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Poor families, removals and ‘nurture’ in late Old Poor Law London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2010

ALYSA LEVENE
ALYSA LEVENE
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes University.
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Abstract

The consideration of the removals aspect of settlement law – that is, the moving on of paupers or potential paupers to the parish where they ‘belonged’ – has focused almost exclusively on working-age adults and labour migration. This article focuses on how removal law affected families with children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in two large London parishes. It finds that children were a sizeable presence among the removed population but that there were notable differences in family type between the two parishes. Furthermore, while most young children were kept with their mothers even if they did not share a settlement, others were removed alone, even after a change in settlement law in 1795 that should have assured their common claim in certain cases. The study sheds light on attitudes to poor children and their families, as well as on the exigencies brought about by economic circumstances and employment opportunities in the parish.

Les familles pauvres, renvois dans une autre paroisse et obligation alimentaire selon l'ancienne loi des pauvres à londres

L'étude des renvois dans une autre paroisse, selon la loi sur les conditions de l'établissement dans une paroisse donnée, s'est bornée presque exclusivement à ses conséquences pour les travailleurs adultes et pour les migrations liées au travail. Ici, nous examinons en quoi cette loi a affecté les familles chargées d'enfants dans deux vastes paroisses de Londres entre le 18e siècle finissant et le début du 19e siècle. Nous relevons que, dans les populations renvoyées vers une autre paroisse, la présence d'enfants était importante, mais nous observons aussi des différences marquantes de type de famille d'une paroisse à l'autre. En outre, alors que la plupart des jeunes enfants restaient avec leur mère alors qu'ils avaient une paroisse d'établissement différente, d'autres étaient renvoyés seuls, ce qui reflète probablement à quel point ces deux paroisses étaient en mesure de mettre en œuvre les exigences de la loi. Cette étude apporte quelque lumière sur les attitudes de l'époque à l'égard des enfants pauvres et de leurs familles ainsi que sur les nécessités auxquelles les paroisses devaient se plier du fait de leur situation économique et des conditions de l'emploi.

Arme familien, abschiebungen und ‘aufzucht-pflege’ in london unter dem späten old poor law

Bislang ist das Problem der Abschiebungen im Rahmen der Niederlassungsgesetze fast ausschließlich im Hinblick auf Erwachsene im arbeitsfähigen Alter und die Migration von Arbeitskräften erörtert worden. Dagegen konzentriert sich dieser Beitrag auf die Frage, inwiefern das Abschiebungsrecht im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert auch Familien mit Kindern betraf, und untersucht dazu zwei große Londoner Gemeinden. Dort machten Kinder einen beträchtlichen Anteil der Abgeschobenen aus, wobei es aber im Hinblick auf die Familienformen deutliche Unterschiede zwischen den beiden Gemeinden gab. Außerdem wurden die meisten jungen Kinder selbst dann bei ihren Müttern belassen, wenn sie nicht deren Gemeindeberechtigung besaßen, während andere tatsächlich (ohne ihre Mütter) abgeschoben wurden, wobei diese Unterschiede vermutlich damit zusammenhängen, wie gut die betroffenen Gemeinden ihre Ansprüche vor Gericht durchsetzen konnten. Die Studie wirft damit neues Licht auf die Haltung gegenüber armen Kindern und ihren Familien, aber auch auf die Anforderungen, die sich durch die ökonomischen Verhältnisse und die Beschäftigungsmöglichkeiten innerhalb der Gemeinde ergaben.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 233 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

ENDNOTES

1 See Taylor, J. S., ‘The impact of pauper settlement, 1691–1834’, Past and Present 73 (1976), 42–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 51, and P. Slack, Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London and New York, 1988), 31. See also Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace, and parish officer (23rd edn; London, 1820), vol. IV, 199–200.

2 Styles, P., ‘The evolution of the law of settlement’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal IX:1 (1963), 33–63Google Scholar.

3 Landau, N., ‘The eighteenth-century context of the laws of settlement’, Continuity and Change 6:3 (1991), 418–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This was part of the Poor Removal Act of 1795, 35 Geo. 3.

4 See in particular, Taylor, , ‘The impact’; N. Landau, ‘The laws of settlement and the surveillance of immigration in eighteenth-century Kent’, Continuity and Change 3:3 (1988), 391–420Google Scholar; Snell, K. D. M., ‘Pauper settlement and the right to poor relief in England and Wales’, Continuity and Change 6:3 (1991), 384–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Landau, ‘The eighteenth-century context’; and Landau, N., ‘Who was subjected to the laws of settlement? Procedure under the settlement laws in eighteenth-century England’, Agricultural History Review 43:11 (1996), 139–59Google Scholar. Adam Smith is the best-known critic (The wealth of nations (London, I776), I69–76), but see also Taylor, ‘The impact’, 43, note 4.

5 For example, Rose's Act of 1795 abolished settlement by public notice and rate-paying (J. S. Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement in the Industrial Revolution: sojourners' narratives (Palo Alta, CA, 1989), 21 and 50); see also K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the labouring poor: social change and agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), 69–80, 340–1.

6 Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement; King, S., ‘“It is impossible for our Vestry to judge his case into perfection from here”: managing the distance dimensions of poor relief, 1800–40’, Rural History 16:2 (2005), 161–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. King, T. Nutt and A. Tomkins eds., Voices of the poor: poor law depositions and letters, in A. Levene, gen. ed., Narratives of the poor in eighteenth-century Britain (London, 2006), vol. 1; T. Sokoll, ed., Essex pauper letters, 1731–1837 (Oxford, 2001).

7 See for example Taylor, ‘The impact’ and Poverty, migration and settlement, 26–51; Landau, ‘The laws’; Snell, ‘Pauper settlement’; and Landau, ‘The eighteenth-century context’ and ‘Who was subjected’.

8 Taylor, ‘The impact’, 57; Landau, N., ‘The regulation of immigration, economic structures and definitions of the poor in eighteenth-century England’, The Historical Journal 33:3 (1990), 541-71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 547-58.

9 Burn, The Justice of the Peace, vol. IV, 119–22. See also L. Hollen Lees, ‘The survival of the unfit: welfare policies and family maintenance in nineteenth-century London’, in P. Mandler, ed., The users of charity: the poor on relief in the nineteenth-century metropolis (Philadelphia, 1990), 68–91, and Crowther, M. A., ‘Family responsibility and state responsibility in Britain before the Welfare State’, Historical Journal 25:1 (1982), 131–45CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, for ways in which poor families assisted each other in both the Old and the New Poor Law periods.

10 M. A. Crowther, The workhouse system, 1834–1929: the history of an English social institution (London, 1981), 43; A. Digby, The poor law in nineteenth-century England (London, 1982), 17–18.

11 Laslett, P. and Oosterveen, K., ‘Long-term trends in bastardy in England: a study of the illegitimacy figures in the parish registers and in the reports of the Registrar-General, 1561–1960’, Population Studies 27 (1973), 273–82Google Scholar; A. Levene, T. Nutt and S. Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Levene, Nutt and Williams eds., Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700–1920 (Basingstoke, 2005), 5–8, 10–14; M. Ingram, Church courts, sex and marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), 152–4, 163–5.

12 P. Laslett ‘Introduction’, in P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen and R. M. Smith eds., Bastardy and its comparative history (London, 1980), 1–64; T. Nutt, ‘The paradox and problems of illegitimate paternity in Old Poor Law Essex’, in Levene et al., Illegitimacy in Britain, 102–21.

13 See D. Kertzer, who finds that attitudes to unmarried motherhood in parts of northern Italy were very unforgiving: Sacrificed for honor: Italian infant abandonment and the politics of reproductive control, (Boston, 1993). In the south it seems to have been more acceptable for illegitimate children to remain with their mothers.

14 If no information could be provided at all on where they belonged, all paupers had the right to relief where they were. See John Paul, The parish officer's complete guide (London, 1773), 46.

15 Burn, The Justice of the Peace, vol. IV, 208. If the mother deserted the child then it could be sent back to its own parish.

16 M. Dorothy George, London life in the eighteenth century (Harmondsworth, 1965 edn), 57–9.

17 I am grateful to Joanna Innes for pointing this clause out to me, and for explaining its background. The details can also be found in J. Burn, An appendix to the seventeenth edition of Dr Burn's Justice of the Peace and parish officer (London, 1795), 173, and The laws respecting parish matters. Together with the laws respecting rates and assessments, settlements and removals, and of the poor in general (London, 1795), 93–4. It was part of the same Act that delayed removal for sick paupers, although it remained wedded to the idea that unmarried pregnant women were automatically liable for removal.

18 By 1831 the population of St Clement's had grown to 15,442, while that of St Luke's was 32,371 (census enumeration abstract, part 1, Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP), 1833).

19 Abstract of returns relative to the poor, 1804 (British Library 433.i.12); T. Hitchcock and J. Black eds., Chelsea settlement and bastardy examinations, 1733–1766 (London, 1999), xvi; George, London life, 371, note 2.

20 A workhouse was built in St Luke's in 1737 and one in 1772 or 1773 in St Clement's. The St Luke's workhouse records survive, and provide a useful contrast to the population of removed paupers considered here. According to their own figures, St Luke's supported 3.3 permanent (regular and locally settled) paupers per hundred of the population, and St Clement's 4.2. This put St Luke's on a level with another well-documented and large London parish, that of St Martin in the Fields (3.9 paupers per hundred) and a little above St Marylebone (2.4), with St Clement's supporting higher levels (Abstract of returns). The Abstract included a column asking for the number of non-parishioners relieved, but neither St Luke's nor St Clement's made a return under this heading. A note for St Luke's stated that the figure could not be ascertained because of the presence of the pensioners of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea.

21 Tanya Evans and John Black have both highlighted the vulnerability of London's pregnant domestic servants to poverty. Black's work covers the parish of St Clement Danes (‘Who were the putative fathers of illegitimate children in London, 1740–1810?’, in Levene et al. eds., Illegitimacy in Britain, 50–65). See also T. Evans, Unfortunate objects: Lone mothers in eighteenth-century London (Basingstoke, 2005).

22 W. Gaunt, Chelsea (London, 1954); T. Holmes, Chelsea (London, 1972), 61–95, 127, 135–46.

23 Hitchcock and Black eds., Chelsea settlement and bastardy examinations, xv.

24 Census enumeration abstract, part 1, PP 1833.

25 Comparative account of the population of Great Britain in the years 1801, 1811, 1821 and 1831; with the annual value of real property in the year 1815, House of Commons Papers, 1831, XVIII.1, 161 and 166. The value per head was derived by dividing the rateable value by the population returned in the same source for 1821. It is thus a rough-and-ready indicator of wealth, but indicative nonetheless. The returns for St Clement's are for only that part of the parish that lay in Westminster (the greater part of the total).

26 The foreign-born could only gain settlements through rental (Taylor, Poverty, migration and settlement, 83. See John Diprose, Some account of the parish of St Clement Danes past and present (London, 1868), 96–108, on the Irish population in St Clement's and on conditions in the poorer areas of the parish generally.

27 Hitchcock and Black eds., Chelsea settlement and bastardy examinations, xv.

28 The use of examinations and removals to cover parishes against future indigence has been debated by Snell and Landau; see note 4 above. After 1795 all removals should have been of the actually indigent.

29 Settlement examinations were manually linked by the author to removal orders on surname and family details. It is possible that some examinations that were taken some time prior to the removal order have been missed although, as noted above, the two events usually took place in quick succession. The exact timing of the examination and removal are not a part of the current investigation, however, so this was not unduly worrying. The linkage rate relates to families, not individuals. See Chelsea settlement examinations, London Metropolitan Archive (hereafter LMA), P74.LUK; St Clement's examination books, City of Westminster Archive Centre (herafter CWAC), B1175–90.

30 R. D. Lee and R. S. Schofield, ‘British population in the eighteenth century’, in R. Floud and D. McCloskey eds, The economic history of Britain since 1700, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1981), 28–31; W. A. Cole, ‘Factors in demand 1700–1800’, in Floud and McCloskey, Economic history, 38–45; Lynn Hollen Lees, The solidarities of strangers: the English poor laws and the people (Cambridge, 1998), 94–100.

31 A. Redford, Labour migration in England, 1800–1850 (Manchester, 1964), 88. See Landau, ‘The regulation of immigration’ on the significance of the change requiring actual indigence for a removal to take place. Removal orders were made for pregnant women within the wider datasets used here, but they are coded as single adults.

32 See K. Honeyman, Child workers in England, 1780–1820 (Aldershot, 2007), 113–28, and A. Levene, ‘Parish apprenticeship and the Old Poor Law in London’, Economic History Review (forthcoming). The wider project of which this article forms a part will consider older children as well.

33 The recording of ages was sometimes patchy, and so there are a few cases where the relationship between two people of the same surname is unclear. These cases have not been coded into family groups here. Where there is no corroborative information on age, individuals described as children are taken as such, although we cannot be certain that they were under 13 (or even under 16 or 18).

34 Families including children above and below the age of 13 were coded together as one unit, but the over-13s were not counted as children. Only family members present in the removal orders were included, so that (for example) families with absent husbands/fathers were coded as being single-parent.

35 See Chelsea workhouse admissions and discharges (from 1743), LMA, P74/LUK/110. Details from the registers were recorded for the period 1743–1799, covering 4,352 admissions.

36 There, 29.7 per cent of entrants between 1769 and 1781 were 13 or under; see Levene, A., ‘Children, childhood and the workhouse: St Marylebone, 1769–81’, London Journal 33:1 (2008), 37–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 44.

37 St Clement Danes, Minutes of assistants, 1779–1798, CWAC, vol. B1147. There, children made up an average of only 13 per cent of the workhouse population in the 1780s and ‘90s, even including those actually being nursed elsewhere.

38 Others would have been given outdoor relief. This will form a part of the wider project of which this article is also a part, but the records are notoriously unclear on the ages of family members.

39 See T. Hitchcock, ‘Unlawfully begotten on her body: illegitimacy and the parish poor in St Luke's Chelsea’, in T. Hitchcock, P. Sharpe and P. King eds., Chronicling poverty: the voices and strategies of the English poor, 1640–1840 (Basingtoke, 1997), 70–86, for the classic assertion of this thesis. See also Levene, ‘Children’.

40 This relatively low figure is particularly striking since unmarried women were automatically regarded as liable to become chargeable, and so theoretically they were passed on without reference to their economic standing.

41 In St Clement's 13.9 per cent of single mothers were unmarried, and 13.0 per cent in St Luke's. Widows formed 27.0 and 26.0 per cent, respectively.

42 See C. Pooley and J. Turnbull, Migration and mobility in Britain since the eighteenth century (London, 1998), 259–63; Snell, Annals of the labouring poor, 360–2.

43 They were also younger (mid-20s on average) than the widows and deserted mothers (who were generally in their late 20s or early 30s).

44 Middlesex Sessions Papers (LMA MJ/SP). A catalogue search was made by the author using the keywords ‘removal’ AND ‘child’, and cases involving St Luke's and St Clement's were also searched for by name; 61 cases involving 93 children were retrieved, although this is certainly not a comprehensive return rate because it relies on the way that cases were tagged.

45 See, for example, Steven King and Geoffrey Timmins, Making sense of the industrial revolution: English economy and society 1700–1850 (Manchester, 2001), 314–17.

46 Taylor, ‘The impact’, 53.

47 Early work by this author suggests that babies were relatively rarely removed from their mothers in London workhouses to be sent to wet-nurses.

48 Hollen Lees, The solidarities of strangers.

49 King, ‘“It is impossible”; Hitchcock and Black eds., Chelsea settlement and bastardy examinations, x–xiii.