by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
Mr Lewin said he was a farmer who paid rates; he had told the girl many times of her fault, and it had got worse and worse; and was a bad one and saucy; they had borne with her as long as they could ; he had no thoughts of her settlement.1
Mr Lewin must have been very angry with Sarah. He seems to have forgotten that he paid a property tax to support the poor, and if he did not sack Sarah soon, there would be another resident of his parish that he was responsible for. Sarah herself admitted occasional oversleeping, but also said that her master had told her that sacking her in this way was always his plan. She was sent back to Great Staughton with £3 minus a shilling for the eight days she had not worked. She was not particularly concerned. When Mr Lewin told her not to expect a full year’s salary, she said that the idea never entered her head. This was not a court case about the rights of servants or a judgement on her work habits, and her relaxed attitude proved that she was aware of that.
This action was taken by Great Staughton to prove to the ratepayers of neighbouring parishes that they were not a ‘soft touch’. They won their case. Mr Lewin was not believed – partly because he went on to incriminate himself by saying that many employers in the area used the same methods. The parish of Swineshead was stuck with the now jobless Sarah. The cost of looking after her had not changed. Only the lawyers had benefitted.
Overseers were also prepared to use more strong-arm tactics and to send people much further away. Heaven help you if you became an orphan while living away from your parish of settlement. In 1810, the Suffolk Chronicle reported the fate of an 8-year-old Halifax child whose father had died. Rather than bearing the cost of feeding the orphan, or paying the premium for him to become an apprentice to a tradesman, he was sent back to Rutland, accompanied by the overseer at Halifax.
The overseer at Rutland took the boy in, paid the expenses of his removal, and then beat up the lad in front of the Halifax official. Later the Rutland overseer gave him some bread and cheese and a shilling and told him to make his own way back to Halifax, a distance of 150 miles. He was lucky enough to meet some soldiers with fifty miles to go; it was clear that he had been walking up to that point. The newspaper does not report the fate of the boy or the Halifax overseer; it was just another example of a system that created wastefulness and unnecessary cruelty.
Being born in a parish gave you settlement rights, and the overseers of the poor became worried by pregnant women. It sometimes reached the level of paranoia. According to the Cambridge Chronicle (1819):
…a woman by the name of Jane Bulman was seen in the Parish of Wicken. When the overseers of the Poor noticed that she was pregnant, they panicked and asked the magistrate for a removal order. However, she was neither a pauper, nor a recipient of relief and had no intention of staying in the area. The magistrate quashed the order and fined the overseers £2.
Sometimes pregnant women would be dumped in another Poor Law area prior to birth, or forced to marry somebody from another parish. Families who had lived and worked in a parish for years would be moved away if their circumstances changed and there was a fear that they would become a burden. There was particular discrimination against women, as they were more likely to be a burden on the parish if the main breadwinner had died. Many recently widowed young women had their worries added to by being forcibly removed by the overseers.
This story from Cumberland appeared in Kentish Gazette in June 1816. A poor Irish women, unnamed, was becoming a burden on the parish. She had been ill and was about to give birth or, in the delicate language of the time, she was at her accouchement. As the overseer was away, his wife took it upon herself to get rid of the woman, putting her on a cart and dumping her in the road in the neighbouring parish. Like many overseers of the poor in this period, this one hoped that money would make the problem go away:
The overseer having made pecuniary compensation…and pleaded guilty, and expected to have been discharged; but the Bench, determined to punish that which is in the highest degree reprehensible…and had been of late much practiced, fined the parties £5 or to remain in prison until such fine be paid.
The treatment of people in workhouses varied tremendously from place to place, depending on the desire to save money and the political situation. At the most extreme end, paupers were at the mercy of the bad temper of the aristocracy. There was a particularly shocking case in Somerset. Sir William Manners owned most of the houses in Ilchester and therefore felt entitled to control both the members that it sent to parliament. However, when voters proved hostile, he took the roofs off their houses and evicted them, thus taking their vote away; he built a workhouse to accommodate them instead. In 1818 his selected candidates for election, one of whom was his son, were not elected, and he closed the workhouse down in a fit of pique.
In January 1819, all of the staff and 163 inhabitants were evicted from the house and ended up sleeping on the streets, or using cattle cribs in the fields and barns. In one case of obtaining possession of a house, reported the Morning Chronicle, ‘a wagon load of soil from the common sewers was thrown in the room over them’ – ‘soil’ was very much a euphemism. The inflexible settlement system made moving away even more difficult than remaining. As ever, in the midst of starvation and homelessness, the moral dimension was never far away:
About 20 old men and women, pregnant women, young men and boys promiscuously huddled together in one common bed on the stone floor of the Town Hall, where the numbers have been reduced by the deaths of Ann Pope and Nelly Lye; and where one women daily expects the pangs of child-birth, without anything to divide or screen her from the view of people of different ages and sexes!
Many of these victims were not even paupers a few years earlier. The newly created paupers were given an allowance to find themselves shelter, but there was none to be had. When they strayed into neighbouring parishes they were forbidden relief and threatened with the county gaol.
The Rector, churchwardens, and principal citizens petitioned parliament in April 1819 for an investigation. Honourable members, while accepting the cruelty of the situation, felt that the Commons could not intervene on a matter which rested on the actions of an individual; actions that were not, in themselves, illegal. These houses and tenancies were property, so the Manners family had a perfect right to take the roofs off their houses and dispose of their other property in the town as they wished. The petition was withdrawn. The fact that the Manners had done nothing illegal was a reminder about the type of people who were making the laws. When MPs tried to console the poor with the idea that the law was open to all, the Westmoreland Gazette repeated the words of the reformer Horne Tooke on the subject – that the public house was also open to all, but was not a place of joy for those with no money.
It is not easy to see inside the workhouse or House of Industry in the Regency period, and less easy to make a judgement because of the massive differences between them. The Swansea workhouse advertised its own virtues in a long notice in July 1817 and it gave some insights into attitudes and living conditions.
They reported that that they had acquired a new, convenient building, quite cheaply. It had a kitchen, an oven, and a system of ropes and pulleys around the oven, which allowed them to boil 110lbs of potatoes at any one time. This potato-cooking contraption cost £20 but could cost-effectively feed 120 people at a time with potatoes and broth. In a further attempt to be cheap, the inmates were living on hard biscuit rather than wheaten bread. The organisers vowed to replace this with proper wheaten bread when the price fell. The weekly diet was typical of many workhouses:
Diet – Breakfast, water gruel, with three ounces of bread. Dinners, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, half a pound of fresh meat (butchers weight), boiled, and one pound of potatoes. Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the broth made from the meat, with a little oatmeal and potatoes…At present we have varied it by cutting cabbages previously steamed, into a broth, and substituting occasionally four ounces of bread for the potatoes. Saturday, fish and potatoes, with any of the
remaining scraps. Supper, the same as breakfast.
The dietary highlight of the week was cabbage soup. The cost was clearly calculated at 2s 4d per person. The workhouse also had a kitchen garden, which it hoped would soon contribute cheap food and redeeming work for the poor.
The workhouse was not there to provide financially profitable work. It was not possible, as soon became obvious. ‘Experience has proved that no manufacturing or general business can be carried out at a trading profit in a house of industry’, admitted the Swansea report. If a workhouse could provide profitable work, then the poor-but-guiltless would be employed outside the workhouse doing it, where the highlight of the week would be something more interesting than cabbage. The job of the Swansea house of industry was twofold: to reduce the price of pauperism, and to inculcate good habits into the poor in the future.
The workhouse report goes on to admit that most of their inmates have no handicraft skills at all. So the inmates have to be occupied doing work that was unskilled and not required on the outside. Their economically meaningless but morally important work of choice was picking oakum – unravelling thick ropes for the fibres – which defrayed half the cost of feeding the paupers. Beds were made of wrought iron, which prevented vermin and were cheap, as the economic depression had caused a collapse in raw material prices. Mattresses were thin linen cloth stuffed with straw. The price of straw was being watched keenly by the overseers and they fretted that it was more expensive in Swansea than elsewhere. There were few treats in the workhouse, though tobacco was available for the most industrious men.
The report announced with a level of grim satisfaction that half of their inmates were children because they had stopped paying Speenhamlandstyle outdoor relief and instead had started taking in the children of the poor and leaving their parents outside:
Whenever the latter [parents] are incapable of maintaining their children, we have taken a proportion of them into the house, by which the man himself is saved of the disgrace of being a pauper; being independent of his employer he can make a better bargain with him, and his children are brought up in the habits of cleanliness, industry and morality.
The overseers at Swansea were genuinely angry that the local employers were providing starvation wages, but their response was to take away ‘surplus children’ to allow workers to make ‘a better bargain’ with their employers. They were not suggesting a trade union style negotiation (throughout the Regency, unions were illegal), merely that with fewer children to feed, wages would go further. Wage rates were already depressed because employers had to pay a property tax to support the children in the House of Industry – who were there because wages were depressed. It was the most vicious of circles.
These captured children were educated from age 5 to 9 – reading but not usually writing – and then taught mostly low-skilled trades, which would mean flooding the market with even more hat makers, tailors, cobblers and basket makers that would eventually increase poverty. It was a system with no future; there was no radical reform in our period; there would be improvements in the future, but of the ungenerous kind.
One newspaper, from a correspondent who called himself ‘PHILANTHROPY’, shows how the desire for a tougher Poor Law was building up. He starts with attitudes that we would recognise today. Poverty was terrible and individual charity didn’t help because it was unpredictable and could not cope with long-term, deep-rooted problems. He criticised the Poor Law system; the support was different in different areas, people were tied to their parish, there needed to be a national system. At this point, it seems that PHILANTHROPY is a visionary with views similar to ours. However, he turns out merely to be a visionary who predicted the New Poor Law of the 1830s.2
He then suggested:
an establishment of district workhouses for the purpose of giving some kind of employment to all who are able and separate houses for the abandoned and vile, with a remedy for the corruption of morals, which has ended to increase pauperism; and also for a proposition for regulating wages, for want of which the poor laws have increased
His vision was to come true. In 1834, larger workhouses were set up with a new, crueller regime, and outdoor relief was (in theory) abolished. Outdoor relief went the same way as independent domestic work, rights to use common land and the protection of apprenticeships. The treatment of the poor continued to be a problem after the Regency period, for just like today, we try to solve the problems of poverty by dealing with the consequences rather than the causes of it.
Chapter 7
Cold Charity
The Regency period is full of examples of the rich being helped by the poor. The poor did the fighting against Napoleon, and then the sailors and soldiers were demobilised into poverty. The poor paid taxes on bread to keep aristocratic rents high; they paid tax on everything else in order to abolish the Property Tax, and they were evicted from the smallholding by enclosure, losing land and entitlements held in their families for generations. There was a rapid and brutal descent into poverty for the lower orders in the relatively short period of thirty years.
It was not a one-way street, however. The rich also helped the poor, but the rules were different. It was conditional help, and one major assumption ran through it. It was the simple, brutal, universally held belief that the lower orders in their natural state were idle, would not work at all if they could get away with it, and would do something far worse if they had the spare time. William Hutton, a dissenting bookseller from Birmingham and no particular enemy of the poor, put this comment in his diary (1795):
If a man can support his family with 3 days of labour, he will not work six … If the body is unemployed, it becomes a nursery of disease. If the mind is unemployed, a languor commences, and a man becomes a burthen to himself.
All attempts to alleviate the poor had this idea in the forefront. Idleness was far more dangerous than poverty.
The second popular principle was that it was a mistake to give money to the poor. You had no control over how it was spent, and the poor, in their demoralised state, would waste it. An article in the Leeds Intelligencer, reprinted nationally, put forward the idea that the poor should be given provisions instead of money – ‘by this method the possibility of the money being spent improperly will be done away with’:
A Correspondent suggests, that, to give provision instead of money, to the distressed poor, would be the most proper mode of really relieving wants. Suppose a family of 5, the husband out of employ, the wife unable and the children too young to work, should be relieved at 7 shillings per week; instead of money, supply them with provisions, viz
One Stone of Flour 2s 4 d
Half a stone of oatmeal 10d
Meat 2s 10d
1 ounce tea 5d
Half a pound of sugar 4d
One peck potatoes 7d
Six soup tickets 6d
Total 7 shilling.1
This gives a lot of insights into the attitudes of the time. Children were clearly designed for work and needed to reduce family poverty. Work was their natural state – it explains how parents in mill towns were able to send their children into factories relatively easily, without the reservations people would have today.
With an allowance of flour they were clearly meant to produce their own bread. This shows no understanding of the domestic arrangements of the poor, who mostly bought bread from shops. In the same newspaper, 200lb of flour of the worst quality cost £2 8s. If the poor could buy this, they would survive; but this was four weeks wages for a weaver, and the poor could not buy in such bulk. The two shillings or so allocated to flour by the rich commentator worked mathematically but not in the real world of the poor.
There was a lot of oatmeal gruel in the suggested diet. Meat at these allowances would produce no more than bacon and offal. A peck of potatoes is about 9 kilos, which would be about fifty medium size potatoes per week. That would be seven potatoes per week per person if distributed evenly. The inclusion of tea and sugar showed how entrenched the
se non-nutritional foods had become into the diet of the poor. It seems that the only vegetables to be found would be in the charity soups. Rent is not mentioned at all. The author also admits that there is no provision for coal, and says that he feels that there was probably a way that the money for this could be earned – thus destroying the whole basis of his argument that the poor can survive without money. Neither would this family buy a newspaper, a toy for their children, or a subscription to a burial club. It looked a little like Caribbean slavery, and for humanitarian reasons the trade in slaves was abolished in 1807. There was no such sympathetic feeling for the British lower orders.
The most formalised way of helping people in distress was the subscription society. Many of these societies were designed to help formerly well-established people who had hit hard times rather than the truly poor. The ‘National Benevolent Society for the Relief of Distressed People in the Middle Ranks of Life’ was formed in Gloucester in 1812 with the belief that not enough was being done for this respectable (but now neglected) class. Considering the immense suffering of the rest of the country in 1812, there was a sense of entitlement here. The Institute’s 1815 report records that they had raised £1,835 and provided fifteen persons including the daughter of a clergymen, aged 71, who had found herself in the workhouse ‘with persons of low reputation and suffering terrible privations’; the widow of an officer who had been shot during the war with France; the wife of a chief justice, and the widow of a soldier who had been forced to sell his commission in the army. Not only were these people not ‘the deserving poor’, they were often not poor at all, just members of the establishment who had had some bad luck.