1 Landau, N., “The laws of settlement and the surveillance of immigration in eighteenth-century Kent’, Continuity and Change (1988), 391–420.Google Scholar It is my intention to explore in a new book the wider context of welfare and settlement, belonging, local cultures of xenophobia and insider-outsider divisions.

2 See her ‘Abstract’, Continuity and Change 3 (1988), 316.Google Scholar

3 People stated as falling into the following groups were not included in rural seasonal calculations: unmarried mothers and impending bastard bearers, the ill, debilitated or insane, the very elderly, orphans and the very young, men in or just demobilized from the forces or who were currently or had recently been in the militia (and their wives; there were special circumstances affecting examination of men in the forces and militias), those imprisoned (or the dependents of men imprisoned, ill, insane, or waiting for transportation), young people just married, those who had very recently been widowed or deserted by a husband, some who were examined and asked to obtain certificates (depending on other details), those examined on behalf of others, or any vaguely stated to have first been chargeable in the previous months. (Some cases were back-dated if it was stated that they had become chargeable at a certain date prior to examination.) There are others which are too minor and miscellaneous to list, see, e.g., notes 71, 96 below).

Many of these would be included in modern ‘unemployment’ figures, and it has been suggested to me by some modern social-policy scholars that I should have included them; but I wanted data which was as sensitive as I could make them to agrarian economic fluctuations and their effects on livelihood. Urban parishes of course were also excluded for this reason. Because of the enormous range, number, content and geographical spread of documents, and the variety of thousands of biographical circumstances (not easily categorized), I specified the major exclusions (e.g., p. 19 for seasonality), but did not laboriously list all-embracing particulars for every type of calculation made from my very detailed research forms. Some individuals or families omitted from one calculation (e.g., seasonality) had details of their past or present circumstances included in a different type of calculation (e.g., wages, hiring arrangements, family structure, literacy, age of leaving home, family break-up, mobility, apprenticeship, etc.). For all purposes no simple blanket exclusions can be made. Many were excluded from other measures too. I did not want lengthy preambles before every calculation explaining the very fine details; for some issues (e.g., wages) this would have required small methodological essays. Most of my calculations were done manually, partly for this reason: to escape simplistic categorizations and inadequate computer coding of such complex data. In view of the obvious and recognizable agricultural regional seasonalities shown, the checks on them I made (e.g., against removal orders for the same regions), and historiographical views on settlement and poor relief which had never previously been questioned, I regarded debate of the source in connection with agrarian seasonality as unlikely. I also assumed that readers would appreciate complex biographical variety, and would accept my careful and commonsense judgement on which cases to exclude or include.

4 Annals of the labouring poor, 17–19. There are other misrepresentations. I comment very briefly that high fees I have encountered of 3s. to 7s. charged by a parish clerk for examining would be one ‘disincentive’ to examine anybody unnecessarily. Landau summarizes this as: ‘Snell… argues that the cost of examination was so high that it inhibited examination of all except those who were chargeable or about to become chargeable’ (‘Laws’, 416–17). Further, I did not argue that ‘there were marked similarities between the seasonal patterns for examination of males and females from 1751 to 1792’ as Landau wrongly claims to support her thesis (Ibid., 418, n. 37). It was my argument that in that period (long before the 1795 Act) their seasonalities had already begun noticeably to diverge: that there was ‘a marked change’ between the sexual patterns. Annals of the labouring poor, 21, and see 155–8.

5 Landau, ‘Laws’, 394.

6 Ibid., 405.

7 Ibid., 391.

8 Ibid., 403.

9 Ibid., 391.

10 Ibid., 407.

11 Ibid., 409.

12 Ibid., e.g., 400–1, 412, 414.

13 This point is central, and stressed throughout the literature. See, e.g., M. Nolan, A treatise of the laws for the relief and settlement of the poor (1825 edn), vol. 1, 274–80, who sees the origin of parish settlement as lying in the fact that poor rates and poor relief were based upon the parish. As William Lumley put it in his outline of the history of settlement laws, after the Statute of Elizabeth it became necessary ‘to define who were to be the subjects of relief in any parish’, S.C. on settlement and poor removal (1847, I.U.P. ed.), 115 (not to ‘monitor’ them). For the same point, see, e.g., Report of the Poor Law Commissioners… on the continuance of the Poor Law Commission and on some further amendments of the laws relating to the relief of the poor (1840), 298–300, on the identity of the units for poor rating, relief and settlement; Lieut. Gen. Crauford, Observations on the state of the country since the peace: with a supplementary section on the Poor Laws (1817), 49–50. Hence the origination of the ‘settlement laws’ as commonly understood; although, if one was so inclined, ultimate ‘origins’ could be pushed back to 12 Richard 2, c. 3 & 7, which originated settlement by birth, or even before. This was developed and altered by further Acts in 1391, 1402, 1444, 1496, 1530, 1536, 1547, 1551, 1557, 1563, 1572, 1598, 1601, 1604, 1627 and 1641. The 1642 Act listed various types of settlement already practised. My remarks in this article are made primarily with regard to emphases in the post-1662 legislation and its operation.

14 This point is often made. See, e.g., Rose, M. E., ‘Settlement, removal and the new Poor Law’, in Fraser, D., ed., The new Poor Law in the nineteenth century (1976), 42Google Scholar: ‘The practice of settlement and removal reflected the intensely local nature of the English poor relief system. The desire to preserve this constituted one of the greatest barriers to any drastic reform of the law of settlement’; Redford, A., Labour migration in England, 1800–1850 (1926, Manchester, 1976 edn), 86, 93Google Scholar; or Report from His Majesty's Commissioners for inquiring into the administration and practical operation of the Poor Laws (1834), 165: settlement was the natural result of the parochial poor-law system. Those nineteenth-century reformers whose views were eventually realized, like J. M. White, spoke of the need for ‘a general rating for the support of the poor… if it could be attained, a national settlement’, S.C. on settlement and poor removal (1847, I.U.P. edn), 114. It is unsound to describe settlement by just using eighteenth-century evidence, and to exaggerate the significance of the 1795 Act (at the end of Landau's period) so much.

15 Steer's parish law; being a digest of the law relating to the civil and ecclesiastical government of parishes; friendly societies, etc., and the relief, settlement, and removal of the poor (3rd edn, by H. J. Hodgson, 1857), 627.

16 J. Shaw, The parochial lawyer; or, churchwarden and overseer's guide and assistant (4th edn, 1833), 178. For the same definition, see Davey, H., Poor Law settlement (local chargeability) and removal (3rd edn, 1925), 1.Google Scholar

17 Anon. [Sir Edmund Head], ‘The law of settlement’, in discussion of the Seventh and eighth reports from the Select Committee on settlement, and poor removal: together with the minutes of evidence, appendix, and index, in Edinburgh Review (April 1848), 453; or see J. Shaw, Parish law (1753), 218: ‘By Stat. 43 Eliz. c. 2. every Parish shall keep their Poor, and on this Statute Removals of Poor are made; for unless the Poor are removed to their own Parishes, every Parish cannot maintain its own Poor’; ibid., 235: a settlement is the entitlement to ‘a Maintenance in Case of Poverty and Impotency’.

18 See his A treatise of the laws for the relief and settlement of the poor (4th edn, 1825), vol. 1,284. ‘A person thus settled became part of the local poor, and entitled to relief. Ibid., 275.

19 For the best discussions see Taylor, J. S., “The impact of pauper settlement, 1691–1834’, Past & Present 73 (1976), 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, now admirably developed in his Poverty, migration, and settlement in the industrial revolution (Palo Alto, 1989)Google Scholar, see, e.g., 93, 116, 160, 169, 173, 188. Like Marshall, the Webbs, Hampson, Styles, Redford, Rose, Ashforth, myself and others, Taylor rightly stresses ‘the integral relationship of the [Settlement] Law to poor law administration’ (‘Impact of pauper settlement’, 69). Pauper settlement was the matter of ‘defining the classes of persons whom a parish was obliged to relieve’, wrote Styles, P., ‘The evolution of the law of settlement’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal IX (1963), 34.Google Scholar

20 Landau, ‘Laws’, 409. See also my note 127 below. Part of the 1662 Act, which was by no means the first ‘settlement act’, comes nearest to Landau's view with its mention of poor people settling themselves in parishes where there is the best stock, commons and the like. Before that however, and very clearly in its title, it announces its priority of ‘preventing the perishing of any of the poor, whether young or old’. George Coode, the Webbs and other historians have been quite right to suggest that the 1662 mention of the poor moving to certain commons was a matter mentioned there but subsequently eclipsed as an issue. It may well have been a matter temporarily bearing on London, Middlesex, and Surrey, which the 1662 Act was especially concerned about. See the Webbs’ discussion in English local government: English Poor Law history: part I. The Old Poor Law (1927), 323–6Google Scholar, on the conditions of 1661–1662, including the recent demobilization of 50,000 men from the army, and the relation of the 1662 Act to these special circumstances. They regarded this part of the 1662 preamble as ‘a classic example of legislative mendacity, and of the worthlessness of preambles to Acts of Parliament as historical evidence’ (Ibid., 325). Their discussion is not always reliable, and I would not put it quite like this. However, there seems much truth in their views on this section of the 1662 Act. The matter referred to in this part of the preamble is hardly mentioned or developed in any of the subsequent legislation, or discussed in other sources. It certainly does not support the generalizations made by Landau about the settlement laws.

21 Landau, ‘Laws’, 393.

22 Just as very many ‘poor laws’ are also ‘settlement laws’, and vice versa, e.g., the 1834 New Poor Law. The poor-law literature and legislation underlines the intertwined relationship and identity of poor and settlement law. For one of countless examples of the connection between settlement, rating and the poor law, see Sir Head, E., ‘The law of settlement’, 465–7.Google Scholar The connection also explains why one usually could not gain a settlement in an extra-parochial place: because such a place generally (the issue was much debated) made no provision for poor relief. See, e.g., J. F. Archbold, The Poor Law, comprising the whole of the law of relief, settlement, and removal of the poor; together with the law relating to the poor rate (1873 edn), 665–8, and note his title; Burn, JP and Parish Officer (1814 edn), vol. IV, 390.

23 Attentive reading of my book also makes clear why ‘unemployment’ is put, for historical reasons, in inverted commas. (Consider, e.g., my chapter on enclosure.) A discussion of settlement records, which develops evidential issues, is found in my ‘The poor law historian turned agriculturalist’, Rural history: economy, society, culture (Cambridge, forthcoming).

24 For example, 9 Geo. I c. 7; 36 Geo III c. 23.

25 For example, 8 & 9 Wm III c. 30; 9 & 10 Wm III c. 11.

26 W. W. Skeat (ed.), Etymological dictionary of the English language (Oxford, 2nd edn, 1888), 282.

27 Landau, ‘Laws’, 392–3.

28 See my ‘The poor law historian turned agriculturalist’, forthcoming. And of course parish officers would hardly have had to ‘roam the countryside’ very far (pace Landau, ‘ Laws’, 393) to take an examination before a JP.

29 Landau might have drawn attention to the problems which accompany the unrepresentative nature of Kent petty-session records. She does notice that east Kent had the lowest expenditure in England in connection with vagrancy (and west Kent was also very low), but does not add that some treated as vagrants elsewhere may have been treated as settlement cases in Kent (p. 403). There are also odd signs of atypicality in her data. Yearly settlement data, whatever its provenance (‘Quarter-Session’ ‘Petty-Session ‘ or ‘Parish’), usually show strong and predictable short and long-run statistical patterns – associated in certain ways with prices, poor-relief expenditure, with numbers in the armed forces and with demobilization, with real-wage trends, and with other per-annum county distributions of settlement cases. Landau's data, however (p. 396), are either random by comparison with the normal associations of equivalent data or (e.g., with regard to yearly poor-relief expenditure) they show weak negative correlations as compared to the strong positive association found outside Kent. I am comparing her Kent data here with my own very much larger figures for most other southern, midland and north-midland counties.

30 Landau, ‘Laws’, 393. In those places with the most settlement business, it was usually easy to have documents signed by two resident justices. For some time, there was much misunderstanding of the unclear working in the 1662 Act, which stated only that two justices should remove, i.e., sign the removal order (Burn, Nolan and others tried to clarify this). Examination, the step before removal, was often taken before a single justice. One can even find a single justice examining in a pauper's home, although there would usually be special circumstances involved. Parish officers also frequently left a parish to get a further signature on a document. Indeed, Burn discussed the extent of this practice – ‘one of [the justices] taking the examination, and certifying to the other, who sets his hand to the order of removal without further ceremony’ – and suggested that the practice was such as to require legislative amendment accepting it. R. Burn, History of the Poor Laws (1764), 281. In fact, contrary to her recent methods and argument, Landau earlier acknowledged quite prominently in her book on Kentish JPs that they often acted singly outside sessions when examining. See her The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (1985), e.g., 178–9Google Scholar (giving an example of a JP examining singly much more commonly than he did at petty sessions), or p. 215. She also stressed there how different ‘petty sessions’ could be from one another (ibid., 218).

See also 49 Geo. III c. 124, s. 4; 59 Geo. III, c. 12, on examination by a single justice of the ill, infirm, or prisoners, Symonds, J. F., The law of settlement and removal (4th edn, 1903), 82Google Scholar, wrote (presumably with 25 & 26 Vict. c. 113 in mind, as well as R. v. Everdon (1807), 9 East, 101), that ‘it is not essential that the pauper should be seen or examined’ by justices, excepting removal out of England and Wales, adding that it is nevertheless usual to request his/her attendance, which I would endorse. See also Archbold, The Poor Law, 624; Burn, JP and Parish Officer (1814 edn), 685.

31 Landau, ‘Laws’, 393–4.

32 Ibid., 396–7.

33 Landau admits as much herself: ibid., 398.

34 Ibid., 397.

35 Ibid., 397, and 416, n. 12.

36 Ibid., 393.

37 Landau often cross-relates different types of document as if their provenance was exactly the same, or assumes that lack of documentation of something in her particular source means that such a record never existed, (e.g., pp. 406, or 402: ‘54.8%’ of examinations at two petty sessions produce no record of removal order or certificate. However, very many of the latter two documents would have been taken elsewhere and since lost).

38 Ibid., 392. She gives the impression here and on p. 410 of largely referring just to the £10 clause of the 1662 Act, and those parts of the 1697 Acts (8 & 9 Wm c. 30 and 9 & 10 Wm c. 11) which governed the gaining of settlements by certificate holders. This is a very partial approach to the legislation.

39 Wrigley, E. A., People, cities and wealth (Oxford, 1987), 135.Google Scholar

40 Landau, ‘Laws’, 413–14, 409.

41 See my notes 30 and 37.

42 Ibid., 393 (see also data in her ‘Regulation of immigration, economic structures, and definitions of the poor’, Historical Journal, forthcoming). With roughly 420 settlement places (largely parishes) in Kent, one obtains similar or even lower figures by using her data on pp. 396–7. From those, I calculate an average of between 0.05–1.2 removals per settlement place each year.

43 See my note 103 on the low average numbers of removals per annum. If one dismissed Landau's claim that petty sessions virtually monopolized settlement business, and so rejected her figures outright (as I would), the parish average per annum would not go much higher. See also my note 30.

44 Examinations may say that a person has not gained a settlement by renting for £10 or more, and this is listed with the other possibilities which might have gained her/him a settlement. However, examinations rarely say that a person ‘likely to become chargeable’ is being examined or removed because he/she has failed to rent for £10 or more. This legal feature had in practice low prominence. For further discussion of this see my note 127.

45 See, e.g. Rose, L., ‘Rogues and vagabonds’; vagrant underworld in Britain. 1815–1985 (1988), 4–5.Google Scholar This may have been less the practice in Kent than elsewhere, which might help explain Landau's emphasis. See my note 29 above. I shall discuss the relation of the vagrancy and settlement laws elsewhere.

46 On the wide extent of non-resident relief, see, e.g., Abstract of returns relative to the expenses and maintenance of the poor (1804), 716; Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement, 142–67; Sokoll, T., ‘Household and family among the poor: the case of two Essex communities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, Cambridge University. 1989), 82Google Scholar; Rose, ‘Settlement, removal and the New Poor Law’, 35–6.

47 Mainly men, as heads of families, were given settlement certificates, any family mentioned after them; and in the eighteenth century such men certainly outnumber women as certificate recipients. This addresses realities of demography, life-cycle poverty, the issue of the position of women, and raises the question as to who paid for certificates. Of course, one cannot infer from the different proportions of each sex certificated Landau's surmise that ‘a sizeable proportion of the men who were removed were not indigent'! (ibid., 400). Certificates are of considerable interest, but it is easy to exaggerate their role. Only a very small percentage of examinations mention them, although when they existed they would virtually always be referred to as strong evidence of settlement. While preambles to Acts of Parliament may sometimes be unreliable as evidence on practice, the 1795 Act was probably right in saying that the settlement certificate system had been ‘very ineffectual’. Many others agreed. (Landau's own figures in fact show very small proportions of those examined obtaining certificates. Ibid., 405.) In general, leaving aside certain parishes that asked for them, it seems likely that relatively few migrants troubled with certificates, and that these documents were under-utilized. Their use relative to population size seems to have diminished after the mid-eighteenth century, taking account also of the incrementally greater likelihood of later survival. This was unlike the pattern for examinations and removal orders, the numbers of which grew enormously with rising pauperism after c. 1760. I shall discuss this and other aspects of settlement bonds, certificates and testimonials elsewhere. And see Taylor, ‘Impact of pauper settlement’, 52; Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement, 21; Hampson, E. M., ‘Settlement and removal in Cambridgeshire, 1662–1834’, Cambridge Historical Journal 2 (1926–1928), 286.Google Scholar

48 JP and parish officer, vol. III (1764 edn), 123; and ibid. (1814 edn), vol. IV, p. 687, on the need for careful adjudication of this matter.

49 As discussed in Annals of the labouring poor, ch. 2.

50 There was much legal debate about whether employers had the right to dismiss a servant because of ill health. I shall not discuss this here.

51 Archbold, The Poor Law, 590; Burn, JP and parish officer (1814 edn), vol. 4, p. 384, 653–6.

52 M. Nolan, A treatise of the laws for relief and settlement of the poor (1825 edn), 195–7; Davey, H., Poor Law settlement (local chargeability) and removal (3rd edn, 1925), 6Google Scholar; Symonds, J. F., The law of settlement and removal (4th edn, 1903), 3.Google Scholar An even narrower meaning of ‘chargeable’ is given in Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement, 21, one which did not encompass ‘casual relief in money or kind’. Certainly a parish could give casual relief (unlike regular relief) without this being seen as a precedent which might confer settlement.

53 3Wm.c. II. Or see Burn, JP and Parish Officer (1764 edn), vol. III, 129–30; W. Nelson, The office and authority of a JP (1729), 556; J. Shaw, Parish law (1753), 267, 270; or the discussion of such ‘paupers’ in Archbold, The Poor Law, 668 (e.g., under 3 Wm & Mary c. II).

54 Possible examination and removal was frequently seen and defended as a deterrent to poor-relief application, both before and after 1795, and this applied to all cases – chargeable or likely to become chargeable. This feature was lessened only by the workhouse and other ‘tests’ of the New Poor Law, and it is only from 1834 that one starts to find contemporaries saying that its deterrent effect was now less important, that it was even inhumane. See, e.g., Sir E. Head, ‘The law of settlement’, 469; S.C. on settlement and poor removal (1847, I.U.P. edn), 58–9, 121, 125; S.C. on poor removal (1854–1855, I.U.P. edn), 25, 36–7, 57, 62, 150, 165, 175, 195, 199–200, 205, 207, 209, 213, 237–8, 269–72, 276–7, 283–5; S.C. on irremovable poor (1859, I.U.P. edn), 541, 556–7, 574. It was this very effectiveness as a deterrent which often motivated parishes to take some incipient paupers in hand, classifying them as ‘likely to become chargeable’; and in part such action (ignoring the deterrent) should be understood as a humane response to obvious need.

55 Nolan, A treatise of the laws, vol. 2, 214, 229 (my italics); Shaw, Parish law, 159. See also my ‘The poor law historian turned agriculturalist’, forthcoming. The settlement laws promoted ‘unemployment’ in other ways too – e.g., among those who were unmarried, or had few children, and were not settled – priority in employment went to the settled. These nuances need not detain us, because (as pointed out in my book) the rural seasonalities by sex of both types of removal orders, and of examinations, for whatever period, while varying noticeably by broad region, were almost always very similar and mutually reinforcing in each agricultural area.

56 Nolan, A treatise of the laws, vol. 2, 575. See, e.g., R. Brown, A general view of the agriculture of the West Riding of Yorkshire (1799), 234, on the high costs of removal, a point which could be extensively documented.

57 Landau, ‘Laws’, 400. I will discuss elsewhere the composition of families removed, over a longer period of time. Landau's generalization on changes in this after 1795 is incorrect. Further, she omits to give the number on which her 1796–1799 percentage (‘a full 51 per cent’…) is based – although she provides such a number for her more reliable percentage before 1795. Her 1796–1799 number would be extremely low, and the percentage based on it is scarcely reliable; see also my note 59.

58 A tenth to an eighth of all men were in the forces during the Napoleonic Wars, and their ages were especially concentrated in the 20s and 30s – i.e., their wives would have had dependent children, making them especially vulnerable to chargeability.

59 I refer to my unpublished work here. For published findings see, e.g., the data in Hampson, ‘Settlement and removal in Cambridgeshire’, which are much more reliable than Landau on enduring changes after 1795 because they go well beyond 1799. They do not support her point – quite the contrary. Expressed as a percentage of cases, the category of married men with families shows the biggest rise; single females decline from their eighteenth-century level into the nineteenth century; and there is a short-term rise in the proportion of women with children during the Napoleonic Wars, before they fall back to their usual eighteenth-century level. Or see the figures in Bradley, ‘Derbyshire Quarter Session Rolls’, 113–14, which again refute Landau's argument.

60 Annals of the labouring poor, ch. 1, 6, 7, 8. This was documented by using a wide variety of sources alongside settlement ones. Research by other historians has supported my findings. See Jordan, E., ‘Female unemployment in England and Wales 1851–1911: an examination of the census figures for 15–19 year olds’, Social History 13 (1988), 175–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and her ‘The exclusion of women from industry in nineteenth-century Britain’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989), 273–96Google Scholar; Hill, B., Women, work and sexual politics in the eighteenth century (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar

61 Landau, ‘Laws’, 402.

62 Ibid., 402.

63 Ibid., 403.

64 Ibid., 405. Although she contradicts herself on this on p. 412.

65 Ibid., 405–6.1 and other historians find plenty of ‘correspondence’ between settlement cases and overseers' entries of relief given. See, e.g., Murphy, M. J., Poverty in Cambridgeshire (Cambridge, 1978), 15–16Google Scholar; Marshall, D., The English poor in the eighteenth century (1926)Google Scholar, e.g., 163, 168.

66 It is also despite the fact that if ‘monitoring’ and ‘regulation’ indeed took place at petty sessions of the sort Landau thinks was ‘assiduous’ and ‘vigorous’, many overseer' accounts would nevertheless still be full of its details: costs of journeys and associated expenses, costs for multiple examinations and copies, all the names entered of those many ‘immigrants’ taken ‘en masse’, etc. However, such rural accounts do not bear out Landu's generalizations.

67 This was also true to some extent of settlement (e.g., some urban-rural contrasts). I will discuss this elsewhere. The grouping of large numbers of rural parishes together for many calculations in Annals of the labouring poor was a way to deal with this. One is dealing in generalities: occasional evidence, from some parishes or areas, is not sufficient to shake the generalizations made here as to the most usual practice throughout the country. On variation in poor-law practice, see, e.g., the discussion in Dunkley's Admirable, P.The crisis of the Old Poor Law in England, 1795–1834: an interpretative essay (New York, 1982), 113–15.Google Scholar

68 For example, under 3 Geo. III c. 29.

69 Landau's assumption of a gap between examination and removal of up to 14 months is untenable (p. 417, n. 23), like her language of ‘one sustained regulatory action’. One frequently finds the removal order accompanying an examination, and the time between the documents was very much less than the period she allows – for the obvious reason that the circumstances of paupers and their families (ages, rents, contracts, property ownership etc.) could change, affecting settlement. In her period the removal order was almost always dated within a few weeks of the examination. Longer apparent ‘gaps’ simply indicate missing later documents. One should be wary of jumping from one partially documented settlement episode to another affecting the same family, and assuming these to be the same episode.

70 Landau, ‘Laws’, 408–9.

71 In my book I excluded some parishes from seasonality calculations because of multiple examination, alongside some others where source survival was heavily concentrated on certain months just for a year or so – e.g., where an examination book documented very fully only a short period. Neither case is very frequently found. I ruled out this minor objection to agrarian seasonality after considerable testing of these possibilities, as well as the possibility that numbers peak after vestry meetings, or after a change in parish overseers, both of which are easily disproved.

72 A point which explains some differences of interpretation.

73 For example, A. Young, The farmer's calendar (1771), 229–30.

74 See, e.g., the graph on p. 20 of Annals of the labouring poor.

75 Ibid., 21. See also my note 4.

76 Ibid., especially chs. 1, 4.

77 Ibid., 146 (on the 1795 Act), and 147–59.

78 Ibid., 20.

79 Ibid., 20, 148–9. An accentuation of rural seasonal unemployment can also be supported with evidence from overseer's accounts, a better source for this. For what were preliminary findings, see ibid., 92, 202–6. These findings can now be much better documented.

80 Ibid., 359.

81 I am grateful to Michael Rose for this point. The situation was quite different in France or Prussia, where the troubles of this period produced a number of laws between 1794 and 1808 to control movement.

82 S.C. on settlement and poor removal (1847, I.U.P. edn), 807.

83 Landau, ‘Laws’, 415. Nor did they share her view that ‘nineteenth-century overseers had immigrants examined only when they were destitute’ (ibid., 413). This is a misreading of the 1795 Act, s. 5–6. Some of my excluded categories, like bastard bearers, are still found.

84 S.C. on settlement and poor removal (1847, I.U.P. edn), 807.

85 E.g., D. Ashworth, ‘Settlement and removal in urban areas: Bradford, 1834–71’, in M. E. Rose, ed., The poor and the city: the English Poor Law in its urban context, 1834–1914 (Leicester, 1985), 60; W.A. Cassell, ‘The parish and the poor in New Brentford, 1720–1834’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 23 (1972), 187Google Scholar: The 1795 Act ‘which theoretically made removal more difficult probably made little difference in practice’.

86 Kussmaul, Servants in husbandry, ch. 6.

87 See also my note 29 above.

88 Landau, ‘Laws’, 397.

89 Ibid., 395, 398. This is incorrect. See, e.g., Bradley, L., ‘Derbyshire quarter session rolls: poor law removal orders’, Derbyshire Miscellany 6 (1972), 98–114Google Scholar, for a very contrary pattern.

90 Total settlement costs rose from about £35,000 in 1776, to c. £190,000 in 1802, to c. £327,000 in 1813–1815.

91 A further explanation is that over time unresolved features of the laws were refined and clarified, partly through judicial interpretation. Guides such as Burn's also produced better informed magistrates and parish officers, leading to fewer appeals. I am grateful to Steve Taylor for these points.

92 Landau, ‘Laws’, 399.

93 Ibid., 407.

94 Kussmaul's work is posited on this: Servants in husbandry, e.g., ch. 6; or her ‘Time and space, hoofs and grain: the seasonally of marriage in England’, in Rotberg, R.I. and Rabb, T.K., eds., Population and economy (Cambridge, 1986), 195–219.Google Scholar Landau's contentions imply a different assumption about marriage behaviour, not borne out by Kussmaul's analysis of marriage seasonality to uncover agricultural specializations and the incidence of service.

95 Landau, ‘Laws’, 408, Table 3.

96 In a small number of parishes (out of over two thousand whose records were covered), there were some people examined immediately after marriage, some of them having been long resident in that parish. It was stated that they had married in the last day or so, their circumstances were exceptional, and unlike most pauper couples, they had no children. I did not include these in seasonality calculations.

97 Annals of the labouring poor, 358–9.

98 Pace Landau, ‘Laws’, 410.

99 Burn, JP and parish officer, vol. III (1764 edn), 123.

100 J. Scott, Observations on the state of the parochial and vagrant poor (1773), 1–15.

101 Shaw, Parochial lawyer, 104.

102 Landau, ‘Laws’, 411.

103 See Webb, S. and B., English local government: English Poor Law history: Part I. The Old Poor Law (1927), 334Google Scholar, on an average of ‘one or two’ removals per parish each year; M. E. Rose, ‘Settlement, removal and the New Poor Law’, 37Google Scholar, citing George Coode; Cassell, ‘The parish and the poor in New Brentford, 1720–1834’, 177: even for a parish on a main London road there were ‘only a few persons’ removed every year. See also Abstract of returns showing the number of persons received into and removed out of their respective parishes, P.P. 1829, vol. 182, 4–5: the parish average for the year ending 25 March 1828 was about 2.5 removals–an average much inflated by large towns in counties like Middlesex, Lancashire or the West Riding; and my data show this to be a year of quite high removals nationwide.

104 Landau, ‘Laws’, 412. From 1795 paying local taxes or levies ceased to be a way of gaining settlement unless it was attached to a £10 ‘tenement’ rental.

105 Pace ibid., 412.

106 See my Annals of the labouring poor, 78–81.

107 Landau, ‘Laws’, p. 413.

108 Ibid., 414.

109 Ibid., 418, n. 41.

110 Pace Landau, 413, 418, n. 41. See Archbold, The Poor Law, 704–5, on examinations not being admissible as evidence; or Burn, JP and parish officer (1814 edn), vol. IV, 683. Landau can provide no evidence to show that they usually had any particularly strong status with judges in the eighteenth century. To do so would be more persuasive than to say, as she does, that they were a ‘monitoring’ device because before 1802 judges had not yet entirely ruled them out as admissible evidence in cases where someone had died, gone insane or deserted (p. 413).

111 Pace Landau, ‘Laws’, 413–14. In some areas of England (e.g., Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Shropshire, Nottinghamshire, Norfolk) small numbers were certainly still being issued in the 1830s, and sometimes later. See also Digby, A., Pauper palaces (1978), 21Google Scholar; Burn, JP and parish officer (1814 edn), vol. 4, 590; J. M. White, Parochial settlements an obstruction to Poor Law reform (1835), 10; J. F. Archbold, The Act for the amendment of the Poor Laws (1839 edn), 256–7; W. A. Holdsworth, The handy book of parish law (1872), 219; S. Stone, The Justices' manual, or guide to the ordinary duties of the Justice of the Peace (1887 edn), 843–4, showing that they were still sometimes used even then.

112 Landau's own table (p. 408) contradicts her views here, if one followed her reasoning. It should show a very high proportion of examinations taken immediately after marriage, as she believes that ‘marriage was the event which would most frequently prompt migration’ (p. 407). It does not show this.

113 Landau, ‘Laws’, 412.

114 Ibid., 412.

115 Setting the poor to work was of course a basic parish function under the old poor law, carried out in many ways, as e.g., after removal.

116 Parochial lawyer, 193, my italics.

117 For some discussion of this, see Annals of the labouring poor, ch. 2. On cottage controls, which should not be exaggerated, see e.g., the references in S. C. on settlement and poor removal (1847, I.U.P. edn), 848.

118 Annals of the labouring poor, ch. 2. Landau ignores ch. 2.

119 I shall discuss these elsewhere. Many other resources hinged, informally, upon settlement. Priority for jobs would go to the settled, because otherwise they could come onto parish rates. Likewise, inclusion in labour-rate or roundsman-type schemes of employment/poor relief were only open to the settled poor, inter-parish agreements aside. Hence the particular vulnerability of non-settled people to ‘unemployment’ or pauperism – another reason why certain settlement records are well suited to study that subject.

120 See, e.g., the work discussed in Lasker, G. W., Surnames and genetic structure (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, passim and p. 61.

121 Firth, J. B., Highways and byways in Leicestershire (1926), 210–11Google Scholar, quoting Aikin's letter to his sister. Aikin was born in 1747 and died in 1822. He was referring to the parish of Kibworth Beauchamp, which had a population of 1,232 in 1801. He reported that acquaintances were living elsewhere, ‘too much out of the way to visit’.

122 H. Fielding, Enquiry into the causes of the late increase of robbers (1751), 132: arguing that the laws of settlement are ‘very imperfectly executed’, and that the poor are usually left alone until actually chargeable; J. Howlett, An examination of Mr. Pitt's speech (1796), 14; Sir Eden, F., The state of the poor (1797, abridged edn, 1938), 54.Google Scholar Adam Smith's well-worn quote heads Landau's paper, seemingly with her approval. On Smith's inadequate understanding of (English and Welsh) settlement, Steve Taylor points me to Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, A. S.'s erudite introduction to An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (Oxford, 1976), 52–4Google Scholar, where Smith's treatment of settlement is deemed to be a ‘serious’ ‘failure’, immoderate, exaggerating the extent of removals, and lacking in evidence, investigation and knowledge. One can find similar exaggerated views in Malthus, On population (1960, edn), 36, and in some of their followers. See also Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement, 169–70.

123 Holderness, B. A., Pre-industrial England: economy and society from 1500 to 1750 (1976)Google Scholar, 193: ‘The settlement laws, too, had no serious influence upon labour migration. In 1788, for example, John Howlett noted that agricultural labourers ‘ranged from parish to parish and from county to county unthinking of and undeterred by the law of settlement’; Styles, P., ‘The evolution of the law of settlement’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal IX (1963–1964), 62Google Scholar; Cassell, ‘The parish and the poor in New Brentford’, 189; Huzel, J. P., ‘The labourer and the poor law, 1750–1850’, in Mingay, G. E., ed., Agrarian history of England and Wales: Vol. VI, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989), 786–8Google Scholar; Boyer, G. R., ‘The Old Poor Law and the agricultural labour market in southern England: an empirical analysis’, Journal of Economic History XLVI (1986), 428Google Scholar: the poor/settlement laws ‘had a trivial negative impact on labour mobility’; Body, G., ‘The administration of the Poor Law in Dorset, 1760–1834’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Southampton, 1964), 256–8Google Scholar; Ashforth, D., ‘Settlement and removal in urban areas: Bradford, 1834–71’, in Rose, M. E., ed., The poor and the city: the English Poor Law in its urban context, 1834–1914 (Leicester, 1985), 60Google Scholar: (on the eighteenth century), ‘migrants could expect to be ignored by the parish officers unless they attempted to gain a settlement or were clearly in danger of becoming a charge on the rates’. As Marshall, D. put it: ‘There is plenty of evidence to prove that the parish officers tended to leave strangers who intruded on their parish unmolested, if they neither attempted to gain a settlement by the delivery of a notice in writing, nor appeared likely to become chargeable in the near future’, The English poor in the eighteenth century (1926), 166Google Scholar, and see her ‘The Old Poor Law, 1662–1795’, Economic History Review VIII (1937), 38–47Google Scholar; Webb, Poor Law history, pt. 1, 340; Rose, ‘Settlement, removal and the New Poor Law’, 35–7 (pace Adam Smith); Digby, A., Pauper palaces (1978), 21.Google Scholar Henry Phillpotts wrote ‘that the occupation of cottages by married labourers has at present only a remote and collateral tendency to swell the Poor Rate; for no length of residence by such persons, or their families, can acquire for them a settlement’, Letter to the Right Hon. William Sturges Bourne (Durham, 1819), 22. Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement, provides the most illuminating study, discussing a large number of often picaresque cases.

124 Taylor, J. S., ‘“Set down in a large manufacturing town”: sojourning poor in early nineteenth-century Manchester’, Manchester Region History Review III (1989).Google Scholar

125 For example, ‘T.A.’, A plan for relieving the pressure of the poor rates and affording employment to the agricultural poor and improving their condition (1832), 34; George Taylor, ‘On settlement’, Poor Law report (1834, I.U.P. edn), Appendix C, 120 c, and the references there; J. F. Archbold, The act for the amendment of the Poor Laws (5th edn, 1839), 293 (R. v. Bobbing); Steer, Parish law, 629–30.

126 S.C. on settlement (original edn, 1847), 487; H. Phillpotts, A letter to the Right Hon. William Sturgess Bourne … on a bill introduced by him … to amend the laws respecting the settlement of the poor (Durham, 1819), 22.

127 In the post-1662 era, it is for the period shortly following the 1662 Act that Landau's point about the ‘monitoring’ of ‘immigrants’ would be most applicable, because of the stipulation that a newcomer could be removed within forty days of arrival, or would otherwise gain a settlement. Any such monitoring went together with provision of security (£10 renting or freehold estate), which would allow someone to avoid hasty removal. Such ‘security’ (on which Landau probably puts undue emphasis for too long a period) was in practice a corollary of the immediate situation created by the ease with which someone could, under the 1662 Act (more so than before 1662), gain a settlement (i.e., by only forty days residence). Hence the rapidity with which they might be removed. Failure to discuss the pre-1662 situation has perhaps led some historians to misconstrue that Act as repressive. My view here is in agreement with Beier, A. L., Masterless men: the vagrancy problem in England, 1560–1640 (1985), 32, 173–5.Google Scholar As R. Burn explained: ‘It must be owned, the statute of 13 & 14 C. 2. [he means 13 & 14 Car. II, c. 12, i.e., the 1662 Act] hath exceeded, perhaps, the due bounds … It was the easy method of obtaining a settlement by a residency of forty days [i.e., from 1662], that brought parishes into a state of war against the poor, and against one another; and caused the subsequent restrictive statutes to be made’ … ‘The statutes concerning settlements, subsequent to the 13 & 14 C. 2. are all restrictive of the method established thereby, of obtaining settlements by inhabitancy of forty days. Which easy method of acquiring settlements, appears to have been introductory of many frauds. And therefore it became necessary to ordain, that the said forty days should be reckoned, not from the time of coming into a parish, but from the delivering notice thereof in writing; and after that, from the time of publication of such notice in the church. And hence proceeded the other restrictions about certificate persons, servants, apprentices, and such like, [i.e., the 1685, 1691, 1697,1713, 1730 Acts]. From all which it follows, that the statute of C. 2 [1662] jumped too far at once, namely, from one year to forty days’. See his History ofs the Poor Laws (1764), 106–8, 235 – views which I would qualify in some minor ways. From 1685, people had to give notice to the overseer of their arrival if they wished to gain a settlement, and the forty-day period was from when that notice was given. After 1691 it became virtually impossible to gain a settlement by giving forty days notice, and one will almost never find it reported in examinations. (It was repealed in 1795.) Because of these changes to the 1662 Act, and in the practical context of usually allowing a more mundane and humane interpretation of what ‘likely to become chargeable’ meant (i.e., the poor person needed or would very probably shortly need relief – see note 48), the significance of £10 renting in practice was that it became largely another ‘head’ of settlement, and a relatively little used one except in urban areas. Throughout the eighteenth century, failure to rent at this high sum was infrequently referred to as being the cause of removal. Its alteration in 1795 probably acknowledged prevailing practice, a quite common feature of settlement legislation. The same point, from a different angle, was expressed in the Report from His Majesty's Commissioners for inquiring into the administration and practical operation of the Poor Laws (1834), 154, on the significance of the Acts which shortly followed 1662: ‘We have seen that they were introduced as qualifications and restrictions on the power given by the 13 and 14 Car. II. of removing all new comers whom the overseers chose to consider likely to become chargeable.’ An understanding of these late seventeenth-century Acts, in relation to 1662, and their judicial interpretation, is lacking in Landau's discussion. I had almost no seasonality data for 1662–1691, as little documentation survives. My seasonality calculations were taken from the post-1690 period, and the numbers of individuals involved become large from about 1720. It could be that Landau is basing her argument too much on this early period, although she does not discuss the forty-day legal arrangements.

128 W. G. Lumley claimed: ‘I think it may be very doubtful whether the great mass of labourers are really settled in the parishes where they are residing… the great mass of the labouring classes are not living in the parish in which they are settled… the very great amount of non-resident relief shows that very strongly’, S.C. on settlement and poor removal (1847,1.U.P. edn), 121–3, and this was also said of rural labourers, ibid., 126. There are many statements to this effect in the 1847 Report. This of course became a major issue when ‘irremovability’ was introduced in the nineteenth century; but the facts of residence vis-à-vis settlement were probably long-term. See also Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement, 14; J. M. Martin, ‘The rich, the poor and the migrant in eighteenth-century Stratford-on-Avon, Local Population Studies 20 (1978), 40, 47.Google Scholar I shall quantify this further elsewhere – in 46 East Suffolk parishes in 1835, for example, between 0–61% (a mean of 25%) of rural resident poor in the mid-1830s were living in parishes in which they did not ‘belong’. In less remote areas, or in some towns, the proportion could be much higher. Certainly the great majority of people were so resident at some point in their lives.

129 Even Smith said as much in The wealth of nations (1776), vol. I, 194: ‘Though men of reflexion [i.e., himself] … have sometimes complained of the laws of settlements… yet it has never been the object of any general popular clamour.’ Plenty of poor-law reformers disliked aspects of settlement, and sometimes suggested that the poor agreed with them. But in studying the fourth settlement source – settlement correspondence between paupers, parish officers, legal advisers and others (probably the most revealing source on the working of the law) – 1 find virtually no complaints by the poor against the system in the eighteenth century, if we leave aside specific complaints, as over the treatment of pregnant women, interference in marital affairs by parish authorities involved in settlement matters, and particularly measures (like fifty-one week hirings) preventing settlements. Often the poor eagerly acquiesced in settlement. (The matter becomes rather different with mid-nineteenth-century irremovability disputes.) I would be grateful for any evidence readers may find bearing on the views of the poor themselves.

130 Unlike so many other countries, which lacked pauper settlement and anything like the English poor-relief system – again, the two going together.

131 S.C. on settlement and poor removal (1847,1.U.P. edn), 190. For stimulating discussion of belonging, see Cohen, A. P., ed., Belonging: identity and social organisation in British rural cultures (Manchester, 1982)Google Scholar; and his ed., Symbolising boundaries: identity and diversity in British cultures (Manchester, 1986).Google Scholar I will discuss historical features of this elsewhere.

132 J. Shaw, Parish law (1753 edn), 265.

133 See also Beier, Masterless men, 173, who, like me here, suggests that ‘The settlement laws also probably assisted the mobility of labour’; or Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement, 167, 172, to similar effect.

134 R. Lloyd Kenyon, ed., Abstract of the orders made by the Court of Quarter Sessions for Shropshire, July, 1694-January, 1708–1709 (Shropshire County Records, no. 13, n.d.), 182. The poor themselves, in defence of parish settlement and relief, often referred to their ‘liberties’. E.g., Norfolk Chronicle, 5 November 1774.

135 R. Pashley, Pauperism and the Poor Laws (1852), 267–9. My italics.

136 Landau's emphasis on administration, rather than on pauperism, unemployment and their underlying social and economic causes, also parallels the suspect views on the poor law of'reformers’ like Malthus, Senior or Chad wick.