PAROCHIAL, REGIONAL OR NATIONAL? LOCAL POOR RELIEF LEGISLATION AND THE ENGLISH POOR LAW, 1660-1841

Stephen Thompson Christ’s College, Cambridge

In a series of papers published since the 1980s, Richard Smith has combined evidence derived from early modern English poor relief records with the Cambridge Group’s reconstruction of English population history to challenge the view – widely held among certain demographers, policy-makers and politicians – that welfare transfer payments tend to induce certain kinds of demographic behaviour.1 In particular, he has called into question the theoretical claim that by curtailing transfer payments from the collectivity, the kin of those most in need of support, principally the elderly, would be both willing and able to fill the resulting welfare gap. Rather than placing demographic behaviour ‘downstream of welfare’, Smith has suggested that ‘demography might be viewed as assuming the status of independent rather than dependent variable.’2 Viewed in this light, the massive growth in poor law expenditure in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England and Wales should be understood as a response to, rather than a cause of English population change. Smith’s perspective constitutes a major challenge to large swathes of Malthus’s writings in which the latter repeatedly and emphatically condemned the Old Poor Law for its supposedly pro-natalist effects.3

More recently, Smith has endorsed Peter Solar’s thesis that the ‘national scope’ of the Old Poor Law, underpinned the growth of an economically mobile wage labour force; encouraged the consolidation of farms and facilitated the separation of smallholders from the land; provided local incentives for agricultural capital formation and industrial development; and kept population growth under control.4 In a working paper written in 2008, Smith suggested that as well as contributing to England’s precocious economic development by ‘enabling risk-reduced labour migration’ from rural to urban areas, the Old Poor Law also produced positive epidemiological consequences. In particular, the comprehensive provision of poor relief in all English parishes, which set England apart from France in this period, served to limit ‘the frantic townward migration of impoverished families in periods of dearth’. This in turn may well have lowered the incidence of epidemic disease during crisis periods.5 In other words, the Old Poor Law was sufficiently flexible – thanks to the availability of non-resident relief – to facilitate an efficient allocation of labour, and sufficiently uniform to mitigate the effects of a positive check which persisted much later in other pre-industrial European societies.

In this paper I want to connect these two distinctive strands of Smith’s poor law scholarship through a re-appraisal of local corporations of the poor. There already exists a sizeable, albeit disparate, literature on what the Webbs called ‘practically autonomous federations of parish authorities, urban or rural’.6 Writing in the early twentieth century, the Webbs noted that the 125 or so corporations established between 1696 and 1833 had ‘been almost ignored by historians’. The reason for this neglect, they suggested, arose from the fact that the corporations were the outcome of local acts of

1 R. M. Smith, ‘Welfare and the management of demographic uncertainty’ in The political economy of health and welfare, ed. M. Keynes, D. Coleman and N. H. Dimsdale (London, 1988), p. 109. 2 R. M. Smith, ‘Charity, self-interest and welfare: reflections from demographic and family history’ in Charity, self-interest and welfare in the English past, ed. M. J. Daunton (London, 1996), pp. 25-6. 3 R. M Smith, ‘Transfer incomes, risk and security: the roles of the family and the collectivity in recent theories of fertility change’, in The state of population theory: forward from Malthus (Oxford, 1986), pp. 190-3; Smith, ‘Welfare and the management of demographic uncertainty’, p. 130. 4 P. M. Solar, ‘Poor relief and English economic development before the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 48, (1995), pp. 12, 16. 5 R. M. Smith, ‘Social security as a developmental institution? Extending the Solar case for the relative efficacy of poor relief provisions under the English Old Poor Law’ (BWPI Working Paper 56, October 2008), p. 22 [http://www.bwpi.manchester.ac.uk/resources/Working-Papers/bwpi-wp-5608.pdf, last accessed 1 August 2011] 6 S. Webb and B. Webb, English local government: statutory authorities for special purposes (London, 1922), p. 107. Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? parliament.7 Nearly a century later, historians of eighteenth-century England remain remarkably reluctant to engage systematically with this particular class of statutes, with a handful of exceptions.8 As a result, the Webbs’ discussion of corporations is still the most exhaustive available, at least with respect to the legal and administrative principles around which these statutory authorities were organized.9 Perhaps not surprisingly, given their Whiggish proclivities, the Webbs singled Incorporations out for special study because these bodies appeared to be prototypes for the reforms of 1834: The new Local Authorities thus established tried … a whole series of experiments in dealing with the destitute, from which much was gradually learnt … It was from these statutory Poor Law Authorities that was derived the machinery of administration by committees, for unions of parishes, through salaried officials, with the workhouse in the background, out of which was constructed the Poor Law reform of 1834. Indeed it is scarcely too much to say that their peculiar “principle of combining an elective controlling power with a paid executive” has become the dominant feature of the constitutional structure of English as distinguished from American and from Continental forms of Local Government10 There is a clear sense in this passage that corporations represented the future, not only of poor law administration, but local government more generally. Yet more recent generations of poor law historians have not shared the Webbs’ view of these bodies as harbingers of nineteenth-century reform.

Instead, one important re-assessment has treated the formation of corporations not as a pioneering step on the road to modernity and uniformity, but as the afterglow of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant zeal for godly reformation. According to Paul Slack, the 14 urban corporations formed in the period 1696-1712 ‘constitute a cluster of instances of local reformation’, which in as many as nine cases built upon a pre-existing tradition of godly reform.11 Moreover, Slack’s account – with its emphasis on the sectarian and partisan character of these early urban corporations – is an important corrective to the Webbs’ story of a steady, albeit slow, march towards a national, secular and bureaucratic welfare system. Indeed, Slack notes that parliament repeatedly blocked attempts to make corporations the administrative norm across the country. There is even some evidence to suggest that the failure of comprehensive reform packages served to stimulate new local corporations.12 Extending this line of thought, it could be argued that parliament’s willingness to sanction local solutions fundamentally undermined the ambitions of would-be eighteenth-century reformers such as Humphrey Mackworth, William Hay, and Thomas Gilbert.

Yet as Slack makes clear, local enthusiasm for corporations could prove to be short-lived and fleeting. In Bristol, for example, parochial churchwardens re-asserted their primacy less than two decades after John Cary’s pioneering scheme was adopted.13 Elsewhere, such as in Gloucester and Hull,

7 Ibid., p. 109. 8 See especially S. Lambert, Bills and acts: legislative procedure in eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1971); J. Innes, ‘Parliament and the shaping of eighteenth-century English social policy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 40, 5th series (1990), pp. 63-92; P. Langford, Public life and the propertied Englishman 1689-1798 (Oxford, 1991); J. Hoppit, ‘Patterns of parliamentary legislation, 1660-1800’, Historical Journal, 39, (1996), pp. 109-131; J. Hoppit (ed.), Failed legislation, 1660-1800: extracted from the Commons and Lords journals (London, 1997); J. Hoppit, ‘The landed interest and the national interest, 1660-1800’, in Parliaments, nations and identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660-1850, ed. J. Hoppit (Manchester, 2003), pp. 83- 102; J. Innes, ‘Legislating for three kingdoms : how the Westminster parliament legislated for England, Scotland and Ireland 1707-1830’, in Parliaments, nations and identities, pp. 15-47; J. Innes, Inferior politics: social problems and social policies in eighteenth-century Britain (Oxford, 2009). 9 Webb and Webb, English local government: statutory authorities, pp. 107-51. 10 Ibid., pp. 109-10. 11 P. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: public welfare in early modern England (Oxford, 1999), p. 103; cf. Slack, Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), p. 197: ‘It makes sense, therefore, to see the Corporations as lineal descendants of the Puritan municipal projects of the early seventeenth century.’ 12 Slack, From Reformation, pp. 117-18, 143-4. See also J. Innes, ‘The ‘mixed economy of welfare’ in early modern England: assessments of the options from Hale to Malthus (c. 1683-1803)’ in Charity, self-interest and welfare in the English past, pp. 151-2, 154-5, 160-3. 13 Slack, From Reformation, p. 127.

2 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? workhouses were initially embraced as a panacea for the problem of outdoor relief, only to fall into disuse within a decade or so.14 A more systematic analysis of the fate of these pre-1714 corporations by Chikashi Sakashita reveals that only five survived the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act.15 Notwithstanding the mixed fortunes of these pioneering bodies, however, it should be noted that they represent only a tiny fraction of the ‘125 Incorporated Guardians of the Poor’ identified by the Webbs.16 There is, in other words, considerably more to be said about these statutory authorities.17

In what follows I want to address two substantive issues. First, questions of chronology and geography. When and where were new corporations established, and to what extent were their powers amended? Rather than simply abstracting local legislation from its wider statutory context, I propose to chart parallel developments in the general law relating to poor relief.18 In the second part of the paper I use evidence from the returns made by Suffolk parishes in the early nineteenth century to examine the effects of incorporation on the poor rates. Suffolk was the most heavily incorporated county by the late eighteenth century, with 252 parishes or places (not including the boroughs of Sudbury and Bury St Edmunds) subject to local poor law legislation.19 A comparison of the parochial returns for the county as a whole reveals a number of important, and somewhat surprising, findings. First, it would appear that incorporated parishes were more effective at restraining expenditure than their unincorporated neighbours. Secondly, indirect demographic evidence suggests that the different relief regimes had a limited impact on the age structure and growth rate of the Suffolk population. Finally, I attempt to relate these quantitative findings to contemporary critiques of the Suffolk incorporations.

1. Poor relief statutes, 1660-1841: chronology and geography

Analysing the scope and content of poor relief legislation is hardly novel. Eighteenth-century commentators including Richard Burn and Sir Frederic Eden digested those statutes that were regarded as particularly important.20 The Webbs referred somewhat dismissively to the method of Sir George Nicholls in his History of the English Poor Law (1854) as ‘describing one after another … the fourscore or so general statutes, initiated, not by Ministers, but by private members, in addition to the hundred or more Local Acts’.21 Subsequent historians have taken the Webbs’ rough estimate of the number of local acts for granted, even where they have stated the number of general acts with greater precision.22 The purpose of this section, then, is to improve on the Webbs’ estimates by quantifying the passage of both local and general poor relief legislation during the long eighteenth century.

14 Ibid. pp. 127, 135; cf. Innes, ‘The ‘mixed economy’’, p. 151. 15 These were Bristol, Norwich, Hull, Exeter, and Plymouth. See C. Sakashita, ‘Patterns in the formation and dissolution of corporations of the poor 1696-1834’, unpublished paper. I am grateful to the author for letting me see a copy of this. 16 Webb and Webb, English local government: statutory authorities, p. 109. I have identified at least 140 corporations established between 1696 and 1833, but classification is not straightforward. 17 Langford, Public life, p. 241 notes that ‘certain principles united these late eighteenth-century foundations’, including the distinction between ‘guardians’ (ratepayers above a certain property qualification) and ‘directors’ (the executive); workhouse provision; borrowing powers secured on the revenue of the poor rates; and the subordination of parish officers. His discussion is based on evidence from Suffolk and Shropshire. 18 Cf. Innes, Inferior politics, p. 101: ‘It is evident that general and local legislation did not constitute two independent streams of legislation. On the contrary, in numerous instances the one can only be fully understood in the context of the other.’ 19 A total of 510 poor law units existed in early nineteenth-century Suffolk. 20 R. Burn, The history of the poor laws (London , 1764); F. M. Eden, The state of the poor, or, an history of the labouring classes in England, from the Conquest to the present period (3 vols, London, 1797). 21 S. Webb and B. Webb, English Local Government: English poor law history: part I. The old poor law (London, 1927), p. 149. 22 S. King, Poverty and welfare in England 1700-1850: a regional perspective (Manchester, 2000), p. 18 notes that ‘in total 264 general acts and more than 100 local acts impinged directly upon the poor and the administration of their communal relief between 1601 and 1850’.

3 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national?

Classifying legislation is a time-consuming task and this section builds on the path-finding work of Julian Hoppit and Joanna Innes.23 Hoppit and Innes devised a comprehensive coding scheme based on ten major categories, 31 sub-categories and 177 particular descriptors.24 The most relevant codes for present purposes begin ‘62’ (‘Poor law and poverty’). A preliminary analysis of all statutes passed between 1660 and 1832 returned 369 acts with this code. A further 11 acts had a secondary coding beginning ‘62’. To test the robustness of the coding scheme, I compiled an independent dataset based on statute titles. By using a variety of keyword searches (with variants of: ‘poor’, ‘relief’, ‘employment’, ‘workhouse’, ‘settlement’, ‘bastardy’, ‘apprenticeship’, ‘vagrancy’, ‘rogues’, ‘idle’, ‘labourers’, ‘charity’, ‘labourers’, ‘wages’, ‘rates’ etc) a larger dataset was created of around 800 statutes, covering the period 1660-1850. This second dataset was then coded according to my own classification scheme. After excluding legislation relating to Scotland and Ireland, as well as charities, friendly societies and debtor legislation, a dataset comprising 141 general and 299 local statutes was created.25

If we compare these totals with the estimates provided by the Webbs, it is immediately apparent that they underestimated the volume of general and particular legislation by a considerable margin. Most strikingly, there were nearly three times as many local acts passed during the period 1660-1850 than has generally been supposed. In addition, as table 1 makes plain, the vast majority of local poor relief acts (250/299, or 83 per cent) were passed after the accession of George III.

Table 1. Poor relief bills and acts, 1660-1841 General poor relief Local poor relief All % All failures legislation legislation acts success No. Acts Failures % Acts Failures % sessions success success 1660-1679 19 3 20 13.0 1 11 8.3 531 1,301 29.0 1680/1-1698/9 15 3 12 20.0 9 6 60.0 725 1,058 40.7 1699/1700-1719/20 22 10 26 27.8 11 12 47.8 1,384 891 60.8 1720/21-1739/40 22 9 6 60.0 4 5 44.4 1,258 570 68.8 1740/41-1759/60 21 8 8 50.0 24 5 82.8 1,967 580 77.2 1760-1779/80 22 3 15 16.7 64 14 82.1 3,897 1,046 78.8 1780/81-1800 22 22 29 43.1 59 40 59.6 4,454 1,579 73.8 1660-1800 143 58 116 33.3 172 93 64.9 14,216 7,025 66.9

1800-1820 22 39 - 75 - 7,556 - 1821-1841 22 44 - 52 - 5,942 - 1800-41 44 83 127 13,498

1660-1841 187 141 299 27,714 Sources: Portcullis; Hoppit (ed.), Failed legislation.

The pattern of legislative action reported here deserves further comment, not least because existing scholarly accounts have tended to focus on the pre-1712 local acts, largely to the exclusion of later developments. This is perhaps not surprising since these were the trailblazers and it is generally assumed that subsequent corporations were closely modelled on Bristol et al. Table 1, however, reveals a number of different trends. The period as a whole can usefully be divided into four phases.

23 I am grateful to Joanna Innes for supplying me with a machine-readable version of the dataset of failed bills underlying Hoppit (ed.), Failed legislation and a machine-readable dataset of public and private statutes, 1660- 1832 classified according to the same coding scheme. I have constructed an independent dataset of the titles of all public and private statutes, 1660-1850, based on the Parliamentary Archives catalogue, Portcullis. 24 Hoppit (ed.), Failed legislation, pp. 30-2. 25 The exclusion of Scotland and Ireland is justified on the grounds that the Westminster parliament did not legislate for these kingdoms at the beginning of the period. The exclusion of charity / friendly society statutes is more arbitrary, but limitations of space prevent a full consideration of this material. I hope to return to them on a future occasion.

4 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national?

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century (1680/1-1719/20) there was a flurry of local poor relief bills, just over half of which succeeded. In the second phase, during the 1720s and 1730s, local initiatives decreased sharply. The inclusion of failed bills in table 1 indicates that this was a ‘real’ decline rather than simply a function of a higher failure rate. The demand for local legislation roughly halved in this sub-period. Intriguingly, the 1720s and 1730s was the only time after 1688 when general poor relief statutes exceeded local ones. In addition, these two decades saw the highest success rate – 60 per cent – for relief legislation of a general nature.

The third period, 1740/41-1779/80, witnessed a dramatic reversal. There was a sustained take-off in the demand for local acts (29 local bills were initiated in the 1740s and 1750s, representing a more than three-fold increase on the 1720s and 1740s) and the success rate of local measures peaked at around 82 per cent. At the same time, both the number and success rate of general legislation declined markedly. This seems to confirm the suggestion hinted at earlier, namely, that the failure of far-reaching reform of the poor laws was closely related to the success of more limited local initiatives.26

In the final phase, 1780/81-1841, there was a step-change in the frequency of parliament’s recourse to general legislation. Nearly three-quarters of all general poor relief statutes in the dataset were passed in the final third of the 181-year period. Alongside this sustained increase in the passage of general legislation, we see evidence of a gradual, but nonetheless perceptible, decline in the number of local acts (with the exception of the period 1800-20). Such a reading may seem counter-intuitive because, as I noted above, many more local acts were passed after 1760 than before. It is important, however, to distinguish between the absolute numbers of statutes on the one hand, and the relative balance between general and local legislation on the other. By depicting the trends graphically, as figure 1 does, this point is easier to grasp.

Figure 1. The balance of local and general poor relief legislation

Source: Table 1.

Although the period 1800-20 saw a spike in the number of local acts passed, the share of local acts fell relative to the preceding sub-period (from 73 per cent in 1780/81-1800 to 66 per cent in 1800-20), and continued to fall through to 1841. Over the whole period, the balance of general to local acts resembles a ‘W’ shape. The troughs in figure 1 correspond to the periods of most intensive local

26 Above, p. 2.

5 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? action: the first wave of urban corporations established between 1696 and 1712, followed by a second wave coinciding with the first two decades of George III’s reign.

This analysis provokes a number of further questions. First, to what extent were late eighteenth- century local acts simply amending existing corporations of the poor? There is clearly a significant discrepancy between the Webbs’ estimate of 125 corporations and the nearly 300 local acts passed in this period. Secondly, what types of communities applied for local legislation? Were they drawn from across England and Wales, or limited to particular regions? Finally, to what extent was the demand for local legislation driven by demographic or social structural concerns?

Table 2. The formation, amendment and repeal of local poor relief authorities New local act Amending act Repeal Total 1660-1679 1 1 0 2 1680/1-1698/9 8 1 0 9 1699/1700-1719/20 8 3 0 11 1720/21-1739/40 1 3 0 4 1740/41-1759/60 15 9 0 24 1760-1779/80 44 18 2 64 1780/81-1800 28 28 3 59 1800-1820 28 44 3 75 1821-1841 16 30 6 52 1660-1841 149 137 14 300 Source: as Table 1. Note: The 1662 ‘Act for the better relief of the poor of this kingdom’ (the ‘Settlement Act’) is treated as a local act for the purposes of this table because it contained provisions relating to the City of London Corporation of the Poor.

Table 2 indicates that over the period as a whole, there was an almost even split between local acts that granted new statutory powers (149) and acts that either amended or repealed such powers (151). Demand for new local acts peaked in the first two decades of George III’s reign, when 44 individual parishes or groups of parishes successfully secured parliamentary sanction for the better ‘government and regulation’, ‘relief and employment’, or ‘maintaining’ of the poor. Thereafter, the passage of Thomas Gilbert’s ‘Act for the better relief and employment of the poor’ in 1782 provided an alternative mechanism for either single parishes or groups of parishes to fund workhouse construction.27 Notwithstanding Gilbert’s efforts, however, it should be noted that just under half of all new local acts were passed after Gilbert’s Act.28 This suggests, in other words, that Gilbert Unions and Local Corporations were being formed simultaneously in the closing decades of the Old Poor Law: the former were manifestly not a substitute for the latter.29 By the early nineteenth century, meanwhile, an increasing proportion of local acts were concerned with amending existing powers, rather than creating new ones. Based on the evidence presented in table 2, then, it would seem that

27 22 Geo. III c. 83. The act is reprinted in Eden, State of the poor, iii. pp. clcccii-ccix. 28 Eden, State of the poor, i. p. 366 noted that ‘few incorporations of parishes have taken placed under this Act’. The Webbs suggested that as many as 924 parishes united into 67 unions as a result of this legislation: Webb and Webb, English poor law history: Part I, p. 171. This is repeated in J. R Poynter, Society and pauperism: English ideas on poor relief, 1795-1834 (London, 1969), p. 12 and King, Poverty and welfare, p. 25. The Webbs derived their estimate from Appendix A, No. 2, Ninth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, pp. 67-68 (PP, XXI, 1843). 29 A. Digby, Pauper palaces (London, 1978), p. 46 notes that ‘Gilbert’s Act slowed the incorporating movement in Norfolk’ because ‘it was very much cheaper to set up a Gilbert Union of parishes than to seek incorporation under an expensive local act of Parliament’. Writing a decade earlier, Poynter (Society and pauperism, p. 12) observed that Gilbert Unions ‘were hardly more successful in the long run than earlier ventures, and did not even supersede the old practice of seeking reform by local act.’ Further work is needed to establish how far post-1782 corporations departed from the provisions of Gilbert’s Act. In particular, it would be interesting to know whether it was Gilbert’s preference for excluding the able-bodied from the workhouse that helped to maintain local demand for bespoke legislation.

6 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? the Webbs’ claim that there were around 125 local corporations, while a little too low, was of roughly the right order of magnitude.

In terms of geography, local poor relief acts were not limited to a particular region, but nor were they found in all English counties. Table 3 provides an overview of the counties represented in the dataset of local acts:

Table 3. The regional geography of local poor relief acts No. statutory Total no. County authorities local acts Middlesex (including Cities of London and Westminster) 44 112 Suffolk 12 28 Surrey 18 25 Norfolk 8 19 Gloucestershire 5 16 Kent 11 16 Devon 5 15 Worcestershire 3 7 Wiltshire 5 6 Yorkshire East Riding 2 6 Essex 3 5 Shropshire 4 5 Durham 2 4 Warwickshire 3 4 Hampshire 2 3 Lancashire 2 3 Shropshire, Montgomeryshire 1 3 Sussex 3 3 Cornwall 1 2 Herefordshire 1 2 Leicestershire 2 2 Lincolnshire 1 2 Oxfordshire 2 2 Somerset 1 2 Bedfordshire 1 1 Cheshire 1 1 Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire 1 1 Dorset 1 1 Hertfordshire 1 1 Huntingdonshire 1 1 Shropshire, Denbighshire 1 1 Staffordshire 1 1 TOTAL 149 300 Source: as Table 1.

What is immediately striking is the large number of acts – over one third of the total – that regulated Middlesex parishes. If one also includes the Surrey legislation, which related to parishes no further south than Croydon, then it appears that nearly half (46 per cent) of local poor relief acts were concerned with London and its immediate hinterlands. Although the most recent historian of London poor relief has noted the existence of ‘a bewildering array’ of local acts in the capital, sustained discussion of their chronological development, scope or coverage is conspicuously thin.30

30 D. R. Green, Pauper capital: London and the poor law, 1790-1870 (Farnham, 2010), p. 82. Elsewhere, Green comments that the powers of parochial vestries ‘had multiplied and grown in complexity from the mid- eighteenth century as a result of innumerable local acts’ (p. 87). Green makes the not uncommon error of describing local acts as ‘private’ (p. 89); in fact only three of the 112 Middlesex statutes (1 Anne Stat. 2, c. 21;

7 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national?

For the moment, I proposed to limit myself to a brief sketch of the legislative patterns found in the capital. Although the 100 or so parishes of the City of London had been incorporated as early as 1647, by virtue of an ‘Ordinance for the relief and employment of the poor, and the punishment of vagrants and other disorderly persons’, subsequent eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century legislation almost exclusively dealt with single parishes, or parts of parishes, lying outside the City.31 This is quite unlike the pattern found in most of the pre-1712 urban incorporations, where several contiguous parishes generally united to elect a supra-parochial body of ‘Guardians of the Poor’.

In terms of the micro-geography of metropolitan relief acts, figure 2 presents clear evidence of what might be described as ‘domino effects’. That is to say, when one parish obtained a local act, those immediately surrounding it soon followed suit. In the West End, for example, St Martin-in-the-Fields obtained a poor relief, street cleansing and watch act in 1749 (23 Geo. II, c. 35).32 Two years later, the neighbouring parish to the south of St Martin’s, Westminster St Margaret’s, united with its own southerly neighbour, Westminster St John the Evangelist for the purpose of the ‘better relief and employment of the poor … and for cleansing the streets, and repairing the highways’ (25 Geo. II, c. 23). This was followed by the parish sandwiched between the two detached parts of St Margaret’s, St George Hanover Square, in 1753 (26 Geo. II, c. 97).33 Then, in 1756, the parishes lying immediately to the west, Kensington, and to the north, St Marylebone, also obtained local acts (29 Geo. II, c. 53 and c. 63). Similar waves of statute-making occurred in George III’s reign such that by 1800 virtually all of the parishes bordering the City, not to mention outlying districts, including Mile End New Town, Stepney (1780) to the east and St John Hampstead (1800) to the west, had acquired local acts. Altogether there were over 30 separate statutory poor law authorities operating in Middlesex at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

South of the Thames, meanwhile, considerably fewer parishes petitioned for local legislation before 1800. Parishes within the Bills of Mortality like Bermondsey (1757; 1791), three of the four parishes in the Borough of Southwark (1774; 1783; 1786), as well as outlying parishes like Richmond (1766; 1785) and Streatham (1790) were successful; Lambeth (1783; 1792) and Walton-upon-Thames (1795) were not. Between 1808 and 1816, a swathe of half a dozen urban or urbanizing Surrey parishes, beginning with St Mary Newington, sought acts ‘for better assessing and collecting the Poor and other Rates … and for regulating the Poor thereof’.34 Following a brief hiatus, a further five Surrey parishes – Croydon, Wandsworth, Merton, Wimbledon and Rotherhithe – secured similarly titled local acts between 1825 and 1829.35

58 Geo. III, c. 2 and 10 Geo. IV, c. 43) were designated as private. The rest were public, i.e. they contained a specific clause declaring them as such, and/or received the royal assent in the form ‘Le Roy le veult’. For a fuller discussion of the difference between public and private acts, see Lambert, Bills and acts, pp. 29-30, 84-5, 172-7. 31 The only parishes to be united for poor relief purposes were Westminster St Margaret and St John the Evangelist (1751, to which St James Piccadilly, the Liberties of Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Ely Rents and the Precinct of the Savoy were added in 1835); St Andrew Holborn (above the Bars) and St George the Martyr (1766); and St Giles in the Fields and St George Bloomsbury (1774). See 25 Geo. II, c. 23; 6 George III, c. 100; 14 George III, c. 62. 32 St. Martin-in-the-Fields had previously obtained an act ‘for the better improving a certain Piece of Ground … for the Use of the Poor, and for other purposes’ in 1702 (1 Anne Stat. 2, c. 21), hence it is shaded with speckles in figure 2. 33 The title of this act was virtually identical to that uniting St Margaret and St John the Evangelist. 34 St Mary Newington (48 Geo. III, c. xxi), Lambeth (50 Geo. III, c. xix) and Southwark Christ Church (51 Geo. III, c. xxxii) were all within the Bills of Mortality; Clapham (51 Geo. III, c. cvii); Camberwell (53 Geo. III, c. clxii) were not, but bordered Lambeth to the west and east respectively. Mitcham (56 George III, c. v) lay to the south of Streatham. 35 6 Geo. IV, c. lxxvi; 7 Geo. IV, c. lxiii; 9 Geo. IV, c. i; 9 Geo. IV, c. ii; 10 Geo. IV, c. cxxxi. While Croydon (1821 pop. 7,801), Rotherhithe (1821 pop. 12,114) and Wandsworth (1821 pop. 5,644) were clearly urbanized by the mid-1820s, Merton (1821 pop. 905) and Wimbledon (1821 pop. 1,914) were little more than large villages.

8 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national?

Figure 2. Metropolitan parishes with local acts

Selected parishes (with dates of first local act): 1. Chelsea St Luke (1821); 2. St Anne Limehouse (1809); 3. Camberwell (1813); 4. Peckham (part Camberwell AP); 5. Croydon (1825); 6. All Saints Poplar (1813); 7. Wimbledon (1828). Source: as Table 1. I am grateful to Max Satchell for supplying me with electronic boundary data.

Explaining these legislative patterns is less straightforward than describing them. However, it is at least plausible to suppose that the demand for local legislation may be taken as a rough index of London’s suburban expansion in the century after 1750. Local relief acts, I would suggest, were a response to the stresses and strains of population growth. The face-to-face administrative structures and rural assumptions of the old poor law were ill-equipped to deal with sprawling urban centres, where labour markets operated according to different rules and rhythms. The overwhelming preference for workhouses expressed in local act after local act was intended to provide hard-pressed parish officers, who were responsible for thousands, rather than hundreds of inhabitants, with a more reliable mechanism for preventing fraudulent relief claims.

Trends in local relief legislation correspond reasonably well with what we already know about the metropolis’s demographic and physical growth. The initial incorporation of the City’s parishes in the mid-seventeenth century coincided with the tail end of London’s ‘first heroic age’ of explosive

9 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? demographic growth, 1500-1650.36 From around 1660 – when the Corporation went into temporary abeyance due to the confiscation of its property by Charles II – the growth of London was slowing down and this trend continued during the early eighteenth century.37 Schwarz has even suggested that London’s population may have declined in the second quarter of the century.38 For John Landers, meanwhile, ‘it is overwhelmingly likely that demographic expansion virtually ceased in the 1730s and 1740s, and the population of 1750 probably exceeded that of 1730 by less than 3 per cent.’39 During this period of relative demographic stagnation there was a corresponding dearth of local statutes in Middlesex. Only a handful of acts were obtained, two for St Martin-in-the-Fields (1702; 1749), another for St Botolph without Aldgate in 1741 and one for Bethnal Green in 1745.

After 1750, however, evidence from foreign trade, coal imports and building activity points to a sustained physical and demographic expansion of the metropolis. Schwarz estimates that London’s population grew by as much as 50 per cent at the end of the eighteenth century.40 By the end of our period, in the 1830s, the process of suburban growth had resulted in ‘a contiguous mass of housing from Limehouse to Chelsea, on the northern side of the Thames, linked by half a dozen bridges to a matching southern expanse stretching from Camberwell to Peckham.’41 This cumulative thickening of the built environment is clearly discernible in figure 2, although arguably stretched even further west and south than Landers’ comments might suggest. For example, although St Anne Limehouse (marked 2 in figure 2) obtained a local relief act in 1809, the district immediately to the east, the ‘Hamlet’ of Poplar and Blackwall (marked 6 in figure 2), followed suit in 1813. In 1811 this so- called hamlet was home to 7,708 inhabitants; ten years later this figure had risen to 12,208. What I am arguing, in other words, is that in London at least, the ebb and flow of local relief acts tends to confirm the pattern of urban growth that previous historians have identified using wholly independent proxies. A trickle of Middlesex statutes in the first half of the eighteenth century was followed by a steady stream from 1750. On average, just over one Middlesex statute was passed every year between 1750 and 1841.42

If we consider the legislative trends beyond Middlesex and Surrey, the first half of the eighteenth century saw considerable activity in regions that were experiencing much faster population growth than the metropolitan core. Wrigley has estimated that twenty counties experienced population growth rates in excess of Middlesex’s during the first half of the eighteenth century. This was in complete contrast to the seventeenth century, when Middlesex’s population grew by 84.4 per cent, compared to only a 55.6 per cent increase in the second fastest-growing county, Northumberland.43 Although places that obtained local poor relief acts before 1750 were located in counties growing both slower and faster than Middlesex, it is noteworthy that the county with the highest frequency of statute-making in this period – Gloucestershire – was the second fastest growing county in England at this time.44 Much of this growth must have been driven by the expansion of Bristol, which probably more than doubled in size between 1700 and 1750, leap-frogging Norwich to become the country’s second city. Although pre-census estimates are necessarily approximate, it is possible that Bristol

36 L. D Schwarz, London in the age of industrialisation: entrepreneurs, labour force and living conditions, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 2. 37 The Interregnum Corporation was revived without new statutory backing in 1698 at the suggestion of the Lord Mayor, Sir Humphrey Edwin. See S. MacFarlane, ‘Social policy and the poor in the later seventeenth century’ in London 1500-1700: the making of the metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and R. A. P. Finlay (London, 1986), p. 262. 38 Schwarz, London in the age of industrialisation, p. 128. 39 J. Landers, Death and the metropolis: studies in the demographic history of London, 1670-1830 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 84. 40 Schwarz, London in the age of industrialisation, p. 128. 41 Landers, Death and the metropolis, p. 51. 42 1750-1800: 56 statutes; 1800-1841: 48 statutes. 43 See Table 4, E. A. Wrigley, ‘Rickman revisited: the population growth rates of English counties in the early modern period’, Economic History Review, 62, (2009), p. 723. 44 Bristol obtained four local acts (1696, 1713, 1717, 1743) to Gloucester’s two (1702, 1726).

10 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? increased its share of the Gloucestershire population from around 15 per cent in 1700 to 24 per cent in 1750.45

Another way of trying to determine whether local acts were a response to urbanization is by considering the English urban hierarchy. Table 4 reports the size and rank order of the largest English towns at the beginning and end of our period.

Table 4. The changing English urban hierarchy and the number of local acts, 1662-1841 Population Year of first No. local Population Year of first No. (c. 1662)1 local act [or acts (1841)2 local act [or local failed bill] failed bill] acts London3 310,941 1662 45 London4 1,948,417 1662 133 Norwich 14,216 1711 4 Manchester* 311,269 1790 1 York 14,201 [1730] Liverpool 286,487 1831 2 Bristol 13,482 1696 8 Birmingham* 182,922 1783 2 Newcastle 11,617 Leeds* 152,074 Oxford 11,065 1771 1 Bristol 125,146 1696 8 Cambridge 10,574 Sheffield* 111,091 [1791] Exeter 10,307 1697 5 Wolverhampton* 93,245 Ipswich 9,774 Newcastle 70,337 Great Yarmouth 9,248 Hull 67,308 1697 5 Canterbury 7,671 1727 3 Bradford* 66,715 Worcester 7,046 1703 5 Norwich 61,846 1711 4 Deptford* 6,919 1754 1 Newington5* 54,606 1808 2 Shrewsbury 6,867 1784 2 Sunderland* 53,335 1791 2 Salisbury 6,811 1770 2 Bath 53,196 1815 2 Colchester 6,647 1697 2 Portsmouth 53,032 [1674] Hull 6,600 1697 5 Nottingham 52,360 [1701] TOTAL 83 161 Source: Table 14.4 in J. Langton, ‘Urban growth and economic change: from the late seventeenth century to 1841’, in The Cambridge urban history of Britain, vol. 2: 1540-1840, ed. P. Clark (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 473- 4. Notes: 1 Based on the Hearth Tax returns 2 Based on size, density and nucleation criteria defined by Law 1967. As a result, figures differ from those reported in the 1841 census. 3 Cities of London and Westminster, their Liberties and the Borough of Southwark 4 London Division, 1851 Census (PP, 1852-3, LXXXV) 5 Although (St Mary) Newington was part of the 1851 Census London Division (and its population is included in the 1841 London total), Langton enumerated it separately in his 1841 hierarchy. I have adjusted the number of local acts so that the two Newington statutes were not double counted. * Enfranchised by the Great Reform Act in 1832. All other towns listed were parliamentary boroughs before 1832.

This table implies that any relationship between settlement size and the presence of statutory poor law authorities is far from straightforward. Demography alone cannot account for different administrative and institutional configurations, nor would anyone familiar with the capricious nature of eighteenth- century parliaments expect it to. Nonetheless it is striking that in both urban hierarchies, a clear majority of England’s largest towns and cities were successful in securing peculiar local powers at

45 See Table 1 in E. A. Wrigley, ‘Urban growth and agricultural change: England and the continent in the early modern period, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 15, (1985), p. 686 and Table 3 in Wrigley, ‘Rickman revisited’, p. 721. Bristol grew from 21,000 to 50,000, while Gloucestershire grew from 139,448 to 206,599.

11 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? some point during the long eighteenth century. Three-fifths of all local poor law acts passed during this period regulated with the towns and cities listed in table 4.46

What is more, it would appear that places that were not represented in parliament were not unduly disadvantaged when it came to establishing statutory authorities. Had the unreformed parliament been entirely indifferent to the claims of rapidly urbanizing – and unrepresented – communities, we would expect to find a quite different pattern in table 4. Over half the towns listed in the 1841 hierarchy were not parliamentary boroughs before 1832, yet this did not prevent the inhabitants of Manchester, Birmingham, (St Mary) Newington and Sunderland from acquiring statutory powers for the relief of the poor between 1783 and 1808. Meanwhile, the failure of Sheffield’s principal inhabitants to obtain ‘a Bill for taking down … the present Workhouse for the said Township, and erecting a new one instead thereof, sufficiently large and commodious for the Reception and Employment of the Poor’ in February 1791 cannot be attributed to any procedural irregularity. Like Deptford, Birmingham and Manchester before, and Sunderland and Newington after, Sheffield’s petition was referred to a committee to which at least one of the relevant county MPs was appointed.47 If we also consider the fact that long-standing boroughs such as York, Portsmouth and Nottingham all failed to make their case for local legislation earlier in the period, it would appear that borough representation was neither a necessary, nor sufficient, condition of legislative success.

2. Local corporations of the poor and demographic change

So far the analysis has been concerned with identifying aggregate trends and national patterns. In this section I propose to investigate the extent to which local poor law statutes were a response to, or a cause of, sub-national demographic and social structural change. As I noted in the introduction, Richard Smith has argued on more than one occasion that Malthus’s critique of the Old Poor Law stemmed from the latter’s conviction that the English Poor Law extended an offer of a right to subsistence to the labouring poor that it could not fulfil. The income redistribution that it attempted through the parish rates (or local property taxes) had the effect of raising prices and particularly in conditions of dearth just swelled the number of dependent poor whose income was insufficient to purchase food for their families. In the medium to long term such transfer-incomes facilitated demographic growth but did not stimulate increases in food supply.48 According to Smith, Malthus’s Essay provides an early formulation of the view that ‘rapid population growth has negative ‘pecuniary’ externalities’. For Malthus, the Old Poor Law, and particularly the more widespread use of allowance scales from 1795 onwards, enabled couples to marry or have children without reference to the prevailing level of demand for labour. As a result, Malthus argued that the poor laws tended to drive down aggregate living standards by depressing wages and removing incentives to industriousness.49

In rejecting this interpretation, Smith has argued that Malthus failed to appreciate the ‘positive-feed backs’ created by ‘late eighteenth-century population growth (c. 1.5 per cent per annum), booming farm rents and soaring welfare expenditure funded by the rent-receivers who were the major landlords and farmers benefiting from inflating agricultural prices and an abundance of relatively cheap

46 This is based on adding the total number of acts in the 1841 panel (161) to the acts for Oxford, Exeter, Canterbury, Worcester, Shrewsbury, Salisbury and Colchester, all of which had dropped out of the hierarchy by 1841. Deptford’s act is included in the 1841 London total. 47 C[ommons] J[ournal], xlvi. 18 Feb. 1791, p. 191. Sheffield’s petition was referred to a committee consisting of William Wilberforce and Henry Duncombe, both of whom sat for Yorkshire. The petitions from Sunderland (received three days after Sheffield’s on 23 Feb 1791) and St Mary Newington (CJ, lxiii. 25 Feb. 1808, pp. 109- 10) were treated in exactly the same way, whereas those from Birmingham (CJ, xxxix. 27 Jan 1783, p. 111) and Manchester (CJ, xlv. 1 Mar. 1790, p. 194) were referred to committees that contained only one of the relevant county’s MPs. 48 R. M. Smith, ‘The social policy: Malthus, welfare and poverty’ in Visiting Malthus: The man, his times, the issues, ed. A.-M. Jensen, T. L. Knutsen and A. Skonhoft (Oslo, 2003), p. 83. 49 Ibid., pp. 86-7.

12 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? labour’.50 In addition, because Malthus took the welfare obligations of the conjugal family unit for granted, rather than seeing them as culturally mediated, he overlooked the possibility that the Old Poor Law should best be understood as dependent – rather than independent – variable within the early modern English demographic regime. For Malthus, the Old Poor Law was defective because it appeared to undermine the ‘laws of nature’ that governed, among other things, family formation, accumulation and reproduction. Smith, by contrast, has insisted that ‘many features of the nuclear family as they functioned … in England before the Industrial Revolution reflected a functionally integrated relationship between the family and the collective’.51

Eighteenth-century corporations of the poor provide an important testing ground for investigating the validity of some of these contested theoretical claims about the relationship between welfare and demography. As the first half of this paper has emphasised, statutory poor law authorities tended to be instituted in large urban centres, both old and new. In addition, the overwhelming majority of these bodies were established after 1750. Thanks to the work of Wrigley and Schofield we have long known that ‘in terms of the rate of natural increase, the later eighteenth century looks remarkably like the later sixteenth century’.52 In addition, it was only in the half century after 1751 that dependency ratios (DR) reached levels not experienced since the late sixteenth century.53 Superficially, then, there appears to be an intriguing symmetry between the demographic conditions prevailing at the time of the 1601 Act for the relief of the Poor (43 Eliz. c. 2) and those current during the period with the highest frequency of local poor law statutes. This raises the possibility that changes to welfare legislation in both periods were demand-led and principally a function of ‘nuclear hardship’. Put simply, population pressure created the need for new forms of communal provision because nuclear families were unable to cope with rising dependency ratios.

In this section I propose to examine the expressly declared intent of local poor relief statutes by analysing a random sample of the petitions to parliament that resulted in legislative action. I am principally concerned with gaining a better understanding of the motivations that lay behind local communities’ efforts to obtain additional or substitute poor relief powers. This will be followed by a comparison of poor relief expenditure trends in the incorporated and unincorporated parishes of Suffolk. By examining both the stated aims of local corporations and their actual functioning in one particular region, I hope to recover an alternative perspective on the operation of the Old Poor Law which defies existing stereotypes, Malthusian or otherwise.

Before doing so, however, it is important to note that Malthus never endorsed local corporations as an alternative to the existing Elizabethan welfare regime. Indeed, given his opposition to extra-familial, rate-funded welfare provision in general, we should not be surprised to find so little discussion in the Essay of the pros and cons of different local communities’ relief practices. Malthus referred to workhouses – usually the keystone of local statutory authorities – only a handful of times in the 1803 Essay. When he did so, he appeared to be extremely sceptical of their worth, observing that the quantity of provisions consumed in workhouses, upon a part of the society, that cannot in general be considered the most valuable part, diminishes the shares that would otherwise belong to more industrious and more worthy members, and thus, in the same manner, forces more to become dependent.54 Later in the same chapter, Malthus struck a remarkably ambivalent, even contradictory, tone while reflecting upon the demographic implications of outdoor and indoor relief. ‘Those who are not deterred for a time from marriage’, Malthus wrote,

50 Ibid. p. 88. 51 Ibid., p. 95; Smith, ‘Transfer incomes’, pp. 193-7. 52 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England, 1541-1871: a reconstruction. (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1989), p. 179. 53 Appendix 9 in E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen and R. S. Schofield, English population history from family reconstitution, 1580-1837 (Cambridge, 1997). If one looks at the number of quinquennia in which the DR falls below 700 per thousand between 1551 and 1846 the results are as follows: 1551-96: 2; 1601-46: 6; 1651-1696: 9; 1701-46: 5; 1751-96: 0; 1801-46: 0. 54 T. R. Malthus, An essay on the principle of population (London, 1803), p. 410.

13 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national?

are either relieved very scantily at their own homes, where they suffer all the consequences arising from squalid poverty; or they are crowded together in close and unwholesome workhouses, where a great mortality almost universally takes place, particularly among young children…A very great part of the redundant population occasioned by the poor laws, is thus taken off by the operation of the laws themselves, or at least by their ill execution.55 Notwithstanding his negative assessment of workhouses, Malthus subsequently took a more favourable view of their effects on nuptiality when lambasting Arthur Young’s plan to grant allotments to the poor. Young’s proposals, Malthus argued, would unleash the full potential of population to grow faster than the means of its support. Malthus conceded that ‘the poor laws … do not encourage marriage so much as might be expected from theory’ and put this down to the ‘terrific forms of workhouses and parish officers’. Young’s ‘fascinating visions of land and cows’, by contrast, would positively promote early marriage among labourers.56

While Malthus self-evidently failed to articulate a consistent position on workhouses, there is at least some evidence to suggest that he regarded them as constraints on fertility, and indeed population growth more generally. Ceteris paribus, a Malthusian would expect to find higher marriage ages and slower population growth in areas where poor relief was conditional upon entry into the workhouse. Before assessing how far the Suffolk experience confirms these expectations, I want to start by asking whether those who lobbied for local corporations of the poor shared Malthus’s attitudes to workhouses. To do this, I drew a 10 per cent random sample of the 149 local corporations established during the long eighteenth century and then used the Journal of the House of Commons to identify the reasons given for seeking a local act in each case.

55 Ibid., p. 416. This rather astonishing statement is discussed in Smith, ‘The social policy’, p. 94 and Poynter, Society and pauperism, p. 155. 56 Malthus, Essay, p. 575.

14 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? 15

Table 5. Declared purpose and scope of 15 randomly selected poor law statutes Place No. parishes Principal category of pauper to be relieved Powers sought Date of petition King’s Lynn 2 Poor children Workhouse; assistants; street lighting No petition (12 & 13 Will. III, c. 6) printed in CJ1 Gloucester 10 Poor children Workhouse No petition (1 Anne Stat. 2, c. 11) printed in CI2 St Paul Shadwell 1 Manufacturers and labouring persons New workhouse; power to rate owners of sub- 24/01/1770 (CJ, (10 Geo. III, c. 56) divided houses xxxii. 617) New Sarum 3 General poor Consolidation of rates 09/02/1770 (CJ, (10 Geo. III, c. 81) xxxii. 677) Southampton 6 Children; general poor Consolidation of rates; workhouse for whole town; 29/01/1773 (CJ, (13 Geo. III, c. 50) sharing cost of maintaining roads xxxiv. 82) Hartismere, Hoxne and Thredling 63 Aged, infirm and diseased; able and industrious; Workhouse for general reception of poor 03/12/1778 (CJ, Hundreds (19 Geo. III, c. 13) profligate and idle; children xxxvii. 12) Westbury 1 General poor Additional overseer 06/03/1786 (CJ, (26 Geo. III, c. 23) xli. 297) London Saint Bride Fleet Street 1 Aged, infirm and diseased; industrious; idle and Workhouse for general reception of poor; repair of 24/02/1792 (CJ, (32 Geo. III, c. 64) refractory; infant poor church xlvii. 425) Tewkesbury 1 Exceedingly numerous poor Workhouse for general reception 17/02/1792 (CJ, (32 Geo. III, c. 70) xlvii. 396) Montgomery and Pool 15 Very numerous poor United district with workhouse for general 05/03/1792 (CJ, (32 Geo. III, c. 96) reception xlvii. 495) Bedford 5 All the poor Workhouse for general reception 21/02/1794 (CJ, (34 Geo. III, c. 98) xlix. 210) Aldbourne 1 Exceedingly numerous poor Additional overseer; workhouse to compel poor to 06/03/1800 (CJ, (39 & 40 Geo. III, c. xlviii) work lv. 270) Chatham St Mary 1 Very numerous poor Enlarge existing workhouse 26/02/1802 (CJ, (42 Geo. III, c. lvi) lvii. 178) Saint Pancras 1 Very numerous poor Directors of Poor; new workhouse; paid collectors 03/12/1803 (CJ, (44 Geo. III, c. xlvii) of rates lix. 27) Bromley St Leonard 1 General poor Workhouse; removal of coal dust 31/01/1811 (CJ, (51 Geo. III, c. cxxv) lxvi. 60) Sources: Table 2, column 2 (New local acts) 1 Reasons for passing the bill for better employing the poor of Lynn; in answer to some pretended reasons lately publish’d against it (n.d.) 2 1 Anne Statute 2, c. 11

15 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national?

Table 5 presents an abstract of a sample of the local petitions presented to the House of Commons with a view to obtaining a local poor relief statute. It would clearly be unwise to place too much interpretative weight on the arguments articulated in what were, after all, highly formal documents drawn up to satisfy proper parliamentary procedure.57 Petitions were recorded in the Journal according to the clerks’ stylistic conventions with the result that we have only a partial insight into the objectives and priorities of the petitioners. Nonetheless, it is possible to detect shifting attitudes and priorities. Although the workhouse was an almost constant refrain of petitioners’ demands throughout the period, its functions became increasingly inclusive. Whereas the earliest workhouses were intended as ‘schools of industry’, those of the late eighteenth century were promoted for the ‘general reception’ of the poor.

For two places in the sample – King’s Lynn and Gloucester – no petition was printed in the Commons Journal. We can reconstruct the purpose of these statutes from other evidence, including the statutes that followed, as well as broadsides published in favour and against the proposals.58 In both King’s Lynn and Gloucester, the promoters placed particular emphasis on making provision for poor children (who, along with the elderly, were the classic victims of ‘nuclear hardship’59). The King’s Lynn workhouse, we are told, was spacious enough to accommodate ‘more than 100 Poor Children of both Sexes’, who ‘before were Naked, Surfeited, and almost perished with Diseases’. In Gloucester, meanwhile, ‘a considerable number of Poor Children … have been lately and now are exercised in Readeing, Writeing, and Working’.60 Petitioners after 1750, by contrast, tended to be far less precise when referring to the poor persons most likely to benefit from local statutory regulation. Children were only mentioned explicitly in the petitions from the inhabitants of Southampton and the Suffolk Hundreds of Hartismere, Hoxne and Thredling. Far more common in the late eighteenth century were references to ‘the general poor’, or simply ‘the poor’. The most frequent adjective used to describe the poor was ‘numerous’. In only a couple of cases – St Bride’s and Hartismere, Hoxne and Thredling – do we find petitioners drawing a distinction between ‘deserving’ (aged, infirm and diseased) and ‘undeserving’ (idle and refractory) poverty.

In terms of specifying a link between demography and poverty, the petitioners remained largely silent. Marriage, family or kin are never mentioned, either positively or negatively. Indeed, one gets the impression that poverty is largely taken for granted; it is not principally viewed as the outcome of individual or familial moral shortcomings. Five of the petitions (St Paul Shadwell, Westbury, Tewkesbury, Aldbourne, and St Pancras) note how ‘populous’ the parish in question is but this is not attributed to defects of the existing poor law administration. There is, in other words, no evidence in the petitions of a Malthusian or proto-Malthusian explanation of poverty.

Indeed, it could be argued that the outstanding characteristic of these petitions is their clear recognition of the collectivity’s welfare obligations. If anything, it would seem that the petitioners – usually encompassing the clergy, churchwardens, overseers and principal inhabitants – were seeking a more formal specification of the community’s duties vis-à-vis the poor. For example, the inhabitants of St Paul Shadwell applied for the power to rate the landlords and leaseholders of sub-divided dwellings on the grounds that these individuals were evading their parochial responsibilities. Elsewhere, in Southampton and Salisbury, we find evidence of a supra-parochial commitment to sharing the costs of poor relief according to the relative wealth of individual parishes. Moreover, it

57 Lambert, Bills and acts, p. 153 notes that for local bills, ‘the petition … was always considered by a committee before leave to introduce a bill was given.’ See also J. G. Hanley, ‘The public’s reaction to public health: petitions submitted to parliament, 1847-1848’, Social History of Medicine, 15 (2002), pp. 393-411 for a helpful survey of parliamentary petitioning more generally during this period. 58 See Slack, From Reformation, pp. 103-6 for a discussion of the political background to the King’s Lynn and Gloucester corporations. 59 Smith, ‘Charity, self-interest and welfare’, p. 27; cf. P. Laslett, ‘Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: a consideration of the ‘nuclear-hardship’ hypothesis’, Continuity and Change, 3, (1988), p. 154. 60 Reasons for passing the bill for better employing the poor of Lynn; in answer to some pretended reasons lately publish’d against it (n.d.); Preamble, 1 Anne Stat. 2, c. 11.

16 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? would appear that these two proposals for incorporation were not driven by a desire to reduce aggregate relief expenditure. It is only from the late 1770s that comparative statements concerning the increasing cost of poor relief find their way into the petitions sampled here.61 Crucially, however, the principle of rate-based welfare provision was not challenged, either before or after 1798.

If we now turn to consider the practical effects of incorporation in one particular county – Suffolk – we find little evidence to support the notion that different welfare regimes produced markedly different patterns of demographic behaviour. Beginning with the hundreds of Colneis and Carlford in 1756, much of the eastern half of Suffolk had been incorporated by 1780.62 The ten corporations established by this date were all modelled, to a greater or lesser extent, on the example of Colneis and Carlford. In place of the parochial system of management, up to twenty-four ‘Directors of the Poor’ and up to thirty-six ‘Acting Guardians of the Poor’ were elected from among the local clergy, landowners and substantial occupiers to administer poor relief in the incorporated hundreds. Whereas Directors generally held office for life and were required to own land within the hundred, Acting Guardians served for up to three years at a time and could be owners or occupiers.63 Directors and Guardians were empowered to borrow money against the security of the rates for the purpose of erecting and maintaining a central workhouse for the use of all the incorporated parishes. Controlling costs was a major priority for the incorporated hundreds. To achieve this goal, the local acts typically contained a clause stating that the assessments of individual parishes should not exceed ‘the Sum which shall have been expended for the Relief and Support of the Poor … upon an Average of Seven Years’ prior to the passage of the act.

Individual-level analysis of the relationship between Suffolk welfare practices and demographic behaviour is beyond the scope of this paper. The age, marital status and family circumstances of poor law pensioners can only be reliably established using family reconstitution techniques.64 What is attempted here is more modest. Parliament’s insatiable appetite for parish-level data on population and poor rate expenditure in the early nineteenth century provides us with a rich, albeit neglected, source for examining the relationship between demography and welfare at various scales of analysis.65 It is possible, for example, to see whether parishes that were incorporated for poor relief purposes experienced lower marriage rates or different age structures as a result of ‘harsher’, indoor-based welfare policies.

61 Eight petitions (Hartismere, Hoxne and Thredling, Westbury, St Bride’s, Tewkesbury, Montgomery and Pool, Bedford, Aldbourne, and Chatham) refer either to the ‘great’ and ‘burthensome’ expense, or the ‘annual’ increase of the poor rates. 62 Colneis and Carlford Hundreds (29 Geo. c. 79); Blything Hundred (4 Geo. III, c. 56); Bosmere and Claydon Hundred (4 Geo. III, c. 57); Samford Hundred (4 Geo. III, c. 59); Mutford and Lothingland Hundred (4 Geo. III., c. 89); Wangford Hundred (4 Geo. III, c. 91); Loes and Wilford Hundreds (5 Geo. III, c. 97); Stow Hundred (18 Geo. III, c. 35); Hartismere, Hoxne and Thredling Hundreds (19 Geo. III, c. 13); Cosford Hundred (19 Geo. III, c. 30). 63 19 Geo. III, c. 30. See also Webb and Webb, Statutory authorities for special purposes, pp. 126-35 for a fuller discussion of the constitutional structure of the Suffolk and Norfolk incorporations. 64 R. M Smith, ‘Ageing and well-being in early modern England: pension trends and gender preferences under the English Old Poor Law c. 1650-1800’ in Old age from antiquity to post-modernity, ed. P. Johnson and P. Thane (London, 1998), p. 74. 65 See S. J. Thompson, ‘Census-taking, political economy and state formation in Britain, c. 1790-1840 (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2010), pp. 134-58 for a discussion of John Rickman’s role as both producer and interpreter of census and poor law data.

17 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national?

Table 6. Poor rate expenditure and selected demographic measures for Suffolk, 1821 Population Crude marriage Population Total Poor rate rate (average of under 15 expenditure on expenditure per 1820, 1821, (%) the poor capita 1822) Unincorporated Hundreds Babergh 21,784 7.85 40.0 £30,106.40 £1.38 Blackbourne 13,089 7.72 39.7 £12,750.10 £0.97 Hartismere1 16,186 7.95 38.8 £17,818.25 £1.10 Hoxne1 15,458 8.04 40.6 £19,634.10 £1.27 Lackford 11,521 8.33 39.6 £8,799.00 £0.76 Plomesgate 10,616 8.16 39.8 £10,392.65 £0.98 Risbridge 14,719 8.15 41.2 £16,834.35 £1.14 Thedwestry 9,278 6.79 39.6 £8,009.55 £0.86 Thingoe 5,724 7.92 38.5 £5,321.40 £0.93 Thredling1 3,166 5.26 39.8 £3,362.65 £1.06 sub-total 121,541 7.84 39.9 £133,028.45 £1.09

Incorporated Hundreds Blything 22,903 6.58 40.9 £15,232.05 £0.67 Bosmere and Claydon 12,100 6.78 39.0 £8,219.25 £0.68 Carlford 5,966 7.88 41.4 £7,256.35 £1.22 Colneis 4,169 7.92 42.2 £4,374.25 £1.05 Cosford 9,478 7.49 39.6 £9,825.90 £1.04 Loes 12,208 7.37 39.1 £12,275.10 £1.01 Mutford and Lothingland 13,565 8.77 39.9 £2,469.50 £0.18 Samford 10,629 6.37 41.3 £7,926.40 £0.75 Stow 7,536 7.30 38.7 £6,182.40 £0.82 Wangford 12,594 6.17 39.7 £8,679.45 £0.69 Wilford 6,718 7.29 39.8 £6,592.75 £0.98 sub-total 117,866 7.14 40.1 £89,033.40 £0.76

Boroughs Bury St Edmunds 9,999 8.17 38.5 £6,445.45 £0.64 Ipswich 17,186 9.64 38.1 £13,248.05 £0.77 Sudbury 3,950 9.37 36.1 £3,052.35 £0.77

Suffolk 270,542 7.68 39.8 £244,807.70 £0.90 England (GIP) 11,456,808 8.35 38.8 - - Sources: Table A1.5 in Wrigley, The early English censuses (Oxford, 2011); 1821 Census. Enumeration Abstract, pp. 324-5 (PP, 1822, XV); 1821 Census. Parish Register Abstract, pp. 113-7 (PP, 1822, XV); 1831 Census. Parish Register Abstract, pp. 312-24 (PP, 1833, XXXVIII); Report from the Select Committee on Poor Rate Returns, pp. 162-9 (PP, 1822, V); Wrigley et al, English population history, pp. 614-5. Notes: 1 Although Hartismere, Hoxne and Thredling were incorporated by 19 Geo. III, c. 13, no workhouse was ever built and the corporation was never constituted.

Table 6 exploits a feature of the 1821 census that is unique among the early nineteenth-century censuses, namely age recording. The 1821 census reports the age structure at hundredal level and is around 97.1 per cent complete for Suffolk.66 Rather than tabulate all ages, table 6 records the percentage of the population aged under 15. This measure has been chosen because it provides evidence on the extent of variation in the number of dependent children in the population. Malthus’s objection to the poor law was based, in part, on his conviction that rural overseers’ adoption of allowance scales at the end of the eighteenth century tended to promote younger marriage and therefore larger families. While table 6 cannot provide any direct evidence on the validity of this claim, it does suggest that there was no systematic difference in the proportions of dependent children

66 1821 Census. Enumeration Abstract, p. 324.

18 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? within the populations of different rural hundreds. Indeed, the share of the population under 15 looks remarkably invariant across the county as whole, at around 40 per cent. Only in the boroughs of Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich and especially Sudbury is there any suggestion of a different age structure from the rest of the county.

The other demographic variable reported in table 6 – the crude marriage rate – also appears to be relatively stable across the different Suffolk hundreds, at around 7 or 8 per thousand. Yet if we look instead at poor rate expenditure per capita, it is clear that there was a much higher degree of variation from hundred to hundred.67 At the extremes, the hundred of Babergh were spending nearly eight times what was being spent in Mutford and Lothingland. Demographically, however, the two hundreds look remarkably similar. Forty per cent of the population in each hundred were under 15 and the difference in the crude marriage rate was less than one per thousand. What this suggests, in other words, is that demographic behaviour – and more particularly the relative youthfulness of the population – cannot be explained by reference to the prevailing level of poor relief, as figure 3 makes plain:

Figure 3. Scatter plot of population under 15 and poor rate expenditure per capita, 1821

Source: as Table 6.

These findings largely confirm the verdict of Henry Stuart, the Assistant Commissioner appointed by the Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate poor law administration in Norfolk and Suffolk in 1832. As Stuart put it: The county of Suffolk is exclusively agricultural, there being no kind of trade or manufacture carried on within it, beyond the ordinary handicraft trades required for the purposes of husbandry, and to supply the daily wants of the inhabitants … The general circumstances of the population being throughout so much alike, the chief variety that is to be found in the practical operation of the Poor Laws within the county, arises from a difference in the manner of administering them.68 One obvious and important consequence of Suffolk’s different administrative arrangements which Stuart drew attention to was that ‘the pressure of the poor-rate in those parts of the country where it is under parochial management, will be observed to be uniform and heavy’, whereas ‘in the incorporated districts, it will be seen that the burthen is comparatively light’. As table 6 indicates, this pattern was at least a decade old. In 1821 the unincorporated hundreds spent £0.33 – or 43 per cent – more per

67 If the three variables are re-scaled by dividing each observation by the county average and then applying a log transform, the standard deviations are as follows: share of the population under 15: 0.03; CMR: 0.13; poor rate expenditure p.c.: 0.39. Alternatively, the co-efficient of variation for each variable is as follows: share of the population under 15: 0.03; CMR: 0.13; poor rate expenditure p.c.: 0.28. I am grateful to Peter Kitson for providing statistical advice. 68 No. 12, Appendix A, Reports of Assistant Commissioners, Part I, p. 333 (PP, 1834, XXVIII.337). My emphasis.

19 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? capita than the incorporated districts. In seeking to account for these expenditure differences, Stuart was emphatic that poor law administration, rather than local topographic, economic or demographic conditions, was the key. The Corporation workhouses – or ‘Hundred Houses’ as they were known – were only part of the story, however. Indeed, Stuart noted that ‘although the workhouse was the great recommendation of the system’ it was quickly found that ‘the benefits to be derived from it had been greatly overrated; profit there was none’.69

Much more significant, Stuart suggested, was the fact that acts of incorporation established a common fund, whose managers ‘guarded with more jealousy’ than their parochial counterparts.70 In the coastal hundred of Mutford and Lothingland, where expenditure was dramatically lower than in other parts of Suffolk, either incorporated or unincorporated, the directors and guardians exercised ‘an inflexible and vigilant system of management’. This was greatly aided by the magistrates’ refusal to ‘intermeddle’ in the Board’s decisions.71 Notwithstanding his obvious admiration for the incorporated system, Stuart objected to the inequality of assessment within incorporations. This defect arose from the provision in the various local acts that regulated parochial assessments according to a fixed average of expenditure in the period immediately preceding incorporation.72

It is possible to observe the effects of these clauses by looking at the relationship between parish size and poor rate expenditure. In the absence of a local statute, parochial poor rate expenditure appears to be strongly correlated with the number of inhabitants living in the parish (figure 4b). Around three- quarters of the variation in expenditure can be explained by population size. It might be argued that this is neither a particularly interesting, nor original, finding. Total expenditure on the poor is self- evidently a function of the total number of people – and therefore paupers – living in a particular community. What is striking, however, is the decreased explanatory power of this simple model when applied to the data for incorporated parishes (figure 4a).

Figure 4. The relationship between parish size and poor rate expenditure, 1821

a) EXP(incorporated) = 0.387POP1821 + 158.86 b) EXP(unincorporated) = 1.0318POP1821 + 22.836 R2 = 0.4416 (n=242) R2 = 0.7316 (n=252) Source: as Table 6

Less than half the variation in total poor rate expenditure in the incorporated parishes can be explained by variations in parish size.73 This discrepancy – as well as the gentler gradient of the line

69 Ibid., p. 355. 70 Ibid., p. 356. 71 Ibid., pp. 362-3. 72 Ibid., p. 356. 73 Even if the possibly anomalous hundred of Mutford and Lothingland is excluded from the model, the value of R2 does not exceed 0.65.

20 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national? of best fit – is due, I would argue, to the legal constitution of the Suffolk corporations. Because the local acts sought to cap individual parishes’ assessments according to a pre-incorporation average, and provided no mechanism for varying the level of contribution short of an amending act, poor rate assessments ossified. By 1821, when the Suffolk incorporations were all at least forty years old, out- of-date assessments and uneven population growth produced the expenditure patterns depicted in figure 4a. In the unincorporated parishes, by contrast, overseers (and magistrates) retained administrative autonomy and outspent their incorporated counterparts by a considerable margin.

Two important implications follow from the results reported in figure 4. First, the perceived failure of the Suffolk incorporations – both in the eyes of contemporaries and subsequent historians – needs to be set within its regional context. To be sure, the Hundred Houses, like other corporation workhouses, failed to generate the kind of profits which their most enthusiastic promoters had promised. As the Webbs observed in 1922, the constituent parishes, not finding their Poor Rates reduced, and gradually discovering both the unprofitableness of the enterprise and the demoralisation of the inmates, themselves revolt against the system … In case after case, they obtain new Local Acts; sometimes according new powers and removing restrictions found to be inconvenient74 Judged on their own terms, the corporations manifestly failed, but judged by reference to their immediate neighbours – as figure 4 demonstrates – poor rate expenditure grew less rapidly. Whether or not the poor would have regarded this as a mark of success is debateable, but there is no doubt that the principal inhabitants who petitioned parliament between the 1750s and 1770s regarded cost control as a major priority.75

Secondly, and relatedly, local discontent concerning the operation of the Suffolk corporations, especially in the 1820s, was not about the absolute cost of corporations, but the relative costs borne by individual parishes within corporations. The distribution of expenditure data in figure 4a, which is arguably more curvilinear than linear – implies that costs rose most sharply at small parish population sizes (population < 250). As population size increases, the distribution flattens out. This suggests that incorporation was advantageous for large parishes, but relatively more expensive for small rural parishes. By contrast, the distribution of expenditure in unincorporated parishes is more obviously linear: in other words, there was no financial advantage associated with relief administration in large parishes. In addition, the constants in the regression equations – crude though this model is – indicate that there were much higher fixed costs associated with incorporation. It was these flaws, I would suggest, that caused the Guardians of the Loes and Wilford Corporation of the Poor to seek disincorporation in 1826. Five years earlier, in 1821, the writing was already on the wall: the smallest parish in the corporation, Boulge (pop. 44), was spending the most per head (£3.34), while the second largest parish, Melton (pop. 861), was paying the least per head (£0.53). No wonder that the Guardians complained about the ‘great and unequal burthen on the several Parishes composing the Incorporation’.76 Notwithstanding the fact that relief costs were significantly higher in the unincorporated half of the county, the Guardians of Loes and Wilford appear to have taken a narrowly parochial view about the costs and benefits of the corporation.

*

More broadly, and by way of conclusion, the demographic and poor law evidence from Suffolk contributes to recent historiographical debates about the scope and economic significance of the Old Poor Law. Peter Solar has argued that ‘the local financing of poor relief gave English property owners, individually and collectively, a direct pecuniary interest in ensuring that the parish’s demographic and economic development was balanced’.77 Solar’s interpretation builds on the very substantial foundations laid by earlier scholars – notably Mark Blaug, Joel Mokyr, Joan Thirsk,

74 Webb and Webb, Statutory authorities for special purposes, p. 142. 75 See p. 17, above. 76 CJ, 10 Feb. 1826, lxxxi. p. 31. 77 Solar, ‘Poor relief and English economic development’, p. 16.

21 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national?

Richard Smith, Tony Wrigley and Paul Slack – who have emphasised ‘a more positive economic role for poor relief’ than earlier eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics of the Old Poor Law were prepared to acknowledge.78 As I have already noted, Richard Smith’s distinctive contribution to this re-appraisal has been to expose the weaknesses of T. R. Malthus’s claims about the demographic implications of poor relief. The evidence presented here, both in relation to the urban/metropolitan focus of the great majority of local poor law acts, and the extent of demographic stability across Suffolk in the face of quite different welfare regimes, adds further weight to the view that eighteenth- century welfare administrators were responding to population growth, rather than promoting it. Certainly, local officials responded in different ways, as the case of Suffolk makes plain, but it is not at all clear that individual demographic behaviour, as measured by the marriage rate or share of the population under 15, was sensitive to quite considerable variations in poor law policy. To adapt Smith’s telling analogy, welfare was downstream of demography, but the stream flowed into several different channels.79

The ‘Solar-Smith’ account has not gone unchallenged, however.80 Solar’s contribution in particular has been questioned, on the one hand, by Steve King, for failing to appreciate ‘the diversity and complexity of poor law practice in England prior to 1834’, and on the other, by Steve Hindle, for overlooking the role played by politics, power and ideology; ‘the complexity of the matrix of institutional and ideological instruments that constituted the parish in early modern England’.81 Common to both critiques is an insistence on the ‘complexity’ of poor relief practice, together with an implicit scepticism of macro-economic interpretations that attempt to integrate welfare history within the economic and demographic history of England. In this paper I have tried to indicate some of the ways in which the study of poor law politics, especially in the form of local legislation, can be usefully incorporated into the kind of overarching economic and demographic models employed by Solar and Smith. To some extent I have had to simplify the ‘complexity’ of parochial and regional variation; but it is surely telling that the explanatory power of the simple model employed in the last part of this paper is considerably greater in the parishes that were autonomous welfare republics than in the parishes that threw in their lot with their immediate neighbours. There may have been 242 independent vestries in the western hundreds of Suffolk, in which relief was negotiated within the context of highly specific political, institutional and ideological considerations, but the outcome of vestry politics – as measured by the relationship between poor rate expenditure and parish size – appears to have been remarkably uniform.

78 Solar, ‘Poor relief and English economic development’, p. 2, n. 11. 79 Smith, ‘Charity, self-interest and welfare in the English past’, p. 25. 80 P. M. Solar and R. M. Smith, ‘An old poor law for the new Europe? Reconciling local solidarity with labour mobility in early modern England’ in The economic future in historical perspective, ed. P. A. David and M. Thomas (Oxford, 2003), pp. 463-77. 81 S. King, ‘Poor relief and English economic development reappraised’, Economic History Review, 50 (1997), p. 361; S. Hindle, ‘Power, poor relief, and social relations in Holland Fen, c. 1600-1800’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), p. 94.

22 Thompson, Parochial, regional or national?

Appendix: Map of Suffolk Hundreds

Unincorporated Hundreds Incorporated Hundreds 1 Lackford 8 Hartismere (1779) 15 Loes (1765) 2 Blackbourne 9 Hoxne (1779) 16 Blything (1764) 3 Risbridge 10 Wangford (1764) 17 Cosford (1779) 4 Thingoe 11 Mutford and Lothingland 18 Carlford (1756) 5 Thedwestry 12 Stow (1778) 19 Wilford (1765) 6 Babergh 13 Bosmere and Claydon (1764) 20 Samford (1764) 7 Plomesgate 14 Thredling (1779) 21 Colneis (1756)

Boroughs 22 Bury St Edmunds (1747) 23 Ipswich 24 Sudbury (1702)

23