Are you a parachutist or a truffle hunter? A curious question from which to start in regards this publication by the Suffolk Records Society, bringing together a collection of transcribed records of the Loes and Wilford Poor Law Incorporation from over its sixty-one-year lifespan. Shaw adopts such a metaphor from Le Roy Ladurie, the French Annales historian, to explain the scope of this work: historians can be either parachutists, observing patterns from high above; or truffle hunters, scratching ‘with their noses searching for some … precious fact’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw2019). There are clearly dangers in both, with the parachutist missing the tasty morsel and the hunter often oblivious to their wider surroundings. Shaw concludes that the historian is usually an amalgamation but offers this volume to ‘cater to the needs of the truffle hunter’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw2019). The local, then, is the focus here. The volume explores the experience of rural incorporations which, outside of the Webbs (Reference Webb1922) and Digby (Reference Digby1978), has largely been bypassed in discussions of Old Poor Law enabling legislation. As Shaw comments, such incorporations ‘have only obtained a passing comment … with most texts failing even to mention their existence’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw2019). Distinct from the more familiar and nationally-reaching 1723 Knatchbull’s Act and 1782 Gilbert’s Act, rural incorporations were a particularly East Anglian experience (albeit also existing in Shropshire, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight) formed between 1756 and 1806 by parliamentary act and providing indoor relief within a workhouse for incorporated parishes (Higginbotham, Reference Higginbotham2016). Shaw’s focus is on the oldest of such incorporations in Suffolk: the Loes and Wilford Poor Law Incorporation, formed in 1765 and disincorporated in late 1826.
The volume begins with an introduction, setting out the local, national, legislative and historiographical context of the work, as well as including a longitudinal analysis of policy and outcomes over the course of the incorporation. The documentation-proper is split between seven quarterly minute books, beginning in July 1765 and ending in October 1826, with a further section on post-disincorporation documents. These post-1826 documents consist largely of correspondence and accounts, but also include overviews of names and settled parishes for resident paupers; inventories of the incorporation’s goods; and important, general demographic information for incorporated parishes. The content of the final section gives a good overview of the nature of the documentation in general, which outlines the detailed day-to-day running of the incorporation through such things as committee meeting notes; accounts and finance records; demographical information about both administration and paupers; inventories; legislative documentation; and incorporation policy. The minute books for the 1810s and 1820s also give particularly detailed information, organised via parish, on pauper demographics, settlement and weekly and quarterly allowances made. Detailed and precise information about the scope and nature of documentation is given (including archive reference numbers, condition and size measurements of documents) with editorial notes giving wider context by providing modern equivalents of historical measurements, as well as a glossary of perhaps unfamiliar terms found within the transcriptions. Although this volume does not claim national scope, it does include important information relevant to a non-East Anglian context such as a map of the national concentration of workhouses in 1777. Overall, this is a tightly presented collection of documents.
Shaw is conscious of the volume’s place within the wider historiography and claims for its importance within this are largely justified. Despite its local focus, the volume offers more than morsels and anecdotes, sitting firmly within a call for a re-evaluation of the importance of Old Poor Law enabling legislation on poor law practice and policy within its own context rather than as a footnote to the 1834 New Poor Law (Jones and King, Reference Jones, King, Jones and King2015; King, Reference King2000; Shave, 2013 and Reference Shave2017). In this sense, the volume sits alongside recent analysis, which has tried to contextualise pre-1834 enabling legislation within appropriate framings, for example, Shave’s (2013 and Reference Shave2017) work on the 1782 Gilbert’s Act and the 1818 and 1829 Sturges Bourne’s Acts. Therefore, Shaw’s work helps move away from a monolithic reading of the Old Poor Law towards a more nuanced understanding of the diversity and complexity of the English poor law landscape of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Again, the period packaging of the volume, ending in 1826 with the demise of the incorporation, makes sure the documentation is not used purely as a preamble to the New Poor Law. The derision felt towards the incorporation by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who viewed it as a model for the unionisation of 1834 to which they were politically-axiomatically hostile, is used by Shaw as an entrance to offer a revaluation of relief policy and outcomes within the incorporated parishes. Although the volume acknowledges that East Anglian Rural Incorporations received attention from the 1832 Commission in regards perceived ‘good practice’ in the administration of poor law, Shaw’s focus on the developmental nature of the incorporation, amended by Act in 1791 and 1810, counters assumptions of Old Poor Law practice being essentially stagnant until the reforms of the 1830s. Here, Shaw provides concrete evidence for Connors’s (Reference Connors2002) analysis of the eighteenth-century parliamentary debates around poor law reform, illustrating a prolonged anxiety and discussion about the purpose, scope and administration of poor law well before the latter decades of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries. These closing and opening decades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have received most attention within the literature, being conceived as the pivot for the ‘crisis’ of the Old Poor Law (Connors, Reference Connors2002: King, Reference King2000: Eastwood, Reference Eastwood1997), particularly after 1795 when the creation of the Speenhamland system; changes in settlement law; and general economic malaise caused increasing levels of pauperism and ballooning poor law expenditure. By bridging the 1760s to 1820s, the volume’s temporal packaging allows for a wider embedding of these important decades to examine some of the main conclusions made by the literature in regards the closing period of the Old Poor Law, namely a shift towards an increasingly negative sentiment towards the poor; larger amounts of habitual pauperism; and rising anxieties about rocketing national poor law expenditure.
The volume shows clear support for the ballooning cost of poor relief from the opening decades of the 1800s. Financial issues are explicit in the 1791 and 1810 amendments to the original 1765 Act of incorporation, which highlight growing financial problems. In 1791, borrowing of up to £14,000 was allowed, as opposed to the £10,000 limit in the 1765 Act, with an increase of £5,000 made in 1810. By 1810, the incorporation could borrow £19,000; 90 per cent more than allowed for in 1765. Indeed, financial difficulties were acknowledged in the minute notes of 26th October 1824, when disincorporation was suggested for the first time: ‘considering the great sum in which the maintenance of the poor amounts … it appears … most desirable … to consider the best means of reducing every unnecessary expense’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw2019). Therefore, even before the final dissolvement in 1826, the incorporation was in financial difficulty. However, Shaw’s longitudinal analysis shows a fluctuating expenditure experience, with peaks of spending being seen between 1815 and 1819 corresponding to the post-Napoleonic War depression that hit agrarian southern and eastern England the hardest, and a significant drop in spending from the early 1820s to disincorporation in 1826, corresponding with King’s (Reference King2000) conclusions about a drop in national expenditure after an 1819 high. In addition, the House of Industry was enlarged and a House of Correction created in 1791, with a stipulation that ‘idle persons may be punished’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw2019). This suggests both increases in the numbers of poor as well as a new emphasis on the ‘moral character’ of inmates, further supported by the appointment of cleric and schoolmaster in the same year. Deterring application for relief also seems to have been more pronounced from 1791, with changes in eligibility of settlement within the incorporation by disallowing settlement by birth in the House of Industry and placing the financial burden for maintenance of non-settled residents on the parish, aligning with latter, national changes to settlement law in 1795 which placed financial responsibility for the removal process on the evicting rather than receiving parish. Punishment became notably harsher from 1791, with the aim of deterrent for able-bodied poor, when ‘solitary confinement, abatement of diet, distinction of dress … or being placed in the stocks for 24 hours’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw2019). All this supports the general historiographical consensus of increasingly shifting attitudes towards the poor, defined by Hollen-Lees (Reference Hollen-Lees1998) as notably hostile from the late 1810s and 1820s in the wake of the post-Napoleonic Wars depression and rising levels of pauperism. Carter, James and King’s (Reference Carter, James and King2019) recent work on the linguistic move under the New Poor Law from ‘pauper’ to workhouse ‘inmate’ seems, at least in this Suffolk context, to be able to be pushed back into the early 1800s, with the institutionalisation of the pauper to inmate via the workhouse experience evident within the volume and not necessarily, therefore, being explicitly a post-1834 phenomenon.
By presenting documentation from across the lifespan of the incorporation, Shaw is able to show an experience of poverty, both for administration and paupers, that by 1826 was pragmatically at odds with the 1765 preamble for incorporation: ‘to balance the interests of the poor in a humane system of relief with those of the rate payers in an economical administration’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw2019). Having a set of institutional documents, such as transcribed here, offers new scope for source material used to make sense of the development of the Old Poor Law in its final century. Source material has too often been limited to parish and magisterial records which can be temporally sporadic, sparse and piecemeal. Here, we are offered a concise and comprehensive collection of documents, framed within the experience of an institution, from which can be gleamed wider evidence for both sentiment towards the poor and the policy, practice and outcomes of relief. This collection may suggest that the literature needs to re-examine Old Poor Law institutional collections (such as Gilbert Union Houses of Industry and parish workhouses) where they exist, in order to create a fuller picture of the English welfare landscape between the 1720s and 1830s. Such a revisiting of the institutional source material offers wide scope for a comparative study of the development of the workhouse experience in the century before 1834 and perhaps may suggest a re-evaluation of the radical nature of the unionisation and workhouse system implemented under the New Poor Law, going far to answer debates about the amount of change and continuity around the axis of 1834. Indeed, Shaw concludes that demographically, as with New Poor Law workhouses, the incorporation’s House of Industry was a place for the young and the old: ‘it was directed at the young, unmarried mothers, the aged and families ‘overburdened’ with children’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw2019). The volume is filled with numerous incidences that suggest that experiences of poverty deemed by the literature as peculiarly apparent under the New Poor Law (restriction in goods in kind; institutionalisation of the poor; segregation of paupers; restriction of dress, movement and diet) were evident, at least within the Loes and Wilford context, from the 1790s. Shaw’s comments on the uniform of inmates, of which he states ‘removed any vestiges of … individuality, and also served to stigmatize them whenever they left the house’ (Shaw, Reference Shaw2019), are particularly intriguing and may prove fruitful for future research into cognitive understandings of eligibility, being and being seen as poor via symbolism as touched on by Hindle (Reference Hindle2004), Jones (Reference Jones2006) and King (Reference King2002). This all goes to suggest that a deeper understanding of indoor relief prior to the union workhouse of the New Poor Law is needed. Within the literature, a welding of ‘the workhouse system’ (Crowther, Reference Crowther1981; Driver, Reference Driver1993) as something distinctive to the New Poor Law has hindered sustained understanding of earlier developments in indoor relief, and has removed the workhouse as an integral part of poor relief, admittedly varying across the country, in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Dunkley’s (Reference Dunkley1979) emphasis on the evolutionary development of poor law, within which he views 1834, is integral in approaching Shaw’s work because, in many ways, the policy and practice of the incorporation foreshadow later, national changes to poor law. This adds further support to Innes’s (1998 and Reference Innes2009) conclusions that the relationship between central and local authority within Georgian England was largely inverted, with wider, legislative change, such as Gilbert’s Act and one may argue the New Poor Law, being guided in part by existing perceived good practice at local level. Therefore, Shaw’s volume transcends its local focus by providing clear evidence for evolutionary practice, absorbing and adjoining the wider contemporary, national poor law context and adding something vital in questioning current historiographical understandings.
The volume also offers a broadening of the units of discussion used in analysing the Old Poor Law, breaking away from the boundaries of the parish, the so-called ‘welfare republic’ (Hindle, Reference Hindle2009), which has been traditionally adopted as the base unit to contextualise policy, practice and outcomes pre-1834. The parish is far from redundant, with Shaw acknowledging important differences between relief offered in incorporated and non-incorporated Suffolk parishes, such as the curtailment of relief in kind within incorporations. However, by assessing an institutional collection, aspects of regionalism, policy dissemination and process are illuminated, which do not fit squarely into current models of understanding of the Old Poor Law. Shaw shows that in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Suffolk there were important distinctions intra-county within relief provision, with differing relief landscapes existing in parallel. As such, the parish-administrative boundary becomes malleable, both in the sense that it was negated somewhat through belonging to a rural incorporation where policy decisions were made over and above vestry and overseer; and in its membrane-like purpose, relevant to incorporated and non-incorporated parishes, which appropriated or rejected policy through active agency embedded in an awareness of diversified welfare practice existing around it. Perhaps the parish was a republic, but it was by no means a closed state. The volume then can say something about the policy process of poor law explored by Shave (Reference Shave2017), showing the dissemination and adoption of policy through the agency of stakeholders engaged in networks of exchange through such things as correspondence and personal visits. The wealth of correspondence and administrative records collected in the volume offers scope for a reappraisal on the nature of policy process, perhaps offering arguments for a need for in-depth administrative studies, fallen out of favour since the mid-1990s with the emphasis on ‘history from below’ (Hitchcock et al., Reference Hitchcock, Sharpe and King1997; Shave, Reference Shave2017), which could complement the recent important work completed on Old Poor Law pauper agency and negotiation (Sokoll, Reference Sokoll2001; King, Reference King2019). This opens up further possibilities for research into the legislative role; embedding; and underpinning of policy process, practice and outcomes, answering Charlesworth’s (Reference Charlesworth2009) calls for an acknowledgement that ‘poor law was law’ and perhaps adding to the limited, albeit important, studies of wider magisterial roles within poor law (Dunkley, Reference Dunkley1979; King, Reference King2015).
Overall, Shaw’s volume pivots on an important assertion; namely that unique localised responses to poverty under the Old Poor Law have been either overlooked or under-analysed. One may suggest that Shaw’s purpose of catering to the discerning taste of the truffle connoisseur is fulfilled via the in-depth analysis and presentation of the experiences of poverty for all stakeholders involved in the spatial and temporal framing of the Loes and Wilford Poor Law Incorporation. Here, the volume will obviously speak to the local historian of Suffolk and East Anglia. However, parachutists must not despair. Through its presentation, this volume places itself squarely in the wider context of English welfare literature and provides lines of enquiry which ask us to rethink, or at least dig deeper, into some of the key tenets of contemporary welfare historiography.
