Poor Laws

I

Introduction

Poor Laws more properly the Elizabethan poor laws, a corpus of legislation through which social welfare was organized in England from the late 16th century until the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

The Elizabethan poor laws represented a codification of a number of statutory experiments in poor relief that had begun in 1495. Most of these statutes, especially those of 1536, 1547, 1563, and 1572, were designed to cater for two specific groups of poor people: the impotent (those who were considered eligible for relief because they were old, sick or orphaned and therefore unable to support themselves through their labour) and the idle (those who were capable yet simply unwilling to work). This binary distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” originated in the Bible, especially in the advice of St Paul that “if a man shall not work then neither shall he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10); and was refined by medieval canon lawyers who developed the principle of discriminating between the “worthy” and the “unworthy poor” in order that charitable resources could be targeted where there was most need.

II

The Provisions of the Elizabethan Relief Statutes

When the Tudor statutes were codified as the Elizabethan poor laws in 1598 and 1601, this moral distinction was used to justify the very harsh treatment of “vagabonds”, those “masterless” young men who lived lives of itinerant beggary (and allegedly of theft) outside the discipline of a household. These “vagrants” were to be whipped and returned to their parish of settlement, in principle that of their birth but in practice more likely to be their last parish of more than three years’ residence. The deserving poor, however, were to be treated benevolently and sympathetically, being relieved in cash (usually weekly “pensions” or “collections” of between 4d and 6d a week in the early 17th century) and/or kind (fuel, clothing, rent, medical care) from a communal welfare fund collected by unpaid overseers of the poor, two of whom were specially appointed in each of the 9,000-odd parishes in England. All the householders “of ability” were assessed to contribute to rates in support of the poor and could have their property sequestrated if they refused to do so. The 1598 statute therefore marked a decisive step in the gradual bureaucratization of charity in 16th-century England, for it introduced for the first time the principle of compulsory taxation in support of the poor of the parish.

The legislation also, however, took account for the first time of a third, hitherto-unsuspected, group of poor people (who were difficult to classify in the light of the contemporary commonplace that idleness was always voluntary): those who were willing to work, but unable to support themselves and their families because their labour was so irregularly and inadequately remunerated. The existence of these unemployed and underemployed householders, who were to become known as the “labouring poor” by the early 18th century, was a belated discovery by the Tudor regime, their presence being detected in a series of urban censuses undertaken by the municipal authorities of growing towns in the late 16th century, most famously in Norwich in 1570. The 1598 statute empowered overseers of the poor to use their parish funds both to set the unemployed on work (usually the beating of hemp or the spinning of yarn, most often in their own homes); and also to apprentice their children between the ages of 7 and 14 to masters (usually in agricultural work for the boys and domestic service for the girls) who would, it was hoped, inculcate those values of thrift and industry which parish officers found wanting in their parents (who were to be denied relief if they objected to the forced relocation of their offspring). The Elizabethan statutes also outlawed begging, which was tolerated only under licence from a magistrate in 1598 and prohibited altogether in 1601.

The most significant administrative role was, however, played by overseers of the poor, who served in this parish office for a year at a time and only on a voluntary, unpaid basis. They were usually yeomen or tradesmen (rather than gentry), men of middling income who had both the necessary skills (sufficient literacy and numeracy to cast up accounts of income and expenditure, sufficient discretion to make fine judgements about the depth of need among the poor relative to the length of the purses of their fellow ratepayers) and the necessary status (sufficient honesty and respectability to earn and keep the trust of the parishioners as a whole) to act both as guardians of parish funds and governors of the poor.

III

The Nature and Timing of the Legislation

The distinctive shape of the Elizabethan poor laws therefore derived from changing perceptions of the causes of poverty; from Renaissance conceptions of society as a “commonwealth”, an organic whole which would prosper only if all the members of the body politic were able to thrive; from ancient Christian notions of charity (refracted through the values of labour discipline which were advocated by those radical Protestant MPs who drafted the statutes); and to fears of social and political turmoil created not only by (largely mythical) tramping armies of vagabonds but also by a desperate class of labouring men for whom necessity knew no law. The timing of the codification in the last years of the 16th century owed a very great deal to the sequence of harvest failures between 1594 and 1597, which stretched voluntary traditions of almsgiving to their limit (resulting even in starvation in the pastoral communities of the north and west) and to the projected insurrection of the poor husbandmen of Oxfordshire villages who threatened to cut the throats of the gentry in the winter of 1596.

IV

Amendments and the Background to Repeal

For over two centuries the Elizabethan statutes remained in force with only marginal amendments: a series of “settlement” laws from 1662 onwards regulated procedures for deciding upon liability for the migrant poor, responsibility for whom might be contested between parishes; a statute of 1697 both reinforced the power of parish officers to force masters to take parish apprentices, and insisted that “collectioners” wear a cloth badge on their coats as a public sign that they were dependent on the charity of the parish; and an act of 1723 introduced the “workhouse test”, by which pensioners were forced to forgo parish relief unless they agreed to enter a workhouse. These late 17th-century and early 18th-century innovations betray contemporary fears that parish relief was becoming too expensive, and each was designed to make life “on the parish” as unattractive as possible. In the short term, these modifications led to some retrenchment, but by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, welfare costs were spiralling beyond control (a development exacerbated by the consequences of the Speenhamland system of rate-subsidized wages introduced in 1795 amid the intersecting crises of dearth in the countryside and war with France (see Napoleonic Wars). It was also clear by the 1790s that a system that had been principally designed to ameliorate the condition of tiny minorities of paupers in small rural communities was inappropriate to meet the needs of sizeable proportions of the unemployed in the increasingly urbanized context of industrial England (see Industrial Revolution). The poor laws had functioned effectively where the patterns of settlement, migration, and employment were fundamentally agrarian, but they were far less able to do so in the towns of the industrial revolution. By the 1830s, the Whig government was able to argue that the poor laws had been responsible for creating a culture of dependency among the poor, who would rather live off the parish than seek work for themselves. In abolishing outdoor relief, and insisting that those that were capable of work would only be helped if they entered a union workhouse, the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act brought to an end one of the most significant, and certainly the most progressive, experiments in social welfare provision practised in any early modern European society.