Nineteenth Century Poverty in England and Wales

 

The National Archives [TNA] is seeking expressions of interest from local history groups to work with us on a planned project to catalogue a proportion of the nineteenth century English and Welsh poor law material held here at TNA. Until the relatively recent creation of the 20^th century welfare state poverty was dealt with through a series of 'Poor Laws'. Until the mid 1830s most administration and supervision of the poor laws took place at a local level and consequently the records are held at Country Record Offices. This is because in the main each parish raised poor rates to spend on the management of their own poor. The parish vestry was supervised by the local gentry through the office of the magistrate (see pre-1834 box left).

In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act completely overhauled the system and the parish was largely replaced for poor law purposes by the 'Poor Law Union'; a new tier of local government. As you may be aware Poor Law Unions were collections or groups of parishes and/or townships brought together to administer poor relief. Earlier 'unions' were often referred to as 'incorporations' and some of these existed until the 1860s. The 1834 act introduced a new structure for poor relief provision (see below).

 

 

            Each parish was to elect one or more guardians (elected by local rate payers) who would employ a clerk, master and mistress and other 'professional' staff to run the workhouse on a day to day basis. Parishes would still raise money through a rating system and the monies from all of those parishes within a union would form the funds for the provision of relief. In effect this saw the establishment of two new bureaucracies, the Poor Law Union (in effect the new local government authority) and the Poor Law Commission ('the 'Centre'). The job of the centre was to reduce poor relief expenditure by limiting the nature of relief to be given locally and monitor each locality. The Victorian poor law was predicated on the 'workhouse test'. This is where poor relief across any particular union would be offered via the 'deterrent workhouse' which was designed and run to be an institution of last resort. Once the new bureaucracies were set up they engaged in a continuous round of letter writing and information sharing: finance, indoor- and outdoor poor relief, information on individual paupers, education, building work, workhouse staff, public health, local politics, labour matters (such as trade union, friendly societies, Chartism etc.) – in fact all of those subjects we attribute to local government activities.

            In the main these records are really the original in-coming correspondence to the Poor Law Commissioners/Poor Law Board from the localities. The out-going letters (where they survive) will be with the records of the Poor Law Union itself (in county record offices where they survive). Nevertheless, the vast majority of Commission/Board 'copies' of the responses are usually scrawled on the reverse of the incoming letter or fully drafted on 'acknowledge sheets'; in effect giving both sides of the conversation.

In conclusion these records are a fantastic resource for local historians… if only they were catalogued/listed in such a way that researchers new what was in specific volumes. We know they are underused by local historians; notwithstanding how essential they are for local nineteenth century studies

To bring them to the fore TNA is proposing (if we are able to secure additional funding) to employ two project specialists who would:

·        work with c.20 local history societies across England and Wales and determine with them groups of volunteer editors in their societies to undertake cataloguing work

·        scan 20 'sets' of poor law correspondence (for the period 1834 to 1871) for use by the volunteer editors)

·        run training/education workshops on both record content and cataloguing skills for the identified groups

·        engage in continuous support and advice with the volunteer editors for the length of the project

·        catalogue the agreed sets of records (c.220 volumes/pieces) and make those catalogues available online

·        provide encouragement and practical support for the volunteer editors to publicise their work and the historical content of the work they are undertaking

·        undertake final editorial work and feedback to volunteers editors

·        scans of the materials will be made available via The National Archives website for free (so once material is identified via the catalogue researchers will be able to view the individual letters, reports, etc. immediately)

 

There are around 16,500 volumes of this material for the Poor Law Unions of England and Wales (Scotland and Ireland had their own systems under separate legislation) so we are approaching this in a piecemeal way. If your local history society wishes to take part in this exciting project please complete the expression of interest form and send to Paul Carter at the address given at the end of the form.

 

 

 

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