THE SPEENHAMLAND SYSTEM

THE poor, as Jesus Christ reminded his disciples, are always with us.  That being so it is interesting to see how various Governments and their societies have dealt with this permanent phenomenon.  In 1795, for example, some Berkshire gentlemen Justices meeting at an Inn in Speenhamland, which is near Newbury, came up with a proposal aimed at dealing with economic and social hardship, which gentlemen-justices in several counties either adopted or imitated and hence it became known as the “Speenhamland System”.

    In the eighteenth century poor relief was provided on the basis of two influential statutes: the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1597 and 1601 and the Act of Settlement of 1662.

    The Elizabethan statues required that each parish had to be responsible for its own poor.  Justices of the Peace, i.e. J.P.s or Magistrates were given the duty of setting up a framework for the administration of the Law in their parish and in this task of organising poor relief they were assisted by the minister of the Parish and those householders designated as members of the parish meeting or Vestry.  The Vestry was given the authority to raise the money required by collecting a rate, the level of which depended on the estimated value of each property.  The decisions of all Vestries were enforced, on a day-to-day basis by the Parish Constable and paid officials who collected the rates and acted as “Overseers of the Poor”.

    However, care of the poor varied from place to place but in the second half of the seventeenth century, Government and society found itself having to cope with the consequences of increasing population movements in the aftermath of the Civil Wars.  In an attempt to deal with these consequences the Act of Settlement of 1662 required parish authorities to give poor relief only to those persons who had lived in the parish for a long time or were born there.  All other persons seeking assistance had to return to the place where they were born.

    This then was the administrative framework but what kind of relief did it provide?  It either took the form of “outdoor relief” i.e. donations designed to help people to continue living in their own homes or “indoor relief” i.e. the provision of relief in work houses.

    Moreover, between 1601 and 1750 the Poor Law created a vast and inefficient system of social welfare, which was adapted to the requirements of English rural society.  But in the second half of the eighteenth century England’s economy and society began to be transformed.  The population began to increase; increased industrialisation required greater mobility of labour and changes in land structure and the character of farming were taking place.  So although the earlier system continued the Law was amended to enable the Poor Law authorities to attempt new and different solutions to the problems posed by these economic and social changes.  For example in 1782 an Act of Parliament, sponsored by Thomas Gilbert permitted parishes to form unions to build workhouses.

    However, in the early 1790s a further complication occurred.  From 1793 Britain was at war with France and the acute distress produced in the rural South placed a further strain upon the Poor Law System.  It was in a county that was suffering from changes taking place in forming that a “novel” solution was promulgated.

    The County was Berkshire. It was one of the counties most affected by enclosure and it was also a county that was on the fringe of the South West textile industry, which was going into decline.  Thus it was an area where one might expect particular distress and hardship.  In April 1795, following a poor harvest and hungry winter, the Berkshire  magistrates decided to hold a meeting at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland to discuss how they would respond to this situation.

    The meeting was held on  6 May 1795.  It was attended by Magistrates and clergymen and Charles Dundas from Barton Court near Kintbury acted as Chairman.  They all agreed that action was needed and passed a resolution which maintained “that the present state of the poor does require further assistance than has been generally given them” So it was an attempt by the governing elite to retain the affection of and control over their labourers.  Their motives were a mixture of altruism and self-interest.

    They agreed to supplement the labourer’s wages from the poor rates and they did so by setting on a minimum level which would enable a family to survive and moreover they proposed to make up the pay of those who found themselves below it.  Thus they proposed that “when the gallon loaf (i.e. 8lb 11oz loaf) shall cost one shilling, then every poor and industrious man shall have for his own support three shillings weekly either produced by his own or his family’s labour or an allowance for the poor rates and for the support of his family one shilling and sixpence”.  For every penny that the loaf rose above one shilling they reckoned that a man would need three pence for himself and one penny for each member of his family.  Consequently this provided a basis for outdoor relief in Berkshire.

    A system of supplementary wages from parish funds to a minimum was soon adopted in a modified form in other counties where the distress was much worse.  In 1824 – and one assumes the situation was similar before 1815 – returns revealed that the “system” was operating in Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridge, Devon, Dorset, Essex, Huntingdon, Leicester, Northampton, Nottingham, Oxford, Suffolk, Sussex, Warwick, Wiltshire and the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire.

    However, some historians have two reservations about the system, the first is that they doubt whether the “Speenhamland System” was as novel as some claim for they point out that at the beginning of the eighteenth century grants were sometimes made in Cambridgeshire even to able bodied men who were “overcharged with children” and the late Professor George Rudé notes that in France in 1789 it was suggested “that wages should be geared to the price of bread”.  Secondly, they challenge the notion that it should be designated a system, given that the application of the system varied from one area to another.

    Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that it was one way in which the Poor Law was administered between 1795 and 1934.

    Another important issue is how efficient and effective the “Speenhamland System” was.  During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, George Carring M.P., a future Prime Minister, claimed that the “System” saved the state from experiencing rioting and perhaps even revolution.  However, in the Post War years i.e. after 1815 and especially between 1815 and 1822 and between 1831-32, attitudes to the poor began to change and the system was subjected to great criticism.  It was criticised by ratepayers for being ruinously expensive, objected to by the Rev. Thomas Malthus, on the ground that it encouraged the farm labourers to have large families and condemned both by Liberal economists because it impeded mobility of Labour and by philosophical radicals, the followers of Jeremy Behtham, who argued that it was archaic, untidy, inefficient and liable to discourage labourers from working hard.  It was also regarded as being an invitation to farmers to pay low wages since they knew that the poor rate would be used to make up the difference and to lay off their workmen in winter and re-employ them in spring and summer.  Moreover it was believe that indiscriminate relief demoralised the recipients of it.  Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the “old” Pool Law was the “Swing” riots by labourers in 1830-31, when it seemed that it was no longer able to keep the labourers docile and quiet.

    All of these adverse factors led in 1832 to a Royal Commission on Poor Law, which reported in 1834. The Commission was predisposed to be critical of the “Old” Poor Law and so it recommended the abolition of “outdoor” relief and the maintenance of workhouse inmates at a level that was below that of lowest paid workers.  The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, based on these recommendations, created a system, which favoured the provision of “Indoor” relief in the workhouse.

    The “Speenhamland System” had been consigned to the past but it is worth while reminding ourselves that originally it was a measure intended to deal to with a particular situation by responding to it in a humane and pragmatic fashion.  For this the Magistrates Meeting in the Pelican Inn, deserve some credit.

    Bernard J. Eggleton ã 2006