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The Regulation of Immigration, Economic Structures and Definitions of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Norma Landau
Norma Landau
Affiliation:
University of California at Davis
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Extract

In the eighteenth century, parish officers used the laws of settlement to regulate the immigration of the poor to their parishes. Their regulation went well beyond ridding their parishes of indigent immigrants. Parish officers monitored the immigration of the non-indigent poor; they insured that their parishes acquired the documents which guaranteed that a poor immigrant would not become the responsibility of the parish to which he had immigrated; and they even removed non-indigent immigrants from their parishes, using their parishes' funds to pay for sending these immigrants back to the parishes which were legally responsible for their welfare.1 To the modern observer, such regulation of migration from one parish to another may seem odd, so odd that some historians have assumed that this regulatory activity did not occur.2 Obviously, then, the parishes' regulation of immigration was part of a world now lost. Regulation of immigration by parish officers disappeared in 1795, when parliament abolished the legal foundations for this practice.3 In detective stories, discovery of the circumstances and implications of a disappearance reveals the structure of the world in which it occurred. So may it be with the regulation of immigration.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 541 - 571
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Landau, N., 'The laws of settlement and the surveillance of immigration in eighteenth-century Kent', Continuity and Change, III, 3 (1988), 391–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Webb, S. and Webb, B., English local government, VII, English poor law history: part I. The old poor law (London, 1927), pp. 334–43Google Scholar; and most recently, Snell, K. D. M., Annals of the labouring poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 17–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 35 George III c. 101.

4 Payment of local rates bestowed a settlement provided the ratepayer did not have a certificate to the parish to which he paid rates.

5 Landau, N., ‘The settlement laws and the surveillance of immigration’, pp. 402–3, 412–14Google Scholar.

6 Since this article examines the surveillance of immigrants, those settlement documents relevant to persons who were settled in the parish in which they resided are excluded from this study. On occasion, usually when their division's petty sessions had temporarily ceased meeting, parish officers brought some of their settlement business to a petty sessions that did not normally deal with their parish's business. A variety of types of evidence suggests that the cases these parish officers bothered to bring to distant petty sessions were somewhat unusual – the resources of the examinee more exiguous and his circumstances more exigent than those of examinees from parishes within the petty sessional division.

Since this study examines change in the surveillance of migration by the officers of the parishes within each petty sessional division, it also excludes those examinations and removal orders drawn at a petty sessions for persons who were not resident in parishes within that petty sessional division. However, the numerations in this article do include examinations relevant to certificates issued by parishes in the division to parishes out of the division as well as such certificates.

7 It is likely that about one in six mere examinations resulted in a removal order that was signed out of petty sessions. Many of the mere examinations did result in a certificate (Landau, N., ‘The settlement laws and the surveillance of immigration’, pp. 402–3Google Scholar and see below p. 565).

8 Some clerks did not record the issue of all three varieties of settlement document, but this does not mean that these petty sessions never issued the absent variety of document. For instance, the date of and signatures to certificates granted to parishes in the Mailing division reveal that certificates were authorized at Mailing petty sessions, though they were not noted in its minute books.

9 Landau, N., The justices of the peace, 1679–1760 (Berkeley, 1984), p. 211Google Scholar.

10 Harris, M., ‘Government and urban development in Kent: the case of the Royal Naval Dockyard at Sheerness’, Archaeologica Cantiana, CI (1984), 254, 259, 261Google Scholar.

11 2nd edn, 12 vols., Canterbury, 1797–1801.

12 The certificates to ‘urban’ places not in these divisions were, in the main, to Faversham, Canterbury, Margate, Ramsgate, Sandwich, Dover, Deal and Maidstone.

13 Corfield, P. J., The impact of English towns 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982), p. 14Google Scholar. Corfield does not number Bromley among the towns, possibly because a part of the parish's population lived in a rural setting.

14 In some and probably large part, the great increase in certificates recorded at petty sessions from the 1730s is an administrative artifact. Statute, 3 George II c. 29, demanded that a witness swearbefore two justices that the parish officers had authorized the certificate. Since witnesses were not eager to chase justices across the countryside, they found petty sessions an institution convenient for taking their oaths.

15 Kent Archives Office (Kent A.O.), West Malling P243/13/147, Maidstone P241/13/1, Milton-next-Sittingbourne P253/8/3; Bromley Central Library, Bromley vestry record book; Sevenoaks Library, Sevenoaks D292B. For St Dunstan's, Canterbury, see Newman, A. E., ‘The old poor law in east Kent 1606–1834’ (unpublishedPh.D. dissertation, University of Kent, 1979), p. 187Google Scholar.

16 The children of the poor, and especially boys, left home in their early teens (Wall, R., ‘The age at leaving home’, Journal of Family History, III, 2 (1978), 189–90Google Scholar; idem, ‘Work, welfare and the family: an illustration of the adaptive economy’, in L. Bonfield, R. Smith and K. Wrightson (eds.), The world we have gained (Oxford, 1986), pp. 272–3, 275). Therefore, the age of the youngest child is a more sensitive calibrator of stage of family development than the age of the oldest child.

17 Table 3 in Landau, ‘The settlement laws and the surveillance of immigration’, p. 408, displays the distribution of the interval between marriage and examination under the settlement laws for married male examinees at Bearsted petty sessions at mid-century. Since either a person's immigration or his destitution might prompt an overseer to have him examined, this Table is not an undistorted reflection of the frequency of migration at different stages of the family cycle. Nonetheless, since that Table shows that 50·5 per cent of the 91 married examinees whose date of marriage is recorded had married within eighteen months of the examination, it does show the preponderance of the recently married among the married male immigrants brought to petty sessions.

18 As Table 3 reveals, the number of children in families which had children increased among immigrants to both town and countryside. To some extent, this increase can be attributed to decline in child mortality, decline in women's age at marriage which resulted in decline in the average interval between pregnancies, and to rise in prenuptial conception and therefore to increase in marital fertility. (Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., ‘English population history from family reconstitution: summary results 1600–1799’, Population Studies, XXXVII, 2 (1983), 162, 165, 168–9, 177Google Scholar; idem, The population history of England 1541–1871 (London, 1981), pp. 256, 429.)

19 Married women took their husband's settlement; widows took their late husband's settlement (if it could be discovered) unless they acquired another settlement after his death.

20 Of the males examined at petty sessions in the periods indicated in Table I, II rural examinees and 14 urban examinees were former apprentices who by 12 Anne c. 8 could not claim a settlement in the parish where they were apprentices because their master was certificated to that parish. In the following analysis, which attempts to relate the legal categories for claims to settlement to social strata, these former apprentices are numerated among the 294 males who claimed a settlement by apprenticeship.

21 9 George I c. 27; 21 George II c. 10.

22 A total of nine adult male immigrants claimed settlement based on current or former possession of a freehold. As three of those claimants also claimed a settlement based on payment of rates, they are included in that category. The other six freeholders (two urban, four rural) are not included in those categorized in Figure 2. Statute, 9 George I c. 27, declared that purchase of a freehold for less than £30 conferred a settlement in the parish of the freehold on the owner of the property only so long as he owned the property.

23 Legitimate children took the settlement of their father; bastards were settled in the parish in which they were born.

24 The two-sample difference of proportions test declares that the probability that the increase in the proportion of former servants is due to random variation is O·O1 for the Malling division and 0·02 for the Sittingbourne division. Snell, , Labouring poor, pp. 78–80Google Scholar, presents evidence for considerable increase in the proportion of men claiming by birth in southeastern England from the mid-eighteenth century. This phenomenon is not apparent in examinations of men in rural parishes taken at Kent's petty sessions.

25 Twenty-six per cent of those claiming settlement based on one of rent, rates, or parish office, also claimed settlement under a second of these three qualifications. Only two per cent of claimants who had gained a settlement by other qualifications also based a claim to that settlement on rent, rates, or office.

26 For ability to sign among each social stratum, see Schofield, R. S., ‘Dimensions of illiteracy, 1750–1850’, Explorations in Economic History, X, 4 (1972–1973), 450Google Scholar. See also Pond, C. C., ‘Internal population migration and mobility in eastern England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1981), pp. 108, 118–19Google Scholar; Snell, , Labouring poor, p. 36Google Scholar.

27 As Figure 3 suggests, the distribution of these distances – as indeed all distributions of distances discussed in this article – is highly skewed. Therefore, non-parametric tests are the appropriate instrument for determining whether the differences between these distributions are statistically significant (Ebdon, D., Statistics in geography: a practical approach (Oxford, 1977), pp. 49, 57Google Scholar). I have used two non-parametric tests – the two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov (for which see Siegel, S., Nonparametric statistics for the behavioral sciences (New York, 1956), pp. 127–36Google Scholar), and the two-sample X2 test. I constructed 5 two-sample X2 tests, each grouping the data on migration into different categories. The categories of the five tests are: (1) 1—5 miles, 6–15 miles, 16–40 miles, over 40 miles; (2) 1–10 miles, 11–30 miles, over 30 miles; (3) 1–30 miles, over 30 miles; (4) 1–20 miles, over 20 miles; (5) 1–10 miles, over 10 miles. Since a X2 test can be constructed so that it will show that even a very minor difference between two samples is statistically significant, and since a X2 test can also be constructed to show that the difference between two wildly different patterns is not statistically significant, I decided that I would not report that these tests yielded statistically significant results unless at three of the six tests (Kolmogorov–Smirnov plus five X2 tests) pronounced for a probability of 0·05 or less. In the event, all results reported in this article as statistically significant according to nonparametric tests were also awarded a probability of 0·052 or less by the conservative Kolmogorov–Smirnov test.

28 Those without resident children were most probably those married within the last eighteen months. See above, pp. 548–9.

29 See below, p. 554 and Table 6.

30 The occupation of the examinee at the time of examination was consistently noted only in the Bromley examinations. The total number of cases which included this information was 353 – 184 claiming under service, 64 under apprenticeship, 65 under birth, and 40 under office, rents, or taxes.

31 The difference in proportions test declares that the difference between the proportion of 699 rural labourers without resident children (45·6 per cent) and of 186 rural tradesmen/craftsmen without resident children (38·7 per cent) is significant at the level of P = 0·065.

32 The category ‘labourer’ here and in the following discussion comprises all those whose present occupation was denoted as labourer or agricultural worker plus all those whose claim to settlement was based on service (excluding those whose present occupation was noted as tradesman or craftsman). The category ‘tradesman/craftsman’ comprises all whose present occupations were so noted plus all whohad been apprenticed (excluding those whose present occupation was noted as labourer or agricultural worker). This means that married men who could not be categorized as ‘labourer’ or ‘tradesman/craftsman’ are excluded from Table 6. Those who based their claim to settlement on payment of rent or taxes, or on tenure of a parish office, were significantly more likely to have more and older children than other claimants. Since their examinations frequently do not contain information about their occupation or their employment before they married, a large proportion of this group cannot be so categorized. Their exclusion from Table 6 means that the number and age of children shown in Table 6 is lower than those shown in Table 3. Likewise, exclusion of many in this group and of many of those claiming settlement by birth explains why the percentage of males without resident children is higher in Table 6 than in Table 3.

33 For elaboration of the use of the combination of the change in proportion of childless married men and change in the age of oldest and youngest child to determine whether there has been a change in stringency of surveillance, see above pp. 549–50.

34 Of 1157 labourers, 37·9 per cent were removed; so were 34·1 per cent of 413 craftsmen and tradesmen. (Of course, this numeration was based only on those petty sessions' minute books which recorded both examinations and removal orders.)

35 Those claiming settlement by birth or inheritance from their father were both slightly less likely to be removed and less likely to be recorded as recipients of certificates than were those in the other legal categories for claims to settlement. As a result, the proportion of those who were simply examined is larger than the proportion of those in other legal categories who were simply examined. This aberration might have been due to examination of single men who had as yet been unable to acquire a settlement based on their own labours, but who did not pose a threat to the poor rates. Nonetheless, when the pool of persons under observation was restricted to married men, those claiming under birth still had a statistically significant (test of difference of proportions P = 0·03) over-representation in the ranks of those simply examined. It may be that a claim based on birth was less easy to dispute and so less likely to require certification than a claim based on the assertion that the claimant had acted in a particular fashion. It is also possible that some of those claiming under birth came from the higher strata of poor society – strata which included those who did not have to send all their teenagers to labour for other families. However, neither former eminence nor certitude of claim hindered the overseers from treating those claiming under birth much as they did other claimants: the difference between the proportion of those claiming under birth who were removed and the proportion of other claimants removed is not statistically significant.

36 The population of rural and urban parishes was calculated by multiplying the number of families reported in these parishes in the 1801 census by the ratio of the number of persons aged 25 or over in 1791 to the number of persons aged 25 or over in 1801. (For the distribution of the ages of the English population, see Wrigley, and Schofield, , Population history of England, p. 529Google Scholar.) As the purpose of this calculation is to determine the proportion of the population who were not indigent but nonetheless subjected to surveillance, it excludes all cases resulting in removal, unless the removal produced a certificate. Since petty sessions records sometimes do not note the number of persons in a family, calculation of the proportion of the poor subjected to the settlement laws must be based on the proportion of families, not individuals, so subjected. Conservative estimation therefore requires that all cases in which women or children are the principals be excluded, as well as all cases in which the principals are men whom these sometimes laconic records do not note as married.

37 Webb, and Webb, , The old poor law, pp. 334–43Google Scholar.

38 Ibid. p. 315.

39 13 and 14 Charles II c. 12.

40 Webb, and Webb, , The old poor law, p. 324Google Scholar.

41 This scholarship is summarized in Clay, C. G., Economic expansion and social change: England 1500–1700 (2 vols., Cambridge 1984), IGoogle Scholar, People, land and towns, 27–8, 98–101, 190.

42 I James II c. 17; 3 and 4 William and Mary c. 11.

43 Subsequent modifications to this statute are: 9 and 10 William III c. 11; 12 Anne c. 18 s. 2.

44 For the bar upon children of a certificate person gaining a settlement in the parish to which he was certificated see Burn, R., The justice of the peace and parish officer (3rd edn, London, 1756), p. 528Google Scholarsub ‘Poor (Settlement by Service)’, referring to E. 15 George II R. v. Sherborne. See also: Nolan, M., A treatise of the laws for the relief and settlement of the poor (2nd edn, 2 vols., London, 1808), II, 50–1Google Scholar, sub ‘Of the Continuance and Determination of a Certificate’; Bott, E., A collection of decisions upon the poor's laws (New York, 1978 reprint of 1771 edition), pp. 78–9Google Scholar; Burn, R., The justice of the peace and parish officer (22nd edn, 4 vols., London, 1814), IV, 602–5Google Scholar, sub ‘Poor, (Settlement)’ [Sect, XVI.4] (Certificate), citing T. 32 George II R. v. Darlington, E. 45 George III R. v. Mortlake, E. 33 George III R. v. Testerton, H. 40 George III R. v. Batheaston.

45 At various times, some of Kent's parishes resolved not to grant certificates. Ash (in the Wingham division) resolved against certificates in 1729, and Sutton at Hone (in the Dartford division) in 1708. Neither parish abided by its resolution. (Kent A.O., U442/O45, 26 Mar. and 24 July 1708, case of James Clarke; Newman, ‘The old poor law in East Kent’, p. 186.)

46 Justice of the peace (3rd edn, 1756), p. 540, sub ‘Poor (Settlement by Estate)’.

47 Some parish vestries assumed that the certificate itself was proof of unemployment in the certificating parish. For example, in 1709 the vestry of Westerham, Kent, objected to receiving poor Palatines ‘by reason theire parish is full of Inhabitants that they are forced to give Surtificates for many; and that they have not worke for them’ (Cooke, R., ‘The Palatines’, Archaeologia Cantiana, XXVI (1904), 323Google Scholar).

48 In making such a choice, the overseers and churchwardens (the majority of whom had to sign the certificate) acted as representatives of the parish. In some parishes, such as Orpington in Kent, parish procedure placed the authority to grant the certificate in the vestry (Kent A.O., P277/8/1).

49 In parishes where employers wanted immigrants in order to lower wages, but ratepayers objected to the dangers this posed to the parish economy – including decline in the standard of living of the parish poor – employers might import certificated workers. So, Thomas Turner of East Hoathley in Sussex noted in his diary in 1761 that the largest employers in this parish had attempted to ‘reduce the price of day labour by bringing into the parish certificate-men for that purpose’. Earlier, in 1756, he had observed of the same affair that some of the imported labourers had certificates and some had not. It was to the advantage of the settled poor to insure that all immigrants had certificates, as this would reduce the number of immigrants and so the competition for jobs (Vaisey, D. (ed.), The diary of Thomas Turner 1754–1765 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 238, 67Google Scholar. I wish to thank Joanna Innes for this reference). I am not aware of any study which investigates the influence of employers or of ratepayers (including poor ratepayers) on the action of the overseers in regulating immigration. Such a study might illuminate tensions within parish society.

50 Indeed, though most observers have noted that the number of certificates in parish collections peaks between the 1720s and the 1770s (for which see nn. 64 and 67 below), Gowing, D., ‘Migration in Gloucestershire 1662–1865. A geographical evaluation of the documentary evidence related to the administration of the law of settlement and removal’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Southampton University, 1979), page 47Google Scholar, notes a secondary peak in Gloucestershire in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, and Randall, H. A., ‘Some aspects of population geography in certain rural areas of England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (unpublished Ph.D. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1971), Page 275Google Scholar, notes a peak in some Essex parishes in the first four decades of the eighteenth century.

51 SirEden, F. M., The State of the poor (3 vols., London, 1966 reprint of 1797 edn), II, 288Google Scholar. Eden's observation is similar to Hasted's in History of Kent, 2nd edn, VII, 516.

52 Those who were both certificated and removed are included in both categories.

53 That most migration subjected to the settlement laws was over a short distance is an observation so usual that it is almost a cliché. See: Barke, M., ‘Migration into Darlington in the mid-eighteenth century: some tentative observations’, Bulletin of the Durham County Local History Society, XXVII (1981), 21Google Scholar; Pond, , ‘Internal population migration’, pp. 66, 68, 151–2, 179, 203–5, 217Google Scholar; Randall, , ‘Some aspects of population geography’, pp. 221, 247–8Google Scholar; Awty, B. G., ‘Settlement and removal in Bury, 1679–1820’, Report of the Lancashire Record Office for 1958, p. 21Google Scholar; Thomas, E. G., ‘The poor law migrant to Oxford 1700–1795’, Oxoniensia, XXXXV (1980), 301Google Scholar; Martin, J. M., ‘The rich, the poor, and the migrant in eighteenth century Stratford-on-Avon’, Local Population Studies, XX (1978), 41–2Google Scholar; Mitchelson, N., ‘The old poor law in East Yorkshire’, East Yorkshire Local History Society, II (1954), 9Google Scholar; Brown, A. F. J., Essex at work, 1700–1815, Essex Record Office Publications, IL (1967), 107–8Google Scholar; Clark, P., ‘Migration in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Past and Present, LXXXIII (1979), 73, 74Google Scholar; Body, George A., ‘The administration of the poor laws in Dorset 1760–1834, with special reference to agrarian distress’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Southampton University, 1965), p. 130Google Scholar.

54 It has long been recognized that a certificate usually referred to an immigrant who had travelled a short distance. See, for example. Ashton, T. S., An economic history of England: the eighteenth century (London, 1955), p. 15Google Scholar; and see also Pond, , ‘Internal population migration’, pp. 118–19; andGoogle ScholarSouden, D. ‘Pre–industrial English local migration fields’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1981), pp. 259–64. Gowing, reworking Randall's data for Reigate, Essex, and Kettering, and Oxley's data for the West Derby Hundred of Lancashire showed a statistically significant difference in the distributions of the distances travelled by the certificated as compared to those removed, but a statistically significant difference between these distributions appeared in only one of the Gloucestershire parishes which Gowing examined (‘Migration in Gloucestershire’, pp. 136, 141, 220, 227–31)Google Scholar.

55 For the statistical tests applied to the curves presented in Figure 4, see n. 27 above.

56 In issuing certificates out of the division, the practice of these Kentish petty sessions differed from that in Norfolk and Suffolk, where certificates were refused to those going out of the hundred, or to those more going more than ten or twenty miles from their parish of settlement, or to corporate towns (Lloyd-Prichard, M. F., ‘The treatment of poverty in Norfolk from 1700 to 1850’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1949), pp. 127, 198Google Scholar; Eden, , State of the poor, 11, 691Google Scholar ).

57 For this practice in Essex, see Pond, , ‘Internal population migration’, p. 43Google Scholar.

58 Kent A.O., Milton-next-Sittingbourne P253/8/3, Bredgar P43/8/1, Bobbing P33/13/1–2.

59 Some readers might be unfamiliar with this bit of Americana. I should therefore explainthat chicken was a contest between two male teenagers, each equipped with a (preferably souped up) vehicle, each of whom attempted to remain in his vehicle longer than his opponent remained in the opponent's vehicle, as both vehicles hurtled toward destruction (usually toward the edge of a cliff or toward each other). Chickenappeared in at least one of James Dean's movies, and also, I believe, in at least one of Paul Newman's.

60 As the notations by petty sessions' clerks indicate, those ordered to get a certificate could choose a n alternative course of action: they could just leave the parish in which they were residing. That a considerable proportion of those ordered to get certificates were subsequently removed (31 per cent of the sixty-two persons so ordered at Sittingbourne petty sessions from 1723 through 1726) suggests thatmany of the immigrants whose parish of settlement refused to grant them a certificate preferred the free transportation provided under a removal order to departure at their own expense. For a request by a poor woman to be removed (a request denied by the justices on the grounds that the parish officers had not asked for a warrant of removal), see Kent A.O., U951/O4, PP.47–8.

61 Burn, The justice of the peace (3rd edn, 1756), p. 532Google Scholarsub ‘Poor (Settlement by rates)’.

62 Norman, P., ‘Bromley Common’, Archaeologia Cantiana, XXXIII (1918), 113Google Scholar.

63 This change in the practice of surveillance affects interpretation of Snell's comparison of the timing of the examinations of artisans before and after 1790. He finds that the later group of examinations varies much more with the seasons than does the earlier, and interprets this as evidence of greater seasonal unemployment(Labouring poor, pp. 246–9). However, this change in the seasonality of examination could also be due to the virtual disappearance of surveillance of immigration in towns, and so to the change from examination of immigrants and the destitute to examination of the destitute only. Reports on parish collections of certificates note that it was in the 1770s and 1780s that the number of certificates most usuallyand sharply declined (see following note), and Snell finds (p. 246, n. 44) that the contrast between seasonal and non–seasonal patterns of artisanal examination is most acute if the examinations are divided into those taken before and after 1780.

64 Pond, , ‘Internal population migration’, p. 51Google Scholar; Lloyd-, Pritchard, ‘The treatment of poverty in Norfolk’, p. 156Google Scholar; Oxley, G. W., ‘The administration of the old poor law in the West Derby Hundred of Lancashire, 1601–1837’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1966), p. 158Google Scholar; Taylor, J. S., ‘The impact of pauper settlement 1691–1834’, Past andPresent, LXXIII (1976), 52–3Google Scholar; Gowing, , ‘Migration in Gloucestershire’, p. 47Google Scholar; Johnston, J. A., ‘The Parish Registers and poor law records of Powick, 1662–1841’, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeologial Society, series 3, IX (1984), 62Google Scholar; Hampson, , Treatment of poverty in Cambridgeshire, p. 147Google Scholar; and see n. 67.

65 Gowing, , ‘Migration in Gloucestershire’, p. 50Google Scholar, summarizes findings from Gloucestershire, Essex, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Lancashire showing thatthe number of certificates in a parish collection usually at least equals and frequently greatly exceeds the number of removal orders. See also Oxley, , ‘The administration of the old poor law’, p. 158Google Scholar and Newman, , ‘The old poor law in East Kent’, p. 185Google Scholar.

66 In Woodford, Essex, five of every eight family groups of immigrants were certificated (Pond, , ‘Internal population migration’, p. 19)Google Scholar.

67 Randall, , ‘Some aspects of population geography’, p. 275Google Scholar; Awty, B. G., ‘Settlement and removal in Bury, 1679–1820’, p. 21Google Scholar; Thomas, E. G., ‘The poor law migrant to Oxford’, p. 302Google Scholar; Martin, J. M., ‘The rich, the poor, and the migrant in eighteenth century Stratford–on–Avon’, p. 41Google Scholar; Hampson, E. M., ‘Settlement and removal in Cambridgeshire, 1662–1834’, n Cambridge Historical Journal, 11, 3 (1926–1928), 286Google Scholar. Similarly, the two other towns in Kent whose certificates I examined, Cranbrook and New Romney, received many fewer certificates in the 1780s than they had earlier (Kent A.O., Pioo/16/1, P309/13/2).

68 Because the number of certificates delivered to most rural parishes was quite small, itis likely that most researchers have focused on at least semi-urban places, as the larger number of certificates in these collections provides a better basis for the analyses they were attempting.

69 For such attempts see: ‘A Bill to prevent unnecessary and vexatious removals’, 1773, reprinted in S. Lambert (ed.), House of Commons sessional papers of the eighteenth century (Wilmington, Delaware, 1975), xxiv, 45 ff., and same bill introduced in 1774, 125 ff.; ‘A Bill to prevent vexatious removals’, 1782, in ibid, xxxiv, 235 ff.; ‘Bill [with the amendments] forthe preventing vexatious removals’, 1788, ibid. 315 ff.; ‘A Bill for the preventing vexatious removals’, 1789, ibid, LXIV, 60 ff.; ‘A Bill for preventing the removal ofpoor persons’, 1794, ibid, XCII, 39 ff., and same bill as amended, 45 ff.

70 By the 790s, Adam Smith's thought provided much of the ammunition for attacks on laws which restricted the circulation of labour (Cowherd, R. G., Political economists and the English Poor Laws (Athens, 1977), pp. 10–11Google Scholar; Teichgraeber, R. F., ‘“Less abused than I had reason to expect”: the Reception of The Wealth of Nations in Britain, 1776–90’, Historical Journal XXX, 2 (1987), 362)Google Scholar. However, the absence of reports of debate on the 1795 act renders it difficult to determine why country gentlemen found Smith's condemnation of the settlement laws' restriction on mobility persuasive (The Wealth of Nations (London, 1891, p. 126Google Scholar.)

71 For the roundsman system and its variants, see Oxley, G. W., Poor relief in England and Wales 1601–1834 (London, 1974), pp. 110–1, 116–8Google Scholar.

72 For ‘open’ and ‘close’ parishes, see Banks, S., ‘Nineteenth–century scandal or twentieth–century model? A new look at ‘open’ and ‘close’ parishes’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, XLI, 1 (1988), especially p. 71Google Scholar. Perhaps even the survival of regulation of immigration in the Sittingbourne division of Kent might be attributed to the very small size of its parishes: their diminutive size permitted almost all parishes to be controlled by a few landlords, and so inhibited the development of a structure dependent for its labour on the existence of conveniently located ‘open’ parishes. (For the concentration of land in a few hands in this area see Everitt, A., The pattern of rural Dissent: the nineteenth century, Department of EnglishLocal History, University of Leicester Occasional Papers, 2nd series, iv (1972), 58–60 87Google Scholar.)

73 For discussion of the elaboration of this distinction, see Himmelfarb, G., The idea of poverty: England in the early industrial age (New York, 1985), pp. 41, 62–3, 68–70, 76–80, 111–12Google Scholar.