Preface: The Small Bills and Petty Finance project
Peter Collinge and Louise Falcini
In June 1784 Joseph Wilson, overseer of the poor for the parish of Skelton, Cumberland, drew up ‘A Bill of Expences and Trouble Concerning Jane Sewel Child & Father’.1 It included the cost of a journey to Penrith, about seven miles from Skelton; another journey made by Wilson and John Turner to Matterdale; and five shillings paid to a midwife.2 The total bill amounted to 16s 6d. After the birth, Jane Sewell and her new-born child were denied further relief. Sewell then approached magistrate William Wilson to intervene.3 She complained that, despite her being very poor and unable to provide for herself and her child, the parish had repeatedly declined relief. In response, Wilson issued a summons instructing Skelton’s overseers to appear before him at Mrs Roper’s Sun Inn, Penrith, to explain their decision.4 Having heard the case, Wilson ordered relief. Surviving overseers’ vouchers, the bills and receipts generated as part of the administration of the Old Poor Law show that over the next four years Jane Sewell received regular relief for her child’s maintenance. The receipt of money was acknowledged by Sewell’s father.5 There is then a silence in the records until 1793 when, after the birth of her fourth illegitimate child, a warrant was issued. This instructed Jane Sewell and John Nicholson, the putative father, to appear before magistrates William Wilson and Edmund Law at Isaac Wilkinson’s inn, Penrith, for examination.6
In the struggle for welfare between individuals, localized politicking and the wider economics of the parish, Sewell’s story is a familiar one. It identifies a range of people each of whom, for different reasons, had an interest in the Old Poor Law: Sewell herself; Nicholson; Sewell’s father; the overseer, Joseph Wilson; John Turner; the innkeepers, Mrs Roper and Isaac Wilkinson; and the magistrates, Wilson and Law. As the receipt of 19s 6d each quarter gave Sewell (albeit limited) spending power, it is likely that there were others in the locality, such as retailers, who also took an interest in the case.7 Parish relief would allow Sewell to settle in part or in full any outstanding debts she may have accrued or to pay for food, lodgings, fuel and children’s clothing as she saw fit.
The partial biography of Jane Sewell draws attention to overseers’ vouchers as a new evidential pathway for research into the Old Poor Law and into the wider operation and administration of parish welfare during the latter part of the long eighteenth century. It also raises methodological issues relating to overseers’ vouchers, namely their presence, absence or unevenness in the historic record. As discussed in the Introduction, such issues could have arisen from the ways in which information was recorded in the vouchers or transferred between documents at the time, or by later retention and archival policies. In this volume, issues of presence, absence or unevenness issues are combined with thematic topics regarding parish welfare. These include the agency of the poor, illegitimacy, the role of parochial administrators and wider authorities, and the involvement of goods and service providers. Each is examined from different, yet interconnected, standpoints. Elizabeth Spencer, Peter Collinge and Alannah Tomkins use the rich detail of the vouchers to explore new perspectives on the provision of relief for the poor. Tim Hitchcock, Louise Falcini and Samantha Shave either use the vouchers as embarkation points for new thinking about the Old Poor Law or consider how researchers might approach future work on welfare more broadly defined. Collectively, the contributors ask: Who was responsible for the poor and in what capacity? What was the extent, nature and duration of the relief given? And who, other than the poor, benefited from or participated in the process and with what agency?
Research into the bills and receipts generated in the process of administering the Old Poor Law was made possible by a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, ‘Small Bills and Petty Finance: Co-creating the History of the Old Poor Law’.8 This collaboration involved the universities of Keele and Sussex, over forty volunteer researchers, and the staff of the county record offices of Cumbria, East Sussex and Staffordshire. Although bills and receipts form one of the cornerstones in histories of consumption, they tend to be limited to specific sections of the literature, including the wealthy and their purchases.9 Indeed, although they are an important historical resource, before the ‘Small Bills’ project began in 2018 overseers’ vouchers appeared only tangentially in the historiography of the poor law. Their absence is not hard to account for. At best, their survival is patchy. Even so, their sheer volume is problematic for individual researchers. Both issues are discussed further in the Introduction. Moreover, the vast number of transactions they document and the inconsistent ways in which their contents were recorded present significant methodological challenges. Over the course of four years, however, the collaborative nature of this project, utilizing the commitment, skills and local knowledge of volunteer researchers – explored in Chapter 7, ‘Public histories and collaborative working’ – provided the means by which this information was gathered. By capturing, coding and analysing the information contained in thousands of overseers’ vouchers from thirty parishes and townships across three counties, the ‘Small Bills’ project has generated a significant new dataset.10 Consisting of some 41,500 lines, it reflects the goods and services supplied to the poor and enables research on the Old Poor Law to go beyond existing scholarship on pauper letters and inventories, parish practices and policies.11
Providing for those unable to support themselves created complex relationships that crossed boundaries of gender, class and age. Through the lens of overseers’ vouchers, the actions of both parish officials and the parish poor become more visible, as do the roles of tradespeople and service providers, their assistants, clerks, apprentices and family. The vouchers thus help to fill the silences in parochial account books or to give context to the many transactions they record. They help to clarify what Steven King termed the ‘ambiguities around poor law expenditure’, and make possible a more granular analysis of the microeconomics of the parish.12 The vouchers, however, are by no means comprehensive and do not provide a universal answer to the uncertainties of parish finance, especially in relation to vagrancy. Yet, as shown in the case of Jane Sewell, they do expose processes and tensions that stand behind the recording of expenditure in overseers’ accounts. Providing new insights into the economics of poverty and of the parish, such processes and tensions are linked through financial reciprocity, obligation, parochial responsibility and overlapping networks.
The conundrum of determining what constitutes a representative sample of different socio-economic communities is well known, and for historical research into materials like vouchers can never be fully resolved.13 Each county selected for the ‘Small Bills’ project – Cumbria (incorporating the historic counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, parts of Lancashire ‘North of the Sands’ and parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire), Staffordshire and East Sussex (half of the historic county of Sussex) – however, benefits from the survival of a good range of vouchers from a variety of settlement types. Vouchers are particularly numerous for East Sussex’s parishes. Both the nature of the vouchers and the individual settlements from which they have been drawn are explored further in the Introduction. The project counties fall on either side of the broad north-west–Midlands–south-east axis identified in Steven King’s analysis of regional poor relief, itself built on the older economic history division between highland and lowland. While acknowledging what could amount to significant differences within local areas, overall this suggests the existence of a relatively generous provision in the south-east (based on an established wider definition of entitlement) and stricter conditions in the north-west.14 A decline in relative wages and an associated fall in demand for women’s labour, particularly in the rural south-east and rising wages in the north-west, however, mean that these differences in entitlements measure the way in which the poor law worked rather than living standards.15 Indeed, by the 1790s, ‘eight out of the eleven highest-wage counties were in the north and midlands and only three were in the south-east’.16 This underlines the economic hardships of the early nineteenth century suffered in the largely rural areas of the southern counties despite a more ‘generous’ relief system.
Geographic separation of the counties enables the identification of commonalities and distinctiveness in the approach officials took towards the poor in their parishes. As Samantha Shave has demonstrated – and as Tomkins elaborates further in relation to assistant overseers in this volume – through publications, visits and correspondence, those responsible for administering the poor law in geographically distant parishes sought advice, shared examples of good practice and were prepared to travel in order to secure positions.17 For Staffordshire and Cumberland Collinge provides evidence of similar trading practices among businesswomen, while Spencer’s analysis of textiles and prices identifies both similarities and differences between the two counties. The Interludes in this volume, together with other pieces to be found on the project website, provide insights into the quotidian lives of the men and women in the settlements studied in the course of the ‘Small Bills’ project. The quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered during the project thus extends and broadens regional, subregional and local understandings of welfare provision.18
Each of the project counties contains a variety of settlement and landscape types in an attempt to capture the experience of the majority of the population at the turn of the eighteenth century. Indeed, in 1834 Cumberland was noted as one of seven counties deemed ‘typical’ of England overall.19 According to the Abstract of Answers and Returns Relative to the Expence and Maintenance of the Poor, Cumberland contained 215 parishes, of which fifty-five maintained some or all of their poor in workhouses; Westmorland, 108 parishes and seven workhouses; and Staffordshire, 246 parishes and seventy-three workhouses. Sussex contained 308 parishes and 155 workhouses.20 Within these counties, settlements with surviving vouchers encompass hamlets, villages, townships, market towns, a cathedral city and industrializing areas. Each location was characterized by some or all of the following: the established church, a school, a dissenting chapel, at least one public house, improved transport links, fairs, markets and small-scale textile production. Urban improvement – paving, lighting, newly built houses and public buildings – was also evident. Each also had a number of retail craft producers – blacksmiths, butchers, carpenters, cobblers, grocers and petty dealers, hatters, tailors and dressmakers – the people whose business activity and contact with the Poor Law generated overseers’ vouchers. These features, however, did not necessarily guarantee any alignments in styles of Poor Law management.
Combining both academic pieces and shorter texts authored by volunteer researchers, Providing for the Poor focuses on paupers and on providers and enablers of welfare to show evidence of the ‘complex web of negotiations between and within central and local welfare authorities, and between welfare providers and recipients’.21 It examines the Old Poor Law as a mechanism for supporting local economies, problems at the margins of parish welfare, pauper entitlement, behaviour and agency, and the responses of parish officials and of those beyond the immediate Poor Law system. Individual chapters open up new lines of enquiry, contribute to existing debate on Poor Law implementation or reflect on the broader issues of power at the heart of the Old Poor Law. While overseers’ vouchers form the basis of the chapters on textiles, businesswomen and assistant overseers, the chapters on illegitimacy, vagrancy and welfare reform consider aspects that are largely absent from the vouchers. The chapter on public history and the Interludes recognize the immense contribution made by archival volunteer researchers to the ‘Small Bills’ project. Each Interlude, linked to one or more of the substantive chapters, uses vouchers as starting points for partial biographies of people who came into contact with the Old Poor Law. Collectively, they illustrate that those who either generated the vouchers or benefited from what they contained matter in Poor Law history.
Part I focuses on the poor and their interactions with the parish. Conflicts at the intersection between paupers’ rights and responsibilities, the law and parochial authority in a small rural parish in East Sussex lie at the heart of Louise Falcini’s chapter on ‘Accounting for illegitimacy’. Taking a micro-historical approach, it argues that the interests of ratepayers could be challenged by the agency of paupers in their ‘negotiations’ surrounding illegitimacy. In ‘Clothing the poor’ Elizabeth Spencer draws on over 400 vouchers from Cumbria and Staffordshire focusing on textiles, haberdashery and prices. She demonstrates how regular repeat purchases and the services of the local needle trades to make, mend or replace garments provide insights into the relationship between paupers, their clothing, parishes and local economies. Tim Hitchcock’s ‘Vagrancy, poor relief and the parish’ explores the role of vagrancy as a form of punishment, as a regulator of migration and as an arbiter of settlement under the Old Poor Law. The approximately 14,000 people detailed by the vagrant contractor for Middlesex in the 1780s reveals a picture of mobile humanity moving constantly across a complex landscape of seasonal work, of military deployment and demobilization; and of step-wise urban migration from village to regional centre to London. This evidence is contrasted with parliamentary returns of vagrants punished in houses of correction in the 1820s to reveal the role of the system in controlling both migration and more localized forms of disorder.22
In Part II, ‘Providers and Enablers and their Critics’, Peter Collinge’s ‘Women, business and the Old Poor Law’ shifts the focus from women as recipients of poor relief to women as suppliers and providers. It emphasizes how women conducted business, identifies the level of engagement they had with parish authorities and the wider community, and provides a greater appreciation of the Poor Law system as a consumer of goods and services in local economies. In ‘The Overseers’ assistant’ Alannah Tomkins asks who these men were. By considering the occupational backgrounds, social standing and life chances of men who secured these posts, this chapter sees the assistant overseer as a representative of changing relief policies. While the offer of paid parish roles required vestries to consider their own interests, their concerns were sometimes overwritten by a desire to give an income to men who might otherwise have suffered financial problems. Parish ‘pay’ takes on a new meaning if assistant overseers were being offered a defence against immiseration. Samantha Shave’s ‘Who cares? Mismanagement, neglect and suffering in the final decades of the Old Poor Laws’ analyses and contextualizes two pamphlets. These questioned the ‘morality’ of the relief system, and documented the suffering of the poor and the extent to which their authors wanted to provoke scandal. In considering whether the ‘welfare process’ has been conceived too narrowly and whether historians could consider a greater range of individuals as important and influential in the negotiations over poor relief, the chapter reflects many of the themes of this volume.
Part III, on public histories and collaborative working, situates the volume both in the context of recent work on crowdsourcing and on the co-creation of resources and in the wider historiography of public history. It examines the processes, practicalities and wider implications of collaborative working by drawing on the collective experiences of archival staff, academics and the communities of volunteers connected with the ‘Small Bills’ project. The last chapter brings together the broad themes of the volume, looking at the paupers, providers and enablers of the Old Poor Law together with those who sought to criticize it. The economics of the parish are firmly embedded across the historical chapters, although each uses a markedly different perspective, from financial incentives, local expenditure and business acumen to financial mismanagement and personal bankruptcy.
Providing for the Poor stresses the ‘centrality of poor relief and its administration in local communities’, and reflects the widening scope of research into the management of relief and the poor under the Old Poor Law and the significant roles of co-creation and collaborative history in such investigations.23 From micro-histories to larger-scale analyses, it provides new perspectives and methodological approaches, and opens up new research possibilities in histories of the Old Poor Law.
1 ‘Sewel’ appears as ‘Sewell’ in other documents. Cumbria Archive Service (CAS), PR10/V/10/11, Expenses and trouble concerning Jane Sewel child & father, 3 June 1784; PR10/76, Skelton, Warrants, 30 July 1793; PR 10/81, Skelton, Overseers’ accounts, 1734–1817; M. Dean, ‘Jane Sewell (1759–1823) Parish of Skelton, Cumberland’, The Poor Law (2019) <https://thepoorlaw.org/jane-sewell-1759-1823-parish-of-skelton-cumberland> [accessed 13 Apr. 2021].
2 It also included unspecified expenses amounting to 3s 6d and payment of 2s 6d ‘to a woman’.
3 Steven King notes that ‘petitions by paupers to magistrates represent the end of a long, parochially based decision-making process’. S. King, ‘Poor relief and English economic development reappraised’, The Economic History Review, l (1997), 360–8, at 363.
4 CAS, PR10/74, Skelton, Warrant for refusal to pay on bastardy orders, 28 Sept. 1784.
5 For example, CAS, PR10/V/12/35, 18 May 1786.
6 CAS, PR10/76, Skelton, Warrants, 30 July 1793.
7 No vouchers are extant to show how Sewell spent her relief money.
8 AHRC grant number AH/R003246/1.
9 For example, J. Stobart, ‘“So agreeable and suitable a place”: the character, use and provisioning of a late eighteenth-century suburban villa’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxxix (2016), 89–102.
10 See the project website, The Poor Law: Small Bills and Petty Finance 1700 to 1834 <www.thepoorlaw.org>.
11 S. King and P. Jones, Navigating the Old English Poor Law: The Kirkby Lonsdale Letters, 1809–1836 (Oxford, 2020); J. Harley, Norfolk Pauper Inventories, c.1690–1834; T. Sokoll, ‘Writing for relief: rhetoric in English pauper letters, 1800–1834’, in Being Poor in Modern Europe: Historical Perspectives, 1800–1940, ed. A. Gestrich, S. King and R. Lutz (Oxford, 2006), pp. 91–111; S. Ottaway, The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth Century-England (Cambridge, 2004); S. A. Shave, Pauper Policies: Poor Law Practice in England, 1780–1850 (Manchester, 2017).
12 S. King, Poverty and Welfare in England, 1700–1850 (Manchester, 2000), p. 87.
13 King, Poverty and Welfare, pp. 7–8.
14 King, Poverty and Welfare, pp. 257, 261–5.
15 F. W. Botham and E. H. Hunt, ‘Wages in Britain during the Industrial Revolution’, The Economic History Review, xl (1987), 380–99, at 396.
16 Botham and Hunt, ‘Wages in Britain during the Industrial Revolution’, 397.
17 Shave, Pauper Policies,pp. 150–65.
18 S. King, ‘Reconstructing lives: the poor, the poor law and welfare in Calverley, 1650–1820’, Social History, xxii (1997), 318–38, at p. 319; C. S. Hallas, ‘Poverty and pragmatism in the northern uplands of England: the North Yorkshire Pennines, c.1770–1900’, Social History, xxv (2000), 67–84, at 68.
19 S. Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle under the English Poor Law, 1760–1834 (London, 2011), p. 21.
20 Abstract of Answers and Returns relative to the Expence and Maintenance of the Poor (Parl. Papers 1803–4 [C. 175], xiii), pp. 84, 476, 532, 556.
21 Shave, Pauper Policies,p. 6.
22 The returns provide details of all those punished in a house of correction as a vagrant between 1820 and 1823.
23 P. M. Solar, ‘Poor relief and English economic development: a renewed plea for comparative history’, The Economic History Review, c (1997), 369–74, at 2, 6–8.