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The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Mark Blaug
Mark Blaug
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

No Matter which authority we consult on the English Poor Laws in the nineteenth century the same conclusion emerge: the Old Poor Law demoralized the working class, promotedd population growth, lowered wasges, reduced rents, destroyed yeomanry, and compounded the burden on retepayes; the poverty which it relieved; the problem of devising an efficeient public relief system was finally solved with the passaage of the“harsh but salutry” Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. So Unanimous are both the indictment and the verdit of historians on this question that we may forego the pleasure of citing “chapter and verse.”

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 1963 , pp. 151 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1963

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References

1 Marshall, Alfred, testifying in 1893 before the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, deplored the persistence of Malthusian thinking among laymen and illustrated the evolution of professional economic opinion in the nineteenth century in these words: “Suppose you could conceive a Mad Emperor of China to give to every English working man half-a-crown for nothing: according to the current notions, as far as I have been able to ascertain them, that would lower wages, because it would enable people to work for less. I think that nine economists out of ten at the beginning of the century would have said that that would lower wages. Well, of course, it might increase population and that might bring down wages; but unless it did increase population, the effect according to the modern school would be to raise wages because the increased wealth of the working classes would lead to better living, more vigorous and better educated people with greater earning power, and so wages would rise. That is the centre of the difference.” Official Papers (London: Macmillan and Co., 1926), p. 249.Google Scholar

2 For theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of disguised unemployment, see Leibenstein, H., “The Theory of Underemployment in Backward Economies,” Journal of Political Economy, LXV (04 1957)Google Scholar; and Wonnacott, P., “Disguised and Overt Unemployment in Underdeveloped Economies,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXXVI (05 1962)Google Scholar.

3 P. P. 1803–1804 (175), XIII. The returns of the census are also found in Marshall, J., A Digest of All the Accounts (1833), pp. 33, 38Google Scholar.

4 ibid., p. 34.

5 S. and B. Webb., English Poor Law History: Part 1: The Old Poor Law (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1927), pp. 181, 185, 188–89, 400–1.Google Scholar

6 Clapham, J., The Economic History of Modern Britain. The Railway Age (2d ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1939), pp. 123–25Google Scholar. The Webbs dismissed this piece of evidence in a footnote in English Poor Law History: Part II: The Last Hundred Years (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1929), I, 610Google Scholar.

7 Poor Law History, p. 182.

8 See ibid., pp. 170–73.

9 See ibid., pp. 182–83; L., J. and Hammond, B., The Village Labourer (4th ed.; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1927)Google Scholar. Hampson, E. M., The Treatment of Poverty in Cambridgeshire, 1579–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1934) pp. 195–96Google Scholar.

10 See Finer, S. E., The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick. (London: Methuea Co., 1952).Google Scholar

11 There are no official figures available for total relief expenditures in the years 1785–1801 and 1803–1811. For sources see Appendices A and B.

12 Tooke, T., History of Prices (1857), VI, App. 6.Google Scholar

13 See Appendix A.

14 For sources see Appendix B.

15 See Appendix C for the derivation of the series.

16 See Gayer, A. D., Rostow, W. W., Schwartz, A. J., Economic Fluctuations in the British Economy, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), II, 563–64, 793, 854Google Scholar; Matthews, R. C. O., A Study in Trade-Cycle History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1954), ch. 4Google Scholar.

17 See Appendix D.

18 See Appendix E.

19 , Clapham, The Railway Age, p. 125Google Scholar. He cited a few Speenhamland counties which show a fall of wages between 1795 and 1824, but does not mention Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Essex, Cambridge, Northampshire, Warwick and Devon-all Speenhamland counties-where wages were higher in 1824 than in 1795.

20 See Orwin, C. S., Felton, B. I., “A Century of Wages and Earnings in Agriculture,” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, 92 (1931)Google Scholar.

21 See Redford, A.Labour Migration in England, 1800–1850 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1926), ch. 11, and appendices.Google Scholar

22 Another explanation suggests itself. The Report of 1834 presented some evidence to show that small parishes, measured in terms of population per acre, granted more relief per head than large parishes, the reason being that the intimate personal connections between magistrates and farm hands in small parishes invited prodigality. If this were so, the high rates of relief per head in southern rural counties might be due to the fact that most of the 1,000 parishes under fifty inhabitants and most of the 6,000 under three hundred inhabitants were located in southern agricultural districts. To test this hypothesis, we would have to examine the size distribution of parishes among counties, a question which cannot be entered into here.

23 In the years 1835–1837, they arranged for the migration of about 5,000 workers to the northern factory districts. In the same period, some 6,500 Poor Law emigrants went overseas, and in both cases about half of the migrants came from the East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. , Redford, Labour Migration, p. 94Google Scholar.

24 For a review of the evidence, see Gash, N., “Rural Unemployment, 1815–1834,” Economic History Review, VI, No. 1 (10 1935)Google Scholar. The records of the Emigration Inquiry of 1826–1827 supply additional evidence of redundant labor in the southern rural counties: See , Clapham, The Railway Age, pp. 64–65Google Scholar.

25 Fussell, G. C., Compton, M., “Agricultural Adjustments after the Napoleonic Wars,” Economic History (02 1939)Google Scholar, show that it was the grain-growing areas which were hit hardest in the postwar years.

26 , Clapham, The Railway Age, pp. 19–22, 124, 467.Google Scholar

27 See Ernie, Lord, English Farming, Past and Present (6th ed.; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1961), pp. 308–12Google Scholar.

28 The official returns for the year 1844 are found in McCulloch, J. R., A Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire (1854), II, p. 670Google Scholar.

29 , Redford, Labour Migration, appendix 1, map A.Google Scholar

30 Krause, J. T., “Changes in English Fertility and Mortality, 1781–1850,” Economic History Review, 2nd Series, IX (08 1958).Google Scholar

31 Ibid., and T. H. Marshall, “The Population Problem During the Industrial Revolution: A Note on the Present State of the Controversy,” Economic History, 1929, reprinted in Essays in Economic History, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (London: Edward Arnold, 1954), I.

32 Cannan, E., The History of Local Rates in England (4th ed.; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1927), p. 80.Google Scholar

33 Ashby, A. W., One Hundred Years of Poor Law Administration in a Warwickshire Village. Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, ed. Vinogradoff, P. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), III, 57–58.Google Scholar

34 For the available evidence, see Gayer, , et al., Economic Fluctuations, pp. 927–29Google Scholar.

35 , Clapham, The Railway Age, pp. 98–105, 430–32Google Scholar. Davies, E., “The Small Landowners, 1780–1832, in The Light of the Land Tax Assessments,” Economic History Review, 1927Google Scholar, reprinted in Essays in Economic History, I; J. D. Chambers, “Enclosure and the Small Landowner,” Economic History Review, X, No. 2 (Nov. 1940); Chambers, J. D., “Enclosure and Labor Supply in the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review, 2nd Series, V, No. 3 (1953)Google Scholar.

36 See Blaug, M., Ricardian Economics. A Historical Study (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 183–84Google Scholar.

37 See Marshall, D., “The Old Poor Law, 1662–1795,” Economic History Review, 1937Google Scholar, reprinted in Essays in Economic History, I.

38 , Webbs, Old Poor Law History, p. 88n.Google Scholar

39 This fact was carefully, and perhaps intentionally, hidden from the public. Throughout the remainder of the century, the Poor Law authorities displayed an incredible reluctance to supply any quantitative information about the body of people relieved, other than the ratio of outdoor to indoor relief recipients. Since some children and old people received outdoor relief, while a proportion of the able-bodied did enter the workhouse, we have no way of knowing just how many of the able-bodied received unemployment compensation; the “able-bodied” were not even defined by the Act of 1834 Io r purposes of administration. See Dessauer, M., “Unemployment Records, 1848–1859,” Economic History Review, X, No. 1 (02 1940)Google Scholar.

40 See Beales, H. L., “The New Poor Law,” History, 1931Google Scholar, reprinted in Essays in Economic History, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (London: Edward Arnold, 1962), III.