^1. See particularly Huzel's, J.R. contribution, ‘The labourer and the poor law, 1750–1850’Google Scholar, in Mingay, G.E. (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. VI, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989).Google Scholar

^2. Chambers, J.D., ‘Enclosure and labour supply in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, V (1953).Google Scholar

^3. Young, A., An Inquiry into the Propriety of Applying Wastes to the Better Maintenance and Support of the Poor (Bury St. Edmunds, 1801)Google Scholar; see also his Autobiography (ed. M. Betham-Edwards, 1898), pp. 351, 433.Google Scholar

^4. I raised aspects of this in Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1985), chapter 4.Google Scholar

^5. Snell, , Annals, and my ‘Pauper settlement and the right to poor relief in England and Wales’, Continuity and Change, 6 (1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, explore uses of settlement records, but are not studies of administration. On administration see Styles, P., ‘The evolution of the law of settlement’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, IX (1963)Google Scholar; Hampson, E.M., ‘Settlement and removal in Cambridgeshire, 1662–1834’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 2 (1926–1928)Google Scholar; Marshall, D., The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1926)Google Scholar; Mills, D.R., ‘Francis Howell's Report on the operation of the laws of settlement in Nottinghamshire, 1848’, Transactions Thoroton Society, LXXVI (1972)Google Scholar; Rose, M.E., ‘Settlement, removal and the new poor law’Google Scholar, in Fraser, D. (ed.), The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century (1976)Google 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)Google Scholar. The most authoritative account is Taylor, J.S., Poverty, Migration and Settlement in the Industrial Revolution: Sojourners' Narratives (Palo Alto, California, 1989)Google Scholar, and see also his important articles, Taylor, J.S., ‘The impact of pauper settlement, 1691–1834’, Past & Present, 73 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, J.S., ‘A different kind of Speenhamland: nonresident relief in the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), 183–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The best contemporary discussions are Nolan, M., A Treatise of the Laws for the Relief and Settlement of the Poor (1805, and later editions)Google Scholar, and Burn, R., JP and Parish Officer. See also Steer's Parish Law (3rd edn, by H.J. Hodgson, 1857)Google Scholar; Lumley, W.G., A Popular Treatise on the Law of Settlement and Removals (1842)Google Scholar; S.C. on Settlement and Poor Removal, VIII, XI (1847)Google Scholar; Coode, G., Report to the Poor Law Board on the Law of Settlement and Removal of the Poor, XXVI (1851)Google Scholar; S.C. on Irremoveable Poor, VII (1859)Google Scholar; Shaw, J., The Parochial Lawyer (1895).Google Scholar

^6. See Snell, ‘Pauper settlement’, pp. 377–9.Google Scholar

^7. Steer's Parish Law (3rd edn, by H.J. Hodgson, 1857), p. 627Google Scholar. Words to this effect comprise the definition of settlement in all periods.

^8. Snell, , Annals, pp. 17–18Google Scholar: my term ‘examinant for relief’ (p. 17) referred of course to those examinations preceding or accompanying relief. As is obvious from this passage, I do not believe that all examined were requesting relief, or necessarily in immediate need of it, and I am also assuming prompt action often being taken vis-à-vis vulnerable newcomers (p. 18). ‘Unemployment’ should not simply be equated to ‘indigence’ or chargeability - think for example of some new arrivals seeking employment, or unemployed workers after harvest, still with their harvest earnings.

^9. It was as yet unnecessary to state that non-certificated people were chargeable, and ‘likely to become’ so may have been default phrasing. Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1756 edn), pp. 544, 547.Google Scholar

^10. Examination had to be by the same two justices who removed (Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1814 edn), IV, 680–1)Google Scholar; it had to be current with the removal (e.g. to ensure that no settlement or irremovability through property or contract occurred between examination and removal); and it had to be original, accurate and specific to present circumstances, family details and ages. The pauper had to be heard (wherever possible) by the examining magistrates before they signed the removal (Nolan, , Treatise on the Laws (1808 edn), II, 64–79)Google Scholar. An examination was sometimes sent some days in advance as notice to the receiving parish, allowing it time to appeal, but many parishes removed immediately upon examination without giving notice. After 1834 the examination and removal order frequently became an amalgamated document.

^11. Nolan, , Treatise of the Laws (1808 edn), I, 493Google Scholar, repeated on pp. 203 or 549. This point has been ignored in some recent settlement historiography. For further elucidation of this principle, and on all those excepted, see ibid., pp. 201–4, 492–582 and follow up his footnotes; ibid., II, 54–63, 92; Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1814 edn), IV, e.g. 520, 524, 552–61Google Scholar, to the same effect: ‘Persons to be removed under the statute of C. 2 are those that wander from place to place … [those making] a vagrant intrusion into a parish, in which the party has nothing of his own, within the purview and scope of the poor laws’. Renting a ‘tenement’ of £10 value per annum meant a ‘tenement’ in its older sense: ‘anything that may be holden … of a permanent nature’, including offices, rents, common, advowsons, a franchise, the-fogs or after-grass of a field, fishing of a pond, tithes, market tolls, a mine and/or stock, a cattle-gate, rabbit-warren, use of cows, use of machinery, any profit out of land, and so on - a very wide meaning. Those not renting to £10 value who were nevertheless excepted included certificate holders; indentured apprentices; unmarried persons without a child hiring for a year, including those who were pregnant; all cases where removal would interfere with a relationship in which the pauper stood towards a third person; those with any actual or prospective freehold, copyhold, leasehold or minor interest in property (i.e. ‘tenements’), or with any such property devised to them, or being in the same parish as property in which they had an equitable interest, however small in value; those with any interest by operation of law in property (freehold, copyhold, leasehold or beneficial term for years), i.e. by descent, marriage, executorship or administration; a person in a parish where there was any such property belonging to a spouse; those in possession of a ‘tenement’ of £10 value per annum, even if not actually paying that sum, or not paying any rent (i.e. permissive possession, voluntary donation etc), or proving not able to pay an agreed rent; persons paying any sum towards local taxes; persons in any parish annual office or charge; any persons lacking a settlement born in extra-parochial places (these places did not support any poor); officers, soldiers, marines, mariners and sailors, and their wives and children; mariners and soldiers exercising any trade; officers and soldiers in the militia, or any of the fencible regiments; married militia men, their wives and families; gate-keepers or persons renting turnpike tolls; members of friendly societies; woolcombers (this trade often moved seasonally between certain industrial centres); any case that might separate man and wife; or any case that might separate children from parent(s). Nolan pointed out that before 1795 all such cases were legally excluded because they were not wandering or vagrant poor. In practice further cases were excluded according to local discrimination and judgement.

^12. Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1764 edn), III, 123.Google Scholar

^13. Parochial Lawyer (1833 edn), p. 193.Google Scholar

^14. Nolan, , Treatise of the Laws (1825 edn), pp. 195–7Google Scholar; Davey, H., Poor Law Settlement (Local Chargeability) and Removal (3rd edn, 1925), p. 6Google Scholar; Symonds, J.F., The Law of Settlement and Removal (4th edn, 1903), p. 3Google Scholar; Taylor, , Poverty, Migration and Settlement, p. 21.Google Scholar

^15. 3 Wm. c. 11; Burn, , J.P. and Parish Officer (1764 edn), III, 129–30Google Scholar; Nelson, W., The Office and Authority of a J.P. (1729), p. 556Google Scholar; Shaw, J., Parish Law (1753), pp. 252, 267, 270Google Scholar; or the discussion of such ‘paupers’ in Archbold, , The Poor Law, p. 668Google Scholar (e.g. under 3 Wm & Mary c.11).

^16. Nolan, , Treatise of the Laws (1825 edn), II, 214, 229Google Scholar; ibid., (1808 edn), II, 70–1; Shaw, , Parish Law, p. 159.Google Scholar

^17. Nolan, , Treatise of the Laws (1825 edn), II, 575.Google Scholar

^18. Possible examination and removal was frequently seen and defended as a deterrent to poor-relief application, both before and after 1795. This feature was lessened by the workhouse and other ‘tests’ of the New Poor Law.

^19. I am grateful to Christine Vialls for this point.

^20. Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1814 edn), IV, 590, 599, 617, 634–5.Google Scholar

^21. Ibid., p. 634.

^22. Snell, , Annals, pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

^23. This is not to deny that examination to obtain certificates sometimes occurred, a practice compatible with my assumptions vis-a-vis the connection of examinations and removals with rural working seasonalities. The more vigorous any such action may have been (e.g. for certification) the more my assumptions about possible examination on arrival are fulfilled; I suggested elsewhere ‘the rapidity of local authorities’ action against those felt to be a potential encumbrance on the rates’. (Annals, p. 18). Nevertheless, I would exclude for seasonality purposes occasional examinations stating that the examinee should obtain a certificate.

^24. Snell, , Annals, esp. pp. 166–227.Google Scholar

^25. It may be possible that that Act, and any such administrative change preceding it, affected the composition of those affected by settlement, so as to question (for example) analysis via examinations of the decline of farm service or change in apprenticeship. (Snell, , Annals, chapters 2 and 5, esp. pp. 76 and 235)Google Scholar. This possibility can be dismissed however, as the changes documented from examinations in these two institutions have been independently verified by other historians using entirely different sources, strongly supporting such analysis: for example, Kussmaul, A., Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, M.J., ‘The guild control of trades in England, c. 1660–1820’Google Scholar, (paper to the Economic History Conference, Loughborough, April 1981). As we have seen above, there was very little change in the social composition of those affected by settlement over this period.

^26. S.C. on Settlement and Poor Removal (1847, I.U.P. edn), p. 807.Google Scholar

^27. Snell, , Annals, p. 20.Google Scholar

^28. See also Huzel, , ‘The labourer and the poor law’, pp. 786–8.Google Scholar

^29. It is occasionally suggested that settlement practice was influenced by enclosure - for example, that parliamentary enclosure after c.1740 may have lessened concern over resource access, thus contributing to the 1795 Act. I have discussed elsewhere links between settlement and enclosure, and the effects of enclosure on the meaning of ‘employment’. (Annals, chapter 4). Settlement was related to agrarian perceptions of ‘limited good’ – this was as true in the early nineteenth century as previously, and such considerations influenced precautionary behaviour over settlement. I will associate ideas of ‘limited good’, belonging, entitlement and settlement elsewhere. On ‘limited good’ see Foster, G.M., ‘Peasant society and the image of the limited good’, American Anthropologist, 67 (1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

However, in connection with possible settlement changes in the late eighteenth century, such links with enclosure are slight. In many counties enclosure was irrelevant. Kent is the extreme example, excessively discussed by settlement historians, but in fact as atypical in its enclosure history as in its local administration. Here there was only one enclosure Act (later repealed) between 1741 and 1804, for a small urban piece of waste. Only 0.8 percent of Kent's acreage was enclosed by Act, and this almost entirely after 1804. In counties like Kent, any supposed changes in settlement practice owed nothing to parliamentary enclosure and associated resource access. There were other more important causes, tied to features of rural poverty: causes that affected both parliamentarily enclosed counties as well as those that were long-enclosed.

It is also worth pointing out that the 1795 Act did not end certificates. It laid down that removal could not normally take place until a person became actually chargeable. Certification could for example still be a pre-condition of work. A certificate still hindered settlement, although it was no longer a means allowing non-chargeable poor to sojourn. The main motives remained to prevent or determine settlement.

Indeed, some of the most restrictive settlement practices came after 1795, with increasing reluctance to hire yearly servants, abuse of apprenticeship, growing use of 51 week hirings and other methods to stop settlements, leases imposing penalties for creating settlements, accentuation of practices underlying open-close divisions, and so on, producing a rise in the taking of paternal settlement. What occurred, perhaps inadvertently, was that one method of restricting settlements (via certificates) tended to give way to other (possibly more effective) practices with the same purpose, perhaps from the 1760s, partly because certificates became even more ‘ineffectual’ and harder to obtain. The 1795 Act, passed in a crisis year against the background of intensifying southern rural pauperism (significantly, it also extended coverage of the poor rate by abolishing local tax paying as a head of settlement), was not a recognition that safeguards against settlement were no longer required. Nor did settlement thereafter function in such a way.

^30. A three-month moving average to present data helps obviate any inexactitude in seasonal dating.

^31. Snell, , Annals, p. 20Google Scholar. The exception to this (separately analysed both before and after 1795) is the change upon enclosure in that minority of parishes affected in the south Midlands and East Anglia. Ibid., pp. 148–9.

^32. See Snell, , ‘Pauper settlement’, pp. 382–3, 396, 411 (n. 103), 413 (n.123).Google Scholar

^33. Kussmaul, , Servants in Husbandry, chapter 6Google Scholar; Snell, , Annals, chapter 2.Google Scholar

^34. Ibid, pp. 78–80.

^35. Nolan, , Treatise on the Laws (1808 edn), II, 16–17.Google Scholar

^36. Estate parishes also sometimes have good certificate collections, as one would expect. Of the few hundred listings of inhabitants at the Cambridge Group, only one (for Barlborough in Derbyshire) entered details of who ‘belonged’ and who were certificated. Barlborough, with its elaborate Elizabethan Barlborough Hall and its property held in very few hands, was a place one would expect to ask for certificates. I will analyse this listing elsewhere.

^37. Snell, , ‘Pauper settlement’, pp. 3–5Google Scholar. Despite stress in all sources on this meaning and purpose of settlement, some still assume that its records are best suited to study mobility. Certainly the laws influenced the residence of the poor. But it is clear that settlement documents have no necessary or legal affinity to the issue of migration per se. Rather, settlement was the intimate corollary of a parochial (and later union) system of poor relief, allocating responsibility to relieve and entitlement to relief. The settlement laws in their post-1662 form existed because of the need to reconcile the parochial poor law with a market economy and mobile labour force.

^38. Snell, , Annals, chapter 2Google Scholar; Kussmaul, , Servants in Husbandry.Google Scholar

^39. As in Kussmaul, A., A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538–1840 (Cambridge, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^40. Under 43 Eliz. c. 2, boys were to be apprenticed till the age of 24.

^41. Parry-Jones, D., My Own Folk (Llandysul, 1972), p. 180.Google Scholar

^42. 43 Eliz, c. 2, and see 6 & 7 Wm. 4, c. 71. ‘Lands’ were, or came to be, taken to include also docks, canals, gasworks, waterworks, railways, the land in which electric telegraph companies fixed their wires and posts, and land owned by cemetery companies. Exemptions included or came to include churches, chapels, meeting-houses certified for religious worship, county lunatic asylums, lighthouses, militia or volunteer stores, premises of municipal corporations, lands occupied by municipal and public bodies for a public purpose (hospitals, courts, police stations etc), and a number of other such examples.

^43. Under Geo. III, c. 12, s. 19, an exception was made in the case of small tenements let at a rent of under £20, and over £6, let for under a year, as well as cases where the rent was paid for periods under three months. In these circumstances, the owner rather than occupier was rated. See also 21 & 22 Vic. c. 43, and 13 & 14 Vic. c. 99.

^44. Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1776 edn), p. 509Google Scholar, and ibid., (1814 edn), IV, 66. And see 3 & 4 Vic. c. 89 on the exemption of stock-in-trade. Rating of the latter was unusual. See e.g. Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1814 edn), IV, 65–70Google Scholar. The Poor Law Commissioners in 1838 for example commented that ‘the practice has, with very few exceptions, hitherto prevailed only in the old manufacturing districts of the south and west of England’. See Cannan, E., The History of Local Rates in England (1898, 1927 edn), p. 98Google Scholar, and chapter 4. People were rarely rated for goods held merely for personal use, and farmers' stock was not rated. Salaries, fees, money out at interest and wages were not assessed, nor could landlords be assessed for rent. Cannan comments that ‘in most parishes no notice was taken of anything except lands, houses, tithes, coal-mines, and underwoods’, ibid., p. 86.

^45. Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1776 edn), p. 509.Google Scholar

^46. 17 Geo. II, c. 3. An overseer was liable to a heavy fine if he refused to allow inspection of the rate books.

^47. Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1776 edn), p. 508.Google Scholar

^48. See also 3 Car. I, c. 4 and 16 Car. I, c. 4.

^49. Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1814 edn), IV, 68.Google Scholar

^50. On intervals between rates, Burn, , JP and Parish Officer (1776 edn), p. 522.Google Scholar

^51. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, some parishes adopted different systems of rating (e.g. based on the number of open-field yardlands per person, or on acres), but most came to adopt the more flexible use of rental value of property. For further details of rating see the elaboration of the 1601 Act in 17 Geo. II, c.3; 17 Geo II, c. 37–38; 41 Geo III, c. 23 and 6 & 7 Wm. IV, c. 96. Gross estimated rental had come to be established in the mid nineteenth century as the rent at which the property could be expected to be let, free of tenants' rates, taxes and tithe commutation rent-charge, the tenant paying these himself. If the tenant paid the full rent, taxes and rates, then gross estimated rental was the actual rent paid. If the tenant paid a rent, and the landlord paid the taxes, the sum paid for the latter was to be subtracted from the paid rent in calculating the gross estimated rental. Rateable value was ascertained by deducting from the gross estimated rental a sum representing the annual cost of repairs, insurance and any other expenses which would be necessary to maintain the property in a state which would warrant such a rent. If the rent actually paid was, for whatever reason, not a realistic one, then the rent which the property or land could obtain was to be used as the basis for calculating rateable value. It is important to note that the rent paid was not necessarily the basis of rateable value; and in this sense the rateable value can be taken as a more accurate and sensitive indicator of changing land values than can rent. It is also evident that rateable value could alter regardless of fixed rents. For elaboration regarding the definition of ‘gross estimated rental’, and the further concepts of ‘gross value’ and ‘net rent’, see Lumley, W.G., The Law of Parochial Assessments Explained (1863), pp. xv, 21–32.Google Scholar

^52. Venn, , Foundations of Agricultural Economics, p. 189.Google Scholar

^53. For discussion of such rates and assessments, see the legislation referred to, and Cannan, , History of Local RatesGoogle Scholar; Lumley, , Law of Parochial AssessmentsGoogle Scholar; SirNicholls, G., A History of the English Poor Law, 2 vols (1843)Google Scholar; Burn, , JP and Parish OfficerGoogle Scholar; Burn, R., The History of the Poor Laws (1764)Google Scholar; S. & Webb, B., English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: the Parish and the County (1907, 1927 edn)Google Scholar; Row-Fogo, J., An Essay on the Reform of Local Taxation in England (1902), pp. 66–106Google Scholar; Goschen, G.J., Reports and Speeches on Local Taxation (1872)Google Scholar; Bayldon, J.S., A Treatise on the Valuation of Property for the Poor's Rate (1828)Google Scholar; Davis, H.J. & Owston, H.A., The Overseers' Manual (1864)Google Scholar; Shaw, J., The Parochial Lawyer (1829).Google Scholar

^54. Including those concerning removals, those to do with obtaining levies, or those regarding orders upon individuals for the maintenance of relatives. Settlement costs were sometimes accounted separately.

^55. In addition, some formal expenditure on the poor came from other sources: churchwardens' accounts, and the highways account - especially to circumvent the new poor law.

^56. Snell, , Annals, pp. 198–209Google Scholar; and using the same method see pp. 91–3.

^57. Emmison, F.G., ‘Relief of the poor at Eaton Socon, Bedfordshire, 1706–1834’, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, XV (1933).Google Scholar

^58. The use of parochial rateable values and relief expenditure in conjunction with a series of other socio-economic variables is explored in Paul Ell & Snell, K.D.M., The Geography of Religious Pluralism in England and Wales (forthcoming).Google Scholar

^59. See in particular Turner, M.E. & Mills, D. (eds), Land and Property: the English Land Tax, 1692–1832 (Gloucester, 1986)Google Scholar; Mingay, G.E., ‘The land tax assessments and the small landowner’, Economic History Review, XVII (1964), 381–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ginter, D.E., A Measure of Wealth: the English Land Tax in Historical Analysis (forthcoming).Google Scholar

^60. This Act defined the precise way in which property was to be assessed; although see also 17 Geo. 2, c.38, s.13, which required copies of all rates to be entered into books kept by overseers.

^61. On this see the valuable work by Holderness, B.A., ‘Capital formation in agriculture’Google Scholar, in Pollard, S. & Higgins, J.P.P. (eds), Aspects of Capital Investment in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (1971)Google Scholar, and his ‘Prices, productivity and output’, in Mingay, G.E. (ed), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. VI, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 187–9Google Scholar: ‘there is no straightforward alternative to rent as a yardstick for measuring fixed capital formation’, p. 187. See 17 Geo. II, c. 37 on the way the rates ought to reflect improvements in land. As Sir G. Nicholls commented on this Act: ‘The amount at which property is rated should obviously be open to revision whenever a change takes place in its actual value, whether arising from improvement, deterioration, or any other cause’ - A History of the English Poor Law (1854, 1904 edn), II, 33.Google Scholar

^62. If one wishes to calculate the rateable value, this can be done by dividing the amount raised (i.e. preferably not the amount expended, as there was often a mismatch between the two) by the rate in the pound, having first standardised the units into pounds. For example, if the amount raised was £100, and the rate was 15d. (£.0625), the rateable value would be £1600. See Goschen, G.J., Reports and Speeches on Local Taxation (1872), pp. 19–31Google Scholar, on the changing relation between the rate in the pound and its yield between 1803 and 1868, and the reasons for this at national level.

^63. The enclosure award establishes the extent of enclosure of waste and common. Correlation by parish of the percentage waste or common of all land enclosed, against the percentage increase in yields from a shilling rate upon enclosure, would crudely indicate whether waste and common was a significant element in explaining an augmented yield from a given rate.

^64. I summarise here the work of Madge Brown (Department of English Local History, University of Leicester) on Nottinghamshire enclosure, which will promote this among other methods.

^65. See e.g. McCloskey, D., ‘The economics of enclosure: a market analysis’, in Jones, E.L. and Parker, W.N. (eds), European Peasants and their Markets (Princeton, 1975).Google Scholar

^66. Kussmaul, , General View and her Servants in Husbandry, chapter 6.Google Scholar