The Workhouse System 1834-1929

The History of an English Social Institution

M. A. Crowther

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317236818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1981. Professor Crowther traces the history of the workhouse system from the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 to the Local Government Act of 1929.

At their outset the large residential institutions were seen by the Poor Law Commissioners as a cure for nearly all social ills. In fact these formidable, impersonal, prison-like buildings – housing all paupers under one roof – became institutionalised: places where routine came to be an end in itself. In the early twentieth century some of the workhouses became hospitals or homes for the old or handicapped but many continued to form a residual service for those who needed long-term care.

Crowther pays attention not only to the administrators but also to the inmates and their daily life. She illustrates that the workhouse system was not simply a nineteenth-century phenomenon but a forerunner of many of today's social institutions.

I

ADMINISTRATORS

1

From the Old Poor Law to the New

After a sustained political crisis, the Great Reform Act was passed in 1832, making a moderate concession to the fact that the wealth of Britain was now being generated in the towns rather than the countryside. The countryside itself was still in an uneasy state, and had in the previous two years experienced a series of labourers’ riots, with the burning of ricks and destruction of agricultural machinery. One of the first acts of the Whig government which had passed the reform was to bow to a long-felt pressure and attempt to change the laws which governed the relief of the poor.

The Royal Commission appointed to investigate the Poor Law was faced with unravelling legislation of more than two centuries, local acts affecting certain parishes, and almost unfettered local discretion in administration, all of which made both the theory and the practice of the Poor Law very complex. The Commissioners, or rather, the dominant figures of Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick, were fortunate in possessing that ability characteristic of political economists of their day: to reduce the most disorderly social problems to their simplest essentials. They believed that they were clearing a jungle of evil growths, from which would emerge the original intentions of the Poor Law: these they dated at 1601, ‘the 43 Elizabeth’, in which was affirmed the obligation of each parish to relieve the aged and helpless, to bring up unprotected children in habits of industry, and to provide work for all those capable of it who were lacking their usual trade. The men responsible for carrying out the law were the parish overseers, elected annually by the parish vestry, and serving unpaid and often unwillingly in dispensing bread or money, and supervising the parish poorhouse.

Not surprisingly, the preoccupations of the Tudors and the Royal Commission were entirely different, in spite of the effort made in the Commissioners’ report to convince the public that their recommendations were reviving a worthy statute which had fallen into corruption and abuse. To both, the able-bodied dependent poor were a source of concern, but the ‘unemployed’ who most agitated the Tudors were not those settled poor who found themselves temporarily without their normal labour in a hard winter or a depression of trade: the main problem was the large number of roving vagabonds and beggars who offered a threat to civil order. The Elizabethan law assumed that the settled poor would accept such work and relief as the parish provided; it was not expected that the offer of work, in their own homes or a parish house, would be felt as harsh and punitive by the poor. One of the aims of the law was to prevent the poor becoming detached from their place of origin, and to discourage them from vagrancy. Legislation of 1607 set up county Houses of Correction where work was given as relief to the unemployed at the local rates of pay, and where work could be enforced on the idle and vagabond, but the element of punishment soon became stronger, and the houses became an early form of gaol, quite separate from the parish workhouse.¹ The law distinguished between the settled and the wandering poor.

The Commissioners of 1832 confronted a different type of able-bodied pauper. They barely mentioned vagrants in their report, but were preoccupied instead with inadequately paid labourers in counties where the poor rates were used to supplement wages. Able-bodied labourers also believed they had an automatic right to parish relief when temporarily out of work. The system came to be known as ‘Speenhamland’ after the Berkshire parish where, in 1795, the magistrates had decided to supplement wages on a scale which would vary with the price of bread. The Commissioners blamed the Speenhamland magistrates unfairly, for the system had not originated there, but such practices certainly became more common as wages failed to keep up with rising food prices during the French wars.

The Commissioners argued that under this system, the pauper claimed relief irrespective of his merits; large families received most relief, and this encouraged improvident marriages; women claimed relief for their bastards, which encouraged immorality; labourers had no incentive to work hard and be thrifty when they saw that the most worthless idler in the parish could get more from relief than could be earned through honest labour. Employers, realizing that their workers were subsidised from the poor rate, kept wages artificially low. The Poor Law demoralized the labouring classes and interfered with their natural relationships both with their employers and with their families. The pauper did not respect his employer when he knew that wages would be supplemented by the parish; he was discouraged from providing for his family and his aged parents when he knew he could throw them upon the rates. Although the Commissioners did qualify their language, for not all parishes suffered in this way, the total effect of their report in 1834 was emotive. The Old Poor Law was undermining the prosperity of the country by interfering with ‘natural’ laws.

It appears to the pauper that the Government has undertaken to repeal, in his favour, the ordinary laws of nature; to enact that the children shall not suffer for the misconduct of their parents, the wife for that of the husband, or the husband for that of the wife: that no one shall lose the means of comfortable subsistence, whatever be his indolence, prodigality, or vice: in short, that the penalty which, after all, must be paid by some one for idleness and improvidence, is to fall, not on the guilty person or on his family, but on the proprietors of the lands and houses encumbered by his settlement. Can we wonder if the uneducated are seduced into approving a system which aims its allurements at all the weakest parts of our nature—which offers marriage to the young, security to the anxious, ease to the lazy, and impunity to the profligate?²

As this shows, the language of the report was charged with moral judgements.

The Commissioners offered many answers to these apparently overwhelming problems, but essentially they required that parish administration, with all its potential for inefficiency and corruption, be replaced by a more unified system under the regulation of a central board. The workhouse was to be at the centre of the new system. No longer a mere receptacle for all kinds of paupers, the workhouse was to be supervised by the central board, and run by a staff of professional officers. The board should be able to unite several parishes in order to build an efficient workhouse if the existing parishes were too small for the purpose. The ultimate aim was that ‘ALL RELIEF WHATEVER TO ABLE-BODIED PERSONS OR TO THEIR FAMILIES, OTHERWISE THAN IN WELL-REGULATED WORKHOUSES (i.e., PLACES WHERE THEY MAY BE SET TO WORK ACCORDING TO THE SPIRIT AND INTENTION OF THE 43 ELIZABETH) SHALL BE DECLARED UNLAWFUL …’³

Many historians have attacked the Commissioners both for their assessment of pauperism in the 1830s, and their recommendations. Their criticisms undeniably applied more to the agricultural than the industrial counties, for relief in aid of wages was almost unknown in industrial areas. The Commissioners investigated the agricultural southern counties more than the cities or the north, but their methods were dubious. Mark Blaug argues that the report was ‘wildly unstatistical,’ and that it ignored evidence which the Commissioners themselves had collected. The Commissioners had sent out a questionnaire to which about 10 per cent of the 15,000 parishes in England and Wales had replied. If the Commissioners had framed their questions more carefully, and scrutinized the replies thoroughly, they might have realized that the ‘Speenhamland’ system was declining, and that most agricultural parishes were really paying a kind of family allowance to maintain the large families who could not earn enough to keep themselves. At a time of agricultural depression and low wages, such help was essential.⁴

Further evidence suggests that in the years after the French wars, the southern counties had to pay more poor relief, not because of their administrative methods, but because of the depression and the nature of the labour market. It is still a matter of debate whether bread scales were being more widely used in these years, but in any case, the poor rate was rising as fast in parishes in the south-east where there was no bread scale, as in those where it was used. Parishes had their own notions of how relief should be given, usually related to the number of children in a family, and possibly also to the amount the whole family could earn; but in the 1820s falling wages forced more labourers to apply for help. The vestry sometimes had a rough and ready system under which they gave more relief to the ‘deserving’. It seems that few parishes gave relief according to a regular scale, for they knew as well as the Commissioners that this encouraged paupers to demand their ‘rights’.⁵ In the south, although the laws of settlement probably did not discourage emigration as much as the Commissioners believed, labourers did not wish to move a long distance from their native place. If there were no large town nearby to draw them away, the ever-growing population remained on land which offered full employment only at harvest time.

The able-bodied male pauper may have been less of a problem than the Commissioners implied, for the bulk of relief must have gone to the sick and aged, and particularly to children. The average expectation of life for the labouring classes was much lower than it is today, which meant a high proportion of widows and orphaned families. Widows with young children frequently depended on poor relief, for women’s wages (even where work was available) were rarely sufficient to support a family. J.D. Marshall argues, admittedly of an earlier period (1802–3), that probably no more than 20 per cent of the pauper population were able-bodied men, even in the counties worst affected by pauperism.⁶ This is a speculative subject because there are no reliable statistics, but agricultural employment notoriously fluctuated with the seasons. Parishes had more able-bodied applicants in the winter months when work was slack; summer wages could not tide a family over the whole year.

Historians have not been as certain as the Commissioners that poor relief encouraged the huge expansion in population from the end of the eighteenth century. Other explanations offer themselves, not least the growing national income, which made it possible for the country to sustain more people. Poor relief may have helped to diminish mortality, especially infant mortality, by sustaining the rural population in years of hardship, but even wages subsidized with poor relief did not give families more than a subsistence income.⁷ Poor relief was usually as parsimonious as possible—hardly an encouragement for the poor to breed recklessly, and families with young children were likely to be the most impoverished. The Poor Law was supposed to encourage bastardy too, and it does seem that the illegitimacy rate rose during the eighteenth century: but this began well before the period of Speenhamland. Peter Laslett’s research suggests that bastardy was highest in the northern counties of England, where Speenhamland did n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Dedication
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures in the text
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• A note on terminology
• Introduction
• Part I • Administrators
• Part II • Inmates
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index