THE IMPACT of PAUPER SETTLEMENT 1691-1834* I a Woman Having a Settlement Married a Man with None: the Question Was
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James Stephen Taylor Past and Present n° 73, November 1976 THE IMPACT OF PAUPER SETTLEMENT 1691-1834* I A woman having a settlement Married a man with none: The question was. He being dead, If that she had, was gone? Quoth Sir John Pratt — Her settlement Suspended did remain, Living the husband: But, him dead, It doth revive again. Chorus of Puisne Judges Living the husband: But, him dead, It doth revive again. W. S. GILBERT MAY NEVER HAVE KNOWN OF THE KINDRED LYRICIST who wrote this anonymous verse in the early eighteenth century, but his work must have been familiar to those thousands of English- men who had reason to study guides to the statutes and judicial precedents collectively known as the Law of Settlement.1 Very simply, as it obtained between 1691 and 1834, the Law of Settlement (hereafter called the Law) established the circumstances under which an English or Welsh unit of poor law administration (hereafter called the parish) became liable to provide poor relief to an individual, and the legal means of deporting, under certain conditions, the individual (hereafter called the sojourner) who had no legal right to relief from the parish in which he dwelled.2 But the Law was not simple, and generations of lawyers derived income from litigious parish officers, intent on saving their parish from as many paupers as possible. So intricate in its applications, the Law could appear deceptively clear at the outset of a pauper * I wish to thank Professor A. H. John for inviting me to present an earlier version of this essay at a seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, Univ. of London, Michaelmas Term, 1972. I owe a special note of thanks to Mr. Peter Kennedy and Mr. Michael Dickinson, County Archivist and Senior Assistant Archivist of Devon, for assistance and advice on numerous occasions over the past fifteen years. 1 The verse is found in Richard Burn's classic compendium, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, 20th edn., 4 vols. (London, 1805), iii, p. 766. In ibid., pp. 689-90, Gilbert could also have found a pauper settlement case reminiscent of the "most ingenious paradox" flummoxing Frederic in the Pirates of Penzance. Burn's manual ran through thirty editions between 1755 and 1869. 1 The civil parish was the most common unit of poor law administration, although there were divisions and unions of parishes for various times, places and purposes. THE IMPACT OF PAUPER SETTLEMENT 1691-1834 43 settlement dispute. The path was wide into the enchanted wood but, if one entered, it was all too easy to lose the way in a labyrinth that only a Judge Pratt could follow. The Law is not a promising source for the humorous couplet or metaphor when one moves from litigation to the poor themselves, for lives could be dramatically, often tragically, altered by a legal nicety. Jeremy Bentham used a grimmer metaphor when he ironically assessed the Law's apparent intent: "The notion seems to be that the prosperity of the hive depends upon the extirpation of the working bees".3 This was extreme, but most of his contemporaries shared his belief that the Law was, in the main, nonsensical, inhumane and economically benighted, and most historians have accepted the contemporary consensus.4 The basic criticism of the Law is that it inhibited the physical mobility of paupers and those whose conditions of life made it seem likely that at some future time they would require poor relief — that is, the majority of the work force. The Law "ensured that the rural labourer, at least, should become not unlike the shell-fish, which cling to the rocks and let the drifting tide bring them their daily food", wrote Dorothy Marshall.6 "Charity in the grip of Serfdom" is Sidney and Beatrice Webb's colloquial assessment of the pre- 1834 Poor 'aw m general, and it was the Law, as here defined, that "gripped" the poor.6 The Webbs take as their point of departure the so-called Settlement Act of 1662, and provide a succinct summation of the criticism: The Law of Settlement and Removal inflicted, during the ensuing couple of centuries, so much hardship on individuals) and indirectly, also on the whole body of manual-working wage-earners; may be assumed to have interfered so seriously with the economic prosperity of the community, and certainly involved such a colossal and long-continued waste of public funds, that it demands a detailed examination.7 a "Fragment on Settlement", 1786: University College London, Bentham MS., box cli/16. 'Adam Smith wrote the most well-known assessment in The Wealth of Nations (London, 1776), pp. 169-76. Burn, Bentham, Frederick Eden, T. R. Malthus, Patrick Colquohoun and Sidney Smith were other critics, although they were not entirely in agreement. Eden, for example, believed that Adam Smith exaggerated the Law's significance: The State of the Poor, 3 vols. (London, r797)> JJ P- 181. The fullest appraisal is by a former Chadwick lieutenant, George Coode, Report to the Poor Law Board on the Law of Settlement and Removal of the Poor, Parliamentary] P[apers], 1851 (675), xxvi (hereafter Coode). This report, which included a historical assessment, influenced Sidney and Beatrice Webb's English Poor Law History, Part I, The Old Poor Law (London, 1927), ch. v. The Webbs provide the best bibliography of contemporary pamphlet literature. For typical later criticism, see A. W. Ashby, One Hundred Years of Poor Law Administration in a Warwickshire Village (Oxford, 1912), p. 80; and J. D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd edn. (London, 1966), p. 266. 5 Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1926), p. 248. • Webb, The Old Poor Law, p. 396. 7 Ibid., p. 315. 44 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 73 In a powerful synthesis, supported by a wealth of illustration, the Webbs thereupon set forth the most detailed examination the Law has ever received from historians.8 Yet even the Webbs approach the Law obliquely, in the context of their larger synthesis of the pre-1834 poor law. Indeed, there are no separate and general historical assessments of the Law. This is curious. Perhaps the legal complexity of the Law, however interesting it may have been on occasion to the legal mind, is inhibiting, especially to those who assume that the Law was, as the Webbs have described it, a "Framework of Repression": the Law may thus appear to deserve an important place in the litany of poor law criticism, but its main lines are thought to be relatively clear. Of course the Webbs' assessment of the pre-1834 Poor law *s not unchallenged, but the most common alternative to their view of pauper settlement is that it did not matter much. E. J. Hobsbawm, who warns in another context against rejecting "the consensus of informed and intelligent contemporaries", believes that the consensus was wrong in this instance, and that the effect of the Law, on the employment tenure of the rural poor at any rate, "was almost certainly only of marginal importance".9 Thus, to those who see the Law's impact as baneful, and to those who believe it was of minor import, further appraisal may in itself appear marginally important. This is no more than a guess; whatever the actual reasons for this lacuna in poor-law scholarship, misconceptions are the inevitable consequence. T. S. Ashton, for example, wrote: "If a man left the parish in which he was domiciled, and remained in another for a full year, he lost his right to relief in the first and established a claim to it in the second". This is not so. More recently Michael Rose, himself a student of the poor law, wrote that the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act "failed to make any drastic change" in the Law. This was not, in fact, the case. Finally, without exception, the importance of the backward-looking, largely transient and ineffective Settlement Act of 1662 has been exaggerated.10 Not all misconceptions deserve lengthy correction, but in this case they are symptomatic of an overall misconception of an important aspect of English poor law history and a subject that may deserve 8 Ibid., ch. v. ' The warning was made in defence of the pessimistic view of "The British Standard of Living, 1790-1850", Earn. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., x (1957-8), p. 46; and the rejection, in the context of the "proletarianisation of the farm-labourer", in E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rud£, Captain Swing (London, 1969), p. 46. The latter view may rest partly on the paucity of surviving removal orders (i.e., those whose dislodgement by the Law can be counted), but perhaps more to a perception of the conditions of life of the agricultural labourer. 10 T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution (London, 1948), p. no (E. Halevy had made the same mistake: England in 181s, New York, 1924 edn., p. 212); Michael Rose, The English Poor Law, 1780-1930 (London, 1971), p. 191 (post- 1834 editions of Burn may have influenced Rose). THE IMPACT OF PAUPER SETTLEMENT 1691-1834 45 its own modest place in a list of those factors contributing to English economic growth in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The purpose of this essay is to provide a historical framework in which to view the Law, and then to speculate on the social and economic impact the Law may have had between 1691 and 1834. No attempt will be made to subject the Law itself to detailed exposition, for there are many excellent legal treatises that do this well enough.11 As for the specific applications and consequences of the Law, this essay attempts only a few illustrations, partly because the format is insufficient to do otherwise, but also because still more work on the local level is needed.12 Three hypotheses are implicit in what follows.