Frederic Eden on the Poor

Eden’s Book

The State of the Poor … [the full title is very long indeed] was published by Sir Frederic Morton Eden Bart as a private individual in 1797. He explained in the preface to volume I that “The difficulties which the labouring classes experienced, from the high cost of grain and of provisions in general, as well as clothing and fuel, during the years 1794 and 1795, induced me, from motives both of benevolence and personal curiosity to investigate their condition in various parts of the kingdom.” He attempted to obtain answers to a range of questions and for that purpose visited some places himself and had others visited by an unnamed agent, who “spent more than a year travelling from place to place”; he also obtained information from correspondents. He presented a wide variety of facts but but had to accept what information was available locally, which varied and makes it difficult to compare towns.

Eden’s survey included Louth (and also Lincoln, Alford and Spilsby, but not eg Boston or Horncastle). This page deals with an account of poor relief in Louth included in volume II of the book. Eden he gave figures for income and expenditure for the years 1774-1795. as set out in table 1 below. It is not known whether he visited Louth himself. Eden’s account is supplemented by information from a government survey published in 1804. His comments on Louth’s open fields (though not entirely relevant to poor relief) are valuable in themselves, because of the shortage of other information.

Eden’s General Comments on Louth

Extracts from Eden’s text are shown in red below.

This parish contains about 3000 acres. Its population in 1782 was 3300 and at present is generally supposed to amount to 4000 inhabitants … Louth is a small market for cattle, grain, butcher’s meat and other provisions but is not a thoroughfare of any consequence. Coal is now brought by a canal from the Humber to within half a mile of this town, which has considerably lessened the prices of fuel…

The prices of provisions are: beef, from 4d to 5d the pound; mutton 5d; veal 3½d to 5d; bacon 8d; flour 2s 6d the stone; … milk 1d a pint. The wages of common labourers are from 20d to 2s a day in summer and 16d in the winter, or throughout the year 1s 6d a day, without victuals. In this parish there are 22 alehouses (8 of which sell wine) and four friendly societies containing altogether 190 members.

Charities

Donations, of the annual value of about £100 are distributed amongst such Poor of this parish as do not recive parochial aid. Here is a hospital or alms-house, in which apartments are provided for 12 decayed widows; besides which a pension of £3 7s and 7 pecks of coals is given to each of them annually.

The twelve bedeswomen were entitled to a quarter of the income from King Edward’s Rental administered by the corporation.

Arrangements for Poor Relief

In describing some of the arrangements for poor relief in Louth Eden was evidently trying to make the best of unclear information. The basic position was that responsibility rested with the overseers of the poor, elected annually, but it was expected that important decisions should be taken by the vestry, in effect a meeting of ratepayers. The overseers were unpaid and in Louth, as in many other towns, there were repeated attempts to deal with the detail of administration by employing a manager or by contracting it out to a “farmer of the poor”, whose payments from the parish would be supplemented by the paupers’ earnings. Contemporaries tended to exaggerate the potential for earnings, particularly because by the late eighteenth century machine spinning was rapidly displacing the spinning wheel. In his account of Spilsby Eden described an unsuccessful Lindsey scheme for encouraging the employment of poor children. The expectation was that every boy and girl should be able to knit by the age of six and spin by the age of nine. However, the scheme was found to be “not only expensive to the parish but detrimental to the children themselves; for, by being so long confined to a sedentary employment at an early stage of life, they were often rendered puny and weak, and at the age of 12 or 13, when they ought to go out to service with the farmers, or become apprentices, they were … extremely ignorant of everything except spinning…”

The Workhouse (“House of Industry”) about 1795

In 1791 a new house of industry was erected, which cost £700; towards the payment of which £260 (which arose from the sale of a house and a piece of land belonging to the parish) were paid. The remaining debt is to be discharged by annual instalments of £50 from the farmer of the Poor till the whole debt is discharged. The house is not erected on a good plan … There are no regular working rooms or detached apartments for the reception of the sick. There is one large lodging-room for the men and another for the women, each containing 14 beds, which are partitioned from each other by deal boards at each end and on one side …

The present farmer of the poor-house of industry is a woolcomber and manufacturer of worsted. He employs some of the Poor in combing wool, spinning and knitting worsted and some in common labour out of the house… At present there are 39 Paupers in the house, consisting of 15 children under 12 years of age, 9 men and 15 women. The farmer adds that not more than 8 or 9 people are constantly employed. The others are either young children, old, or infirm or are engaged in attending their sick companions…

The stated number of 39 inmates contrasts with the stated number of 28 beds. There were also 39 inmates when the workhouse was inspected about 1832.

The farmer of the Poor pays at this time about 22s a week to 28 poor people out of the house and about £65 a year to the families of 5 militia men serving for this parish and he is at the expense of all necessary medicinal assistance.

If the figure of 22s a week spread amongst 28 paupers is correct, it must have represented only minor assistance, certainly not enough to keep them alive. But the number contrasts sharply with the 1802/3 figures in table 4. For the militia families see below.

Small beer is allowed at every dinner and supper, when cheese is used; those who work out of the house have often cold meat allowed them for dinner on bread and milk days. On meat days about 28 lbs of meat are boiled for 40 people.

“Small beer” had a low alcohol content. The milk may well have been skimmed milk, the cream being used to make butter and cheese. Eden then gave details of expenditure on poor relief from 1774, as shown in table 1. It is not known whether the “disbursements” column covers all expenditure met from the rates or only the expenditure on poor relief; probably the latter. He added figures (not reproduced here) for the number of baptisms and burials, which fluctuated considerably but in total showed that over the 20 years from 1774 the surplus of baptisms over burials was nearly 400. However, the growth of Louth’s population was mainly attributable to immigration from nearby villages. Moreover baptisms did not constitute a reliable proxy for births and the percentage of unbaptised children was probably increasing. On deaths the only period that stands out in the parish register is October 1783 to March 1784, when 80 children died, presumably as a result of some unrecorded epidemic.

Eden summarised the management of poor relief as follows.

Property Values

The basis for rating land and buildings was normally either (a) the full open market market that a tenant paid (or, in the case of owner-occupied property, that a hypothetical tenant would pay) or (b) the net rent that the landlord would receive after allowing for landlord’s expenses or (c) a scaled down version of either (a) or (b). Eden’s investigations showed all of these options in use in different places. The heading “Rates in the pound net rent” (see table 1) indicates that he had been told that the valuations used for rating in Louth were net rents. As is explained on another page the evidence for the 1767 rating list suggests that the full rack rents were being then used, but that evidence is very thin.

The final column of table 1 shows an increase in the total rateable value of the town of roughly 70%, which probably corresponded to the increase in the town’s population. Doubtless many of the new families inhabited mud and stud houses with very low rents but at the same time there was a great increase in brick buildings including some high value houses and warehouses associated with the canal (opened 1770) that made Louth a port. Also, agricultural rents were rising. The total rateable values used, less that £6,000 in 1795 (and less that £7,000 in 1802: see table 3 below), were too low to be credible. By 1815 the declared rental for schedule A income tax purposes was £16,497 and that was almost certainly an understatement. Probably what happened in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was that the rateable values of older properties were not increased to reflect rising rents and the values given to new properties tended to be arrived at by comparison with the older ones.

Parliamentary Surveys

National concerns led to a special act of parliament passed in 1803 for the purpose of ascertaining the cost of poor relief in England and Wales. The statutory survey asked for each parish various questions about expenditure in the year ending Easter 1803 and repeated information supplied in earlier for the years 1776 and 1783-5. The results were published in 1804, as an Abstract of the Answers and Returns … (available online). The entries for Louth were in tablar form and, as reproduced with some additions in tables 2-4 below. The financial year in question was exceptional in that it represented a brief interval of peace in the wars with France 1793-1814.

An apparent difficulty here is the large percentage difference between the “other” expenditure in 1802/3 (28% of Louth’s expenditure financed by rates) and that in the earlier years. It is likely that the 1802/3 survey was not measuring exactly the same things as the earlier surveys. The “other” expenditure intended to be covered by the parliamentary survey included “church rate, county rate, highways, militia etc”. The church rates fluctuated considerably and might be nil. The county rates were fixed by the magistrates and covered (eg) prisons. The highway rates were fixed by locally elected surveyors but there is no evidence of their level in Louth.

The militia regiments were designed for local defence against a French invasion. They were raised locally by a selective ballot. In practice the recruits were normally labourers, because, if a reasonably prosperous man was selected, he could pay for a substitute. Most militia expenses were met by the central government, but the support of their wives and children fell on the parish. Eden stated (see above) that in about 1795 £65 was spent on five militia families, equivalent to five shillings a week each on the assumption that they served for the whole year. He noted that in Spilsby the weekly allowance was six shillings. (The militia system may have increased the number of marriages. Some labourers on receiving the going rate of about £10 for acting as a substitute may have considered themselves in a position to marry. This seems to have been so during the Seven Years War: in the period August 1760 to January 1763 Louth’s parish register recorded the marriages of 15 militia men. Unfortunately the local practice of recording the occupations of bridegrooms was abandoned long before 1802 and so we do not know whether the position was then the same.)

The total rateable value used for calculating rates accords reasonably well with the Eden’s figures, after some allowance is made for new building.

It is difficult to know what to make of the figures in table 4. Items numbered 1, 2 and 3 were all expressed as being “persons being relieved permanently”, which meant throughout the whole year. Many of these must also have fallen into item 6, which was intended to apply to persons “above 60 years of age or disabled from labour by permanent illness or other infirmity”. Item 4 cannot relate to the whole year, because Louth’s workhouse was too small to accommodate 65 people at one time (see above). For item 5 it is unclear whether those receiving “occasional relief” were inside or outside the workhouse.

The Open Fields

Louth’s open fields were enclosed by a private act passed in 1801. The award made under the act was estimated to cover almost 1702 acres. The three commissioners appointed by the act sealed their final award in 1806; but the redistribution of land was largely settled in 1802 ¹1. Mercury 26.3.1802. All of the previous rights were replaced by allotments of land, typically small fields, with individual owners. There is a good map of the fields immediately before enclosure in Robinson 1979.

For example, before enclosure a Louth farmer might hold, as tenant of the corporation as lords of the manor, but paying only a nominal rent, a total of 20 unfenced acres in the open fields. The land would be divided between the North Field and the South Field and would comprise strips (formerly called “selions”, though the term was dying out in the eighteenth century). The farmer could plant and harvest crops; but the value of his holding was reduced by the rights of other people to put cattle to graze on the land at certain times and by the right of vicar or other Church representative to claim about 10% of the crops as tithes. Also, the strips were likely to be scattered about the fields, rather than contiguous, which did not make for efficient farming. After enclosure the farmer would be the freehold owner of an enclosed field, not subject to other people’s grazing rights and not subject to tithes. However, the new field would be a good deal smaller than the original 20 acres; and he would have to pay the initial cost of fencing.

In addition to farmers of this type there were a much larger number of people with “rights of common”, which entitled them to graze one or more cows (or possibly other animals) on the open fields. Grazing rights on open fields were a form of property and were often mentioned in sale advertisements. For example, when the Marquis of Granby (a pub, now demolished, next to the White Swan) was advertised for sale in 1785 it was stated to have a right of common in the common fields, but two adjoining cottages had no such right.²2. Mercury 16.12.1785 The extent of grazing rights depended on the “custom of the manor”. Unfortunately there is very little evidence to show what Louth’s custom was. Eden commented:

Most of the land belonging to this town lies in two large common fields, which are fallowed and cropped alternately. In several parts of these common fields there are large tracts of waste land, upon which a great number of poor people summer each a cow, which in winter go at large in these fields. The poor complain heavily of the farmers, saying “That they encroach on their property”; and the farmers say “That the poor take the opportunity of eating their corn with their cattle.”

Eden referred to “waste land” but this had become a technical term in enclosure legislation and should not be taken literally. He meant that the two large open fields were only partly used for arable farming and had within them areas of permanent pasture. This is corroborated by a crop survey in 1801, which stated that in that year 548 acres were used for arable farming (largely wheat, peas and beans), which must have represented roughly two thirds of one of the large common fields.³3. The crop returns have been transcribed and are available online via the UK Data Service. So the remaining land (ie the other third of the cropped field and the whole of the field that was lying fallow) would have supported a large number of cattle.

Eden did not mention the third common field, the East Field, a much smaller field apparently used as meadow. Probably it was treated in the same way as the two main fields, except that a crop of hay could be taken every year, rather than in alternate years, with common grazing permitted after the hay had been harvested.

The distinction drawn by Eden between the farmers and the poor needs to be treated with caution, firstly because many of the rights of common are likely to have belonged to the farmers as rights attached to the arable land. Secondly, most poor people could not afford to keep a cow and there is no information as to whether the custom of Louth manor permitted them to lease their unused grazing rights to others. The enclosure act expressly stated that claims could be be made in respect of grazing rights that had not been exercised and it is likely that many claimants were seeking compensation in the form of tiny pieces of land that would promptly be sold.

The number of people with rights of common is an important consideration, because some contemporaries and many later historians have assumed that in open field parishes most of the labourers had rights of common. In particular in a much-quoted passage the Hammonds said “… before enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land; after enclosure he was a labourer without land.“⁴4. J L & Barbara Hammond The Village Labourer 1760-1832 (1911) p 100. Their book describes the parliamentary process for Louth’s enclosure on pp 368-74 The word “cottager” was apparently used in the OED sense of “one who lives in a cottage”; but in nineteenth century Lincolnshire usage the general idea of a cottager seems to have been someone who farmed agricultural land that was insufficient to provide full time work for an able-bodied man; the land was important either to supplement his earnings from another occupation or to provide him with an income after his retirement from his main job. An illuminating example was provided in 1847 by the Grantham Agricultural Society’s prize for “the best milch cow … the property of a Cottager, the tenant occupier of not more than ten acres, who is getting his living principally as a day labourer.⁵5. Mercury 22.10.1847.

In a detailed article ⁶6.Past and Present May 2001 pp 95-126 Leigh Shaw-Taylor showed that the earlier generalised accounts often exaggerated the frequency with which labourers had common rights. For Louth property advertisements are far too few to support any estimate of the number of people with common rights. The enclosure award made 67 allotments that were wholly or mainly in lieu of rights of common, but it is clear that many claimants sold their rights shortly before the award was finalised. The only earlier evidence relating to the eighteenth century seems to be an agreement in 1735 ⁷ 7. Lincolnshire Archives GOULDING PAPERS/4/A/1/1/40 under which a piece of common land was enclosed for the use of the poor. The document was signed by over 240 people expressed to be “the Lords of the Manor Land Houses and Tenements and occupiers of farms lands or tenements within the town and parish of Louth”. This number must have represented a good half of the householders in the town in 1735 and implied that many small cottages had rights of common attached to them.

Unfortunately Louth was not covered in Rex Russell’s series of studies of Lincolnshire enclosures. However what does emerge from those studies was that the system was heavily biased in favour of the Church: allotments in lieu of tithes were on a generous scale and the cost of fencing the tithe owners’ land was met by the the other allottees. This applied in Louth and may have had a disproportionate effect on the smaller tenants. The comment that the poorer allottees “could do little but sell up and get drunk on the proceeds”⁸8. Robinson 1979 p81 may have been true in some cases, but it should be noted that the nineteenth century rating lists showed many examples of small detached gardens, presumably used to grow vegetables or to keep pigs.