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The Mythology of the Old Poor Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

James Stephen Taylor
James Stephen Taylor
Affiliation:
Wells College
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Extract

The Old Poor Law has recently found a forceful defender in Mark Blaug, who in two articles has challenged the critics of England's first public welfare system and displayed the clay feet of that towering structure of words, the evidence for the 1834 Report. This is a notable achievement, but Mr. Blaug's case should not be accepted in toto: indeed, that it has survived so long without criticism is surprising. G. R. Elton felicitously referred to one of his critics as a “self-appointed hound of heaven,” but scholars who propound provocative theses are likely to provoke responses. Mr. Blaug's interpretation of the Old Poor Law is, to at least one “selfappointed hound,” eminently provocative.

Type
Notes
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 1969 , pp. 292 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1969

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References

1 Blaug, Mark, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New,” Journal of Economic History, XXIII (June 1963), 151–84;CrossRefGoogle Scholar“The Poor Law Report Reexamined,” Journal of Economic History, XXIV (June 1964), 229–45.Google Scholar In the second article (p. 230) Mr. Blaug states that there were nine folio volumes of evidence for the 1834 Report: in fact, there were twelve. His reexamination of the Report is actually limited to the five volumes of Answers to Rural Queries (Appendix B.I). In addition to Rural Queries, the evidence consists of two volumes of Reports of Assistant Commissioners, two volumes of Answers to Town Queries, and three volumes of additional material in the form of foreign and domestic communications and special appendixes on the labor rate and vagrancy.

2 Blaug, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law,” p. 151.

3 Ibid., p. 154.

4 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (5th ed.; New York: Random House, 1937), p. 141.Google ScholarStyles, Philip, in “The Evolution of the Law of Settlement,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal, IX, No. 1 (1963), 62,Google Scholar disagrees with Smith, but his opinion appears unduly influenced by the records of one parish (Painswick, Gloucs.). The 35 Geo. Ill (1795), c. 101, which prevented removal of all but those actually in need of relief, may have encouraged migration, but the law may have been easier to change than habits of mind.

5 Blaug, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law,” p. 155.

6 Ibid., p. 156.

7 P. P., Accts. & P., Abstract of the Answers and Returns…; 1804 (175), XIII.Google Scholar

8 Mr. Blaug himself mentions that the costs of relief between 1802 and 1840 lagged behind falling wheat prices. “The Myth of the Old Poor Law,” p. 163.

9 Between 1748–1750 and 1813 the costs of poverty increased tenfold: thereafter there was no major trend before 1834 in actual amounts expended on the poor. Whether ratepayers' burdens were increasing in the last decades of the Old Poor Law is open to question. Retail prices, population growth, and the increasing tendency to use the poor rate for local government costs unrelated to poor relief would have to be considered, but this is not the place to do it. Suffice it to say that a graph charting costs of relief from 1748 to 1834 would create a very different impression of the early nineteenth-century cost pattern than Mr. Blaug's graphs with their base at 1802; 1802 is not the base of a pyramid of rising cost—it is well up the slope. A digest of relevant cost data is P. P., Accts. & P., Returns Relative to Local Taxation; 1846 (17), XL.Google Scholar

10 The 1802 returns give the total number of workhouses in England and Wales as 3765, but there is an error in addition of one (3766) and the returns do not include an additional 145 workhouses in the Metropolis. Mr. Blaug's figure of 400 workhouses was apparently the result of a typographical error, the number meant being 4000.

11 Blaug, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law,” p. 157.

12 See West Alvington, In-house account books, 1765–1803 & 1820–36, 6 vols. Devon Rec. Office, 818A/PO1–6.

13 The per capita costs of indoor relief as given in the 1802 returns were almost four times as high as for outdoor relief.

14 P. P., Accts. & P., Abstract of Returns on Labourers' Wages; 1825 (299), XIX, 1.Google Scholar

15 Neuman, Mark, in Aspects of Poverty and Poor Law Administration in Berkshire, 1782–1834 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1967),Google Scholar shows that the Speenhamland system was not widely adopted even in Berkshire, its home county (pp. 213–14 & 288). There certainly were magistrates' and parish scales of relief in Berkshire and elsewhere, but we are not yet in a position to generalize about them.

16 Blaug, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law,” p. 167.

17 p. p., Reports of Special Assistant Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture; 1843 (510), XII, 56–57.Google Scholar

18 Letter to Southey, Nov. 21, 1827, as quoted in Williams, Orlo, Lamb's Friend the Census-Taker: Life and Letters of John Rickman (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1912), p. 237.Google Scholar

19 English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 231.Google Scholar

20 Blaug, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law,” pp. 176–77.

21 Blaug, “The Poor Law Report Reexamined, p. 229.

22 Editor's Preface, Hampson, E. M., The Treatment of Poverty in Cambridgeshire, 1597–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), p. xix.Google Scholar