Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 312

These two studies offer some important new conclusions about the English poor law system. This is a significant achievement in itself, given the number of previous books, articles and chapters on the subject. In fact, both are likely to become required reading for students of the subject.

Despite the crowded field, each monograph marks out new territory. McIntosh’s national study offers a powerful corrective to existing orthodoxy, by claiming that the 1598 and 1601 Elizabethan statutes really represented only the culmination of a process of parochial levies for the poor begun by Edwardian legislation in 1552. By contrast, Williams’s monograph achieves what a number of other studies have promised, but which they have rarely delivered, namely a thorough dissection of how the poor law actually operated within the parish in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

McIntosh’s book is the fruit of almost thirty years of detailed archival reconstruction in which she has identified the records of 1,005 hospitals and almshouses in operation between the mid-fourteenth and the late sixteenth centuries, not to mention churchwardens’ accounts from 206 parishes between 1404 and 1598. She uses these materials to substantiate several arguments.

Firstly, she suggests that the variety, sufficiency and reach of late medieval parochial charity, and endowed institutions, was much greater in extent than has sometimes been suggested. While almshouses tended to concentrate their efforts on the elderly and the sick, their levels of provision probably met the prevalent levels of need, as well as being motivated by the purgatorial imperatives of the founders. Indeed, one could argue (although McIntosh does not), that institutional care may have been particularly important in a late medieval society characterized by high death-rates, comparatively sparse kinship networks and potentially high levels of geographical mobility.

Secondly, the dissolution of these parish endowments had an acute and immediate effect on provision for the poor within these parishes. McIntosh shows the creative way in which many parishes sought to convert their parochial endowments or simply to hide them from the commissioners charged with dissolving the chantries and other ‘superstitious’ uses after 1547. Even so, she emphasizes that the problem of poor relief generated innovative national and local responses. Nationally, the (historically neglected) statute of 1552 empowered churchwardens to record the names of all those capable of contributing to the relief of the poor, and then to nominate two collectors, who were to ‘gently ask and demand of every man and woman what they of their charity will be contented to give weekly towards the relief of the poor’. The recalcitrant were to be brought before the bishop, while the collectors were to render quarterly accounts to the parish. McIntosh has done very important research on these ephemeral paper accounts, showing that, although rare, they survive often and widely enough to indicate that the system probably operated nationally with some degree of uniformity.

Thus, McIntosh suggests that all subsequent Elizabethan statutes (in 1564, 1572 and 1598) were, to some degree, merely developments of this initial departure, not radically new steps. She also explains something that has often puzzled the reviewer: why the ‘Elizabethan Poor Law’ appears to have been adopted so swiftly, completely and comprehensively, in southern England at least. The definitive answer now appears to be that parishes had already had half a century of practice!

Williams’s study is regional, rather than national, in scope, but it deserves a wide readership. She focuses on two Bedfordshire parishes, one the village of Campton, with 449 inhabitants in 1831, 80 per cent of whom were (under-) employed in agriculture, the other the small market town of Shefford, with 763 inhabitants in 1831, 40 per cent of whose families were employed in manufactures or trade. Both were located in the classic ‘Speenhamland’ region of rural immiseration during the Napoleonic era, where low wages, agrarian under-employment and (some) declines in rural industries led to an increasing dependence on poor relief, wage subsidies, work-fare schemes and the family allowances loathed by Malthusian reformers.

This study is particularly important because it deals with the issue of rural poor relief in the round. Firstly, it gives meticulous consideration to the range of relief payments provided by these parishes, both weekly pensions and occasional payments, as well as the effects of payments in kind (clothing and footwear), and for services (particularly medical care). Secondly, it explores the changing profile of recipients in great detail. As in other studies, Williams finds an increase in the number of able-bodied families receiving relief, but only really during the crisis years after 1795. Her nuanced analysis shows that relief was targeted, with the most generous pensions continuing to go to those deemed ‘most deserving’ (widows, single-parent families, and orphans), and other payments being spread quite widely, but quite thinly, too. As a consequence, Williams finds no evidence to support the Malthusian critique that generous payments to pauper families encouraged ‘improvident marriages’, because the levels of payment were supplementary, and declined in value in real terms between 1795 and 1834. Thirdly, Williams devotes attention to the payers of poor rates, an essential but not wholly sympathetic group, who are sometimes overlooked in studies of poor relief. She shows that the rapid increases in expenditure after 1795 were matched by significant increases in the number of ratepayers, with perhaps 40 per cent of Shefford’s population constituting rate-paying families by 1821 (but paying for recipients who perhaps amounted to only 12–17 per cent of the population). She then explores the local and national ‘policy’ implications of this increasing burden, drawing on the contributions of the local JP and MP, Samuel Whitbread.

Finally, and most importantly, Williams’s detailed reconstructions of the life-histories of poor relief recipients in these two communities allows her to engage in a fine-grained and forensic analysis of the effects of the life-cycle, gender, ill-health, and the effects of under-employment on the propensity to receive relief, its duration and its consequences. These chapters set the experience of these parishes securely within a regional context, showing (for example) that elderly men were more likely to receive pensions by the end of the eighteenth century, in part because they were being crowded out of the local labour market. They also provide the essential human detail of individual stories and family histories that is sometimes lacking in studies in which attention is concentrated on the abstraction of aggregates. The great strength of this study is its combination of well-conceived and nuanced serial analyses with carefully selected and highly appropriate examples to personify broader trends and highlight the effects of local labour markets.

Although McIntosh’s work is national in scope, while Williams concentrates on a specific region, both are the products of immense scholarly effort, highly detailed local analyses, and careful consideration and presentation of the results. While neither makes dramatic claims of new discoveries, both advance our understandings of the poor law substantially. Williams’s work offers a model of how to explore the mechanics of the poor law, its scale, reach and its texture within daily life. While its approach incorporates the incremental refinements in analyses provided by a series of local and regional studies post-1760, it takes these to a new level and produces a study of innovative depth, complexity and clarity.

McIntosh’s study has achieved the same thing, but on a national scale. Yet, it has also done something else. As in all her other historical writings, particularly her monographs on local courts and crime, and women’s work, she has burst the bubble in which early modern historians sometimes like to operate. Her work is a must-read book because it forces us to think of the evolution of poor relief in a much longer historical perspective, and because it treats the period from 1400–1550 as an important one in its own right, not simply as the prelude to ‘early modernity’. By telling the first half of the story of the English poor law so coherently, Marjorie McIntosh forces us to rethink the meaning of the rest of the tale.