Poor Law in Louth

The “Old” Poor Law

This page deals with the financing of poor relief in the nineteenth century. For the eighteenth century see Frederic Eden on the Poor and Poor Relief 1767

The main type of expenditure financed by rates in the nineteenth century was the relief of the poor. People in receipt of poor relief were described as “paupers”. Under a system dating back to the sixteenth century the established principle was that each parish should pay for the relief of its own poor. Relief often took the form of cash payments; sometimes food, clothing or rent-free accommodation was provided. A small minority of the people assisted were accommodated in workhouses, where it was hoped that costs would be reduced by putting the inmates to productive work.

The whole of Louth constituted a single parish. Two overseers of the poor were elected annually to manage the expenditure and fix the rates needed to finance that expenditure, though the rates had to be formally approved by justices of the peace. Painter 2000 gives a good general account of the arrangements in Louth.

Some information about how this system worked in practice in the early 1830s can be derived from the notes to R1838 and from the report of Major Wylde, an assistant poor law commissioner.¹1. Wylde’s report on Lincolnshire is included in Appendix (A) to the report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws; Louth is dealt with in pp 135a–136a and 148a–149a. The report probably dated from late 1832. In principle the overseers were supervised by the Vestry, a parish meeting of ratepayers, but this obviously presented difficulties for a parish the size of Louth and in 1823 a “select vestry” was established to supervise the administration of poor relief. It comprised the vicar, the two overseers of the poor, the two churchwardens and three other “substantial householders”.²2. Vestry minutes 24.4.1823 Administration was assisted by the employment of a salaried assistant overseer. Louth had its own small workhouse, which on the day of Wylde’s inspection, housed 39 people.

The poor in the workhouse are maintained by contract with the master at 2s 6d a head [per week] from a month old, he taking the benefit of the labour of such as are able to work; the parish clothes them.

Wylde had a low opinion of the value of this establishment. However most expenditure related to relief outside the workhouse. He stated that

the permanent resident paupers at present are 144 in number, which has been about the average number for about the last three years. These, with their families, make 262 persons.

The total of 262 was about 3.8% of the town’s 1831 population. The small average size of the families suggests that a high proportion of those assisted were elderly or infirm people living alone or as lodgers. In addition to the 262 long term paupers there were an unascertained number of people that received temporary assistance, the “occasional poor”.

Wylde said that for the previous three years the total expenditure on poor relief averaged £3,162, which represented an average rate of 6s 1d in the pound (ie on the half values used in R1823) or about 9s per head of the town’s population. The notes in R1838 include some summary accounts for expenditure on poor relief in recent years. They correspond fairly well with Wylde’s description. A good year to examine is 1836/7, which was the last financial year of the operation of the Old Poor Law. For a summary see Appendix table 1.

Under the Old Poor Law the issue of “settlement” was important and the law on it, which was very complicated, led to much litigation between parishes. In the simplest cases people were settled where they were born. If they moved to a different parish, they could be sent back, unless the parish of settlement accepted financial responsibility for them. It can be seen from table 1 that in 1836/7 the overseers of the poor for Louth paid out £303 to other parishes in respect of people settled in Louth but living elsewhere.

The New Poor Law and Louth Union

R1838 was compiled at a time when the Whig government was introducing the “New” Poor Law under the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. The Act radically changed the administration of poor relief by requiring the establishment of poor law unions comprising groups of parishes. These unions were closely supervised by three Poor Law Commissioners with a view to achieving national standards. In 1847 the Commissioners were replaced by a government department, the Poor Law Board, which in 1871 became the Local Government Board, with wider responsibilities.

The 1834 Act reflected a view, described at length in a Royal Commission report in 1833, that far too much money was being spent on payments to the poor, and that this expenditure both encouraged idleness amongst labourers and operated as a subsidy for those employers that failed to pay adequate wages. It was therefore considered better for the able-bodied poor to be accommodated in workhouses, where food, clothing and shelter would be adequate but conditions would be exacting.

Though contemporary discussion tended to concentrate on the use of workhouses to deter work-shy adults from seeking undeserved assistance, it was always recognised that some people that were not able-bodied would continue to receive help outside the workhouse. Even within the workhouses most adults were likely to be ill or aged and a substantial proportion of all inmates were orphaned or abandoned children. The 1841 census showed Louth’s new workhouse about half full with 123 paupers, of whom 76 were children under 14. Appendix table 2 shows that on a sample date in 1840 just over 5% of Lincolnshire’s inhabitants received some form of poor relief, but only about one sixth of the recipients were in workhouses.

Louth Poor Law Union had its first meeting on 13 April 1837.³3. Mercury 21.4.1837. It covered 88 parishes (including eg Binbrook, North Somercotes, Mablethorpe, Burwell and Ludford) and was governed by 90 elected “guardians”, three from Louth and one from each of the other parishes. The electors were mainly the ratepayers, but landowners were also entitled to vote. Occupiers and owners might have more than one vote, according to the value of their property. Eligibility for election as a guardian depended on occupation of property rated at £25 or more; so in many parishes the number of possible candidates was small.

Initially the New Poor Law did not change the principle that each parish was financially responsible for its own paupers, those that had a settlement in the parish. Accordingly the level of poor rates varied greatly from parish to parish within the same union. The responsibility for levying the poor rates remained with the overseers of the poor; but under the New Poor Law it was the guardians, not the overseers, who took the decisions that determined the level of expenditure. Some items of expenditure (eg the salary of the clerk to the guardians) were met by the parishes collectively. This collective responsibility was extended in stages. Finally in 1866 the union became the rating unit for all ordinary expenditure (Union Chargeabilty Act 1865). This reduced disputes about settlement, since it did not matter whether a pauper was settled in Louth or in another parish in Louth Union; but settlement in a parish in a different union did have financial consequences and some disputes continued.

In Louth it was reasonable to expect the new system to reduce expenditure by achieving economies of scale and by systematic competitive tendering. For example in 1840 there were successful tenders for milk at 14 pints for a shilling and for “men’s suits of strong blue cloth consisting of coat, waistcoat and beverteen [a type of corduroy] breeches with white metal buttons” at £16 6s per dozen suits. In 1842 the contract rates for pauper coffins were 12s 4d each, or 6s 6d for children under sixteen or 3s 9d for children under three.⁴ 4. Chronicle 27.3.1840; Mercury 7.10.1842. There was indeed a reduction in net expenditure, but expenditure fluctuated considerably from year to year, as shown in Appendix table 3.

Expenditure in 1850/51: the balance of In-maintenance and Out-relief

In Louth Union expenditure on paying the rents of paupers did not accord with the national policy: see Housing Paupers. Weekly returns of expenditure were required but these were only occasionally reported in the press. I have not found any such report for 1851; but in July 1849 there were here 1,857 paupers receiving out-relief at a cost for the week of £170. There were also 129 in the workhouse. ⁵5. Chronicle 6.7.1849). The annual reports of the Poor Law Board give some information about expenditure for individual unions, but statistics on pauper numbers are given only for counties and for sample weeks in January and July. In 1851 the census shows that the number resident in Louth workhouse on the census date, 30 March was 172. This was probably close to the average figure, about half way between the Winter maximum and the Summer minimum; but only a minority of those relieved outside the workhouses can be identified.

The fourth annual report of the Poor Law Board, dated 31 December 1851, painted a gratifying picture of reduction in expenditure on poor relief. Expenditure had fallen in every English county, except Lincolnshire, where expenditure had been almost static. The annual cost per head of population had fallen to only 5s 6½d.

Expenditure in Louth Union, 7s 8½d per head of population, was well above the Lincolnshire average, 6s 1½d per head. This arose because expenditure on out-relief was relatively high. Details are given in Appendix table 4. The figures do not show whether this high expenditure arose because of the high number of persons given out-relief or because of high expenditure per person; probably both.

For the size of the union the number resident in Louth workhouse was not exceptional. The figure shown in table 4 of £873 for the food and clothes of the inmates (roughly £5 per head per year, if 172 is taken as the average) may at first sight seem barely credible, but is broadly consistent with a report in the previous year that the “average cost of each pauper per week in the workhouse was 2s 1½d”.⁶6. Mercury 20.9.1850.

It is not possible to expand table 4 to cover the rest of the century, because the Local Government Board soon discontinued the practice of publishing detailed figures for individual poor law unions and tended to concentrate on the balance of in-maintenance and out-relief, ignoring the steady growth of other expenditure. However Appendix table 5 gives the figures for 1870/71 and a comparison with table 4 shows that both national expenditure and the expenditure of the Lincolnshire unions combined had risen faster than the large increase in population. Louth Union’s expenditure had risen slightly but was then only slightly above the Lincolnshire average. The population of Louth Union was almost static and the population of the town itself had begun to decline.

Fear of the Workhouse

In the nineteenth century workhouses had a bad press. In the early years of the New Poor Law there were a number of scandals relating to inadequate food or a failure to give ill inmates proper nursing; the semi-starvation of paupers in the workhouse at Andover (Hants) in 1845 was the most publicised. Oliver Twist did not help; and Victorian novels contained many other disparaging references to the way in which workhouses were run. A very common, and entirely genuine, objection was that the inmates of workhouses lived regimented lives and had scarcely any personal freedom.

Workhouses were highly unpopular; admission to a workhouse carried with it a social stigma in a way that receipt of out-relief did not. Indeed workhouses were often seen as little better than prisons. The following is an extreme local example that cannot be entirely dismissed as sensationalised reporting.⁷7.Mercury 29.10.1852.

Catherine Drayton, aged 17, who had been an inmate of the Louth Union-house for upwards of two years, escaped from that establishment by fearlessly climbing over the large and spiked iron gates … The girl much lacerated one of her arms and clothes in effecting her escape … The night following, another female inmate was in the act of absconding, when she was perceived and captured by the porter, and returned to her ward.

However, workhouses were not prisons. Catherine Drayton was entitled to leave the workhouse on giving reasonable notice; but would then almost certainly have been refused out-relief.

The Crusade against Out-relief in the Second Half of the Century

The civil servants of the Poor Law Board (Local Government Board from 1871) took the view that the principles of the 1834 act were being undermined by excessive grants of out-relief. The Board’s inspectors had to operate mainly by persuasion, because they had no power to override the grants of out-relief made by poor law guardians in individual cases. There developed a long national debate, later referred to by economic historians as “the crusade against out-relief”.

The leading crusader was Albert Pell (1820-1907), MP for the southern division of Leicestershire from 1868 to 1885. Pell admitted that as a poor law guardian in Brixworth Union (Northants) he had acquiesced to lax administration of out-relief, but after he became an MP he studied the issue more carefully and was taught by officials of the Local Government Board to recognise that “the poor-rate was by law to be devoted to the relief of destitution and not to the alleviation of poverty”. In Brixworth Pell initiated a series of personal calls at the house of every pauper and established that many of those receiving out-relief either were not entitled to any assistance or ought to enter the workhouse.⁸8. Pell was a Tory MP but his biographer commented that “upon all Poor Law matters he was a Whig of the highest economic orthodoxy”: Thomas Mackay Reminiscences of Albert Pell 1908 p xlv)

The next step was to spread this doctrine amongst other poor law guardians. In the 1870s the practice developed of holding regional conferences of guardians to discuss current problems. Pell soon became a leading speaker at these meetings and chairman of a national committee organising conferences.

The extent of poor relief could be measured in a number of different ways eg by annual expenditure relative to population, by the percentage of the population receiving assistance or by the number of person/days on which assistance was given in each year. Pell and his associates tended to use a simplistic comparative test: the ratio of the number of paupers receiving out-relief to those in the workhouse.

At a conference of guardians in 1875 Pell pointed out that some economical poor law unions (all outside Lincolnshire) had succeeded in reducing the ratio to three paupers receiving out-relief for every pauper in the workhouse. This contrasted with ratios of 13 to 1 in Louth and Brigg Unions. Pell made hostile comments about Spilsby Union, evidently the worst of all, with a ratio of 15 to 1.⁹9. Reports of the Poor Law District Conferences held during the year 1875 p 294 (This use of statistics based on counting heads was ideal for debating purposes. It ignored the fact that the full cost of a workhouse inmate was borne by the union, whereas those receiving out-relief were often partly self-supporting.)

In 1876 Pell attended a regional meeting in Lincoln, where the principal speaker came from London to report that in Stepney there had been a huge reduction in out-relief achieved by searching investigations into the circumstances of claimants. To judge from the press report of the meeting this was received by the Lincolnshire guardians with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.¹⁰10. Chronicle 24.2.1899.

In the second half of the nineteenth century “pauperism” declined nationally. The percentage of the population accommodated in workhouses did not vary greatly, but the percentage receiving out-relief fell steadily. Appendix table 6 summarises this.

Some of the decline in pauper numbers must have been attributable to the crusade against out-relief. However, from the 1860s average wages slowly rose and food prices tended to fall, a combination that reduced the need for poor relief.

There were many local variations, particularly in relation to the elderly: the “extent to which the elderly turned to the poor law for assistance varied sharply across the 586 English poor law unions – in 1891–2, the share of persons aged 65 and over receiving poor relief was 15 per cent or lower in 47 unions, and greater than 45 per cent in 42 unions”. ¹¹11. George R Boyer and Timothy P Schmidle: Poverty among the Elderly in Late Victorian England Economic History Review, 62, 2 (2009), pp 249–278, 250.

The Crusade in Lincolnshire and Louth

For Lincolnshire as a whole the annual reports of the Poor Law Board before 1871 and then the Local Government Board show that relative to population the number of paupers receiving out-relief was unusually high. At a Lincoln board meeting in February 1899 one of the guardians complained that the expenditure on out-relief in Lincoln was greatly higher than that elsewhere; expenditure in Nottingham was £89 per 1000 of the population, which compared with £238 per 1000 in Lincoln Union. The clerk to the board suggested that it was unfair to compare Lincoln with other counties; the proper comparison was with other poor law unions in Lincolnshire; and expenditure per 1000 people was higher in Horncastle, Louth, Spalding and Bourne than it was in Lincoln. The Chairman commented that “in Lincoln they always gave the deserving poor out-relief, and did not compel them to come into the House”.¹² 12. Chronicle 24.2.1899.

In his book The Aged Poor in England and Wales (1892) the social reformer Charles Booth gave detailed information about all of the poor law unions including expenditure per head of population in the year 1891/2. Booth was a member of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor and (like his fellow-member Joseph Chamberlain) dissented from the Commission’s negative report in 1895. Appendix table 7 shows the expenditure per head for four Lincolnshire unions in 1891/2. The sharp contrast between Louth (expenditure on out-relief 4s 10d per head of population) and Spilsby (2s 1d) should be noted. The difference between the two unions was also referred to in a poor law inspector’s report in 1899.¹³13. Twenty Eighth Annual Report of the Local Government Board 1899 pp 149-50. From the civil servant’s point of view Spilsby had become a model union, whilst Louth remained delinquent. The contrast cannot be accounted for by any material difference in the characteristics of the unions and must be attributable to differences in policy. The crusade against out-relief seems to have succeeded in Spilsby but largely failed in Louth.

In practical terms the different levels of expenditure meant little to the very infirm, who often had no alternative to going into the workhouse, because they were incapable of looking after themselves. The effect of Spilsby Union’s policy would be felt by those paupers that were less infirm. A probable example was John Southwell, who appeared in the 1891 census as a shepherd, a widower aged 66. He lived in East Kirkby, which was in Spilsby Union. Subsequently he needed poor relief and Spilsby Union accepted responsibility. By 1896 he appears to have been living as a lodger in Horncastle and was receiving out-relief of three shillings a week; this was paid by Horncastle Union but recharged to Spilsby Union. At some date in 1898 the Spilsby guardians refused to finance continued out-relief and offered admission to their workhouse at Hundleby. The Horncastle guardians remonstrated and resolved “to again draw the attention of the Spilsby Guardians to the fact that the man was of good character, and that as the case was an exceptional one, a sum in out-door relief should be granted to him.” However, John became an inmate of Spilsby Union’s workhouse and died there in 1899. ¹⁴14. The formal records are in the Horncastle minute book 23.8.1898, 20.9.1898. For the representations made by the Horncastle guardians see Horncastle News 24.9.1898.

In the 1890s there was increasing public recognition of the need for old age pensions, but in 1895 the majority report of a Royal Commission took the view that nothing could be done. Pensions were not introduced until 1909, when, subject to certain conditions, a single person over 70 received five shillings a week.

Endnote

This description of out-relief does not imply that either the guardians or the Local Government Board were obsessed with that issue. In the later nineteenth century the character of workhouses slowly changed; they became more like hospitals and there was increasing recognition of the need for better nursing facilities and trained (if not formally qualified) nurses.

In the early years of the New Poor Law children formed a high percentage of workhouse inmates. Painter’s comment that “the institution was almost a children’s home with an additional self-administered function of caring for the aged” is only a slight exaggeration. ¹⁵15. Painter 2000 p 45. Initially it was expected that the children would be educated in the workhouse, and the posts of schoolmaster and schoolmistress were created for that purpose. Later the number of child inmates dwindled and the advantages of educating the children at ordinary schools came to be recognised. The post of schoolmaster became redundant, and the schoolmistress was transformed into an “industrial trainer”, responsible for assisting in the supervision of the children out of school hours and training the girls in domestic skills.

Even in the early years some children were boarded out and this practice tended to increase; but as late as 1891 the census showed that out of the 117 inmates 38 were aged below 15. Painter 2000 gives a sketch of the changes.

In addition the guardians were given responsibilities unconnected with poor relief. These included the vaccination of children and school attendance, both of which were sometimes resisted by parents.

STATISTICAL APPENDIX