3. Vagrancy, poor relief and the parish

Tim Hitchcock

Late in the evening on a quiet Sunday in late September 1756, Thomas Turner, the diarist and overseer of the poor at East Hoathly in Sussex was alarmed ‘by a drunken travelling woman, swearing and rolling about the street’. Turner probably gave her a few pence and hurried her to the parish boundary. Having dealt with the interruption, Turner spent the rest of the evening reading three of Archbishop Tillotson’s sermons.1

The identity of the drunken traveller is unknown. She is not mentioned again in the diary, nor does she appear in the parish records. This is not unusual. In general, the travelling poor, vagrants and disorderly paupers do not figure largely in the parish records of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Of approximately 41,500 payments transcribed as part of the ‘Small Bills and Petty Finance’ project, a vanishingly small percentage – 0.0035 per cent, around 150 – record payments made to ‘travellers’ or paupers with a ‘pass’, or to sailors returning from duty at sea: people who appear momentarily, only to move beyond the eye, pen and dubious care of the overseer. This reflects the extent to which, by the latter half of the eighteenth century, the system of parish relief was substantially focused on the ‘settled’ poor.2 Having a legal settlement was normally the first condition that a pauper needed to satisfy in order to access regular and ongoing parish relief.

This chapter explores one of the hidden boundaries that marked the realities of life for the English poor – the boundary between a settled pauper, who could normally rely on their parish in extremis; and the vagrants and travellers who very frequently could not. By exploring the characteristics that emerge from alternative sources – the lists of vagrants removed from London in the 1780s produced by the ‘vagrant contractor’, Henry Adams; the parliamentary returns of vagrants prosecuted in the early 1820s; and the overseers’ vouchers transcribed by the ‘Small Bills’ project – this chapter seeks to provide a wider context for the parish pump politics of poverty that dominates our understanding of the workings of the Old Poor Law. It is an attempt to view the world of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poverty from the perspective of those excluded from the supposedly comprehensive Old Poor Law.3 In addition, it seeks to illuminate the boundaries of relief and punishment, acknowledging along the way that the sources on which it is based were created and designed to measure neither poverty nor its relief.

The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century countryside hosted substantial numbers of poor travellers.4 With the population growing overall, both internal and overseas migration was increasing during these decades. Competing for migrants with London, the industrial regions of the north and Midlands were drawing to themselves generations of working people. To take the single example of the industrial parish of Darlaston, in Staffordshire, on the Birmingham canal, ‘famous for the manufacture of gun-locks, bits, stirrups, buckles, nails, screws, cast iron articles, &c.’, the population almost doubled in just thirty years.5 The 1801 census recorded 3,812 inhabitants; by 1811 this had increased by over 1,000. The parish continued to grow. In 1831 the census recorded a population for Darlaston of 6,647 souls, most of whom were first-generation inhabitants, who were unlikely to possess a ‘settlement’ in the parish. Yet the 1803 Poor Law returns suggest that Darlaston was relieving just two non-parishioners out of 258 paupers.6 Like most internal migrants of the period, they probably found their way to the parish through a complex pattern of either ‘stepwise’ or ‘circular’ migration.7 For the thirteen parishes in Staffordshire whose vouchers the ‘Small Bills’ project has transcribed, the population increased by just under 80 per cent in the four decades after 1800, while the equivalent figure for the seventeen parishes included in the data for Cumberland is 42 per cent. Even the small rural parish of East Hoathly in Sussex grew in these decades – from 395 in 1801 to over 600 in 1841. Indeed, the only parish whose vouchers are included in the project that failed to see substantial growth was the tiny, isolated township of Cumwhitton in Cumberland, just east of Carlisle.8

Beyond the migratory poor, the English countryside also played host to whole communities of travellers. ‘Gypsies’ had resisted oppression and prosecution for at least 300 years, being described by even a nominally sympathetic contemporary commentator as ‘numerous bands of semisavages dispersed amidst our highly civilised countrymen’.9 While there are no credible population statistics, their prominent place in the statistics of vagrancy and the frequent reference to ‘Gypsies’ in both literature and legislation reflect their presence on the roads.10 To these numbers can be added Irish travellers, who were frequently on the tramp in search of seasonal work.11

To ‘Gypsies’ and Irish travellers can be added discharged soldiers and sailors, left to make their way home on foot at the conclusion of each of the innumerable wars of the period. In 1763, 1784, 1802 and 1817 Britain’s roads and lanes were awash with young men discharged from the army and navy.12 Even in years of peace, the quarterly pension payments that needed to be collected in person at the Chelsea Hospital ensured that disabled and retired soldiers could be found on the roads, in a constant circulation of broken bodies.13

Through the spring, summer and autumn, the roads of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain were heavily populated by what Henry Mayhew would later dub the ‘wandering tribes’:14 navvies employed to dig the new canals and lay the new rails, and showmen tramping to a regular rhythm from village to village and from fair to fair. There were building workers, stonemasons and fishermen hoping for a season’s work; pedlars and cheapjacks; sellers of crockery, earthenware and small goods with their packs on their backs and walking sticks in their hands. There were the harvest workers making hay in June, hoeing turnips in July and harvesting the corn in August. September brought hops and fruit in need of picking. For many, half their year was taken in a slow perambulation from south to north and back again.15 In 1834 Jeremiah Jackson, a magistrate at the Isle of Ely, felt entirely confident that he could enumerate the varieties of ‘tramps’:

In hay time and harvest many labourers from Norfolk, Suffolk, &c., as well as from Ireland … many weavers, cotton-spinners &c., in knots of three or four, wearing aprons, driven … by necessity …. Often sailors two or three together. … The class of blind and maimed fiddlers and singers … They often carry matches, a few balls of cotton, ballads, &c.; pretend to be recent widowers or widows … and drag about with them families of helpless children.16

Many workhouses swept their winter inhabitants out through the door as soon as the weather permitted, hoping to save the parish shilling by joining their own paupers to this summer throng. Of the over 84,000 paupers either discharged or absconding from the parish workhouse belonging to St Martin-in-the-Fields between 1725 and 1825, most left – or were pushed out of – the house between March and June.17

Raphael Samuel characterized these wandering tribes as the ‘comers and goers’ of nineteenth-century Britain.18 Whether migrants or nomads, soldiers, sailors or hop-pickers, they filled the roads, sleeping in barns or the cheapest of lodgings. They were welcomed when there was work to do – ‘rendering valuable assistance’ – and hurried on their way when it was finished.19

The poverty – the real need – of these nomads is beyond question, yet they do not appear to have been treated with compassion by many overseers. Most would have agreed with Jeremiah Jackson that ‘Parish officers have enough to do with their own poor’.20 For Thomas Turner the hop-pickers were a mild irritation. A few days before the ‘drunken travelling woman’ interrupted his evening, he noted that the hop-pickers, ‘very unsensible’ with drink, were carousing in the village. Searching barns and outbuildings for vagrants was part and parcel of the overseer’s job, but Turner recorded doing so only once, over the course of a weekend on Saturday and Sunday, 4 and 5 February 1758, long after the agricultural workers had departed.21 A ‘Gypsy’ like Mary Saxby could spend a vagrant’s lifetime travelling the roads of England, work in half a dozen occupations, raise a family on the move and suffer life-changing tragedy, but receive relatively short shrift from her parish of legal settlement: Olney in Buckinghamshire. On the sudden death of her husband, Mary was left a widow with five children. She ‘sold what [she] … had, and discharged all our debts; except a few shillings at alehouses … I then applied to the parish for assistance: and, for a short time they gave me three shillings weekly, but soon reduced this allowance.’ The parish also paid her house rent for a period, before threatening ‘that, if I did not remove, they would put a man and his wife, and six children, into it with me’.22 In the words of one parliamentary report written by George Chetwynd, member of parliament (MP) for Stafford, many vagrants, even when removed to their parish of settlement, either ‘immediately leave them to resume their previous pursuits, or are dismissed by the parish officers with trifling relief’.23

Drawing on parliamentary returns, historians have noted the wide discrepancy in the percentage of the people dependent on poor relief and the strong regional patterns contained within them. In 1803 only 6.7 per cent of the population of the rapidly industrializing county of Lancashire were in receipt of relief, compared to 22.6 per cent in Sussex.24 Historians have attempted to build on this material and to use more complex methodologies to relate this measure of poverty ‘relieved’ to poverty experienced. Tom Arkell and Steven King have developed strategies built around aggregating sources, including charities and tax exemptions, to estimate the level of ‘unrelieved’ poverty, and concluded that this figure could encompass well over half the population.25 There remains, however, a ‘dark figure’ of unrelieved poverty that historians cannot fully or accurately measure. By exploring the gap between the evidence of poverty relieved by the parish and poverty punished through the system of vagrant removal, this chapter seeks to identify the silence in between. It is an attempt to acknowledge the partial character of all the sources interrogated, and to identify more firmly what we do not know as well as what we do.

At the heart and root of the system of parish relief and the parallel system of vagrant removal that caught so many of the wandering tribes lay a single concept – settlement. Regularized in the 1690s and developed through endless case law over the course of the eighteenth century, settlement implied that everyone had a claim to a parish of settlement: a parish of origin and a parish of obligation. And, while there was no guarantee of being relieved, a settled pauper did have a parish they could appeal to and appeal against.26 Built around a life cycle of birth, apprenticeship, service, marriage and household, settlement seems at first sight inclusive and powerful. You could inherit a settlement from your parents, receive one at birth if you were illegitimate or earn one through apprenticeship or service for a year. You could marry into one (women took their husband’s settlement), you could buy one (by renting a house worth £10 per year and paying the relevant taxes) and you could gain a settlement (by serving in one of the numerous parish offices).27 For the middling sort and elite, a settlement came with little effort through property ownership and paying the associated taxes. For the poor, however, it was something to be sought out and evidenced with difficulty. In the words of Adam Smith, ‘There is scarce a poor man in England, of forty years of age … who has not, in some part of his life, felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlements.’28

Parish archives and justices’ papers are full of ‘examinations’ designed to establish a settlement.29 There were three types of examination: into ‘bastardy’, pauper settlement and vagrancy. The first required two justices sitting in petty sessions and was supposed to occur either a month before or after a birth.30 These examinations were designed to identify the father and to allow the parish to seek financial indemnity for the costs involved. The process was necessary to establish the child’s settlement and hence which parish would be obliged to foot the bill for its upbringing.31

The second type of examination – pauper examinations – could be heard by a single justice, and normally wound through a series of questions as to place of birth, apprenticeship, service, marriage and householding. These examinations could result in issuing a settlement certificate and a removal order and pass, mandating that a pauper up sticks and return to their parish of settlement. The mass of case law that grew decade by decade through the eighteenth century was built around this variety of settlement examination. At their extreme, the legal niceties involved could be absurd.32

The final variety of settlement examination was a vagrancy examination, conducted by a single justice. Many of the same issues of birth, apprenticeship and service were addressed in this type of examination, with the addition of the examinee’s recent behaviour. The outcome determined both where a vagrant was ‘settled’ and how they should be punished. Vagrants were regularized in 1744 and classified in one of three categories, as ‘idle and disorderly persons’, as ‘rogues and vagabonds’ or as ‘incorrigible rogues’, with a steep hierarchy of penalties associated with each classification. Unlike a pauper examination, a vagrancy examination would normally lead to between a week and a month of hard labour in a house of correction, a whipping, and enforced removal to one’s parish of settlement in the back of a cart, via a system of county contactors (from 1792 women were no longer whipped and from 1819 Irish and Scottish ‘vagrants’ were excluded from these punishments).33 Besides the punishments suffered by vagrants, there are two components of the vagrant examination and removal system that set it substantially apart from pauper removal. First, from 1700 the cost of the examination and removal fell to the county rather than the parish; and, second, a parish identified as being a vagrant’s settlement could not appeal against a vagrancy removal.

It was through these alternative systems of examination that one was pigeonholed as deserving of relief or subject to punishment and removal as a vagrant. This process also determined who picked up the tab. Both systems of removal were costly. The legal expenses involved in enforcing pauper settlements could be huge. In 1803 the parish of Brampton in Cumberland reported spending £68 4s 7d on legal expenses – ‘Expenditure in any suites of Law; Removal of Paupers; and Expences of Overseers and other Officers’ – out of a total of just £403 spent on poor relief as a whole. That year, the parishes of Cumberland spent £3,064 on legal fees, out of a total of £34,896 on poor relief. Staffordshire expended £5,390 out of £110,624 and Sussex, £5,747 out of £206,592.34 From the approximately 41,500 payments transcribed by the ‘Small Bills’ project, 3842 relate specifically to legal expenses and record £3973 17s 6½d worth of costs.

Equally expensive was the system of vagrant arrest and removal. Between 1820 and 1824 Staffordshire spent £4,511 on ‘apprehending, maintaining and passing Vagrants’, while Cumberland spent £1795 and Sussex £804.35 This was before the costs of building and supporting the houses of correction are accounted for. Staffordshire was particularly affected, as it formed a weigh station on the journey from London and the agricultural regions of the south-east to the port of Liverpool, whence most Irish travellers were transhipped homeward. In 1821 Staffordshire processed some 6,154 Irish and Scottish vagrants at a total cost of £1,369.36 Towns such as Lichfield, which straddled the major route north, was particularly affected. With a population of just over 6,000 in 1822, the town was obliged to relieve some 1,943 travellers.37

As can be seen in the case of Elizabeth Malbon, the workings of these systems were complex and confusing, and frequently administered in an inconsistent manner.38 There was no obvious reason for Elizabeth Malbon to be removed as a vagrant rather than a pauper. By categorizing her as a vagrant, however, the parish shifted the cost of her removal to the county. In theory it also meant that the receiving parish, Butterton-in-the-Moors, would have had no choice but to acknowledge her settlement. Yet Elizabeth Malbon remained in St Bartholomew, Wednesbury, where she was treated as a settled pauper despite the letter of the law.

The remainder of this chapter interrogates two related but quite different sources. The first is a dataset of some 14,789 vagrants removed from London and Middlesex between 1776 and 1786.39 These data were derived from the monthly bills submitted by the ‘vagrant contractor’ for Middlesex, Henry Adams, and provide a unique early overview of the system of vagrant removal. They are particularly important as they incorporate Irish and Scottish travellers, and the unsettled migratory poor taken up as vagrants. The second source surveyed here is the comprehensive parliamentary returns of vagrants punished in England and Wales between 1820 and 1823. These returns provide details, county by county, of everyone punished in a house of correction as a vagrant over these years. Full lists of names and offences are included for a proportion of counties including Sussex, Staffordshire and Cumberland. Because this source relates to the period after 1819, when Irish and Scottish travellers were effectively excluded from punishment as vagrants, it does not reflect their experience, but it illuminates how local justices of the peace (JPs) and constables used the system to police local disorder and the unsettled poor. Together, they provide a detailed overview of both unsettled seasonal travellers, and of paupers punished as vagrants.

For the migratory vagrants, the best sources are the long lists of men, women and children who passed through the hands of Henry Adams during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Eight times a year, at each session of the Middlesex Bench, Adams submitted lists of vagrants conveyed as proof of his having transported these individuals to the county boundary, after which he would be paid for his services. The original records were created as part of the system for conveying vagrants from Middlesex gaols and holding compounds to the edge of the county, whence they would be sent onwards to their parish of legal settlement. Adams’s role also involved picking up vagrants expelled from elsewhere on their way back to Middlesex, as well as those being shepherded through to counties beyond, as part of the national network of removal.40 The picture that emerges is distinctive.

Table 3.1 Demographic distribution of vagrants removed via Middlesex, 1777–1786

Men and women are both well represented, as are men and women travelling with children. Vagrants returned to the counties that form the basis for the ‘Small Bills’ project are also well represented. Industrial areas of the north generated a higher than expected proportion of removals, despite their distance from London. Irish and Scottish migrants are heavily represented, as are discharged soldiers. The seasonality reflecting the role of harvest work is also present, with December, January and February witnessing high levels of vagrant removal as local demands for labour fell. There remains, however, little overlap between the vagrants removed from London and those exposed in the ‘Small Bills’ data. To take a single example where they do overlap, Elizabeth Fletcher was arrested somewhere in the East End of London – probably Whitechapel – in September 1781, was examined by a magistrate, John Staples esq., and was committed to the Clerkenwell house of correction. She does not appear to have been put to hard labour for the required seven days, nor is there any evidence she was whipped. Instead, after two days at Clerkenwell, she was handed over to Henry Adams and taken by cart to a holding station at Ridge, just on the Hertfordshire border with Middlesex. From there Elizabeth Fletcher was passed from contractor to contractor back to her parish of settlement in Darlaston, Staffordshire.41 The kind of reception she received is unknown, but two years later the parish spent 1s 3d for a new cord to repair her bed. She appears in the vouchers only on this one occasion and does not appear to have been a regular parish pensioner.42 Fletcher stands out precisely because of the rarity of this evidential overlap. None of the other three vagrants removed to Darlaston in the data appear in the vouchers for whatever reason. Equally, none of the thirteen vagrants removed to parishes in Staffordshire for which vouchers have been transcribed appear in the parish-level material, nor do the thirty-four vagrants removed from Middlesex to the project’s parishes in Cumberland.

Regardless of their reception in their parish of settlement, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the south-western counties of Gloucestershire, Somerset and Devon stand out for the large number of migratory vagrants who gave these counties as their home (Figure 3.1). Once population size is factored in, the West Midlands, Lancashire and Northumbria emerge as areas where a much higher proportion than expected on the basis of their population were removed (Figure 3.2). These data have been analysed in detail for what they say about migration and about the policing of vagrancy in London, but they also simply illustrate the existence of a mobile Britain – made up of men, women and children going from job to job, from harvest work to winter work, from military encampment to home. These sources also reflect a distinctive national pattern of migration, in which the West Midlands, the north-east and Lancashire contributed disproportionately to the migratory stream exposed via vagrant removal. While this helps expose a mobile, constantly moving population, it was a population that was apparently not substantially catered for by the system of parish relief.43

The Middlesex lists reflect one image of vagrancy, which is consonant with many literary tropes and older histories of vagrants as travellers, but it does not reflect the full implications of the system of vagrant policing, particularly as, following the passage of Acts in 1819 and 1822, much of the system of vagrant removal was dismantled, with Irish and Scottish vagrants being incorporated into pauper removal.44 As a result, the records of vagrancy increasingly reflected the policing of local disorder. Whipping was largely eliminated, first for female vagrants from 1792 and then, largely through negligence, for all vagrants.45

Figure 3.1 Settlement data recorded by Henry Adams, 1777–86

Figure 3.2 The origin of vagrants, 1777–86, moderated by population

Stewarded through Parliament by the Stafford MP, George Chetwynd, the 1822 Vagrancy Act shifted the focus of the system to rest more fully on disorderly behaviour rather than on the mobile poor. In the words of Edward Littleton, the 1822 Act ‘had saved the counties of England and Wales the sum of 100,000l. annually, which had been heretofore expended in passing vagrants from one part of the country to another … [and] consolidated about fifty acts relative to vagrancy into one act.’ To demonstrate the efficacy of that Act, Littleton moved that data about the implementation of the new law should be collected, including ‘the number of persons committed under the vagrant laws to the respective prisons in England and Wales, specifying the particular act of vagrancy for which each person was committed, from the 1st Jan. 1820, to the 1st Jan. 1824’. 46 The resulting published report is unique and remarkable. It records some 49,115 vagrants punished in houses of correction between 1820 and 1823.47 The returns also give us the names and offences of individuals for a subset of these vagrants, and include approximately 14,000 listings of individuals by name and according to sub-offence, including lists of individuals convicted in Cumberland, Staffordshire and Sussex. This is not a comprehensive list of all vagrants in these years; the Cumberland returns, for example, are limited to 1822 and 1823. They, nevertheless, provide a more complete picture than is available in any other source of who was punished for vagrancy and why. And, while the data support the conclusion that the 1822 Act substantially changed local practice, their historical importance lies primarily in the long lists of names and offences recorded.

The circular letter used to generate the returns does not appear to have specified how vagrants should be categorized, and different counties and respondents used different descriptors. Surrey, for example broke down its vagrants into twelve categories, including:

Idle and disorderly persons …

Reputed thieves …

Wandering abroad, lodging in out-houses, and in the open air …

Wandering abroad and begging …

Neglecting to maintain family …

Exposing naked persons …

Betting and playing at unlawful games …

Gambling on Sunday …

Apprehended with implements to commit felony in possession …

Attempting to commit felony …

Found in houses and inclosed places, with intent to commit felony …

Leaving parish, and going to another.48

‘Wandering’ and sleeping rough are certainly there, reflecting the continuing role of vagrancy in policing migration. There is also some evidence of the gypsy and traveller communities. In Essex, for example, ‘Sophia Smith, Mary Buckley, Lydia Martin; – wandering abroad and lodging in their tilted cart, camps, or tents, in lanes and other places, they being persons commonly called gipsies’.49 There is also a very strong emphasis on more localized forms of disorder, including being ‘idle and disorderly’, ‘reputed thieves’ and ‘neglecting to maintain family’.

The returns also include a new category of disorder for the 1820s – men exposing themselves as a form of sexual assault. They list exemplars of Romantic era sexualities such as Thomas Birch from Essex, who,

having at sundry times, and particularly on Tuesday the 15th day of April, come to the residence of Elizabeth Cooper, and exposed his person to her, by unbuttoning his breeches and exposing his private parts to the said Elizabeth Cooper, whereby he has committed an act of vagrancy.50

In other words, the returns provide a very different picture of the vagrant poor than that revealed by the Middlesex removals. While the 1780s lists reflect a mobile population, the returns from the 1820s reflect the punitive use of vagrancy legislation to control more localized forms of disorder.

Of the counties for which vouchers have been transcribed in the ‘Small Bills’ project, Sussex provided the most extensive and detailed returns to Parliament. Sussex imprisoned and set to labour some 1,076 men and women in the first years of the 1820s (Figure 3.3). Of these, ‘wandering and begging’ and forms of ‘sleeping rough’ amount to just under half the total, though it is unclear whether these were travellers or locals, while over half were convicted of ‘offences under the statute’, as the Sussex returns describe it, including deserting one’s family or being idle and refusing to work. This reflects the policing of a settled population rather than an attempt to regulate internal migration.

A clear measure of the difference between the images of the vagrant population reflected in these two sources can be found in the gender balance. In the parliamentary returns for Sussex, for example, almost three-quarters were male (72 per cent male and 28 per cent female); compared to the Middlesex vagrants of the 1780s, almost half of whom were women (53 per cent male and 47 per cent female).

The national pattern revealed in the 1824 returns suggests that northern England, the south-east and the south-west were particularly active in prosecuting vagrancy, with Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Devon and Middlesex emerging as particularly active counties, both in real terms and per 100,000 of the population (Figure 3.4). While the south-east is not included in the 1780s data, a comparison of the national pattern suggests that the industrializing north, the south-east and the south-west were particularly active in both producing vagrants (who were then returned to their settlements via Middlesex) and prosecuting the disorderly poor in situ.

A similar pattern emerges if expenditure is mapped, figures for which are also given in the returns. A comparison of expenditure per vagrant with vagrants per 100,000 of the population suggests in turn that areas that prosecuted large numbers of vagrants spent proportionately less per vagrant and that places with few vagrants spent more (Figures 3.5, 3.6).

The question remains whether the vagrants detailed in the 1824 returns had greater access to the system of parish relief than those removed from London and recorded in the Middlesex returns. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer appears to be no, despite the apparently self-conscious use of the legislation to police idleness and ‘refusal to work’, and family abandonment. In Sussex, around 15 per cent of all vagrants were charged with either being ‘idle and disorderly and refusing to work’ or with some form of abandonment – of a wife, a husband or children – to the care of the parish. Even ‘threatening’ to ‘run away, and leave his family chargeable’ resulted in Leonard Lewer being charged and convicted.51 As a result, an intimate relationship might be expected between the lists of vagrants returned to Parliament and the paupers whose names appear in the parish vouchers. Yet for Sussex there is not a single example of a clear and demonstrable presence of the same person in both the vouchers and the parliamentary returns.

Figure 3.3 Sussex vagrants, 1820–3 (1,076)

Figure 3.4 Distribution of vagrants by county, 1820–3, per 100,000 of the population

Figure 3.5 Distribution of vagrants, 1777–86 and 1820–3

Figure 3.6 Expenditure per vagrant by county, 1820–3

The evidence from Staffordshire is equally stark. If anything, the magistrates in Staffordshire were more keen than their Sussex colleagues to use vagrancy to police settlement. The vagrants committed to the county prison at Stafford in 1820 were representative:

William Tomkinson, John Haywood, James Blakemore; – idle and disorderly, and refusing to work.

Thomas Bromwich; – leaving his wife chargeable to the parish.

Thomas Hall; – idle and disorderly and spending his money in alehouses.

Henry Price; – leaving children chargeable to the parish.

William Wharton, Thomas Sparrow, – returning to parish after being legally removed.52

Each of the ‘offences’ listed had an impact on a local parish, and in the cases of William Wharton and Thomas Sparrow the prosecution that resulted in their appearance on this list would appear to have been instigated by a parish. Yet there is no single instance in which a name listed in the returns appears unambiguously in the ‘Small Bills’ data. At the same time, there are a few tantalizing glimpses of how the two systems worked in tandem.

In 1821, for example, Mary Millard was convicted in company with Catherine Trindle, Mary Trindle and Mary Hannon of ‘lodging in barns, and not giving a good account of themselves’.53 In the following year, in early June, Mary was issued a pair of shoes by Thomas Horton, the overseer of the poor at Darlaston, at the cost of 6s 6d. The voucher records her as a resident in the workhouse.54 William Rock was first punished, along with William Pointon, Thomas Mills and Samuel Smith in 1821, for ‘leaving their families chargeable to the parish’. He was convicted again in 1823 for ‘leaving family chargeable, &c.’.55 That year the overseer at Abbots Bromley paid £2 ‘for half a year’s Rent for Mary Rock. Due Lady Day Last’.56

The evidence presented here is largely negative but highly suggestive in character. Despite the scale of data collection undertaken by Parliament in 1824, and involved in the ‘Small Bills’ project and in the digitization of the Middlesex vagrancy records, there is no clear overlap between these three datasets. This should force historians to question how they think about the workings of the Old Poor Law in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It suggests that the systems of settlement and removal simply did not work as intended – and could be ignored or gamed by both paupers and overseers. Many fell through the gaps, and the poverty and need of many failed to be recorded or addressed, but in the silence that exists between the sources examined here is evidence of the substantial size of the dark figure of unrecorded poverty. It also suggests, or perhaps simply reminds us, that England was a much more mobile – migratory – country than has frequently been supposed.

The impact and workings of the Old Poor Law were actively debated in the decades up to 1834, and an increasingly popular view was that it worked as a safety net, discouraged the poor from working and generated a form of dependency. It is also known that, following a century of steady growth, the levels of expenditure on relief continued to grow both in real terms and in relation to a rapidly growing population.57 Taken together, the evidence presented here suggests that in the decades prior to 1834 the Old Poor Law was increasingly encompassing varied practices, and that levels of support and access to care were increasingly uncertain. Regional distinctions were certainly present, as were distinctions defined by urbanization, gender and age, but perhaps the most relevant distinction increasingly focused on the division between the settled poor and Britain’s ‘comers and goers’.

The 1824 Vagrancy Act is still in force. It forms the legal foundations for stop and search, and for the arrest and criminalization of beggars and rough sleepers. It creates a catch-all category of the unacceptable that the authorities still rely on and that seems brutally focused on new immigrants and old minorities. It is worthwhile being reminded that the apparent intolerance at the heart of this system was in some measure an intolerance of social welfare as a whole.

1 D. Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765 (East Hoathly, 1994), p. 64.

2 How to interpret the English system of pauper settlement has been the subject of a large body of literature. See, for example, J. S. Taylor, ‘The impact of pauper settlement, 1691–1834’, Past & Present, lxxiii (1976), 42–74; J. S. Taylor, Poverty, Migration, and Settlement in the Industrial Revolution: Sojourners’ Narratives (Palo Alto, Calif., 1989). See also A. Winter and T. Lambrecht, ‘Migration, poor relief and local autonomy: settlement policies in England and the southern Low Countries in the eighteenth century’, Past & Present, ccxviii (2013), 91–126. There has been an ongoing debate between Norma Landau and Keith Snell on how to interpret the implementation of ‘settlement’. See, for example, N. Landau, ‘The eighteenth-century context of the laws of settlement’, Continuity and Change, vi (1991), 417–39; N. Tadmor, ‘The settlement of the poor and the rise of the form in England, c.1662–1780’, Past & Present, ccxxxvi (2017), 43–97.

3 P. M. Solar, ‘Poor relief and English economic development: a renewed plea for comparative history’, The Economic History Review, c (1997), 369–74.

4 ‘Vagrancy’ has been the subject of an extensive literature that tends to move unproblematically between the crime of ‘vagrancy’, the literary depiction of ‘vagrants’ and the experience of the migratory poor. For the early modern period see C. J. Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy, and Beggars and Begging (London, 1887; repr. Montclair, N.J., 1972); A. L. Beier and P. Ocobock (ed.), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, Ohio, 2008); C. Dionne, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2006); A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London, 1985); and most recently D. Hitchcock, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750 (London, 2018). The 18th and early 19th centuries have generated a largely separate literature, including P. W. Coldham, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and Other Undesirables, 1607–1776 (Baltimore, 1992); T. Hitchcock, ‘The London vagrancy crisis of the 1780s’, Rural History, xxiv, special issue 1 (2013), 59–72, N. Rogers, ‘Policing the poor in eighteenth-century London: the vagrancy laws and their administration’, Historie Sociale/Social History, xxiv (1991), 127–47; A. Eccles, Vagrancy in Law and Practice under the Old Poor Law (Farnham, 2012).

5 W. White, History, Gazetteer, and Directory of Staffordshire, and the City and County of the City of Lichfield (Sheffield, 1834), p. 330.

6 Abstract of Answers and Returns relative to the Expence and Maintenance of the Poor (Parl. Papers 1803–4 [C. 175], xiii). It should be noted that the number of ‘non-parishioners’ listed for England, excluding London, is substantially higher than this, at 19.2 per cent – 190,107 non-parishioners against a total number of relieved at 989,201 – but this figure hides substantial variations between parishes, counties and regions.

7 Abstract Return Pursuant to the Act for Taking an Account of the Population of Great Britain (Parl. Papers enumeration abstract, 1841) (1843). For population growth see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, 1981), appendix 7, ‘Rickman’s parish register returns of 1801 and 1841’, pp. 597–630; and T. Wrigley, ‘English county populations in the later eighteenth century’, The Economic History Review, lx (2007), 35–69. For internal migration see C. Pooley and J. Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (London, 2005), and for migration as reflected specifically in the records of vagrancy, see A. Crymble, A. Dennett and T. Hitchcock, ‘Modelling regional imbalances in English plebeian migration to late eighteenth‐century London’, The Economic History Review, lxxi (2018), 747–71.

8 Abstract … for taking an Account of the Population of Great Britain.

9 Quoted in M. Saxby, Memoirs of a Female Vagrant Written by Herself (London, 1806), p. v.

10 For a recent overview see D. Cressy, Gypsies: An English Story (Oxford, 2018); see also Hitchcock, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society; S. Houghton-Walker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2014).

11 R. Harris, ‘Seasonal migration between Ireland and England prior to the famine’, Canadian Papers in Rural History, vii (1990), 363–86; R. Swift and S. Campbell, ‘The Irish in Britain’, in The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland, ed. E. F. Biagini and M. E. Daly (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 515–33.

12 For the classic statement of the impact of demobilization on the social order see D. Hay, ‘War, dearth and theft in the eighteenth century: the record of the English courts’, Past & Present, xcv (1982), 117–60, at 138–41.

13 A. Cormack, ‘These Meritorious Objects of the Royal Bounty’: The Chelsea Out-Pensioners in the Early Eighteenth Century (2017); C. L. Nielsen, ‘The Chelsea Out-Pensioners: Image and Reality in Eighteenth-Century and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Care’ (unpublished University of Newcastle upon Tyne PhD thesis, 2014); C. L. Nielsen, ‘Disability, fraud and medical experience at the Royal Hospital of Chelsea in the long eighteenth century’, in Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, 1715–1815, ed. K. Linch and M. McCormack (Liverpool, 2014), pp. 183–201.

14 See Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1851), i, chs 1–2.

15 R. Samuel, ‘Comers and goers’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff (2 vols, London, 1973), i. 123–60.

16 Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring in the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws (Parl. Papers 1834), appendix E, ‘Vagrancy’, no. 1, Harrison Codd, ‘Report regarding the State and Operation of the Laws relating to Vagrancy’, p. 68.

17 See St Martin in the Fields Pauper Biographies Project, Westminster Archives Centre, St Martin in the Fields, Alphabetical lists of the poor taken in to the House of Maintenance, with the date of admission, date of death or discharge, the age and the number of each pauper, and subsequent Day Books, F4002–F4022, July 1724–March 1819 <https://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives> [accessed 18 Oct. 2021]. The relevant dataset can be accessed via London Lives, 1690 to 1800 <www.londonlives.org> [accessed 18 Oct. 2021]: 3,113 inmates ‘absconded’ – 10 per cent in March compared to 6.3 per cent in November; and 43,437 were ‘discharged’, of whom 11 per cent were removed from the house in March, compared to 6 per cent in December.

18 Samuel, ‘Comers and goers’.

19 Report regarding the State and Operation of the Laws relating to Vagrancy (Parl. Papers 1834), Harrison Codd, p. 68.

20 Report regarding the State and Operation of the Laws relating to Vagrancy, p. 68.

21 Vaisey (ed.), Diary of Thomas Turner, pp. 64, 135.

22 Mary Saxby’s memoirs represent the fullest extant personal account of ‘Gypsy’ life in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries: Memoirs of a Female Vagrant Written by Herself (London, 1806), pp. 54, 57.

23 Report from the Select Committee on the Existing Laws relating to Vagrants (Parl. Papers 1821), p. 5.

24 A. Kidd, State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 18; T. Arkell, ‘The incidence of poverty in England in the later seventeenth century’, Social History, xii (1987), 23–47; S. King, Poverty and Welfare in England 1700–1850: A Regional Perspective (Manchester, 2000), pp. 77–140 and table 5.1 on p. 131.

25 See T. Arkell, ‘The incidence of poverty’; King, Poverty and Welfare, pp. 113–20.

26 See n. 2. For an account of the development of the administration of settlement in the 1690s, see T. Hitchcock and R. Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 42–52.

27 The 1793 edition of the most popular justicing manual of the period devoted 282 pages to the single issue of ‘pauper settlement’; and a further 80 pages to pauper removal. See R. Burn, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, 17th edn (4 vols, London, 1793), iii. 341–683. The examination and treatment of vagrants is dealt with separately in Burn, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, iv. 376–406.

28 A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1910), ii. 128.

29 Large numbers of pauper examinations are now available online via commercial services such as Findmypast. For a representative published collection see T. Hitchcock and J. Black, Chelsea Settlement and Bastardy Examinations, 1733–1766, xxxiii (London, 1999). This volume is also available on open access at <https://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol33> [accessed 18 Oct. 2021].

30 For a comprehensive guide to how eighteenth-century justices understood the administration of bastardy examinations, see Burn, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, i. 174–211.

31 This issue was complicated from 1744, when 17 Geo II, c 5 determined that henceforth the children of those deemed ‘vagrant’ under the law took the settlement of their mother. See Burn, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, iv. 395.

32 C. Steedman, ‘Lord Mansfield’s women’, Past & Present, clxxvi (2002), 105–43.

33 See A. Eccles, Vagrancy in Law and Practice under the Old Poor Law (Farnham, 2012). For contemporary accounts of the history and workings of this system see Report from the Select Committee on the Existing Laws relating to Vagrants, and Burn, The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, iv. 376–406.

34 Abstract of the Answers and Returns … Relative to the Expence and Maintenance of the Poor in England (Parl. Papers 1804), pp. 82–3, 474–5, 531–2.

35 Returns of Persons committed under Vagrant Laws to Prisons in England and Wales; Sums paid for Apprehension and Maintenance of Vagrants, 1820–1823 (Parl. Papers 1824), pp. 138, 136–7, 127.

36 Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring in the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws (Parl. Papers 1834), appendix E, ‘Vagrancy’, no. 1, Harrison Codd, ‘Report regarding the State and Operation of the Laws relating to Vagrancy’, p. 24. Towns such as Lichfield that straddled the major route north were particularly affected. With a population of just over 6,000, the town was obliged to relieve some 1,943 travellers in 1822 alone.

37 The Victoria History of the County of Staffordshire (London, 1908), i. 325.

38 See Interlude 3 (D. Shenton, ‘Elizabeth Malbon (c.1743–1801)’) after this chapter.

39 A. Crymble, L. Falcini and T. Hitchcock, ‘Vagrant lives: 14,789 vagrants processed by Middlesex County, 1777–1786’ (2014) <https://zenodo.org/record/13103#.VgFE-pcYHCY> [accessed 18 Oct. 2021].

40 This material has been subject to extended analysis in three interrelated articles: T. Hitchcock, ‘The London vagrancy crisis of the 1780s’, Rural History, xxiv (2013), 59–72; T. Hitchcock, A. Crymble and L. Falcini, ‘Loose, idle and disorderly: vagrant removal in late eighteenth-century Middlesex’, Social History, xxxix (2014), 509–27; A. Crymble, A. Dennett and T. Hitchcock, ‘Modelling regional imbalances in English plebeian migration to late eighteenth‐century London’, The Economic History Review, lxxi (2018), 747–71.

41 Crymble, Falcini and Hitchcock, ‘Vagrant lives’ dataset.

42 Small Bills data, D951/5/81/149/50.

43 The sheer uncertainty surrounding the workings of parish settlement in this period has exercised a generation of historians and been further complicated by the addition of vagrant removal. For settlement removal see S. King, ‘Poor relief, settlement and belonging in English, 1780s to 1840s’, in S. King and A. Winter, Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500–1930s: Comparative Perspectives (New York, 2013), pp. 81–101.

44 59 Geo III, c 12, 1819, An Act to Amend the for the Relief of the Poor; and 3 Geo IV, c 40, 1822: An Act for Consolidating into One Act and Amending the Laws Relating to Idle and Disorderly Persons, Rogues and Vagabonds, Incorrigible Rogues and Other Vagrants in England.

45 32 Geo III, c 45, 1792, An Act to Explain and Amend an Act Made in the Seventeenth Year of His Late Majesty King George the Second. See also Eccles, Vagrancy in Law and Practice, pp. 52, 162–3.

46 Hansard, HC, Parl. Deb., vol. 10, col. 86, 4 Feb. 1824.

47 Returns of Persons committed under Vagrant Laws.

48 The list is taken from the returns for Surrey: Returns of Persons Committed under Vagrant Laws, p. 104.

49 Returns of Persons Committed under Vagrant Laws, p. 20.

50 Returns of Persons Committed under Vagrant Laws, p. 33.

51 Returns of Persons Committed under Vagrant Laws, p. 97.

52 Returns of Persons Committed under Vagrant Laws, p. 88.

53 Returns of Persons Committed under Vagrant Laws, p. 89.

54 Small Bills data, D1149/6/2/7/6.

55 Returns of Persons Committed under Vagrant Laws, pp. 89, 90. This is probably the same William Rick born at Abbots Bromley.

56 Small Bills data, D1209/4/3/1.

57 For a recent recalculation of the long-term evolution of expenditure under the Old Poor Law, see B. Waddell, ‘The rise of the parish welfare state in England, c.1600–1800’, Past & Present, ccliii (2021), 151–94.