter, 9 shillings in summer, and 15 shillings in harvest, an average of 8 shillings 9½ pence per week. Sokoll, Household and family, 118.

62 T. L. Richardson, ‘Agricultural labourers’ wages and the cost of living in Essex, 1790–1840: a contribution to the standard of living debate’, in B. A. Holderness and M. Turner eds., Land, labour and agriculture, 1700–1920. Essays for Gordon Mingay (London and Rio Grande, 1991), 90.

63 Under the parish employment scheme adopted by the parish in February 1824, pay rates were 9 shillings per week for able-bodied men, 6 shillings per week for ‘old men’, and 3 shillings per week for ‘lads’. These rates may have reflected both lower post-war male earnings levels, and the desire to impose a financial disincentive on parish employment. ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, 12 February 1824.

64 Snell, Annals, 45; Horrell and Humphries, ‘Women's labour force participation’, 105; Burnette, Joyce, ‘The wages and employment of female day-labourers in English agriculture, 1740–1850’, Economic History Review 57, 4 (2004), 664–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 See Shepherd, ‘Income, domestic economy and the distribution of poverty’, 141; Snell, Annals, 21–2; Horrell and Humphries, ‘Women's labour force participation’, 101–5; P. Sharpe, Adapting to capitalism: working women in the English economy, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke, 1995), 135; Verdon, Rural workers, 99–102; Ottaway, Decline of life, 217.

66 Williams, Poverty, 65.

67 Ottaway, Decline of life, 231.

68 Verdon, Rural workers, 60.

69 Snell, K. D. M. and Millar, J., ‘Lone-parent families and the welfare state: past and present’, Continuity and Change 2, 3 (1987), 387–422CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 395–409.

70 ERO D/DRa E16 List of Labouring Families in the Parish of Terling, 5 May 1775.

71 Of the 250 individuals listed in 1801, 195 can be identified in the MS Access Database. Of these, dates of birth can be found or estimated for 173 (or 89 per cent).

72 ERO D/P 299/12/4 Terling Parish Overseers’ Accounts, 4 February 1809; ERO D/P 299/12/5 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 4 May 1811.

73 B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: a study of town life (London, 1901), 137; Baugh, ‘Cost of poor relief’, 57–62.

74 These figures are higher than Ottaway's mean ‘pension’ sums of 29 pence (2 shillings 5 pence) for all female recipients in Terling 1791–1800 and 27.1 pence (2 shillings 3 pence) for men, because they include the values of all ‘occasional payments’ per annum. Ottaway, Decline of life, 228.

75 Ottaway, Decline of life, 228.

76 Ottaway, Decline of life, 243–4.

77 Ottaway's finding for the period 1770–1794 is that the age of 70 years old ‘was a very common marker of male dependency’, whereas women's dependency varied by location. Ottaway, Decline of life, 202, 240–1.

78 Sokoll, Household and family, 265–6.

79 Williams, Poverty, 132–3, Baugh, ‘Cost of poor relief’, 55–63.

80 ERO D/P 299/12/4 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 19 June 1803.

81 ERO D/P 299/12/4 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 4 February 1809.

82 ERO D/P 299/12/5 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 4 May 1811.

83 Widows such as Sarah Cutler (aged 50 years old) and Mary Chalice (aged 67 years old) had previously received occasional payments primarily for the costs of clothes, shoes or food and drink, but in the period from spring 1795 they received regular additional payments of 1–3 shillings per week until the summer of 1796. Thereafter, both moved to receiving weekly allowances (in more than 50 weeks per annum), receiving 2 shillings 6 pence per week until the spring of 1802.

84 ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, 1815–1827. The vestry recorded that men and women were ‘out of employ’ in February, May and July 1816; April 1817; November 1818; February 1819; March 1822; March and December 1823; and January and February 1824. In February 1824 the new select vestry resolved to follow the model of the parish of Oundle, by requiring householders to contribute to labourers’ wages according to the size of their rating assessments, with the rates of those who took on unemployed labourers being reduced accordingly. ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, 3 February 1824.

85 ERO D/P 299/12/5 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 4 May 1811.

86 Kelly, M. and Gráda, C. Ó, ‘The poor law of old England: institutional innovation and demographic regimes’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, 3 (2011), 339–66, here 352CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Williams, Poverty, 135.

88 Williams gives figures of 3–25 per cent of the population in Bedfordshire in the 1830s. Williams, Poverty, 134–5.

89 Shepherd, ‘Income, domestic economy and the distribution of poverty’, 140–1.