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"Poor England Correspondence."
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In Their Own Write
Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its institutions – from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded workhouse – has generally been viewed as a catastrophe for ordinary working people.
Until now it has been impossible to know how the poor themselves felt about the New Poor Law and its measures, how they negotiated its terms, and how their interactions with the local and national state shifted and changed across the nineteenth century. In Their Own Write exposes this hidden history. Based on an unparalleled collection of first-hand testimony – pauper letters and witness statements interwoven with letters to newspapers and correspondence from poor law officials and advocates – the book reveals lives marked by hardship, deprivation, bureaucratic intransigence, parsimonious officialdom, and sometimes institutional cruelty, while also challenging the dominant view that the poor were powerless and lacked agency in these interactions. The testimonies collected in these pages clearly demonstrate that both the poor and their advocates were adept at navigating the new bureaucracy, holding local and national officials to account, and influencing the outcomes of relief negotiations for themselves and their communities.
Fascinating and compelling, the stories presented in In Their Own Write amount to nothing less than a new history of welfare from below.
eBook
Belonging and community: understandings of 'home' and 'friends' among the English poor, 1750-1850
This article is based on unique 'narratives of the poor', that is, letters from poor people to their parishes of settlement, petitions to the London Refuge of the Destitute, and letters from mothers to the London Foundling Hospital, with supportive evidence from newspapers. These display fundamental concepts among the English poor, who were often poorly literate, and who comprised the majority of the population. Discussion focuses upon their understandings of 'home', 'belonging', 'friends', and 'community'. These key concepts are related here to modern discussions, to set important concerns into historical perspective. 'Friends', valuably studied by sociologists such as Pahl, had a wide meaning in the past. 'Home' meant (alongside abode) one's parish of legal settlement, where one was entitled to poor relief under the settlement/poor laws. This was where one 'belonged'. Ideas of 'community' were held and displayed even at a distance, among frequently migrant poor, who wrote to their parishes showing strong ties of attachment, right, and local obligation. This discussion explores these issues n connection with belonging and identity. It elucidates the meaning and working of poor law settlement, and is also an exploration of popular mentalities and the semi-literate ways in which these were expressed.
Journal Article
‘I cannot keep my place without being deascent’: Pauper Letters, Parish Clothing and Pragmatism in the South of England, 1750–1830
This paper examines the issue of pauper agency under the old poor law. It relies on an examination of the ‘voice’ of paupers as it appears in a hitherto neglected source, pauper letters. The ‘face-to-face’ nature of poor relief has often been commented upon by historians, yet despite an ongoing historical preoccupation with all aspects of its administration, the question of how paupers actually interacted with, let alone were able to influence, the provision of that relief remains largely unexamined. Concentrating on requests for, or involving the issue of, clothing, this paper argues that paupers not only demonstrated a keen awareness of the imperatives underpinning relief policy in the locality, but also utilised aspects of many long-standing and powerful cultural discourses to strengthen their case for clothing relief.
Journal Article
‘It is impossible for our Vestry to judge his case into perfection from here’: Managing the Distance Dimensions of Poor Relief, 1800–40
This article addresses the way in which officials in the last decades of the Old Poor Law thought about and addressed the problems posed to the poor relief process by the migration of paupers. Focusing on the so called out-parish relief system, the article uses rich overseer correspondence and supplementary pauper letters from the northwest of England to explore several key themes in the period 1800–1840: the nature of money transmission where allowances had to be paid at a distance, issues of administrative competence and incompetence, the nature of relationships between parishes and between parishes and their distant poor under the out-parish relief system, and issues of trust and reputation between parishes and between parishes and paupers. The article will show that the out-parish system was vital to the stability of the Old Poor Law and that its apparent fragility and susceptibility to fraud and mistrust is to some extent belied by the fact that robust and long term relationships developed between parishes under the out-parish system.
Journal Article
“I Fear You Will Think Me Too Presumtuous in My Demands but Necessity Has No Law”: Clothing in English Pauper Letters, 1800–1834
This article investigates the way in which the English poor used the rhetoric of clothing in their engagement with local officials as they attempted to secure poor relief. Using letters written about or by the dependent poor from a wide selection of English communities, the article suggests that the poor employed concepts such as raggedness, lost clothing, nakedness, compromised dignity, and community presence and the link between poor clothing and unemployment, to assert their deservingness. An exemplar of a series of letters from the same person is used to explore how paupers developed the rhetoric of clothing over a sustained period of correspondence, suggesting that paupers had a keen appreciation of the impact of compromised clothing in their negotiations with officials. Ultimately, this paper will argue, paupers and officials had a shared concept of minimal clothing standards and a shared linguistic register for linking clothing and deservingness.
Journal Article
Friendship, Kinship and Belonging in the Letters of Urban Paupers 1800-1840
This article is driven by an attempt to understand how early nineteenth century urban paupers thought about, experienced and described their belonging to their host parishes and what, if anything, made their experiences different from rural counterparts. It uses pauper narratives — letters written by, for or about paupers — to systematically consider these questions. While such narratives pose problems of orthography, truthfulness and representativeness, the article argues that these potential issues can be over-played. Using these narratives, the article suggests that urban and rural paupers shared a common language and sentiment of belonging to their parishes of legal settlement. However, the article moves on to suggest that urban paupers also showed distinctive rhetorical strategies and experiential trajectories, talking systematically about the depth of their belonging to a host community, about the occasional fragility of that belonging and about being linked into strong neighbourhood, friendship and kinship networks.
Journal Article
Floristic variation and willow carr development within a southwest England wetland
. Woodland colonization on wetlands is considered to have a detrimental effect on their ecological value, even though detailed analysis of this process is lacking. This paper provides an evaluation of the ecological changes resulting from succession of poor fen (base‐poor mire) to willow wet woodland on Goss Moor NNR in Cornwall, UK. Different ages of willow carr were associated with eight understorey communities. During willow colonization, in the ground flora, there was a progressive decrease in poor fen species and an associated increase in woodland species, which appeared to be related to an increase in canopy cover and therefore shade. The most diverse community was found to be the most recent willow and was dominated by poor fen species. The oldest willow was the second most diverse and was associated with a reduction in poor fen species and an increase in woodland species. Architectural features were used successfully to assess the general condition and structure of willow. Tree height and DBH were identified as useful parameters to accurately assess willow age in the field. The implications of active intervention to remove willow in order to conserve the full range of communities within the hydrosere are discussed.
Journal Article
Floristic variation and willow carr development within a southwest England wetland
Woodland colonization on wetlands is considered to have a detrimental effect on their ecological value, even though detailed analysis of this process is lacking. This paper provides an evaluation of the ecological changes resulting from succession of poor fen (base-poor mire) to willow wet woodland on Goss Moor NNR in Cornwall, UK. Different ages of willow carr were associated with eight understorey communities. During willow colonization, in the ground flora, there was a progressive decrease in poor fen species and an associated increase in woodland species, which appeared to be related to an increase in canopy cover and therefore shade. The most diverse community was found to be the most recent willow and was dominated by poor fen species. The oldest willow was the second most diverse and was associated with a reduction in poor fen species and an increase in woodland species. Architectural features were used successfully to assess the general condition and structure of willow. Tree height and DBH were identified as useful parameters to accurately assess willow age in the field. The implications of active intervention to remove willow in order to conserve the full range of communities within the hydrosere are discussed. Nomenclature: Stace (1997) and Meikle (1984) for higher plants; Daniels & Eddy (1990) and Smith (1978) for bryophytes.
Journal Article