The Old Poor Law
English Lotal Government : English Poor Law History : Part I, The Old Poor Law. By Sidney and Beatrice Webb. (Longintuts. 21s.)
IT is impossible to write a review of a new volume by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb without beginning with praise of the monumental industry which they have bestowed upon their history of local government. Although this preliminary salute has become a pleasant but necessary convention, it is none the less sincere. That which authority; working through official bodies, ought to have done, has been done and done handsomely by Mr. and Mrs. Webb. Thus the .Socialists; in this case, give us a noble example of voluntaryism. SO far as we know, the Shropshire County Council is the only Council which has drawn up even an inventory of parish records. We have often wondered that the Church has not taken upon licet;elf to edit a great many more of the parish records. Even the inventories of Church ornaments and plate are not too accessible to the historian.
As everybody knows, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb have undertaken a systematic analysis of the whole local govern- ment of England and Wales from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, together with a summary of the earlier history. They have drawn upon the unpublished records of the justices, the vestries and parish officers, the manorial courts and municipal corporations, Courts of Sewers, Turnpike Trusts and so forth. The history of the Poor Law fits into this series and the volume before us is Part 1 of English Poor Law History. This first part deals with the Old Poor Law, that is to say, with the relief of the poor as it was practised before the great reforms of 1834.
Throughout the Middle Ages the responsibility for relieving destitution was accepted everywhere by the Church. There is a legend that Pope Gregory. - charied Augustine to insist in England on a tripartite division of the tithe. Whether the legend- be true or not, an ordinance is found ascribed in the eighth- century to Egbert, Archbishop of York, that one-third of the divided tithe was to go to the poor and to strangers: This seems to have been an excessive amount, and it may be presumed that so indiscriminating an allocation defeated itself. By the twelfth century tithe had evidently ceased to supply any appreciable amount towards poor relief. - -
When the Church was the only distributor of relief it was natural that the parish should become the unit of organization. The parochial system of relief was what distinguished English poor relief from poor relief throughout the Continent of -Europe. The "Church Stock" out of which relief was paid was a financial fund replenished from various sources, but as the name suggests it was originally composed of agricultural stock. Thus, in the parish of Wootton, in Hampshire, it is recorded that within one year (1559) there were ten gifts of 'sheep, for the Church Stock. Sometimes it was connnanded that each farmer should find the " eatage " for one member • of the flock.
Among the expedients for maintaining the relief fund none is more famous than the Church Ales. On certain days the whole village would assemble for merry-making and ale- drinking. The profits went to the fund. These " jollies " were the equivalent of the modern bazaar or garden-fete. Their defect was that the most generous contributor to the poor was, of course, the heaviest drinker. It is not surprising that Puritanism frowned upon them. As Philip Stubbs wrote ironically in 1585, " lie that sittest the closest to it [the table] and spends the most at it, is counted the godliest man of all the rest." - The suppression of the Ales and such like expedients led gradually to the levying of regular rates for poor relief. It is an interesting fact that in the sixteenth century the Church reformers, not only in England, but throughout a large part of Europe, were as intent upon social reorganization as upon purging the doctrir es of the Church. There was a ferment of moral and intellectual endeavour, and it must be understood that English attempts to introduce order into the relief of the poor were only part of a wide process. Luther' and Zwingli led the way on the Continent, but England owes most to Juan -Luis Vives, a Spaniard, who was brought to England by Henry VIII. It would be amusing if it were not saddening to note that the problems of the sixteenth; seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were very much the problems of to-day. There was the regular complaint that there was bound to be destitu- tion so long as wages remained "too high " ; and there was the problem of those who would not work—who preferred the equivalent of the "dole." When Sir Humphrey Mackworth brought in a fill in 1704 (founded more or less on the thinking of Locke) to start a national joint stock company with the double object of "setting the unemployed on work" and paying dividends to the shareholders, the Bill was killed dead vy a pamphlet from the author of Robinson Crusoe.
This, however, is anticipating. Air. and Mrs. Webb first take us through the experiments of the Privy Council's adminis- trative hierarchy, which preceded the Civil War. The Civil War caused a temporary suspension of all ordered Poor Law work, and the administrative hierarchy could not be restored. Then we are taken to the.curious Suffolk and Norfolk experi- ments of Incorporated Guardians. Readers of Crabbe will remember his denunciation of the Work House under that system. Outside these counties the relief of destitution was carried on as usual by the churchwardens and overseers under the justices.
. Among all the strange experiments which were tried before the great inquiry of 1832, the most disastrous was the practice of rate-aided wages. Scarcely an employer could be found to pay a reasonable wage while he knew that whatever he paid would have the necessary amount added to it out of the rates. Again, schemes for organizing the labour of the unemployed in such a way as to show a profit invariably failed. That was not surprising in an age which knew nothing of regular auditing. For a century and three-quarters reforms seemed to move to the right and to the left, but hardly ever forwards. From the end of the Civil War till 1832 the problems of the Poor Law remained unsolved.
The monumental method of Mr. and Mrs. Webb has its dangers. They, do so much quarrying that they sometimes do-not sufficiently carve the stone they have extracted. The recurrent phrase "as we described" proves the presence of a repetition which is not 'always carefully designed or happy. One would hardly trouble to mention this in the case of writers who had not Mr. and Mrs. Webb's gift of conciseness and sly humour. We are so grateful for the information provided in this volume that we have hardly been conscious of any bias, but now and then there certainly is bias; as, for example, when the whole period is summed up in the phrase, "Charity in the grip of serfdom." What the authors call serfdom was fre- quently produced by the attempt to save human beings from what puts them in the very Worst condition of serfdom— the loss of character with consequent demoralization.
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