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RECONSIDERING POOR LAW INSTITUTIONS BY VIRTUALLY RECONSTRUCTING AND RE-VIEWING AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WORKHOUSE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2020

SUSANNAH OTTAWAY Open the ORCID record for SUSANNAH OTTAWAY [Opens in a new window]  and
AUSTIN MASON Open the ORCID record for AUSTIN MASON [Opens in a new window]
SUSANNAH OTTAWAY*
Affiliation:
Carleton College
AUSTIN MASON
Affiliation:
Carleton College
*
Carleton College, One North College St, Northfield, MN55057, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

There is a fine timber moulded cornice in a front room of the building that was once the House of Industry at Gressenhall, Norfolk, while along the eastern wing of the building one can still see the architectural features of an elegant open arcade. Why were such features included on a structure built to keep the poor at work, where residents spent their days making sacks, spinning, and working in the farm fields that surrounded the institution? Creating a digital 3D model of the 1777 House of Industry has allowed us to peel back the historical residue of the post-1834 Poor Law Union workhouse and re-engage the building's architectural features in their original context. The resulting building's peculiarly elegant characteristics reflect the emerging ambitions and defensiveness characteristic of the newly constituted ‘guardians of the poor’ who constructed it, while its permeable walls indicate considerably lower barriers between the workhouse and the outside world than is generally thought. By applying an innovative, digital humanities methodology to a significant social history topic, this article argues that virtual modelling and traditional archival research can together shape a new approach to the history of the Old Poor Law's institutions for the poor.

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Article
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The Historical Journal , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , June 2021 , pp. 557 - 582
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Our greatest debts are owed to Megan Dennis (curator of the Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse Museum), Jeremy Fisher, and Florence Wong, whose work on the digital reconstruction of the 3D model was essential to its creation. We are grateful for the constructive comments provided by the anonymous readers and the editor of the Historical Journal, as well as Simon Devereaux and Rich Connors. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the North American Conference on British Studies, the American Historical Association annual meeting, and the Digital Innovation and Scholarship in the Social Sciences and Humanities symposium, and we would like to thank Seth Denbo, Tim Hitchcock, Zoe Alker, Kelsey Staples, Andy Urban, and Tom Herron from those productive sessions. Carleton College and the office of Dean Beverly Nagle provided critical financial support for the research project on which this article is based, and digital scholarship librarian Heather Tompkins was an invaluable ally. Finally, our undergraduate ‘Team Workhouse’ participants greatly enhanced our thinking and our work: Graham Earley, Sam Neubauer, Madison Chambers, Tumi Akin-Deko, Claire Jensen, Alex Wachino, Elizabeth Budd, Brittany Johnson, Nicole Connell, Cece Lasley, and Spencer Lekki. Any errors, of course, remain our own.

References

1 Shave, Samantha, Pauper policies: poor law practice in England, 1780–1850 (Manchester, 2017), p. 6Google Scholar. For workhouse museum efforts to counter this memory, see ‘More than Oliver Twist, 2019–2020’, https://www.workhousenetwork.org/more-than-oliver-twist.html.

2 On the importance of the growth of civil society in this period, see ‘Special issue: European civil society’, Social Science History, 41 (2017), pp. 1–135.

3 See esp. Smallburgh House of Industry accounts, master's journal, 1793–4, Norwich, Norfolk Record Office (NRO), MS 4497; Heckingham House of Industry governor's reports, 15 July 1771–Mar. 1772, NRO, C/GP 12/279.

4 Lees, Lynn Hollen, The solidarities of strangers: the English poor laws and the people, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar; Hindle, Steve, On the parish? The micro-politics of poor relief in rural England (Oxford, 2004), p. 363 (quote)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; King, Steve, Writing the lives of the English poor 1750s–1830s (Montreal, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Reinarz, J. and Schwarz, L., eds., Medicine and the workhouse (Rochester, NY, 2013)Google Scholar; Shave, Pauper policies.

7 Geremek, Bronislaw, Poverty: a history (Cambridge, MA, 1997)Google Scholar; Jütte, Robert, Poverty and deviance in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar. See also the nuanced analysis in Tomkins, Alannah, The experience of urban poverty, 1723–82: parish, charity and credit (Manchester, 2006)Google Scholar; and in Carbonell-Esteller, Monsterrat and Marfany, Julie, ‘Gender, life cycle and family “strategies” among the poor: the Barcelona workhouse, 1762–1805’, Economic History Review, 70 (2017), pp. 810–36Google Scholar.

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9 Most relevantly, Joanna Innes argues that local acts (such as those creating the hundred houses) ‘played [a part] in creating a dense, if highly variegated, infrastructure across (especially) rural and small town England through the middle decades of the nineteenth century’. Innes, Joanna, ‘The local acts of a national parliament: parliament's role in sanctioning local action in eighteenth-century Britain’, Parliamentary History, 17 (1998), pp. 23–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 25. See also Dodsworth, F. M., ‘The idea of police in eighteenth-century England: discipline, reformation, superintendence, c. 1780–1800’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69 (2008), pp. 583–604CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 A third of Norfolk's parishes had adopted Gilbert unions or corporations such as hundred houses by 1834, so their presence was crucial to the institution of the Old Poor Law in East Anglia. House of Commons, Abstract of the answers and returns made pursuant to Act 43 Geo 3, intituled, ‘An Act for Procuring Returns Relative to the Expence and Maintenance of the Poor in England’ [1803], printed 1804, from House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, https://about.proquest.com/products-services/House-of-Commons-Parliamentary-Papers.html.

11 A prominent local author located hundred house history not just within the traditional framework of the Elizabethan Poor Laws, but in Anglo-Saxon traditions, highlighting their distinctive regional character. Potter, R., Observations on the poor laws, on the present state of the poor, and on houses of industry (London, 1775)Google Scholar.

12 E.g. French, H. R. and Hoyle, R. W., The character of English rural society: Earls Colne, 1550–1750 (Manchester, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 For Gressenhall's house of industry there is only a four-year record of spinning production and a single guardians’ minute book from pre-1834. Extant sources from the Forehoe hundred house include minutes of the weekly meetings of the workhouse committee, and separate ledgers for the farm, the textile work, and numerous other ‘general accounts’. Mitford and Launditch Hundred House Minute Book, NRO, C/GP 14/137 and 14/1a–2; for Forehoe, see NRO, C/GP 8/3–9 for the 1780s weekly minutes; and NRO, C/GP 8/36, 43, 50–1, 88–9, 97, 106–7.

14 The Forehoe committee adopted the dietary regime of the Mitford and Launditch hundred house, and even knew the dimensions of the cart that the latter used to haul its sick poor to the house. Forehoe weekly meeting minutes, 27 Mar. 1780, NRO, C/GP 8/3. The bill of fare was discussed at the 26 June 1780 meeting, and again on 10 Jan. 1822: NRO, C/GP 8/21. On knowledge networks for pauper policies, see Shave, Pauper policies, ch. 5.

15 Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor network theory (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Wilson, Katherine Anne, ‘The household inventory as urban “theatre” in late medieval Burgundy’, Social History, 40 (2015), pp. 335–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Latour, Reassembling the social, pp. 71–3.

17 Ibid., pp. 10, 39, 41.

18 Ratepayers were those who owned or occupied a house or tenement and land in a given parish, and so were eligible to pay the poor rates.

19 Tarlow, Sarah, The archaeology of improvement in Britain, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Austin Mason, Florence Wong, and Susannah Ottaway, ‘Virtual Gressenhall’, Carleton Digital Commons (Northfield, MN, 2020) https://digitalcommons.carleton.edu/virtual_workhouse/1.

21 The research questions that guided our modelling were thus more process- than product-based. See Snyder, Lisa, ‘Virtual reality for humanities scholarship’, in Nelson, Brent and Terras, Melissa M., eds., Digitizing medieval and early modern material culture (Toronto, 2012), pp. 395–423Google Scholar.

22 Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm and Elliott, Andrew B. R., ‘Conclusion(s): playing at true myths, engaging with authentic histories’, in Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm and Elliott, Andrew B. R., eds., Playing with the past: digital games and the simulation of history (New York, NY, 2013), pp. 357–69Google Scholar, at p. 361.

23 Taylor, Tom, ‘Historical simulations and the future of the historical narrative’, Journal of the Association for History and Computing, 6 (2003)Google Scholar, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3310410.0006.203.

24 This technique provides an accessible method for inferring 3D geometry from 2D images captured on film in the past 150 years. Gerber, Kent, Goldberg, Charlie, and Magnuson, Diana, ‘Creating dynamic undergraduate learning laboratories through collaboration between archives, libraries, and digital humanities’, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 15 (16 May 2019)Google Scholar, https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/creating-dynamic-undergraduate-learning-laboratories-through-collaboration-between-archives-libraries-and-digital-humanities/.

25 Eve, Stuart, ‘Augmenting phenomenology: using augmented reality to aid archaeological phenomenology in the landscape’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 19 (2012), pp. 582–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9142-7.

26 Harris, Trevor, ‘Deep geography – deep mapping: spatial storytelling and a sense of place’, in David, Bodenhamer, John, Corrigan, and Trevor, Harris, eds., Deep maps and spatial narratives (Bloomington, IN, 2015), pp. 28–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 42.

27 Orsi, Cosma, ‘The political economy of inclusion: the rise and fall of the workhouse system’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 39 (2017), pp. 453–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 ‘News’, Middlesex Journal and Evening Advertiser (London), 4 May 1775–6 May 1775, issue 953, available in Seventeenth and eighteenth century Burney collection newspapers, https://www.gale.com/intl/c/17th-and-18th-century-burney-newspapers-collection. The reference to a popish penitential regimen may have been triggered by the convent-like appearance of the hundred houses in East Anglia.

29 Hussey, Stephen, ‘“An inheritance of fear”: older women in the twentieth century’, in Lynn, Botelho and Pat, Thane, eds., Women and ageing in British society since 1500 (Harlow, 2001), pp. 186–206Google Scholar, at pp. 186–8. Many of the hundreds of articles that mention workhouses in the Times of London and the Illustrated London News from 1950 to 2012 contain attacks on the workhouse as isolating and confining.

30 There were no clear rules restricting the inmates at Gressenhall from access to particular areas of the house, or particular passageways designated for their use in either the act or the rules.

31 On segregation in workhouse plans, see Morrison, Kathryn, The workhouse: a study of poor-law buildings in England (Swindon, 1999)Google Scholar.

32 Mitford and Launditch Hundred House minute book, 1841–3, NRO, C/GP 14/5. A letter of 31 Oct. 1842 received from the Poor Law Commission indicates the destruction of the family rooms, in addition to the other significant changes to the building that would now keep the ‘classes’ of poor separate.

33 The workhouse door was required to be locked only at night; during the day, it may have been relatively easy to simply slip away from this house of industry into the surrounding countryside.

34 Eden, Frederic Morton, The state of the poor: or, an history of the labouring classes in England, from the conquest to the present period (3 vols., London, 1797)Google Scholar, ii, p. 454.

35 Forehoe Hundred House minute book, 1784, NRO, C/GP 8/3–4.

36 We should note, however, that the poor who were given the choice to go into the workhouse were often told that they were to have ‘no more’ relief out of doors.

37 From Sept. 1782; nearly every week brought at least one similar allowance. Mitford and Launditch Poor Law Union Guardians’ minute books, July 1782–June 1785, NRO, C/GP 14/137.

38 E.g. the Samford Hundred House, Suffolk, where ‘Paupers, on being admitted into the House are not allowed to go out under Six Weeks, and this permission depends on their having behaved well. Afterwards they are allowed to go out on Saturdays once a Month and to remain out till Sunday evening.’ House of Commons, Abstract of the answers and returns, p. 492. Rules about regular leave on Sundays at Forehoe were re-established in Jan. 1822: see Forehoe minute book, Apr. 1820–July 1822, NRO, C/GP 8/21.

39 Forehoe minute book, 1780, NRO, C/GP 8/3.

40 Smallburgh House of Industry accounts, master's journal, 1793–1794, NRO, MS 4497; Heckingham House of Industry governor's reports, 15 July 1771–Mar. 1772, NRO, C/GP 12/279.

41 An act for the better relief and employment of the poor within the hundreds of Mitford and Launditch, in the county of Norfolk (London, 1775), p. 1545.

42 On fluid movement within a northern workhouse, see Ottaway, ‘“A very bad presidente”’.

43 On such tactics, see Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London lives.

44 The parliamentary act that created the Gressenhall House of Industry in 1775 states: ‘If poor persons shall at any such weekly Meetings desire to be dismissed; then, and in such Case, the said Directors and acting Guardians shall, and are hereby required to dismiss such poor Persons from the said House, any Thing in this Act contained to the contrary notwithstanding.’ But this was not as simple as it appears: the clause would be implemented only for cases where the Guardians of the Poor observed that the poor person could maintain themself outside the house. Act for the better relief, p. 1519. Prevalence of runaways from the houses at Wicklewood, Heckingham, and Smallburgh indicated that some inmates were denied release and then took matters into their own hands.

45 ‘Provided always, That if the Parents of Children so maintained by the said Guardians shall at any Time be desirous or willing to receive and maintain such Children, then the Directors and acting Guardians shall and are hereby required to dismiss such Children, any Thing herein contained to the contrary notwithstanding.’ Act for the better relief, p. 1519.

46 Digby, Pauper palaces, pp. 1–2.

47 Act for the better relief, p. 1524.

48 Digby, Pauper palaces, reproduction of plans on pp. 42–3; Eden, State of the poor, p. 460, wrote: ‘Old people, and a few others, are allowed to reside in cottages; and some are provided with rooms on the ground-floor.’ Given the size and layout of the rooms we have reconstructed, and the emphasis of the minute book on providing temporary housing for families and children, we think it is very likely that some of the family rooms would have housed children and parents.

49 Cromwell, Thomas, Excursions in the county of Norfolk, comprising a brief historical and topographical delineation of every town and village … Forming a complete guide for the traveller and tourist (2 vols., London, 1818–19)Google Scholar, ii, p. 63. Although the travel guide claims that each room was fitted up with a fireplace ‘for the comfort of the aged, infirm and better sort of poor’, our reconstruction demonstrates that this cannot have been the case for each segment of the rooms, which we have determined to be divided into three separate living spaces and a common work/sitting room.

50 House of Commons, Abstract of the answers and returns, p. 492.

51 As Digby, Pauper palaces, pp. 32–4, commented: ‘Nowhere was the departure from the Elizabethan basis of the individual parish as the unit of poor law administration more striking than in East Anglia. By 1834 one-third of the parishes in Norfolk had formed themselves either into incorporations under local act or into unions under Gilbert's act’ (nine of the latter existed according to the map on p. 33). Norfolk had one in ten parishes in a Gilbert Union by 1834, and one in four in an incorporation under a local act: ‘The considerable extent to which the county had departed from the more usual parochial administration of the Poor Law suggests the very active interest taken by the Norfolk gentry and clergy in the relief of poverty.’

52 Latour, Reassembling the social, p. 31.

53 ‘Special issue: European civil society’.

54 E.g. Jan. and Aug. 1800 discussions about installing copper boilers and furnaces, Forehoe Hundred House minute book, 1780, NRO, C/GP 8/11. At the annual meeting on 28 June 1802, the committee recommitted to following Count Rumsford's plans for improving the corporation at Wicklewood: NRO, C/GP 8/13.

55 The fine for missing a dinner at a quarterly meeting was only removed in June 1820: Forehoe Hundred House minute book, NRO, C/GP 8/21.

56 Eden, State of the poor, ii, p. 456; Digby, Pauper palaces, p. 38.

57 Potter's Observations on the poor laws supported the act and the idea of incorporated workhouses and was attacked anonymously in Considerations of the poor laws, on the present state of the poor, and on houses of industry. With some occasional remarks on a pamphlet lately published on these subjects. By the Rev. R. Potter (London, 1775). National publication reviews included a long piece in Monthly Review or Literary Journal, 52 (Apr. 1775), pp. 315–21, and Monthly Review or Literary Journal, 53 (Oct. 1775), p. 355.

58 Eden, State of the poor, ii, p. 456. East Dereham left the corporation and resurrected its old workhouse for the sake of the parish's 117 inmates in 1801, at a time when the inmate total at the Gressenhall workhouse had reached its peak of 670. Pope, Stephen, Gressenhall farm and workhouse: a history of the buildings and the people who lived and worked in them (Cromer, 2006), p. 20Google Scholar. See also Digby, Pauper palaces, ch. 3.

59 John Prest estimates that inclosure acts cost between £1,000 and £2,000; most of his evidence for this estimate seems to be from the early nineteenth century. Prest, John, Liberty and locality: parliament, permissive legislation, and ratepayers’ democracies in the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1990), p. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Note that a similar use of the jurisdiction of the hundreds can be found in the Militia Act of 1750, which set up hundreds’ control over militias.

61 Forehoe House of Industry, receipts and summary account, 1770–82, NRO, KIM6/10. Letters from ‘A.W.’ to Lord Townshend and the J.P. Thomas Beavor, and other letters seeking to ensure support, cast the need for a house of industry to ensure the industrious upbringing of children and the better care of the impotent in extremely urgent terms.

62 Forehoe House of Industry, receipts and summary account, 1770–82, NRO, KIM6/10.

63 Ibid., letter from ‘AW.’, Kimberley, 13. Feb 1770, to Dr Beavor and ?.

64 Dodsworth and historians of policing have demonstrated ‘the gradual development of English policing practices over the period 1660–1830, accelerating from the 1780s’. Dodsworth, ‘Idea of police’, p. 585.

65 See extant minutes of the weekly meetings of the Forehoe House of Industry: NRO, C/GP 8/3–8/29.

66 Innes, ‘Local acts of a national parliament’, p. 37.

67 Such details abound in the minute books of the Forehoe Hundred House, and the one extant Gressenhall guardians' minute book.

68 Latour, Reassembling the social, p. 31.

69 Sir Frederic Morton Eden commented that in Norfolk: ‘Both in this, and in the adjoining county of Lincoln, small shop-keepers, manufacturers, and publicans, and labouring people, complain heavily against those, whom they call monopolizers of corn, farming clergymen (who are not rare,) and the consolidators of small farms. To the conduct of men of this description, the high price of provisions, the increase of the Poor's Rates, and almost every evil, that attends, or is likely to attend the nation, are not unfrequently attributed.’ Eden, State of the poor, ii, p. 471, emphasis added.

70 The list of signatories at the first meeting to consider incorporation shows the most elite residents of the county well represented. These included the countess of Leicester, the earl of Essex, Sir Armine Wodehouse, Sir Edward Astley, and Sir Hanson Berney. Resident members of parliament also signed the petition to pass a bill, including Wenham Coke, Richard Miller, Richard Jackson, and William Clayton. Pope, Gressenhall, p. 10.

71 Ibid., pp. 10–11: ‘The letter stated that the writer could get 100 people to form a mob to destroy Smyth's and other houses if they persisted in their proposal.’

72 ‘News’, Middlesex Journal and Evening Advertiser (London), 4 May 1775–6 May 1775, issue 953.

73 The book claimed that the petition ‘met with such opposition, that had it not been for the efforts and assistance of Marquis Townshend, it might have failed of success’. Cromwell, Excursions in the county of Norfolk, ii, p. 63.

74 In summing up the shocking aspects of the Mitford and Launditch petition to incorporate, a news article highlights that, of all the provisions, ‘the most extraordinary one of all is, a clause which makes it felony without benefit of clergy, to pull down, deface, break, or destroy, any of the fences, hedges, or inclosures, which shall encompass this hallowed spot of earth’. Cited in Pope, Gressenhall, p. 11.

75 Its passage is reported in a number of newspapers, including ‘The Historical Chronicle for May 1775’, in Universal Magazine for Knowledge and Pleasure, 53 (May 1775), pp. 273–7.

76 ‘Observations on the Poor Laws, on the present state of the poor, and on houses of industry’, Monthly Review or Literary Journal, 52 (Apr. 1775), pp. 315–21.

77 J. Innes, ‘Legislation and public participation 1760–1830’, in D. Lemmings, ed., The British and their laws in the eighteenth century (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 102–32.

78 Similar attitudes in the northern context are explored in Ottaway, ‘“A very bad presidente”’.

79 Debates over freedom of movement centred most prominently around the Acts of Settlement. On the moral economy, see the classic article by Thompson, E. P., ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past & Present, 50 (1971), pp. 76–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Compare E. P. Thompson's characterization of the residential focus of this power of the eighteenth-century gentry: ‘their visibility was formidable, just as their formidable mansions imposed their presence, apart from, but guarding over, the village or town … The [eighteenth] century is not noted for the scale of its public buildings but for that of its private mansions.’ Customs in common: studies in traditional popular culture (New York, NY, 1993), pp. 45–7. See also Joel Harrington's view that workhouses were created in part because of ‘bureaucratic momentum’. Harrington, Joel F., ‘Escape from the great confinement: the genealogy of a German workhouse’, Journal of Modern History, 71 (1999), pp. 308–45CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.