¹ There is a general discussion of these issues in Wrigley, E. A., The path to sustained growth: England's transition from an organic economy to an industrial revolution (Cambridge, 2016), ch. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Malthus described the inducement to marriage that arose from the adoption of Speenhamland as follows: ‘In country parishes the poor do really receive some compensation for their low wages; their children, beyond a certain number, are really supported by the parish; and though it must be a most grating reflection to a labouring man, that it is scarcely possible for him to marry without becoming a father of paupers; yet if he can reconcile himself to this prospect, the compensation, such as it is, is, no doubt, made to him.’ Malthus, T. R., An essay on the principle of population, in Wrigley, E. A. and Souden, D., eds., The works of Thomas Robert Malthus (8 vols., London, 1986), iii, p. 381Google Scholar.

³ Ibid., i, p. 27.

⁴ Ibid., p. 33.

⁵ Ibid., p. 35.

⁶ Ibid., pp. 35–6. Such views mirror those of Smith, Adam in The wealth of nations, ed. Cannan, E (Chicago, IL, 1976), book 1Google Scholar, ch. x, pt ii, pp. 151–2. Smith, however, made no other references to or criticisms of specific poor relief practices and their consequences. See Winch, Donald, Riches and poverty: an intellectual history of political economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 202Google Scholar.

⁷ Malthus, Essay on population, i, pp. 30–1.

⁸ Ibid., pp. 36–7.

⁹ Malthus, Essay on population, 6th edn, iii, p. 381.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ T. R. Malthus, An investigation of the cause of the present high price of provisions, in Wrigley and Souden, eds., The works of Thomas Robert Malthus, vii, pp. 5–18; Wrigley, E. A., ‘Corn and crisis: Malthus on the high price of provisions’, Population and Development Review, 25 (1999), pp. 121–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁸ Boyer, G. R., ‘Malthus was right after all: poor relief and birth rates in southeastern England’, Journal of Political Economy, 97 (1989), pp. 93–114CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and further developed in ch. 5 of Boyer, G. R., An economic history of the English poor law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁴ French, ‘Living in poverty’, pp. 298–9; Williams, Poverty, gender and life-cycle, p. 162.

²⁵ Williams, Poverty, gender and life-cycle, p. 162. In a less comprehensive case-study using selected relief recipients, Samantha Shave has argued based on a similar nominative linkage exercise with the parish registers and poor law accounts for the Dorset parish of Motcombe that there was no certainty that those with large families would come to depend on regular weekly or monthly pensions. See Shave, S., ‘The dependent poor? (Re)constructing the lives of individuals “on the parish” in rural Dorset, 1800–1832’, Rural History, 20 (2009), pp. 67–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁷ Ibid., p. 80.

²⁸ Wrigley, E. A., Davies, R. S., Oeppen, J. E., and Schofield, R. S., English population history from family reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Williams, ‘Malthus, marriage and poor allowances’, p. 81.

³⁰ Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, and Schofield, English population history, tab. 5.4, p. 141.

³¹ Ibid.

³² After taking into account army, navy, and merchant seaman abroad when the 1851 census was taken, it was estimated that in England and Wales the male population was 8,907,786 and the female population 9,146,384, a sex ratio of 97.4. Since in the older age groups women outnumbered men, it is probable that in the younger adult age groups numbers were roughly equal. 1851 Census, Population Tables, i, PP 1852–3, lxxxxviii, p. xxvii.

³³ Blaug, M., ‘The myth of the old poor law and the making of the new’, Journal of Economic History, 23 (1963), p. 158CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Hertfordshire was not in Blaug's list of Speenhamland counties, although it lies immediately to the north of London and is surrounded by the other counties in the table. It was not therefore included in Table 3, although it does not differ significantly from those counties which were included.

³⁵ We are grateful to Dr Sebastian Keibek for these percentages. His recent research has greatly improved our knowledge of occupational change in England between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. His sources and techniques of analysis are described in his recent thesis: Sebastian A. J. Keibek, ‘The male occupational structure of England and Wales 1600–1850’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge, 2017).

³⁶ 1831 Census, Enumeration Abstract, i, PP 1833, xxxvi–xxxvii, p. vi.

³⁷ Ibid., ii, p. 778.

³⁸ Blaug provides lists both of all the counties which were in his view ‘Speenhamland’ and all those which were not ‘Speenhamland’: Blaug, ‘The myth of the old poor law’, app. E, p. 184. The county totals of agricultural labourers are listed in 1831 Census, Enumeration Abstract, ii, pp. 832–3.

³⁹ Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, and Schofield, English population history, tab. 7.27, p. 421.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Kussmaul, A., A general view of the rural economy of England, 1538–1840 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 17–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² It is interesting that Malthus objected strongly to Samuel Whitbread's Poor Law Bill of 1807 in which it was proposed to revive the power of parishes to build cottages at the expense of the rates, to be let to the poor at whatever rents they could afford. Malthus looked unfavourably on any measure that might reduce the ‘difficulty of procuring habitations’. He thought that ‘such is the tendency to form early connections, that with the encouragement of a sufficient number of tenements I have very little doubt that the population might be so pushed, and such a quantity of labour thrown into the market, as to render the condition of the independent labourer absolutely hopeless, and to make the common wages of day labour insufficient to support a single child without parish assistance’. In fact, he reminded Whitbread that ‘in England it appears that the proportion of births and marriages to the whole population is less than in most countries of Europe’ and that a specific cause of this ‘unexpected effect’ arose for the difficulty of procuring habitations. See ‘A letter to Samuel Whitbread Esq. MP on his proposed bill’ in Malthus, The amendment of the poor laws, p. 10. See also Whitbreads's reply in Malthus, T. R., The unpublished papers in the collection of Kanto Gakuen University, ed. Pullen, J. M. and Parry, T. H. (2 vols., Cambridge, 1997), i, pp. 80–5Google Scholar.

⁴³ The views of the classical economists on this issue are described in Wrigley, The path to sustained growth, ch. 2.

⁴⁴ Malthus, Essay on population, 6th edn, iii, p. 409.

⁴⁵ Ibid., appendix, p. 598.

⁴⁶ Ibid., ii, p. 247.

⁴⁷ Ibid., iii, p. 586. It is worth noting that he added a footnote which suggests that he was conscious of drawing upon Mandeville's ideas but wished to distance himself from him: ‘In saying this let me not be supposed to give the slightest sanction to the system of morals inculcated in the Fable of the bees, a system which I consider to be absolutely false, and directly contrary to the just definition of virtue. The great art of De Mandeville consisted in misnomers.’ On this issue, see Winch, Riches and poverty, pp. 240–1.

⁴⁸ Malthus, Essay on population, 6th edn, iii, p. 575.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 339.