Samantha Williams has written a very readable book, which is no mean feat when the book in question began as a doctoral thesis. Not only this, the book adds substantially to our understanding of the final decades of the old poor law.
The introduction provides a very useful summary of the ‘period of long-drawn-out crisis’ that characterised the poor law in this period, while Chapter 1 considers Bedfordshire and the technique of developing the pauper biographies that Williams mobilises to such good effect. The substantive chapters that follow consider the sorts of topic we are used to reading about under the poor law such as rates, pensions and extraordinary relief in cash and kind but with the enormous advantage that the gender, age and life-cycle circumstances of each relief recipient can be known. Consequently we can see that Campton and Shefford, the two reconstituted parishes that provide the focus for this research, saw increases in the number and value of all pensions, but that the elderly and lone parents were the most prominent beneficiaries (not the couple-headed families that so concerned poor-law reformers). Williams is able to supply a provocative check to revisionists of the new poor law, by reasserting its ‘radical discontinuity’.
The balance of power within parishes is also given careful, informed consideration, encompassing the points of view of paupers plus the overarching judgements, corrections and adjustments to parish policy given by the magistracy. That Samuel Whitbread, a Justice and Member of Parliament for east Bedfordshire, was coincidentally highly concerned with poor-law reform is particularly fortunate. Whitbread was deeply involved with his locality. He responded favourably to appeals from paupers and even opened a school in Shefford. This makes his justicing notebooks of enormous value for this study, even if his level of regional and parliamentary involvement (he proposed a bill for ‘promoting and encouraging industry and for the relief of the necessitous poor’ in 1807) suggests he was far from representative.
The discussion departs somewhat from the usual roster of topics for the old poor law when it tackles employment. Historians do not often manage to place poor-law pensions so precisely in the context of local earning opportunities. Agricultural workers had the option in Bedfordshire of turning their hands to the straw-plaiting trade instead, albeit that adult men may have regarded this as ‘women's work’.
This leaves one major question and one minor criticism. The question is, why choose Campton and Shefford from among the viable reconstructed parishes for this exercise? Were they the only two options, and if not how was the selection made? They may have been the obvious ones to choose in Bedfordshire given the problems with overseers' accounts at neighbouring Southill (mentioned briefly on p. 31), and Williams does a fair job of justifying a focus on Bedfordshire. Yet this still leaves the question of the other parishes reconstituted by the Cambridge Group that lay elsewhere in England, which might also have been contenders for a comparative study, or for research with a focus outside of Bedfordshire. The selection of Campton and Shefford is treated summarily rather than fully.
The minor criticism is that there are a couple of points where the text alludes to a primary source, but the footnotes point to a secondary one. For example, the discussion of negative contemporary comment on the practice of taxing small rate-payers, who were themselves on the fringes of poverty, is drawn entirely from two histories when the original materials are relatively easy to access. Now this is a modest sort of niggle, exactly the kind of thing you might expect a pedantic academic historian to come up with when reviewing a book. It is also the case that all published writers understand the pressures of time that motivate or curtail the processes of research. It remains, however, the sort of thing we deprecate among our students' dissertations and theses: or at least I do. Therefore it would be tantamount to a neglect of duty if I did not point this out in a book review when I would in undergraduate feedback.
I read this book with great enjoyment, as I have done all of Williams's work. There is much to appreciate here, from the inventive research to the places with names to relish: Blunham-cum-Muggerhanger springs to mind. The book will prove a pithy and significant read for anyone with even a cursory interest in the history of poverty in England.
