3.4 New Poor Law Flashcards
Who were the Whigs
One of the two main political parties in Britain between the late 17th and 19th centuries
They were traditionally associated with political, religious and social reform and by the middle of the 19th century they’d been absorbed into the New Liberal Party
Why did the Whig Government of 1832 set up the Royal Commission of Enquiry into the Poor Law
Long term concerns:
- The increasing cost of poor relief
- the growing belief that those administrating Poor Law were corrupt or exploited the laws for their own benefit
- Systems such as the Speenhamland and Roundsman did nothing to encourage labourers or bring them out of the cycle of poverty
Immediate concerns:
- Swing Riots
- Wars with France
Royal Commission of Enquiry into the Operation of the Poor Laws
- Consisted of nine commissioners (two of the most notable = Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick
- Gathered information using three different types of questionnaires - one sent to parishes in rural areas and the other sent to parishes in towns
- 10% of all parishes replied
Strengths of the Royal Commission
- Commissioners were educated and experienced in economy and charity
- variation in questions asked = gathered info about various urban and rural areas
- actually began to take charge in changing a faulty system
- covered one fifth of the country
- all information was published into 13 volumes by the commissioners
Weaknesses of the Royal Commission
- questionnaires weren’t compulsory = some areas didn’t complete it = unequal
- only 10% of all parishes replied = unrepresentative of the entire population
- Commission made up questions = may be biased towards a particular concern
- Questions were leading and interviews weee skewed
What did the Royal Commissioners Report recommend?
- Workhouses should be separated for the aged and infirm, children, able bodied women and able bodied men
- Parishes should become unions to provide for their workhouses
- Relief outside of the workhouse shall cease to exist whilst the conditions of the workhouse are kept horrific to only attract the most desperate and unwilling
- Centralise the authority to make and enforce regulations regarding the workhouse system
1834 Poor Law Amendment Act: AIMS
- a central authority should be set up = supervise implementation and regulate the admin of the poor law
- parishes were grouped = Poor Law Unions = provide relief efficiently
- Poor Law union = establish workhouse = inmates lived in worse conditions than the poorest independent labourer
- outdoor relief was discouraged but not abolished
Set up the Poor Law Commission
Poor Law Commission
Was established to administer the Poor Law Amendment Act throughout the country
Poor Law Commission: the Commissioners
- Thomas Frankland Lewis: Tory MP involved in Sturges-Bourne’s
- George Nicholls: Bank of England official and former radical overseer in Nottingham under the Old Poor Law
- John Show-Leferve: lawyer and former Whig MP and under Secretary of State for war and colonies
- Edwin Chadwick: secretary to the commission and Utilitarian lawyer
Poor Law Commission: their work 1934-47
- Transfer of out of work and underemployed workers in rural areas to urban = more employment
- Protection of urban ratepayers due to the sudden increase of demand from rural migrants prior to getting regular employment
Aims of poor law policy
- decrease the cost of providing relief to the poor
- ensure only genuine destituye receive relief - provide a national poor relief system
Powers of the Poor Law Commission
Independent from parliament :
-ve as it meant no spokesman in parliament to defend them from criticism from MPs and in public media = they were hated
Powerful constitutional position but no direct power
- established by parliament but didn’t have direct power in making parishes do what they wanted
How the Poor Law Commission tackled their first scheme of work:
Transfer of out of work and underemployed workers in rural areas to urban = more employment
- Set up a programme of workhouse construction to reduce able bodied pauperism but they only did this as they assumed outdoor relief would stop. Therefore:
- Throughout the 1830s they started issuing orders to specific unions in the rural south to stop outdoor relief to able bodied
- 1842 extended to the rural north o
- 1844 General Outdoor relief Prohibitory Order applied to all unions and forbade outdoor relief to able bodied poor
How the Poor Law Commission tackled their second scheme of work:
Settlement laws were used in order to distribute the cost of maintaining paupers fairly amongst rural and urban parishes.
By 1840 = 40,000 removed from parishes to be relocated back in their parishes of settlement however this cost a lot of money
Less eligibility- architecture and design
Designed to instil discipline in the pauper and act as a deterrent to future paupers
- Sampson Kempthorne designed 1. Y shaped workhouse and 2. The X shaped workhouse
- The former was surrounded by a hexagonal wall with the masters bedroom in the middle of the Y and the latter was surrounded by a square boundary
- These designs = segregation and division of paupers = efficiently provides for each class in the workhouse adding to the deterrence factor
- Loss of individuality as people became impersonal units
Less eligibility - rules and routine
- Entry = medical inspection and families separated (children were allowed to stay with their mothers until they were around 7
- Separation of family was justified by the notion that the pauper had already given up all responsibilities for his family so he doesn’t need to see them
- children = sent to school in workhouse until nine or ten then apprenticed w/o parental consent or knowledge (often to cotton mills in Lancashire)
- Paupers had to wear workhouse uniforms (usually ill-fitted)
- Men were given a razor to shave and all had to take a weekly bath monitored by staff so no self harm = no personal privacy
- No personal lockers for personal possessions = lack of individuality
- Monotonous timetable everyday w/prayers at the beginning and end of the day.
Less eligibility - work
- aim: rehabilitate paupers to restore them to the outside workforce
= had to be available to the locality of the workhouse and possible to carry out within the workhouse - it couldn’t diminish employment outside of the workhouse that the able-bodied workers lost their work and became paupers
- commissioners also made it so that the work could pay more than it cost the workhouse to maintain the pauper and if it did = no incentive to return the pauper to the labour market
Work done as a result:
- some (mainly women and kids) maintained the workhouse = laundry, kitchen, sick rooms and worked as cleaners, childminders etc.
- men = dispiriting and monotonous work: chopping wood, weaving sacks, smashing limestone (equated to the labour of a convict)
Less eligibility - diets
- food enough to sustain work life but also served to degrade and disciple
- Poor Law commissioners issued six model diets from which the board of guardians could choose from (usually suited the cost)
- these diets aimed to sustain life as well as make mealtimes boring and tedious so food = no pleasure
- meals were delivered to maintain repressive uniformity: melas in silence and if weighed they were made cold
- the food was often poor quality with poor preparation and many workhouses denied the paupers cutlery
Less eligibility - discipline
- functioned on a complex system of punishment and reward to maintain order
- rewards = material like food, pocket money or a ‘clean’ job
- clear distinction between the favoured and the disliked
- thee disciplinary systems lacked legal backing as they were more tradition = varied from union to union
However PLC laid down specific punishments = punishment book made and recorded in
- new system = guardians had less power over punishment methods e.g. women and girls couldn’t be beaten and food could be rationed but there was a limit
- order = difficult to maintain when paupers were freely mobile (could leave and come back to workhouse as many times as they wanted and guardians couldn’t refuse
Less eligibility - children
- weren’t held responsible for their own poverty
- received basic workhouse education, medical care and at ages 9 or 10 they were apprenticed
- however education = rudimentary to the extreme and could be apprenticed by anyone, far away from their family; weren’t allowed to leave the workhouse out of their own free will and if they ran = found and returned
This made them institutionalised and unable to survive outside of the workhouse - 1870 Education Act = put elementary school system in charge of pauper kid’s education
Less eligibility - new paupers
- outdoor relief = never abolished after 1834 Act = can’t generalise pauper population receiving education
Workhouse =
- for young people: temporary shelter and solution to unemployment = frequently taken in and out due to variables such as seasonality of employment
- for vagrants: considered less deserving than the ‘settled’ poor and usually given an overnight stay. Aim: get rid of them ASAP
- for elderly: shelter and sustenance till death (more men that women as women were able to take domestic roles with their relatives)
- for children: represented 25-40% of all admissions - both long and short term stay as some families, some born in workhouse or some orphans
- single women: couldn’t claim relief and made up most of the workhouse community
- mentally ill: from per 100 inmates to 1 per 8 inmates as the century progressed
Who opposed the New Poor Law
- people who struggled to work outside the workhouse as it is undermined
- Humanitarians
- Paupers forced into the workhouse
- due to cyclical unemployment (seasonal) short term relief was probably needed
- poor law commission wasn’t the government
- the centralisation of the PLC = resented by many in the midlands and the north who believed they had limited knowledge of the industrial conditions
Why people opposed the New Poor Law - rumour and propaganda
- Paupers believed union workhouses = extermination camps where paupers = killed to keep rates low
- ‘Book of Murder’ - incorrectly believed to be the work of the PL commissioners - contained suggestions of gassing children
- Devon: believed bread distributed (outdoor relief) was poisoned
- Many anti-Poor Law campaigners believed that New Poor Law was introduced to decrease the National wage bill
Why people opposed the New Poor Law - genuine fears
- many attacked centralisation of the New Poor Law due to it being London based = no knowledge of life outside the city
- New Poor Law = break traditional paternalistic bonds between the rich and the poor
- Rural ratepayers realised that outdoor relief was cheaper than indoor relief and were worried that a programme of workhouse building would lead to higher jot lower poor rates
- Ratepayers in northern industrial areas, prone to cyclical unemployment, realised that to build a workhouse large enough to contain all those who might need relief, would be an enormously costly undertaking if not impossible
