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.