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Welfare Priorities and Pauper Choices in the Metropolis Under the Old Poor Law, 1718-18241

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Welfare Priorities and Pauper Choices in the Metropolis Under the Old Poor Law, 1718-18241 Indoors or Outdoors? Welfare priorities and pauper choices in the metropolis under the Old Poor Law, 1718-18241 Jeremy Boulton, Newcastle University „It is an established maxim, that is it prejudicial to give money to out-pensioners‟ (Jonas Hanway, 1780). Introduction One of the most striking - and still not well understood - features of many eighteenth century parish welfare systems is surely the survival of outdoor relief in parishes that built workhouses under the 1723 „Workhouse Test Act‟. That act was avowedly designed to deter those in need from applying for poor relief by applying the workhouse test. Those refusing to enter the new workhouses could, quite legally, be denied poor relief. The new workhouses would instil much needed work discipline, reduce the overall costs of poor relief and perhaps improve the morals and manners of those incarcerated. Workhouses spread quite rapidly in the eighteenth century. By the mid eighteenth century Hindle reports around 600, housing some 30,000 inmates and by 1777 there were almost 2,000 workhouses in the country. It has been estimated that by 1782 „a third of all parishes, and probably more, either had their own or had access to one through incorporation or contract‟.2 However, as Paul Slack pointed out some time ago, „it is questionable... whether deterrence worked in anything more than the shortest of short terms‟. Moreover it was doubtful if workhouses ever succeeded in reducing overall spending on the poor in the long term. „More often, outdoor relief for both impotent and able-bodied slowly returned, not only and inevitably in large towns such as Hull, Liverpool and Leeds, but in smaller places like Eaton Socon, Bedfordshire‟.3 Perhaps particularly surprising is the well-documented survival not merely of casual one-off payments but of regular parish pensions paid to the poor in their own homes - despite the fact that room might be available in the parish workhouse. As Richard Smith (in his pioneering 1998 article), Steve Hindle, Alannah Tomkins and others have demonstrated it was indeed common in those parishes which built workhouses for outdoor pensions to either return or remain, albeit at reduced levels.4 The survival of outdoor relief alongside indoor relief makes it very difficult for those studying welfare in the eighteenth century. Firstly, where workhouses were built, the number of outdoor pensions granted and their average value was usually reduced, even if not 1 All papers deriving from larger research projects inevitably accumulate a number of debts. I would, in particular, like to thank my colleague Leonard Schwarz, who is co-director of the Pauper Biographies Project, for his support. John Black, Peter Jones, Rhiannon Thompson and, latterly, Tim Wales collected some of the raw material on which this paper is based. Alison Kenney and other staff at COWAC have been exceptionally helpful and obliging since the Pauper Biographies Project commenced in 2004. 2 Paul Slack, The English Poor Law 1531-1782, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 43; Steve Hindle, On the parish?:the micro-politics of poor relief in rural England, c.1550-1750 (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 187. 3 Slack, The English Poor Law, 42. 4 Richard. 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 P. Johnson and P. Thane, eds, Old Age from Antiquity to Post- Modernity (London: Routledge, 1998), 86-7; Hindle, On the parish?, 186-91; Alannah. Tomkins, The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1723-82. Parish, charity and credit (Manchester: MUP, 2006), 43-50. 1 abolished altogether. This is because such institutions typically cared for those in their declining years, who might otherwise have existed on increasingly large pensions. As Richard pointed out: If sizeable numbers were being removed from the pension lists through their placement in the workhouse this could have been a practice which would have had the effect of reducing the observed size of the pensions paid as forms of outdoor relief and recorded in the Poor Law accounts At Tavistock (Devon) the opening of the workhouse in 1747 had the effect of reducing the average number of parish pensioners from 109 to 64 between 1735-6 and 1760-1, and the average weekly pension fell from 1s 3d to 1s 0d.5 Tomkins in her study of parishes in Oxford, Shrewsbury and York similarly reported: The distribution of out-relief in the three towns was never decisively ended by the use of the workhouse test in the mid –eighteenth century. As elsewhere, attempts to compel all of the poor to enter the house lasted only for short periods after which pension and other payments began again. Fluctuations in total overseers‟ spending, and the proportions of the total spent on either pensions or workhouses, illustrate the emphasis placed on different components of poor relief in each parish.6 In her towns parish pension lists were commonly reduced in size by the application of the workhouse test.7 Clearly, as Richard argued, attempts to measure average size of pension and the number of pensioners are subject to great uncertainty caused by the presence or absence of a parish workhouse and the ways in which such institutions functioned within the patchwork of local welfare systems that made up early modern England. Workhouse admissions policy may also have impacted particularly on the treatment and position of the elderly, particularly elderly females. The elderly formed an expensive component of those receiving parish pensions. A rise in the sex ratio of those granted pensions suggested to Richard there might have been some increase in the institutionalization of the elderly female in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was, however, the ideal to support the elderly in their own homes, rather than ending their days, in Malthus‟s words „in noise and unquietness among strangers, and wait their last moments forlorn and separated from all they hold dear‟.8 The fact that workhouses co-existed with outdoor relief in various forms, of course, is something of an elephant in the room for those who use workhouse admission registers alone to look at local patterns of poor relief. Although such studies can provide striking findings, it is frequently the case that little context can be provided regarding patterns of outdoor relief in those same localities. The 1803 returns confirm the obvious point for London. For every hundred people in the workhouses of the capital (which was itself unusually reliant on indoor relief) there were often hundreds more relieved in their own homes, either „permanently‟ or temporarily. As David Green has noted „In terms of numbers, though not necessarily cost, outdoor paupers far exceeded those receiving relief inside a workhouse or other institution‟. Although interpreting the data from the 1803 returns is not straightforward, „in London as a whole the outdoor poor comprised about 60 per cent of all permanent paupers‟. Data on the total numbers relieved in St Marylebone (which had one of the biggest workhouses in London) 1821-33 show that the numbers of casual poor fluctuated enormously over time but 5 Smith, „Ageing and well-being‟, 77, 84, 89-90. 6 Tomkins, Experience of Urban Poverty, 43. 7 Ibid., 43-5. 8 Smith, „Ageing and well-being‟, 90-1. 2 was never less than 40 per cent of those relieved by the parish.9 This is a particular problem for those looking at individual experiences within any particular welfare system, since those inhabiting a parish workhouse might have received various forms of out relief while they were resident, or more often in periods when they were outside. Since length of stay in workhouses was usually short it is very likely that many of those who experienced indoor relief sought other forms of outdoor poor relief.10 This paper attempts to shed more light on the relationship between outdoor and indoor relief, which lies at the heart of Richard‟s interest in welfare, the parish and the elderly. It does this via a case study of one large metropolitan parish, that of St Martin in the Fields, between 1724 and 1824. The principal focus will be on how the poor experienced indoor and outdoor relief, and how the form and nature of that relief changed over time. The aim of the paper is to analyse the extent to which outdoor relief co-existed with indoor relief. Particular attention is paid in this paper to the immediate impact of the parish workhouse when it opened in 1725 since the later period has been, to some extent, covered in a previous publication.11 Surviving documentation is exceptionally revealing about the transition from an outdoor to an indoor relief system in 1725 and about what actually happened to hundreds of parish pensioners faced with an unpleasant and probably unforeseen dilemma. As Steve Hindle puts it „the workhouse test presented paupers with a stark choice between total and institutional dependence on the one hand and complete reliance on their own resources on the other‟.12 The paper begins by setting out the poor relief system as it existed on the eve of the introduction of the workhouse, sets out the dramatic changes that occurred in its first ten years of operation, and then briefly surveys the later inter-relationships between indoor and outdoor relief. The local welfare system of St Martin in the Fields in 1724 St Martin‟s was an enormous urban district of about 40,000 people in the early eighteenth century located in the West End of London. Unfortunately for our purposes it lost the parish of St George Hanover Square which was carved out in 1725. Although difficult to estimate exactly, our parish probably lost about one third of its population, and a significant number of wealthy parishioners, as a consequence of this division.
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