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The eighteenth-century context of the laws of settlement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Norma Landau
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Continuity and Change , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , December 1991 , pp. 417 - 439
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

End notes

1 My article argues that either of two independent phenomena prompted most settlement examinations: some people – and almost certainly the overwhelming majority of women - were examined because they were in immediate or imminent need of poor relief; on the other hand, a very large proportion - possibly a majority - of the men examined at Kent's petty sessions were examined because parish officers used the settlement laws to monitor and regulate immigration to their parish (Landau, ‘Laws’, 400, 404–5, 406, 408–9). Therefore, despite Snell's assertions to the contrary (‘Pauper’, abstract, 378, 389), my article most certainly does not deny that a very large number of those examined as to their settlement were in need of poor relief.

2 Snell, ‘Pauper’, 400.

3 (Cambridge, 1985).

4 Snell also makes this assumption explicit in his reply, ‘Pauper’, 378–9, 383–5.

5 Snell, Annals, 17, and see Snell, ‘Pauper’ 397.

6 My article also argued that another major change in the administration of the settlement laws occurred in response to decisions of King's Bench in 1801. These decisions declared that examinations of persons who had since died, absconded, or become insane could no longer be accepted as evidence of settlement. So, while before 1801 prudent parishes ensured that immigrant heads of household were examined as to their settlement, from 1802 they had no reason so to monitor immigration.

Snell replies to this argument by stating that the legal status of the examination did not change (‘Pauper’ 397, and n. 110). In fact, the story of change in the legal status of a settlement examination containing evidence taken from a person who could not be questioned about that examination is an episode in the development of the law of hearsay, for which see Wigmore, J. H., ‘The history of the hearsay rule’, Harvard Law Review 17 (1904), 443–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Though my response focuses on the 1795 statute as evidence of abandonment of regulation of immigration and so as the most obvious example of change in the administration of the settlement laws, I intend that my references to such change encompass the abandonment of surveillance of immigration necessitated by the judges' decisions during 1801.

7 My discussion of the regulation of immigration obviously referred to the regulation of the immigration of the independent adult. In the eighteenth century, the law regarded members of an independent adult's household as dependent upon him, and regulation of these dependants' immigration was subsumed in the regulation of the independent adult's. Therefore, women living with their husbands, legitimate children living with their father, apprentices, and unmarried yearly servants were, to the eighteenth century, not independent immigrants. Consequently, these people were neither examined as to their settlement nor removed (other than as members of an independent adult's household).

Nonetheless, Snell presents my discussion as if it refers to women living with their husbands, apprentices, servants, and children. This misinterpretation provides a basis for his allegation that: ‘Landau's opening account of the basis for settlement and removal in is incomplete’ (‘Pauper’, 382). The same misinterpretation also mars Snell's presentation of my argument that the interval between the date of examinees' marriage and the date of their examination indicates that parish officers monitored immigration (‘Pauper’, 395).

8 An independent immigrant could acquire a settlement in his parish of residence by purchase of a freehold there, or by renting a tenement worth £10 a year at least some of which lay in his parish of residence, or by service in a parish office, or by payment as an uncertificated resident of the church or poor rates of his parish of residence. Since service in a parish office bestowed a settlement in that parish upon the officer, parishes avoided choosing non-settled inhabitants as their officers. Similarly, since payment of rates bestowed a settlement on the uncertificated, parish officers first demanded that these immigrants acquire a certificate, and then after he obtained the certificate, rated the immigrant.

9 Snell's use of the settlement examination requires that parish officers' application of the settlement laws after 1795 approximate that before 1795. Since certificates were most definitely issued before 1795, his argument therefore demands that their issue after 1795 approximate that before 1795. This is the context for his declaration: ‘contrary to Landau's argument, the 1795 Act did not “abolish certificates”, nor did they become “obsolete”’ (‘Pauper’, 397).

Snell's presentation of the words ‘“abolish certificates”’ within quotation marks here might well lead the reader to believe that my article argued that the 1795 statute abolished certificates. In fact, my article did not make that argument. (See ‘Laws’, 414.)

My article did argue that the 1795 Act, by allowing immigrants to ‘reside where they willed provided they were not destitute’, made the certificate ‘obsolete’ as a legal instrument which allowed a parish's non-indigent settled poor to live elsewhere, in a parish where they did not have a settlement (‘Laws’, 413). Snell supports his contention that this argument is erroneous by citation of R. Burn, The justice of the peace and parish officer, 22nd edn. (London, 1814) vol. 4, 590 (‘Pauper’, n. 111). However, the passages he cites clearly contradict his contention. Those passages state:

Although the 35 G.3. c.101 [the 1795 Act] by rendering no one removable till he or she become actually chargeable, has made it no longer necessary to grant certificates, yet as the parish officers retain the power to certify, as heretofore, that any particular person is a parishioner of their parish, and as questions upon the subject will probably arise occasionally upon certificates yet existing, it is necessary to retain the law upon the subject: at the same time the reader should recollect the alteration effected by the 35 G.3.

Similarly citations in nn. 19, 30, 48, 85, 89, 99, 110, 122, 123, which Snell presents as supporting assertions in the associated text, actually contradict those assertions; and citations in nn. 30, 47, and 67 undermine the assertions in the footnote which they are presented as supporting.

10 Landau, N., ‘The regulation of immigration, economic structures and definitions of the poor in eighteenth-century England’, Historical Journal 33 (1990), 545, 547–50, 555–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Snell, Annals, 69, 71, 217 n. 148, 231–2.

12 Snell, Annals, 235 fig. 5.1, 237 figs. s.2 and 5.3, 235 fig. 5.8.

13 Snell, Annals, 16–17, 19, 20, 21–2, 246.

14 Likewise, it is probable that, during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, regulation of immigration in small towns masked the seasonality of examination of unemployed artisans; and that the subsequent decline of such regulation produced the increased seasonality of artisanal examination which Snell interprets as evidence of increased seasonality of artisanal unemployment (Annals, 246–9).

15 According to Snell, ‘Examination, the step before removal, was often taken before a single justice’ (‘Pauper’, n. 30). Snell's statement might give the impression that a removal order could be founded on an examination taken before a single justice. It could not. (See Burn, The justice of the peace and parish officer, 3rd edn. (London, 1756), 543, under ‘Poor (Removal) i. order of removal in general’). This was established beyond question by Rex vs. Wykes and others, Trinity 11 and 12 George II (1738), reported in Andrews, 238. The rule had been sketched in decisions extending back to the reign of William III. (Rex vs. Mountficket, Trinity 12 William III, 2 Salkeld 488.) Indeed, Snell's endnote refers the reader to a discussion in J. F. Archbold, The Poor Law, 12th edn. (London, 1873), 624–5, under ‘Removal of the Poor (Examination as to Settlement of Pauper in England)’ which cites Rex vs. Wykes as still authoritative on the matter, though that is not how Snell presents Archbold.

Snell supports his assertion by quotation of the final phrases of a long sentence in Richard Burn's History of the Poor Laws (London, 1764), 281. Snell's quotation does not include the clause to which the phrases he quotes is appended. That clause states that the difficulty of arranging a meeting of two justices ‘it is to be feared, causes the justices sometimes, absurdly and ridiculously enough, and with great danger to themselves of being called to account for it in a superior court, to adjudge the settlement when they are twenty miles asunder, by one of them taking the examination for it...’. (For further discussion of Snell's presentation of evidence, as exemplified by his use of just this one sentence in Burn's History, see n. 16 below.)

16 Snell states (‘Pauper’, n. 28): ‘of course parish officers would hardly have had to “roam the countryside” very far (pace Landau, ‘Laws’, 393) to take an examination before a JP’. Here Snell ignores evidence which, elsewhere in his reply, he presents as authoritative. Just two endnotes after n. 28 (‘Pauper’, n. 30), he quotes with approval the concluding phrases of a sentence in Burn's, R.History of the Poor LawsGoogle Scholar, 281. That sentence begins: ‘It frequently happens, that when a thing is appointed to be done by two justices as (for instance) the making an order of removal of a poor person, great inconvenience arises, both to the parties, and to the justices, where the justices (as is often the case) live at a great distance from each other, in attending the justices to know when it will be agreeable to them to meet (which perhaps may be never)...’. It is the difficulty of arranging a meeting, Burn explains, which ‘sometimes’ tempts a justice to sign a removal order founded on an examination taken when he was not present. (See also n. 15 above.)

17 For a more comprehensive analysis of Snell's evidence and of his presentation of my article's evidence and argument, see N. Landau, ‘Procedure under the eighteenth-century laws of settlement’, forthcoming in Agricultural History Center Working Paper Series, Agricultural History Center, University of California at Davis, Davis, Ca. 95616.

18 See the quotations from Snell's reply denoted by nn. 29 and 30 below. As nn. 29 and 30 indicate, Snell's reply also contains other very similar statements.

19 This and succeeding counts of adults chargeable or likely to become so exclude examinations of women as to the settlement of their illegitimate children.

20 Petty sessions minutes books for the divisions of Sittingbourne, Ashford, Sevenoaks, Bromley, Malling, Bearsted, and Rochester regularly recorded examinations. For these minute books, and the composition of the database I founded on them, see Landau, ‘Laws’, 401 Table 1, and 417–8, n. 11. I apologize for inadvertently omitting the reference for the Bearsted minute book (Kent Archives Office, PS/Be) from the list of sources in Table 1.

21 For transcripts of examinations entered in the minute book for Kent's Malling petty sessions, see Melling, E., ed., Kentish Sources, IV, The poor (Maidstone, 1964), 66–7.Google Scholar

For transcripts and a photograph of the examinations taken by a single Kentish justice, preparatory to selection of some examines for examination before two justices at petty sessions, see ibid., 60–6 and plate VI.

22 Transcripts and reproductions of settlement examinations likewise indicate that these examinations rarely comment on ‘chargeability’. For reproductions, see: Willis, A. J., Winchester settlement papers 1667–1842 (Folkestone, 1967), 6Google Scholar; Berryman, B., ed., Mitcham settlement examinations, 1784–1814, Surrey Record Society 27 (1973)Google Scholar, plates I, II, III; Cornwall Record Office, Parish Poor Law Records, Handlist no. 4 (Truro, Cornwall, 1982), photocopy between 10–11. For transcriptions see: ibid., 4; Cowe, F. M., Wimbledon vestry minutes, 1736, 1743–1788, Surrey Record Society, 25 (1964), 107Google Scholar; Rideout, E. H., ‘Poor Law administration in North Meols in the eighteenth century’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 81, for 1929 (1930), 82Google Scholar; Anon., , ‘Settlement examination of Thomas Smith, 1766’, Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset 28 (1961), 33–5Google Scholar; Marshall, D. A., ‘The treatment of the poor in Chipping Barnet in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Barnet and District Bulletin, no. 11 (February, 1959).Google Scholar Likewise reproductions of a Surrey petty sessions minute book indicate that settlement examinations taken at non-Kentish petty sessions usually did not comment on ‘chargeability’. See Webb, C., ed., Petty sessions minutes, Copthorne and Effingham Hundreds, 1784–1793. West Surrey Family History Society. Record Series, no. 8 (1989)Google Scholar, which has reproductions of pages of the minute book containing examinations on its cover and on page v. I want to thank Mr Michael Webb, of the Surrey Record Office, for informing me that the lack of information about an examinee's chargeability evident in these reproductions is characteristic of the entries in the minute book.

23 Taylor, J. S., Poverty, migration and settlement in the Industrial Revolution (Palo Alto, California, 1989), 54–5.Google Scholar Of the ten examinations of adults taken before 1795 transcribed in J. S. Taylor's book (17, 27, 43–4, 52–3, 56, 72–3, 82, 95–6), none declares the examine chargeable or likely to become chargeable, and only three show that the examine is obviously in difficult circumstances. And this despite Taylor's selection of the most detailed and therefore illuminating examinations for reproduction and comment.

24 I want to thank Mr Tim Wales for doing this research for the parishes in Bedfordshire and Berkshire. The Appendix lists the collections consulted.

25 According to Dr Snell: ‘people “likely to be chargeable” were very frequently described in words like “was this day taken wandering”’ (‘Pauper’, 383). Snell here confuses two different types of document. The phrase ‘“was this day taken wandering”’ appears not in examinations taken under the provisions of the settlement laws but instead in examinations of people apprehended under the vagrancy laws. For standard formulas for the examination of vagrants which provide the model for that quoted by Snell, see Joseph Shaw, Parish law, 2nd edn. (London, 1734), 367, and Joseph Higgs, A guide to justices, 3rd edn. corrected (London, 1750), 320.

26 This is based on 306 orders removing men and 151 orders removing women in the following collections. Hertfordshire Record Office (hereafter R.O.): Ashwell, Aspenden, Hoddesdon, Great Gaddesden, Hitchin St. Mary (D/P/53/13/4 through 1781), Royston, Wheathampstead, Wormeley. Suffolk R.O. (Bury St. Edmunds): Badwell Ash, Long Melford, Walsham le Willows. Bedfordshire R.O.: Ampthill, Bedford St. Paul (DDP1/13/2), Denton, Eaton Socon, Harrold, Pavenham. Berkshire R.O.: Brimpton, Finchampstead, Kintbury.

27 The notation of issue of a removal order in a petty sessions minute book does not state whether the person to be removed is either ‘chargeable’ or ‘likely to become chargeable’.

28 For military exemptions from removal unless chargeable, see 3 George III c. 8, 24 George III c. 6 s. 4, 26 George III c. 107 s. 131. See also 33 George III c. 54 s. 17.

29 Snell, ‘Pauper’, 388, and see 378, 389, 390.

30 Snell, ‘Pauper’, 383 and see also n. 44. Since the proportion of those removed as ‘chargeable’ is so small, it is quite probable that many of those removed as ‘likely to become chargeable’ were actually in need of relief. Indeed, Burn's instructions about the removal order assume that, unless a person is irremovable until chargeable, the order to remove him will declare he is ‘likely to become chargeable’. (Burn, The justice of the peace and parish officer, 3rd edn. (London, 1756), 544, 547, under ‘Poor (Removal)’.) This could explain why the seasonal distribution of orders removing those ‘chargeable’ might resemble that of orders removing those ‘likely to become chargeable’.

31 Snell, ‘Pauper’, 385.

32 Snell, ‘Pauper’ 382–3, 389–90, 394, 396.

33 Snell, ‘Pauper’ 382–3, 394, 396, n. 66.

34 Landau, ‘Regulation’, 545, Table 2. Dr Snell cites this Table when arguing that ‘vigorous’ ‘surveillance’ is not evident in my data (Snell, ‘Pauper’, 382–3, n. 42).

35 3 George II c. 29.

36 Dr Snell alleges that those certificated were those who had been removed to their parish of settlement and/or were receiving relief from their parish of settlement (‘Pauper’, 384). He gives no evidence to substantiate any claim that the majority of those certificated before 1795 (when the law and so the use of certificates changed) were receiving relief, or that the date of examination for the certificate approximated that when the examinee's need for relief became immediate or imminent. Collation of the certificates from five parishes signed at petty sessions with these parishes' overseers' accounts link only 1 of 16 recipients of a certificate to relief. That recipient, Richard Merer, received a certificate over two years after he first received occasional relief. This is based on overseers' accounts in the Kent Archives Office: for 1759 through 1764 for Newington (P265/12/5), Borden (P35/12/3) and Bredgar (P43/12/4), and for 1789 through 1792 for Bredgar (P43/12/6) and Rodmersham (P301/12/3) which were collated with the relevant certificates issued at Sittingbourne petty sessions minute book (deposited at the Sevenoaks Library).

37 Marshall, , The English poor in the eighteenth century (London, 1926), 179.Google Scholar See also Hampson, E. M., The treatment of poverty in Cambridgeshire 1597–1834 (Cambridge, 1934), 147.Google Scholar For more references to the ubiquity and great number of certificates, see Landau, ‘Regulation’, nn. 64, 65, 67.

38 Snell, ‘Pauper’, 382.

39 The average number of removal orders issued annually at each petty sessions can be derived from Landau, ‘Laws’, 397, figure 3. There may be some difficulty in making this calculation because figure 3 refers to spans of years which differ slightly from those covered by the petty sessional data used elsewhere in the article. ‘Laws’, 401, Table 1, presents the spans of years covered by the petty sessional data used elsewhere in my article. The spans of years covered by figure 3 differ from those in Table 1 as follows: figure 3 does not include the removal orders issued by Sevenoaks petty sessions from 1708 through 1710; figure 3 adds coverage of removal orders issued at Sittingbourne petty sessions for 1727 through 1729; as stated in ‘Laws’, 396, figure 3 displays the number of removal orders issued at Wingham petty sessions for 1706 through 1743 and for 1759 through 1768, while references to removal orders issued at Wingham elsewhere in the article are for 1706 through 1715, 1731 through 1740, and 1759 through 1768. Landau, ‘Regulation’, 545, Table 2 provides the data which permit calculation of the number of removal orders issued at these petty sessions during the years specified in ‘Laws’, Table 1. Snell cites the information in ‘Regulation’ in reference to the arithmetical operations he performed on my data (‘Pauper’ n. 42).

40 According to Snell: ‘Landau is not prepared in her article to allow that settlement business of any magnitude took place outside Kent petty sessions’ (‘Pauper’, 382). In fact, my article demonstrates that about 30 per cent of the removal orders issued against people living in parishes within a petty sessional division were signed outside that division's petty sessions (‘Laws’, 397), and that the great majority of the people so removed had not been examined at petty sessions (‘Laws’, 403).

Snell also states: ‘Landau calculates the ratio of appealed removal orders to all removal orders, on the assumption that petty-session records encompass all (or virtually all) removals’ (‘Pauper’, 381). In fact, my article quite specifically stated that I based my calculations on ‘collation of removal orders appealed to Quarter Sessions with the removal orders issued in petty sessions’ (‘Laws’, 396). That is, I listed each of the removal orders whose issue was recorded in the minute books of eight petty sessions, noting for each: the date of issue, name of those removed, and parish to which and from which removed. I then made a second list, a list based on the order books of Quarter Sessions and containing all appeals to Quarter Sessions against removal orders which removed people living in any parish within those eight petty sessional divisions, noting again the names of the people removed and the parishes from which and to which they were removed. I then collated the two lists and so determined - as my article clearly states (‘Laws’, 396–7) - the exact number of removal orders which appeared on both lists and the exact number of removal orders which appeared on only one of each of these two lists. Obviously, this was a tedious procedure. Equally obviously, it is the only procedure which can identify both the number of appeals to Quarter Sessions which arose from removal orders signed at these eight petty sessions, and the number of appeals to Quarter Sessions which arose against orders removing people from places within these same eight petty sessional divisions which were not signed at their petty sessions. Nonetheless, Snell repeatedly states that I simply assumed that all removal orders were signed at petty sessions and bases several assertions about both my data and my argument on this error (‘Pauper’, 381, 382, 394, and n. 43).

41 Snell, ‘Pauper’, n. 29, and see also p. 396, and n. 67.

42 My article used the evidence that many of the immigrant men examined at petty sessions were not removed to argue that these examinations were taken in the course of the parish officers' routine surveillance of poor non-indigent immigrants. Snell's reply obscures that argument. Snell states:

Some people were undoubtedly examined in their parishes of settlement, and no one doubts this. However, Landau repeats this, and from it infers that such practice ‘indicates that parish officers took action under the settlement laws even when immigrants were not destitute’ (‘Pauper’, 387).

In fact, despite Snell's asseveration to the contrary, the phrase he quotes does not in any way proceed from an inference based on the people who were ‘examined in their parishes of settlement’ (and so could not be removed). The sentence from which Snell took the phrase he quotes here states:

This phenomenon - the examination of immigrants unassociated with their removal - is important because it indicates that parish officers took action under the settlement laws even when they were not destitute (‘Laws’, 402, emphasis added).

As my article stated that it did not use the word ‘immigrant’ to refer to people who had their settlement in the parish in which they lived, and that these settled inhabitants were excluded from its analysis (‘Laws’, 405), I cannot discern the justification for Snell's presentation of my argument as based on the examination of settled inhabitants.

In the passage from Snell's reply which this endnote has examined, Snell presented a quotation of a portion of a sentence from my article within a context which radically altered that quotation's meaning. As a result, the statement which his reply attributes to me is, in fact, not mine. This same procedure mars his presentation of the quotations from my article indicated by his nn. 63 and 98, and of quotations from my article within his nn. 4 and 37.

43 Petty sessions minute books are the books in which the clerks of these petty sessions noted the documents issued at petty sessions (‘Laws’, 393). In contrast, parish records are those records which were kept by the parish. And so parish collections of settlement documents comprise the individual settlement documents - examinations, removal orders, certificates - which the parish kept, and contemporaneous lists of these individual documents which were made by parish officers. It is therefore quite simple to determine if a record in a parish collection was issued at a petty sessions whose minute book has survived. If, for example, a parish collection contains an order for the removal of Elisha Jones from the parish of Floozle, dated 10 June 1755, then reference to the minute book for Floozle's petty sessions will instantly reveal whether such an order was signed at a meeting on 10 June 1755. To determine the proportion of a parish's settlement documents issued at petty sessions, I collated petty sessions minute books with some parish collections of original orders and certificates, and also with those parish collections whose records contained contemporaneous lists of the removal orders or certificates issued or received by that parish (‘Laws’, 394, 397, 400, 402, 416 n. 12, 417 n. 27).

Now, according to Dr Snell: ‘this is not a procedure one can adopt. For in most record collections, one has no way of telling how, and from where, records came to be in the “parish” collection’ (‘Pauper’, 381 and see 382). To the contrary: determination of whether a document in a parish collection was issued at a petty sessions is precisely what that petty sessions' minute book allows. As Snell states that his ‘own research has in many counties used both “parish” and “petty-session” settlement records, including her [Landau's] own Kentish material’ (‘Pauper’ 380), it is not evident why Snell bases an extended argument upon this error.

44 Snell, Annals, 418.

45 Snell, Annals, 361, Table 7.8. Note that this Table, on family break-up, is on a subject for which Snell declares he conducted his ‘more extensive’ search for documentation (ibid., 419). So Snell does not present this Table as representing just a sample of his data for south-eastern England.

46 Though county justices could not authorize parish activity under the settlement laws in these exempt places, appeals against removal orders issued in these places went to their county's Quarter Sessions.

47 Marshall, D. (The English poor, 167, 246) and Hampson, E. M. (‘Settlement and removal in Cambridgeshire, 1662–1834’ Cambridge Historical Journal 2 (1928), 278–9Google Scholar; The treatment of poverty, 131) both argued that parish officers regulated immigration. Marshall stated: ‘That it [the settlement law] did inflict severe hardships on certain categories of individuals, such as single women, widows with dependent children, and in the rural districts, married labourers, it is impossible to deny’. Snell (‘Pauper’, n. 123) quotes a sentence from Marshall which states that parish officers did not regulate immigration. He neglects to inform the reader that the sentence refers to parish officers in manufacturing areas.

48 According to Snell, Annals, 361, Table 7.8, deserted wives account for 5.1 per cent of the 2,393 examinations in the collections of rural parishes in 14 south-eastern counties. taken from 1700 through 1792

49 Snell, ‘Pauper’, n. 3.

50 See, for example, Snell's definition of the parishes upon whose records he based his graphs of the effect of enclosure on seasonality of employment (Annals, 147).

51 Snell, Annals, 19 n. 6, 46 n. 25, 144–5 n. 25, 246 n. 42.

52 Snell, ‘Pauper’, n. 69.

53 Snell, Annals, 246 n. 42, and see also 19, n. 6.

54 See also Styles, P., ‘The evolution of the Law of settlement’, Studies in seventeenth century West Midlands history (Kineton, 1978), 201, 202.Google Scholar

55 Snell, Annals, 420, italics mine.

56 I wish to thank Mr Tim Wales for determining which of the parishes that Snell listed under the Berkshire R.O. had deposited settlement examinations there.

57 Snell cites the Westminster City Library, the Lambeth Archives and the Greater London R.O. (hereafter G.L.R.O.) as repositories for the documents he consulted. I wish to thank Mrs Harriet Jones, of the G.L.R.O., for filtering from Dr Snell's list those places whose records, if deposited, would be at Lambeth or Westminster or at repositories for the City of London's records (which Dr Snell does not cite). The 75 places in Middlesex instanced in the text are the remaining places - that is, those whose records, according to Snell's bibliography, would be at the G.L.R.O.

58 ‘Pauper’, n. 47. I have classified as non-rural those places for which the weekly market day is specified in Daniel Paterson, A new and accurate description of all the direct and principal cross roads in England and Wales, 8th edn. (London, 1789). Had I applied this definition to my Kentish data, many of the Kentish parishes I classified as ‘former market towns’ and even some of the Kentish parishes I classified as ‘small towns’ (see above, p. 426), would have been classified as rural.

59 Snell ‘Pauper’, n. 96. A very few clerks routinely noted the date of an examinee's marriage on the settlement examination. (In Kent, only one petty sessions of the seven whose minute books recorded settlement examinations routinely noted the date of an examinee's marriage.) The date of an examinee's marriage is not noted in other settlement or poor law documents (though on rare occasions it might be the subject of comment in a letter to a parish officer).

60 For the additional prospective costs and responsibilities assumed by the certificating parish, see Landau. ‘Regulation’, 559–61.

61 My article clearly stated that it was the parish officers who monitored and regulated immigration (‘Laws’, 391, 392, 400, 404, 405, 406, 409, 410, 412, 413, 414, 415–416 n. 11, 419 n. 44). It was the parish officers who determined if someone should be examined (‘Laws’, 393, 402, 406, 408, 409, 412, 413, 414, 418 n. 42); they who demanded that an immigrant obtain a certificate (‘Laws’, 393, 412, 413, 414); and they who initiated the process which resulted in the removal of an immigrant (‘Laws’, 392, 393, 400, 405, 408, 409). Nonetheless, in Snell's presentation of my arguments my references to ‘parish officers’ become references to ‘justices of the peace’ (‘Pauper’, 377, 383, 392). This severs the connection between a parish's economy and its enforcement of the settlement laws, a connection intrinsic to my argument. This presentation also results in statements such as: ‘an emphasis on “surveillance” administered by JPs leads her [Landau] to distance pauper settlement from poor relief’ (‘Pauper’, 394 and see also 377).

62 8 and 9 William III c. 30.

63 13 and 14 Charles II c. 12.

64 For elaboration of this argument, see Landau, ‘Regulation’ 558–71.

65 D. Marshall, The English poor, 174.

66 Snell, ‘Pauper’, 375.