Poverty
|
Return to the Home Page of the Farndale Family
Website |
The story of one family’s journey through two
thousand years of British History |
The 83 family lines into which the family is divided.
Meet the whole family and how the wider family is related |
Members of the historical family ordered by date of
birth |
Links to other pages with historical research and
related material |
The story of the Bakers of Highfields, the Chapmans,
and other related families |
Introduction
Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to
other pages are in dark
blue.
Headlines are in brown.
References and
citations are in turquoise.
Contextual
history is in purple.
Edith
Farndale was an Inmate at the Guisborough Workhouse in 1921 and then the
Stokesley Poor Law Institution in 1939.
…
Poverty
Flora
Thompson, Lark Rise, I, Poor People’s Houses, 'Poverty's no disgrace, but 'tis a great
inconvenience' was a common saying among the Lark Rise people; but that put the
case too mildly, for their poverty was no less than a hampering drag upon them.
Chronology
1601
The
Old Poor Law
The Poor
Law Act 1601 meant that even the poorest had certain legal rights,
including for economic assistance. The Poor Law 1601 sought to consolidate all
previous legislative provisions for the relief of 'the poor'. The Poor Law made
it compulsory for parishes to levy a 'poor rate' to fund financial support
('public assistance') for those who could not work. Assistance depended on the
residential qualification of living locally (leading Poor Law guardians to
repatriate paupers elsewhere). The role of 'overseer' was established by the
Act. There were two in each parish to administer relief and collect poor rates
from property owners. 'Outdoor' and 'indoor' relief was available. Outdoor relief was designed to support people in
the community and took the form of financial support or non-monetary relief in
the form of food and clothing. Indoor relief
included taking 'the poor' to local almshouses,
admitting 'the mentally ill' to hospitals and sending orphans to orphanages.
There was a distinction between the 'impotent' poor
(the lame, blind, etc) and the 'idle poor',
who were likely to be placed in houses of correction (later workhouses).
Ordinary men of
the local community took turns in the parish as Overseers
of the Poor, with responsibility to help the needy, with the cost being
met from the poor rate, levied on the wealthiest of the community.
Eighteenth
century
The poor laws and
Britain’s wealth meant that relative to other nations, the poor did receive
better assistance. In France for instance the equivalent help in 1790 was no
more than emergency handout amounting to 2s or 3s a year.
Farmers might be
required by magistrates to take on jobless labourers on a minimum wage, though
this often resulted in them being given demeaning or meaningless tasks. In
Yorkshire there was a system of grants to set up small businesses, such as
provision of tools and machinery.
(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023,
328-329).
1834
The Old Poor Law had developed into a unique welfare system. It
was felt though to have become unsustainable. Total spending increased from £2M
in 1784 to £6M in 1815. About 15% of the population were receiving aid. The
rise in population and wartime inflation meant that the old system of local
financing was becoming untenable. In Newburgh in Yorkshire in the Parish of
Coxwold, home of the Ampleforth
Farndales, the annual cost to thirteen ratepayers rose from £34 in 1817 to
1818 to £130 in 1836 to 1837.
It was not so much that there was greater poverty in Britain as
elsewhere, but as a richer society grew, the needs of the poor increased. Folk
were more reported to stand up for their rights, applying to Overseers of the
Poor, appealing to magistrates. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville wrote
about unblushing appearances before JPs and the evolution of a dependency
culture.
Grey’s government appointed a Royal Commission.
The New Poor Law
In 1834, the New Poor Law came
into operation in England and Wales.
· Parishes
were grouped into Poor Law Unions.
· These
were administered locally by a Board of
Guardians, elected by each parish or township.
· Boards
of Guardians were answerable to a central Poor
Law Commission, based in London.
The heart of the reforms was to introduce a test of genuine need.
Traditional payments of cash or in kind were to cease. Assistance would only be
provided within workhouses, the Whig Bastilles, which were intended to
be a deliberate deterrent, with monotonous, thoughj
sufficient, fiet; unpleasant work; regimentation;
unforms; mixing with of ‘respectable’ poor with ‘unrespectable’, and the
splitting of families.
Poor relief dropped from £6M to £4M and the percentage of the
population in receipt of relief from 10.2% to 5.4%.
New characters arose:
· When
Dickens’ story was first serialised in the English literary magazine, Bentley's
Miscellany in 1837, Mr.
Bumble was a cruel and self-important beadle, a minor parish official, who
oversaw the parish workhouse and orphanage of Mudfog,
a country town 75 miles from London where the orphaned Oliver Twist was brought
up. He was described as "A fat man, and a choleric ... Mr. Bumble had a
great idea of his oratorical powers and his importance.". " “Meat,
ma’am, meat,” replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. “You’ve overfed him, ma’am.
You’ve raised an artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am unbecoming a person
of his condition: as the board, Mrs. Sowerberry, who
are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have paupers to do with soul or
spirit either? It’s quite enough that we let ’em have
bodies." (Oliver Twist, Chapter 7).
· Thomas
Gradgrind was the notorious school board Superintendent in Dickens's 1854 novel
Hard Times who was dedicated to the pursuit of profitable enterprise.
His name is now used generically to refer to someone who is hard and only
concerned with cold facts and numbers
However many local
authorities did not comply with the new strict regime and continued to give
outdoor relief. It was impractical in industrial towns. The Bradford workhouse had space for 260, but over 130,000
claimed benefits in 1848.
The stigma of the
workhouse though remained a feature, especially a horrendous strain on
respectable claimants, often elderly or children, lumped together with drunks
and vagrants.
In time there was
some attempt to provide alternatives, such as infirmaries and cottage
hospitals, which did not carry the same stigma.
(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 439 to
442).
Those families
who could not fend for themselves were either given money or food
to sustain themselves (known as out-relief) or were taken into a Union
Workhouse. The workhouse was segregated by sex and the inmates were
expected to perform laborious tasks in return for their food and lodging, so
this was an option that the poor avoided whenever possible.
The funds to pay for the relief of the poor were collected from
the population of the township or parish, according to the value of the
property they occupied. The value of each property, or more particularly, the
rent it would fetch if rented for a year, was assessed. The local Board of
Guardians would decide how much they needed in each year and each householder
was liable for a proportion of this, depending on the annual rateable value of
the property.
Charles Booth began a detailed survey of the London Poor including
a map (The Life and Labour of the People).
There is an In Our Time podcast about Charles Booth and the Labour
Survey, to discover how many people in late Victorian London were living in
poverty, and understand why.
Poverty in Whitby
The 1837 valuation of Whitby is
a list of every property in the township of Whitby in the year 1837, that is
2,435 houses, tenements, shops, offices and other places. The valuation
includes the occupier of the property, its owner, a description and its
rateable value. The record therefore shows the type of house a person was
living in.
In 1837, the Board of Guardians for the Whitby Union came
to the conclusion that the rateable values that they had been using
prior to that date was out of date. They requested permission from the Poor
Law Commission to conduct a new valuation. When this was granted, in
order to record the annual rateable value of each property, the Board of
Guardians appointed a valuer. He wrote a list of properties with their
owners, occupiers and their rateable values, presumably by walking around the
town and interviewing people. This list was published by a local printer so
that people could check that their rateable value was correct and also that
no-one else was being charged too low a rate. A copy of the list was sent to
the Poor Law Commission.
The original record is at The National
Archives at Kew, in reference MH12/14656.
The Workhouse
Male and female vagrant wards were erected at
the Guisborough
Workhouse, first built in 1838.
In these wards, inmates were given a night’s
lodging and then required to perform 3 hours work to pay for it. 2 hours before
breakfast and 1 hour afterwards. Women did oakum-picking and men
stone-breaking.
Guisborough appears to have been regarded as a
model Workhouse by the Assistant Poor Law Commissioners who visited it. It had
water closets (then a novelty) and a slipper bath. It had a piggery, a garden
field, and a small orchard, and the inmates grew and sold large amounts of
potatoes and cabbages. The Workhouse was well maintained and the inmates, who
slept on coconut fibre beds, were regularly shaved, shorn, and provided with
Bibles, Prayer books and literature from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
When it came to work, able-bodied men were required to break half of ton of
stone a day in winter, and three-quarters of a ton in summer. Boys aged 10 to
16 broke a quarter of a ton. Females were occupied in domestic work or oakum
picking. Boys in the Workhouse attended the local Providence School when they
were old enough. Before the first (unqualified) schoolmistress was appointed in
1846, the girls were taught by a female vagrant. A local clergyman conducted
services in the workhouse dining-hall.
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise, V, Survivals: The old people who were not in
comfortable circumstances had no homes at all worth mentioning, for, as soon as
they got past work, they had either to go to the workhouse or find
accommodation in the already overcrowded cottages of their children.
Then there were one or two poorer couples,
just holding on to their homes, but in daily fear of the workhouse. The Poor
Law authorities allowed old people past work a small weekly sum as outdoor
relief; but it was not sufficient to live upon, and, unless they had
more than usually prosperous children to help support them, there came a time
when the home had to be broken up. When, twenty years later, the Old Age
Pensions began, life was transformed for such aged cottagers. They were
relieved of anxiety.
Flora Thompson, Candleford
Green, XXXII, The Green: The world which went very well for some
people in those days was a harsh one for the poor and afflicted. For the
old and poor, too. That was long before the day of the Old Age Pension, and for
many who had worked hard all their lives and had preserved their self-respect,
so far, the only refuge in old age was the Workhouse. There old
couples were separated, the men going to the men's side and the women to
that of the women, and the effect of this separation on some faithful old
hearts can be imagined. With the help of a few shillings a week, parish relief,
and the still fewer shillings their children—mostly poor, like themselves—could
spare, some old couples contrived to keep their own roof over their heads.
Bankrupcy