Settlement
The 1832 Royal Commission had proposed a simplification of the settlement laws so that birth in a parish would become the only means of acquiring settlement. However, this suggestion was not taken up, although the 1834 Act removed a year's hiring and service in a parish office as options to gain settlement. A provision to allow a union, rather than its individual parishes, become the area of settlement was only taken up by one parish, Docking in Norfolk.
Following the 1834 Act, a illegitimate child now took its mother's settlement until it reached the age of sixteen or acquired settlement in its own right. The previous system, where such a child gained settlement from its place of birth, had sometimes led parishes to try and remove from within their borders heavily pregnant single women so that their children would not be a burden on the ratepayers.
In 1846, the already complex settlement laws were further complicated by an Act which introduced the new concept of 'irremovability'. Amongst other things this gave protection against removal to anyone who had been resident in a parish for five years. This privilege was not, however, available to those living outside their home parish and who were in receipt of non-resident poor relief from that parish. In order to prevent a flood of new relief claims from those poor who discovered that they were now irremovable, 'Bodkin's Act' was passed shortly afterwards to place the cost of such claims on the union's common fund rather than on individual parishes. From 1865, one year's continuous residence in a union would qualify a person as being irremovable.
Despite these changes, issues of settlement and removal continued to occupy a significant amount of unions' time and money. In 1907, more than 12,000 individuals were removed from one union to another in England and Wales, the larger number of these being from London and other large cities.
.Bibliography
- Slack, Paul. The English Poor Law, 1531-1782, 1990, CUP.
- Webb, Sidney and Beatrice English Poor Law History, 1927, Longmans, Green & Co., London.
- Webb, Sidney and Beatrice English Poor Law Policy, 1910, Longmans, Green & Co., London.
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