Introduction: The Old Poor Law

Peter Collinge and Louise Falcini

The origins of the Old Poor Law lay in the restrictive statutes of the later medieval period, which sought to regulate the lives of both the itinerant poor – unsettled beggars and vagabonds – and the ‘impotent poor’ – the aged or frail. By the late sixteenth century, each parish in England and Wales was legally obliged to appoint an overseer of the poor and to provide relief for their aged, sick or infirm parishioners. They were also empowered to provide some form of local employment for able-bodied men without work. The parish financed this relief through the collection of a local tax levied on the notional rental value of all domestic buildings, set annually and collected by the overseer. These basic provisions were amended to enable parishes to distinguish ‘their’ poor from the wider pool of potential claimants. From 1662, the Settlement Act permitted parishes to remove anyone likely to seek parochial relief to their place of ‘legal settlement’. In 1691 a further Act specified several ways in which a new settlement could be acquired by either birth, marriage, apprenticeship or employment for longer than a year. Applying for relief without a legal settlement could lead to forced removal.1 Over the course of the eighteenth century, this system of settlement and removal evolved and became ever more complex, resulting in both growing administrative costs and new patterns of relief. By the early nineteenth century, it was common (but not guaranteed) for ‘out-parish relief’ to be given.2 This allowed people to claim relief from their parish of legal settlement while continuing to live elsewhere. The management of out-parish relief generated the archive of pauper letters that has informed much of the recent historical scholarship on the Old Poor Law.3 The complex character of ‘settlement’, however it was managed, reinforced an intense localism and profoundly shaped the lives of the poor. The system led ineluctably to bitter disputes over settlement between parishes, evidenced in Louise Falcini’s chapter on illegitimacy (Chapter 1); while many paupers found their lives turned upside down. Arguably, the laws of settlement had their greatest impact on women who took their husbands’ place of settlement on marriage. In widowhood, women like Elizabeth Malbon might find themselves removed to a parish they had never visited.4 Equally, single women found difficulty in securing parochial assistance, particularly when it concerned matters of settlement.5 Legitimate children took the settlement of their parents but illegitimate children were assigned settlement in the parish in which they had been born. From 1744, an infant born to an unmarried mother identified as a ‘vagrant’ took their mother’s place of settlement.6 All of this occasioned a great deal of Machiavellian politicking within and between parishes as the officers jostled to avoid taking financial responsibility. The management and implementation of settlement in relation to the mobile, itinerant poor is taken up in Tim Hitchcock’s chapter on vagrancy (Chapter 3). In Chapter 1, Falcini addresses the financial ‘negotiations’ between paupers, parishes and the law in a small rural parish.

A permissive legal framework that allowed parishes and townships to determine their own strategies for managing the poor could have profound consequences for the circulation of cash in local economies and the operation of the Old Poor Law as an economic system. Parishes switched between schemes or adopted mix-and-match policies according to circumstance, the availability of resources, and the abilities, zeal or indifference of those appointed to oversee their implementation. Outdoor relief, consisting largely of regular cash payments known as pensions or rent paid directly to property owners, was offered throughout the period. In some places, paupers paid their rent, and fed and clothed themselves and their dependent children from a parish pension. In such instances, evident in the case of Jane Sewell, overseers’ vouchers might record the distribution of money but not how it was spent. In others, overseers supplied discretionary, ‘casual’ relief in the form of fuel, food and drink, medical services, clothing and footwear, and funeral expenses. For most of the period the Old Poor Law was in operation, these varied disbursements were organized by overseers and authorized by vestries who also determined which goods and service providers were utilized. By the early nineteenth century, the increasingly onerous burden of poor-relief administration led some parishes to appoint salaried assistant overseers. This under-researched group of local administrators who shaped and were shaped by their experiences of poverty are the subject of Alannah Tomkins’s chapter (Chapter 5). As the systems adopted locally were complex and varied, so too were the ‘negotiations’ pursued by paupers and parishes. Frequently, these were direct and reflected the relative agency of the actors involved. Scandal and elite advocacy, however, could also come into play, affecting the behaviour of local administrators and paupers. Samantha Shave takes up this theme in Chapter 6 by questioning the role of religion and parish clergy at times of extreme stress on the welfare system when shocking cases of neglect were brought to wider attention. When and where it was deemed necessary, magistrates mediated disagreements between the poor and the vestry, administered the law and provided oversight of the system.7

In addition to relieving the poor ‘outdoors’ in their own homes, ‘indoor’ relief in workhouses gradually rose to prominence, justified as supposedly more efficient or just punitive. Poorhouses or workhouses provided accommodation for the needy with the intention of setting the ‘able’ poor to work. From the 1690s, a dozen Corporations of the Poor, established by Act of Parliament, created large workhouses designed to cater for whole cities. Smaller parochial workhouses began to emerge in the 1710s and, following the passage of the Workhouse Test Act in 1723, became relatively common. The same Act also allowed parishes to deny relief to paupers who refused to enter workhouses and permitted parishes to ‘farm’ out their poor under contract to private workhouses or establishments run by a neighbouring parish. It also allowed small parishes to join with others to create shared workhouses.8 Farming paupers out tended to be relatively expensive, but for some parishes it remained a ‘viable alternative’ because it was a more time- and cost-effective way of applying a ‘workhouse test’ than constructing and maintaining their own premises. Farming was particularly prevalent in Cumberland. Indeed, Steven King notes the ‘tendency for communities in the north and west of England to turn to “farming” for longer and rather more frequently as a way of controlling their poor relief bills than communities in the south’.9 This had an impact on patterns of parish spending and consequently on the overseers’ vouchers generated as a result.

The institutional landscape changed again with the passage of Gilbert’s Act in 1782. This enabled multiple parishes to form ‘Gilbert Unions’ that could construct workhouses for the ‘vulnerable’ poor with the aim of creating institutions substantially different from the workhouses of the preceding fifty years.10 One such union, established in 1811 at Kirkby Lonsdale, Westmorland, included seventeen townships: eight in Westmorland, seven in Lancashire and two in Yorkshire.11 In West Sussex, some seven Gilbert unions and several single parish incorporations were established. These unions were less popular in East Sussex than elsewhere in the county, though Samantha Shave has argued that Gilbert’s Act did influence practice, even when it was not applied directly.12 Despite positive intentions, however, enabling acts simply added further components to an already complex web of overlapping, and at times competing, legislation. For some, they compounded existing views that the Poor Law was ‘chaotic and inefficient’.13

Most workhouses provided accommodation for between twenty and fifty people.14 The able-bodied were expected to contribute to their own maintenance by road mending, small-scale manufacture, cooking, cleaning, picking oakum, breaking stones or working the land.15 The extravagant hopes that the poor would become self-sustaining, however, were rarely realized. In 1787, ‘Being old people, weak and feeble’, the work undertaken by inmates at Longtown, Cumberland, came ‘to very little’.16 In St Mary’s workhouse, Lichfield, paupers manufactured blankets, while in the tiny parish of East Hoathly small sums of money were spent on providing flax for the pensioned poor to spin (albeit not in an institutional setting).17 The moral appeal of work in exchange for relief was deep-seated and long-lasting and, as in East Hoathly, stretched beyond the walls of workhouses. The reality, however, was that the expense necessary to maintain such work very seldom made the economics of these schemes profitable, despite claims from local manufacturers that they undercut businesses or distorted markets.18

The latter part of the long eighteenth century saw increasing pressure on poor relief in both economic and political terms.19 A combination of population growth, war with France (with its associated enlistment and demobilization), a trade depression, rising under- and unemployment, agricultural enclosure, poor harvests and price inflation all combined to increase the amount spent nationally on poor relief.20 In the early 1780s poor relief in England and Wales amounted to £2 million per annum but by 1818 it had risen to £8 million. Measured per capita, expenditure rose from four shillings per pauper in 1776 to thirteen shillings in 1818.21 Recent work by Brodie Wadell has identified the significant rise in the rate of growth in expenditure on poor relief, with spikes in 1781–2 and ‘several years in the 1790s’.22 This general increase, evident in all three project counties, also increased the circulation of money in local economies. In 1803 Cumberland spent £27,604 on relieving the poor, averaging 5s ¾d per head of the population (117,230 in 1801).23 By 1821, when the population had risen to 156,124, poor relief had reached £56,637, averaging 7s 3d per head.24 County averages could conceal wildly divergent parochial experiences. In Hayton, near Brampton, the population increased by 58 per cent – from 1,015 to 1,604 – between 1801 and 1831, while the £211 expended on relief in 1803 had risen to £465 by 1828, an increase of 120 per cent.25 A similar picture can be found in Staffordshire where the cost of poor relief increased from 7s 5d per head of the population to 8s 10½d. 26 Abbots Bromley’s population increased by 23 per cent but its spending on poor relief increased by 49 per cent.27 Likewise, annual spending on the poor in East Hoathly, Sussex, rose from 18s 10d per head of population in 1803 to approximately £1 2s ١½d in 1821.28

Rising costs were not without consequences. Real and perceived extravagance on the part of vestries and rising parish debts (despite increases in the poor rate and rising real wages in the Midlands and the north) ensured that the issue of poor relief was never off local or national agendas.29 Harvest failures in the mid-1790s and wide-scale food riots among the poor (if not necessarily paupers) resulted in a hardening of attitudes.30 While the approach of individual parishes and townships remained diverse and the ‘crisis’ was not felt uniformly across the country, all parishes reconsidered what level of support was appropriate for their poor. Pockets of deprivation, where restricted resources could stretch only so far, existed in areas often characterized by ‘generous’ provision, while examples of individual and collective generosity can be found in areas of more limited provision.31 Even so, manifestations of crisis were most apparent in the south and east. The results were a rise in protests, an increase in the amounts expended on the casual poor, the implementation of stricter relief regimes and shocking examples of neglect.32 Amid an atmosphere of ‘weakening of support for the old poor law’ and a ‘crisis in the management of poverty’, the poor were ‘increasingly problematized and stigmatized’.33

In the southern counties of England, one consequence of landowners reducing agricultural wages was to force parishes to increase their poor-relief contributions to individual labourers. Supplementing agricultural wages, it was argued, favoured farmers, depressed labourers’ incomes, distorted labour markets and was not always welcome.34 Moreover, there was widespread criticism that the burden of the poor rates fell disproportionately on the smaller ratepayers and failed to take adequate assessments of stock-in-trade. Substantial land and business owners and those trading in luxury goods, it was argued, were not shouldering a sufficient share of the tax burden.35 In 1822–3 in Cumberland, for example, the total poor rate amounted to £58,540. Of this, £43,503 was levied on land, £12,625 on houses, £1,518 on manorial profits and only £894 on mills and factories.36 In Bolton, Lancashire, politically motivated individuals claimed that Poor Law administrators favoured family and business networks when allocating funds. Large textile firms acting as property owners benefited at the expense of shopkeepers, householders and owners of small properties when the vestry paid the rents of textile workers.37 In the project counties, a comparison of businesses listed in trade directories with those recorded in overseers’ vouchers reveals the reliance placed by parishes on a relatively small number of goods and service providers.38 It is not surprising, therefore, that in overarching narratives of mismanagement those responsible for parochial relief were believed to be out to ‘gratify themselves and their Favourites’ at the expense of the deserving poor.39

Until the late eighteenth century when poor relief ‘became ever more central and essential’, resorting to parish relief was often undertaken as part of the ‘economy of makeshifts’ involving trade credit, pawning, occasional theft, borrowing from family and friends, and appeals to charities and friendly societies.40 In Cumberland, contemporaries recognized that the poor rate would have been much higher ‘if its evils were not alleviated by the munificent posthumous charities that have been bequeathed’.41 While they ‘lessened the strain on the formal poor relief system’, however, charities and friendly societies routinely refused relief to those in receipt of parish welfare (as occurred in Keswick).42 In part, this was because pressure on them was growing: in Staffordshire, Lichfield’s Mendicity Society offered temporary shelter to vagrants (accounting for some absences in overseers’ vouchers) but found that by 1827 expenditure exceeded income.43 Likewise, most parishes declined applications from people already in receipt of relief from other quarters. Conversely, vestries might countenance using charitable income to reduce the poor rate; in mid-eighteenth-century Greystoke those in receipt of poor relief could also receive money from land rents.44 Parochial income derived from charitable bequests, however, varied significantly between counties. In the period 1786–8, parishes in Cumberland benefited from £251 in interest from invested money, while those in Staffordshire gained £1,083 and in Sussex £1,247.45 In addition, the money was distributed unevenly between parishes. In Sussex, a county with significant income from financial endowments, East Hoathly received the interest on just £100, which amounted to £4 per year to distribute to the poor.46

The operation of the Poor Law between 1750 and 1834 was by no means consistent. Across this period and throughout their longer history, a bewildering array of legislation, much of it enabling rather than compulsory, ensured that local practice would vary considerably.47 Steven King characterized some Midland counties, including Staffordshire, as having a ‘strong unity of Poor Law experience’, whereas he found that north-western counties, including Cumberland, displayed a ‘ramshackle and inadequate collection of welfare strategies’ of ‘complex local diversity’.48 Determining precisely who was and was not considered deserving of assistance within these overlapping frameworks was as discretionary as the nature, extent and duration of relief given.49 As was evident in the case of Jane Sewell, parish welfare was essentially a balancing act between the ‘discretionary disbursements’ made to the poor based on their sense of ‘wide-ranging entitlements’, the ratepayers who funded poor relief and the decisions of parochial administrators, tempered on occasion by magistrates.50 Under the direction of vestries, it was the overseers and later their assistants who authorized payments for goods and services supplied as part of a much larger process by which each parish sought to relieve, direct, control or punish the poor as they saw fit. Excluding those classed as aged or infirm, it was rare for poor relief to be given on a permanent basis, ensuring that the underlying negotiations involved would be ongoing.51 In recent micro-historical studies, this intermittent relief across the life cycle has been documented in a variety of parishes.52 Both Henry French and Steven King identify the 1790s until the 1830s as a period when ‘able-bodied’ young men and women were receiving relief more frequently. These trends are particularly difficult to document using the vouchers, however, partly because parish pensions were often less reliably identified in vouchers and partly, because of the absence of significant runs of vouchers across relevant time periods.53

Parish administration in the Small Bills counties

Apart from more formal and extensive roundsman schemes, the variety of organizational forms, structures and welfare frameworks in existence under the later Old Poor Law are illustrated by the parishes and townships included in the ‘Small Bills’ project. They correspond to David Eastwood’s view that ‘Vestries … would farm the poor one year … make more regular use of workhouse incarceration in … another, and perhaps finally seek salvation in a labour rate scheme’.54 King noted too the variety of action taken towards the poor; it was ‘rare for parishes and townships to follow a single definitive poor law policy’.55 Whether relief provision was indoor or outdoor, casual or permanent, or in- or out-parish, the entire overlapping system, subject to much variation, depended on the levying and collection of a local tax or poor rate. The redistribution of money this entailed was not as straightforward as taking only from the wealthy and giving solely to the poor because purchasing power derived from poor-rate income might be distributed to provision either households or workhouses. Moreover, as discussed in Peter Collinge’s chapter on businesswomen and commercial environments, it is evident that parish decisions about how, where and on whom money was to be spent could have a notable impact on local businesses. Consideration of a sample of parishes included in the ‘Small Bills’ project illustrates this administrative diversity.

East Hoathly in East Sussex lies nine miles north-east of the county town of Lewes in a landscape dominated by the hills of the High Weald and the South Downs. The parish encompassed 2,000 acres of woodland and mixed agricultural land divided into small, tenanted farms, scattered hamlets and a small village. By 1801 the whole of the parish contained only fifty-six domestic dwellings occupied by seventy-six families. Between 1801 and 1841, the population of the parish rose from 395 to 607 and the number of dwellings increased accordingly, but the parish attracted relatively few migrants. In 1841 only thirty-one out of the 607 inhabitants were recorded as having been born outside of the county.56 As well as the church, the parish supported at least two public houses, a general dealer and a school with a handful of private pupils. The overseers’ vouchers make it clear, however, that several craftspeople and traders operated locally, augmented by one or two petty officials. While East Hoathly was an unremarkable rural parish in many ways, it is notable for two things that helped determine its inclusion here. First, there is a significant run of overseers’ vouchers between 1742 and 1834, making it the largest parish collection in the sample. Second, it was the home of Thomas Turner (1729–93), shopkeeper and prolific diarist.57 Turner was twenty-one when he first came to the parish in 1750 to run a small general shop. He threw himself into parish life and administration. He briefly kept the local school and later became a churchwarden, overseer of the poor and surveyor. He also assisted the local tax collector and advised many of his neighbours. The survival of Turner’s diary offered an opportunity to compare overseers’ vouchers with a narrative source and prompted the choice of East Hoathly from among a large number of East Sussex locations with surviving receipts.

Like many small rural parishes, East Hoathly cared for its poor in the community. In the mid eighteenth century regular pensions were paid to approximately six to eight individuals, mainly elderly or otherwise infirm paupers. Food, clothing, footwear and fuel were distributed among the pensioners and the many marginal families that required occasional assistance. The parish also paid rents, provided medical assistance, maintained several illegitimate children and made occasional payments to the itinerant poor. In the year ending Easter 1776, East Hoathly expended £150 of the local rate on the poor. By Easter 1803, this had increased to almost £372. Of this, £358 was spent on relieving the poor and a further £13 on the removal of paupers, overseers’ expenses and legal costs. In 1803 the parish was permanently caring for twenty-two adults, two children under five and a further thirteen children. There does not seem to have been a wage subsidy scheme in East Hoathly but charitable donations to the poor included some meagre gifts of bread and beer and occasionally money at Christmas.58

In northern England, amid the mountains, fells and lakes of Cumberland, much of the land was given over to the grazing of sheep and cattle. Arable crops including barley, oats, wheat, peas and beans were grown on enclosed land.59 The largest centres of population in 1801 were the county town of Carlisle (10,221), the ports of Whitehaven (8,742) and Workington (5,716) and the market town of Cockermouth (2,865). Cumberland’s predominantly agricultural economy, supplemented by textile production, provided most of the employment for the labouring poor but industry was expanding from its domestic base. Frederick Morton Eden noted that spinning was the general employment in the 1790s for women in labouring families.60 Domestic spinning, however, was slowly giving way to the industrial manufacture of cotton and linen. Quarrying and mining were also growing in significance.61 Many of the county’s extensive parishes contained scattered hamlets, villages and market towns where the poor were maintained either in poorhouses or in their own homes. While all three counties had arrangements for farming the poor, a form of contracting out poor relief, it was most prevalent in Cumberland.

Greystoke and Brampton are representative of the seventeen Cumbrian settlements included in the project. Greystoke, four miles west of Penrith, comprised 7,511 acres divided into ten townships and three chapelries and accommodated 2,451 people by 1821.62 Of these, Greystoke, Little Blencow, Johnby, and Motherby and Gill were united for the relief of paupers. The other nine areas supported their own poor separately.63 In 1744 the united townships established a poorhouse to maintain their poor and agreed that, when opened, ‘all the said poor of the Townships do enter the said Poorhouse otherwise cease asking any further supply’.64 To help offset costs, common land was enclosed and the yearly rent arising applied to the poorhouse. If parish officials anticipated that this would absolve them of the majority of their responsibilities towards the poor, they were to be disappointed. Indeed, the poorhouse supplemented rather than replaced Greystoke’s existing provision of outdoor relief in the form of house rents, house repairs, weekly allowances, fuel, clothing and medical services; and out-parish payments. Greystoke also contracted with individuals to care for fellow parishioners for a fixed fee under stringent conditions. In May 1766 John Hunter was ‘put to boarding’ with Miles Fleming at the rate of £2 14s 6d a year. Fleming was to mend Hunter’s clothes at his own expense but the parish officers agreed to procure new ones ‘at their proper charges’. In 1780 the parish agreed with Mary Tydal of Catterlen to nurse Ann Crodas’s child for £5 8s for one year.65 These tailored arrangements may reflect active negotiation between the parties and a shared sense of rights and obligations.

Strategies for managing the poor were more obviously institutional in the market town of Brampton, a parish of 6,466 acres (population: 2,921 in 1821), nine miles east of Carlisle.66 A workhouse, in operation by 1777, had a capacity of twenty.67 Ten years later, Thomas Allen was contracting with twelve settlements including Brampton, Hayton and Kirklinton to farm their poor.68 In 1794, William Hutchinson stated unequivocally that Brampton had no workhouse and that paupers were boarded out at the rate of 2s 3d per week and out-pensions provided at 1s per week.69 Nonetheless, in 1803 a workhouse in the town is recorded as accommodating twenty-eight inmates, while a further thirteen adults and fifteen children were in receipt of regular outdoor relief. That year £140 was expended in relieving the poor in the workhouse and £111 11s 11d out of it.70 By 1828, the poor were once again being farmed, this time for both indoor and outdoor relief. The contractor had use of the former workhouse’s furniture but had to provide food and clothing and was also responsible for all casual relief including vagrancy.71

The twelve Staffordshire parishes included in the project are notable for their diversity, although none is located round Stoke-upon-Trent, with its burgeoning pottery industry. They include the traditional urban centre of the city of Lichfield with its cathedral, administrative functions, parliamentary representation, quarter sessions and court for the recovery of debts; Wednesbury and Darlaston, with their growing metalwork trades built on plentiful coal supplies; market towns including Uttoxeter, based around agriculture; and rural villages such as Abbots Bromley. Darlaston, located between Wednesbury and Walsall, experienced a 74.4 per cent increase in population between 1801 and 1831 (from 3,812 to 6,647) and Wednesbury 102.8 per cent (from 4,160 to 8,437).72 As occurred elsewhere, an increasing population placed greater pressure on relief (Table 0.1).

By 1766, Wednesbury’s small early eighteenth-century workhouse had been enlarged and enclosed. Twenty years later, it had either been substantially rebuilt or replaced.73 In 1801–2 relief amounting to just over £951 was expended on an average of fifty-two workhouse inmates (sixteen men and thirty-six women). In the same year, an average of 172 people received outdoor relief at a cost of fractionally over £815.74

Table 0.1 Numbers in receipt of outdoor relief in Wednesbury, 1770–96

In contrast to Darlaston and Wednesbury, Lichfield’s population grew by 36.5 per cent (from 4,842 to 6,607) between 1801 and 1831.75 Parochial administration was divided between the Cathedral Close and the parishes of St Mary’s, St Chad’s and St Michael’s. Only St Mary’s, the largest parish, maintained a workhouse throughout the long eighteenth century. Periodic attempts to unite the city’s parishes for the purposes of relief were either short-lived or failed to materialize altogether. The result was a shifting collection of relief strategies covering most forms of relief involving shared and independent workhouses, farming the poor, parish poorhouses, pensions, rents, casual relief and recourse to charity.76 As with the other parishes and townships in the ‘Small Bills’ project, the survival of overseers’ vouchers for St Mary’s privileges nothing so much as a combination of administrative efficiency and serendipity.

Overseers’ vouchers

The partial life story of Jane Sewell emerged through the bills and receipts generated as part of the administration of the Old Poor Law. At first glance, these overseers’ vouchers may appear to be little more than ‘indecipherable scrawl’. To dismiss them as such, however, would be to ‘miss the chance to enter into an entire social world converging on the page’.77 It is their very ordinariness and the multiple layers of information embedded within them that makes them important. Indeed, these scraps of paper and their survival, fundamental to the ‘Small Bills’ project, can be regarded as one of the ‘rich, alternative sources for reaching the poor’, and the goods and service providers who supplied them.78

By detailing daily interactions, overseers’ vouchers reveal the degree of complexity and the time-consuming nature of poor-relief administration in the long eighteenth century and the increasing bureaucratization of society. Fleshing out the summaries presented in overseers’ accounts, which Tim Wales described as the ‘endpoint of processes which are often obscure’, the vouchers provide background to hitherto unarticulated stories and illuminate the extent to which local economies were bound up with parish expenditure.79 Consequently, the vouchers add a new level of quotidian detail to metanarratives of consumption and material culture that frequently omit paupers as consumers. With the exceptions of more durable items such as household goods, tools, clothing and footwear, the vouchers reveal a world of ephemeral consumption designed to satisfy immediate needs: the payment of house rent, medical attention and food.80 Analysis of the vouchers, therefore, provides the opportunity to show how the provisioning of workhouses and outdoor relief fit into the bigger pictures of purchasing and consumption practices, and how parishes influenced commercial environments and economic development.81 As illustrated in the chapters on women and business and on clothing, they point to the structural significance of poor relief as a means of sustaining and underpinning local economies.82

Alannah Tomkins noted that the ‘creation, retention and ultimate survival of records relating to … labouring and poor populations’ faltered in major towns and cities as a consequence of industrial change and rapid population growth.83 As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, however, those who came into contact with the Old Poor Law, either as parish officers, ratepayers, suppliers or recipients faced an increasingly bureaucratized system. Letters; petitions; parish registers; highway, churchwardens’, overseers’ and constables’ accounts; vestry minutes; election notices; contracts; and bastardy, removal, settlement and apprenticeship papers all multiplied in response to enabling legislation, greater numbers of paupers, more suppliers and demands for greater accountability.84 Included within such quotidian ephemera are overseers’ vouchers. Over time, much of this material was discarded to make way for new accumulations of paperwork. As a result, survival rates between and within counties and parishes vary considerably. Equally important in determining the survival of vouchers is archival and preservation practice. In 1894, the Local Government Act permitted the newly created county councils to make provision for archives; at the same time parish councils became responsible for non-ecclesiastical records of the parish.85 It was not until the immediate post-war development of county record offices and the passage of the 1962 Local Government (Records) Act, regularizing the position of county record offices that significant progress was made in depositing and preserving parochial records nationally. This larger story of archival development hides a more regional one. Independent of legislation, pioneering work on establishing local archives was undertaken in the south-east between the 1920s and the late 1940s, laying the foundations for the county archive network. The regional nature of these innovations, however, means that parish archives – including vouchers – survive most completely in the south-east.86 Arguably, the journey from parish chest to repository in the twentieth century created as many of the archival ‘absences’ as the records management practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Once individual bills had been settled and overseers’ accounts had been written up in the vestry minutes or a separate account book, there was no specific need or requirement to preserve them. As vestry decisions came under greater scrutiny and pressure to reform the Poor Law gradually intensified, however, there was an increasing recognition that vestries had to become more accountable to those who funded parish welfare.87 In 1744 the Poor Relief Act strengthened requirements to keep registers of expenditure on the poor. Overseers’ accounts were to be written up at the end of each year and certified by magistrates.88 Parishioners were permitted to inspect poor-rate accounts after giving notice and paying sixpence for the privilege. By 1793 further legislation had made it possible to prosecute overseers for neglect of duty, including the mismanagement of parochial funds.89 It is noticeable that in many parish collections from around 1750, and especially after 1800, more vouchers were preserved. In some parishes, this preservation can be ascribed to the diligence of individual parish officers like Thomas Turner who, in addition to his occasional parochial duties, received two pounds per year to act as parish clerk.90 In other parishes, it was because of established procedures that became resistant to change. From the later 1770s, there were repeated requests by the national government to provide detailed accounts of parochial expenditure. It is evident, however, that a significant gap existed between what was expected and what individual parishes did. In the parish of St Mary’s, Lichfield, Frederick Morton Eden reported that the accounts were ‘in such a confused state (some years being lost and others not settled) [that] very little information could be collected’.91 By 1822, however, incoming bills were pasted into two large bound volumes in date order.

Unevenness in the archival record raises questions over how well the vouchers represent spending on the poor. In some instances, records have simply not survived. In others, it is the consequence of the ways in which poor relief was managed. Fewer vouchers survive for Cumberland compared to East Sussex or Staffordshire, posing some problems when assessing aspects of continuity and change. Across a thirty-six-year period, there are only thirty-four vouchers for Irthington and just seventeen covering a ninety-nine-year period for Kirklinton.92 This pattern is due, in part, to the widespread practice of farming out paupers, since contractors were not expected to provide bills or account for their expenditure. In 1787 thirty parishes or quarters in Eskdale and Cumberland wards farmed their poor. Contractors were paid an annual sum plus a set amount per pauper to maintain and support them.93 Rent, clothing, beds and bedding, however, remained the responsibility of individual parishes or townships. Consequently, vouchers were generated for items purchased by parishes but not for those purchased by contractors. Some of the parishes also maintained their poor at home. Paupers in receipt of pensions did not produce accounts of their expenditure. Unevenness is also evident in the ways in which information in the vouchers was recorded. This is especially true for payments made to those without settled status. In 1821 John Waltham of Abbots Bromley drew up a list of relief payments given to ‘poor travellers’: twenty-nine men, twenty-two women and twenty-seven children, none of whom were named. In such instances, discussed in Hitchcock’s chapter (Chapter 3), parish authorities were less likely to record individual names. A few pennies to help them on their way was preferable to the more costly and time-consuming expense of vagrant examinations.

Even with seemingly uninterrupted runs of vouchers, there is no certainty that they represent total expenditure on relief or indeed, whether items paid for by the parish, including those destined for the workhouse, were intended for or even reached paupers. During the long eighteenth century, it was commonplace to dispense alcohol as medicinal relief at the same time as it was customary to provide refreshments to the vestry. Thomas Turner recalled in March 1758: ‘In the evening I went down to Jones’s, where we had a vestry … We stayed until about 11:30 quarrelling and wrangling. We spent on the parish account 5/–, and also 3½d each of our own.’94 Some expenses, including payments relating to assistant overseers’ salaries, legal fees, the outlay of officials who attended local assizes or vestry meetings held in inns, the construction and maintenance of workhouses and their gardens, and administrative expenses ‘benefited’ the poor indirectly.95 Payments such as these, however, were increasingly acknowledged in parliamentary statistics as parishes were asked to report administrative costs separately.

Unevenness in the historic record is compounded if corresponding overseers’ accounts are absent or if parish workhouses operated according to the provisions of Gilbert’s Act. These workhouses were required to draw up their own accounts and present them separately from other vestry expenditure. This financial arrangement was increasingly followed by those administering workhouses in single parishes, making the overseers’ accounts progressively opaque. In comparing the vouchers to entries in account books, it is notable that some items are either under-represented or missing entirely. These absences could include labour or services provided by the parish poor, the regular payment of maintenance for illegitimate children and payments towards parish pensions. Paupers undertaking occasional work for the parish rarely presented bills, perhaps because of their inability to write or the associated cost of paper, pen and ink, and possibly because the issue of a bill by a pauper would have been regarded as inappropriate. Overseers, however, sometimes drew them up on their behalf. As occurred in Cumberland, regular payments for pensions or maintenance would generate a voucher only if parish officers chose to be punctilious about disbursements, perhaps wherever the overseers themselves sought reimbursement for pension monies paid out.

Overseers’ vouchers represent the ‘written means of storing and conveying information’, although their form and appearance vary significantly.96 Accustomed to trading on credit, retailers, producers and service providers used them to record what they had supplied. The majority are handwritten. Except for a flurry of vouchers associated with the drawing up of annual accounts at Easter, sampling the data for parishes reveals few consistent patterns regarding days of the week or periods in the year when accounts were settled. A bill or invoice was usually generated by the supplier and passed, by hand, to an overseer. On payment, overseers may have asked recipients to sign the bills or added their own signature to confirm that accounts had been settled, enabling them to write up monthly or annual accounts for the parish. At a time when individual methods of accounting and bookkeeping varied considerably and as bills might remain unpaid for months, retaining vouchers offered proof that goods or services had been supplied or that payment had been made.97 Retained bills were stored in different ways. In Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, they were folded in thirds, divided into bundles and tied with tape. In a similar manner, Ringmer’s vouchers were so numerous during the 1820s that they were sorted into monthly bundles, remaining in the order in which they were received or paid. Others, like those at Kirkby Lonsdale, Westmorland, with their tell-tale holes, were kept on long, metal receipt spikes.

Similar to pauper letters, the orthography of vouchers runs the gamut from uncertain hands with phonetic spellings to others exhibiting clerk-like precision. In addition to business owners, some were drawn up by assistants, apprentices, family members or parish officials. A small number show evidence of reuse, with different orders on each side or contain working calculations. Others, like the one on a fragment of an East India Company report on tea sales, were written on the backs of old handbills, price lists or printed circulars.98 Some vouchers contain entries for hundreds of items; others are notable for their brevity. Surgeons, apothecaries, doctors, grocers, drapers and haberdashers tended to submit lengthy bills often covering several months. Butchers submitted substantially shorter bills more frequently. Unless notes or letters accompany the vouchers, there is little in the way of personal testimony or comment. Where comments exist, they are mediated through the commercial language common to the period.99 Printed bill-heads form a minority of the collection. A few, containing illustrations of the wide range of products on offer, are indicative of a business’s status and ambitions.100 Others are pre-printed standard blank forms, including out-parish demands for reimbursement designed to reduce the burden of parish administration around non-resident paupers.101 As with other printed ephemera like quasi-legal documents, ‘unambiguous language and utility of design were paramount … A typical example left gaps of varying sizes according to what had to be filled in, the structure of the language forming a prompt to the writer.’102 Surviving bills from stationer Elizabeth Wetton attest to the range of printed ephemera she supplied to Uttoxeter’s overseers: certificates, lists of paupers, Board of Health and cholera notices, electoral and voters’ lists, ‘sets of poor accounts’ and handbills.103 These administrative forms proliferated as the management and administration of the Poor Law became increasingly bureaucratic. John Coles, a stationer from Pulborough in Sussex, with strong family ties there, began to dominate the market for pre-printed forms, particularly those concerning poor relief. By the middle of the eighteenth century, his forms were used nationally, from Westmorland to Sussex, including in East Hoathly.104 In nineteenth-century Cumberland, Charles Thurnam increasingly supplied parishes with printed materials.105 Standardized receipts, itemizing commonly purchased goods, were also popular, especially with innkeepers like the Wilkinsons of Penrith: meals and drinks consumed, and hay and corn provided for horses, were marked up alongside the relevant items.106

Whatever their form and appearance or the level of literacy displayed, most vouchers tended to conform to standard business conventions. That is, their purpose was to convey information about the goods and services provided in a way that would be intelligible to the recipient. Elizabeth Spencer’s chapter on clothing (Chapter 2) brings this need for clarity to the fore. When bills could be submitted a considerable time after the goods were supplied, it was necessary to ensure that their contents were adequately described and priced. The most detailed examples contain the date the bill was submitted; a top line addressed to the parish, overseers or workhouse followed by ‘Bt [bought] of’ or ‘Dr [debtor] to’ and the supplier’s name. Except for the bills of grocers, drapers and haberdashers (which frequently list several items on the same line), goods and services were typically itemised individually with the unit price, quantity purchased and the total price. At the bottom the overall total and the date the bill was settled is followed either by the business owner’s name, that of their assistant, or their mark and is sometimes countersigned by a parish official. Such information is not always evident. Many bills lack specific details about expenditure or the name of the recipient of the relief. In others, only one recipient is named where clearly (given the nature and quantity of goods supplied) the relief was destined for several. The intended use of some goods and services is potentially problematic where uses or quantities are unspecified. Lime, for instance, could be used for improving soil, making limewash, plaster or mortar. Sometimes, unspecified ‘goods’ were simply delivered ‘to the workhouse’. In some instances, notably in Sussex, bills issued by overseers for goods and services they had supplied can be difficult to differentiate from those seeking reimbursement after having already paid for goods and services.

Qualifications aside, by detailing daily interactions, overseers’ vouchers reveal the degree of complexity and the time-consuming nature of poor-relief administration in the long eighteenth century and the increasing bureaucratization of society. They also demonstrate that, through their requests, the poor were less marginal in local economies than might be anticipated. Paupers influenced directly and indirectly what everyday goods and services local businesses produced, stocked and offered. One consequence of this was to see returned to those who paid the poor rate some of their outlay through expenditure on the goods and services they supplied to the parish. Even with the tightening of relief criteria in the early 1800s, the vouchers display an astonishingly diverse response to what constituted the relief of poverty. Moreover, by rendering communities of overseers, shopkeepers, tradespeople, producers and professionals visible, the vouchers offer the possibility of a newly granular understanding of the interactions of all the people who came into contact with the Poor Law. The resulting research, evident in this volume, constitutes a new approach to parish welfare and the economics of poverty with the ability to reach new cohorts among the people caught up in the Poor Law, whether as recipients or as providers.

1 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, at pp. 94–5; S. King, Poverty and Welfare in England, 1700–1850 (Manchester, 2000), p. 22.

2 King, Poverty and Welfare, p. 23; D. Eastwood, ‘Rethinking the debates on the Poor Law in early nineteenth-century England’, Utilitas, vi (1994), 97–116, at 105.

3 S. King and P. Jones, Navigating the Old English Poor Law: The Kirkby Lonsdale Letters, 1809–1836 (Oxford, 2020); S. King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s, i, States, People and the History of Social Change (Montreal, 2019); Sokoll, ‘Writing for relief’.

4 See Interlude 3 (D. Shenton, ‘Elizabeth Malbon (c.1743–1801)’) in this volume.

5 A. M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005), pp. 34–5; B. Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660–1850 (New Haven, 2001) pp. 101–2; C. Steedman, History and the Law: A Love Story (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 130–61. Women could gain settlement through repeated annual hirings as servants: C. Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), p. 106.

6 17 Geo II c 5, Vagrancy Act, 1744.

7 S. King, ‘Poor relief and English economic development reappraised’, The Economic History Review, l (1997), 360–8, at 363.

8 King, Poverty and Welfare, pp. 18–27.

9 King, Poverty and Welfare, p. 185.

10 S. Shave, Pauper Policies: Poor Law Practice in England, 1780–1850 (Manchester, 2017), pp. 4, 37–8, 57–9.

11 W. Parson and W. White, History, Directory and Gazetteer of Cumberland and Westmorland (Leeds, 1829), pp. 688–9; <www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/township/kirkby-lonsdale> [accessed 25 June 2021].

12 Shave, Pauper Policies, pp. 257–8.

13 M. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995), p. 451.

14 J. Boulton and J. Black, ‘Paupers and their experience of a London workhouse: St Martin-in-the Fields, 1725–1824’, in Residential Institutions in Britain, 1725–1970: Inmates and Environments, ed. J. Hamlett, L. Hoskins and R. Preston (London, 2015), pp. 79–91, at pp. 79–80.

15 P. Collinge, ‘“He shall have care of the garden, its cultivation and produce”: workhouse gardens and gardening c.1780–1835’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, lxiv (2021), 21–39.

16 CAS, SPUL/4/1, Report on poorhouses at Longtown, Bewcastle, Horsgill, Farlam and Kingmoor, 1787.

17 The Victoria History of the County of Staffordshire (London, 1990), xiv. 89; see East Sussex Record Office (ESRO), PAR378/31/3/16/33, and PAR378/31/3/21/29, East Hoathly, Overseers’ vouchers, 1779 and 1785.

18 Boulton and Black, ‘Paupers and their experience of a London workhouse’, p. 82; J. S. Taylor, ‘The unreformed workhouse 1776–1834’, in Comparative Developments in Social Welfare, ed. E. W. Martin (London, 1972), pp. 57–84, at p. 69.

19 King, Poverty and Welfare, pp. 26, 143.

20 Shave, Pauper Policies,p. 2.

21 Shave, Pauper Policies,p. 5.

22 B. Waddell, ‘The rise of the parish welfare state in England, c.1600–1800’, Past & Present, ccliii (2021), 151–94.

23 Abstract of Answers and Returns relative to the Expence and Maintenance of the Poor (Parl. Papers 1803–4 [C. 175], xiii), p. 476. Unless stated otherwise, all figures are to the nearest pound.

24 Report from the Select Committee on Poor Rate Returns (Parl. Papers 1822), Supplemental Appendix, 1819–22, pp. 18, 25.

25 Hayton’s population figures can be found at <https://www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/township/hayton> [accessed 25 June 2021]. Abstract … Expence and Maintenance of the Poor, p. 78; CAS, PR102/122, Overseers’ accounts and papers, 1790–1843.

26 Based on a population of 239,153 in 1803: Abstract … Expence and Maintenance of the Poor, p. 476. The figure for 1821 is based on the lower population figure (341,040) quoted in the body of the report. The figure reported in the summary is 345,895, which would give an annual cost of poor relief of 8s 9d per head of the population: Report from the Select Committee on Poor Rate Returns (Parl. Papers 1822), Supplemental Appendix, 1819–22, pp. 18, 25.

27 Abbots Bromley’s population rose from 1,318 in 1801 to 1,621 by 1831: VCH Staffordshire (London, 1908) i,. 325. The £536 spent on relief in 1803 rose to £800 by 1833: Abstract … Expence and Maintenance of the Poor, p. 470; Staffordshire Record Office (SRO), D1209/6/2, Abbots Bromley, Overseers’ accounts, ledger of expenditure and receipts, 1827–43; VCH Staffordshire, i. 325.

28 Naomi Tadmor identifies a ‘near six-fold rise in parish expenditure’ on disbursements in East Hoathly between 1712 and 1772: N. Tadmor, ‘Where was Mrs Turner? Governance and gender in an eighteenth-century village’, in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. S. Hindle, A. Shepard and J. Walter (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 89–112. The annual sum spent on poor relief in East Hoathly in 1803 was £371 15s 4d: Abstract … Expence and Maintenance of the Poor, p. 528. The annual sum spent on poor relief in East Hoathly in 1821 was £564 9s and the annual cost per head of population in the county of Sussex was £1 3s 3½d in 1821: Report from the Select Committee on Poor Rate Returns, pp. 178, 532.

29 F. W. Botham and E. H. Hunt, ‘Wages in Britain during the Industrial Revolution’, The Economic History Review, xl (1987), 380–99, at 394–7; R. Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840: Government, Society and Culture (Harlow, 1999), p. 103; P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 151–4; D. R. Green, ‘Icons of the new system: workhouse construction and relief practices in London under the Old and New Poor Law’, The London Journal xxiv (2009), 264–284.

30 Green, ‘Icons of the new system’, 269–70; L. Smith, ‘Lunatic asylum in the workhouse: St Peter’s Hospital, Bristol, 1698–1861’, Medical History, lxi (2017), 225–45, at 227; Eastwood, ‘Rethinking the debates on the Poor Law’, 105; Taylor, ‘Unreformed workhouse’, pp. 64, 67.

31 S. Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle under the English Poor Law, 1760–1834 (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 5–6; King, Poverty and Welfare, pp. 142, 188–9.

32 Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle, pp. 5, 9, 143; C. J. Griffin, The Politics of Hunger: Protest, Poverty and Policy in England, c.1750–c.1840 (Manchester, 2020).

33 Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle, pp. 8, 92.

34 C. J. Griffin, ‘Parish farms: a policy response to unemployment in rural southern England, c.1815–1835’, Agricultural History Review, lviii (2011), 176–98, at 177–83.

35 R. Dryburgh, ‘“Individual, illegal and unjust purposes”: overseers, incentives, and the Old Poor Law in Bolton, 1820–1837’, Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers 50, University of Oxford, Department of Economics (2003), pp. 20–2 <https://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/Economics/History/Paper50/50dryburgh%281%29.pdf?msclkid=c128fae9a6b511ec951acf776327afb6> [accessed 18 Mar. 2022].

36 Parson and White, Directory Cumberland, p. 31.

37 Dryburgh, ‘“Individual, illegal and unjust purposes”’, pp. 19–22.

38 See Chapter 4 (P. Collinge, ‘Women, business and the Old Poor Law’) in this volume.

39 Thomas Gilbert, quoted in S. Shave, ‘The welfare of the vulnerable in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth Centuries: Gilbert’s Act of 1782’, History in Focus, xiv (2008) <https://archives.history.ac.uk/history-in-focus/welfare/articles/shaves.html> [accessed 14 Apr. 2020].

40 Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle, pp. 7, 19; O. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974); J. Innes, ‘The “mixed economy of welfare” in early modern England: assessments of the options from Hale to Malthus (c.1683–1803)’, in Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past, ed. M. Daunton (London, 1996), pp. 104–34; S. King and A. Tomkins (eds), The Poor in England, 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester, 2003), p. 1; J. Broad, ‘Parish economies of welfare, 1650–1834’, The Historical Journal, xlii (1999), 985–1006, at 985–6.

41 Parson and White, Directory Cumberland, p. 31.

42 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 73. Thanks to Keith Osborne for the Keswick reference: Carlisle Library, Jackson Collection, L93, Keswick Friendly Society, 1776.

43 VCH Staffordshire, xiv. 91. From 1828, St Mary’s parish contributed an annual subscription of five pounds: SRO, LD20/6/7, Subscription to the Mendicity Society, 16 Sept. 1833.

44 W. White, History, Gazetteer, and Directory of the County of Staffordshire, and the City and County of Lichfield (Sheffield, 1834), pp. 94–103; J. F. Ede, History of Wednesbury (Wednesbury, 1962), p. 159; CAS, PR5/43, Greystoke, Poor account book, 1740–1812.

45 Abstract of Returns of Charitable Donations for the benefit of poor persons, made by the ministers and churchwardens of the several parishes and townships of England and Wales (Parl. Papers 1816) [relating to 1786–8]. Annual product of invested money.

46 This legacy was given by Samuel Atkins in 1742. By the 1760s it had been subsumed into the general parish fund: D. Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765 (East Hoathly, 1994), pp. 326–7.

47 S. King, Poverty and Welfare, pp. 18–47; Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle; Shave, Pauper Policies,pp. 1–6, 57–149.

48 King, Poverty and Welfare, pp. 263, 266.

49 Shave, Pauper Policies,p. 3.

50 Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle, p. 79; Eastwood, ‘Rethinking the debates on the Poor Law’, 103, 106.

51 Broad, ‘Parish economies of welfare’, 986.

52 H. French, ‘How dependent were the “dependent poor”? Poor relief and the life-course in Terling, Essex, 1762–1834’, Continuity and Change, xxx (2015), 193–222; S. King, ‘Reconstructing lives: the poor, the Poor Law and welfare in Calverley, 1650–1820’, Social History, xxii (1997), 318–38. See also S. A. Shave, ‘The dependent poor? (Re)constructing the lives of individuals “on the parish” in rural Dorset, 1800–1832’, Rural History, xx (2009), 67–97; Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle, pp. 101–30.

53 The longest run of overseers’ vouchers in the ‘Small Bills’ project appears in the Sussex parish of East Hoathly; however, the vouchers for the critical period, c.1790–1820, are absent. Further analysis is ongoing.

54 Eastwood, ‘Rethinking the debates on the Poor Law’, 105.

55 King, Poverty and Welfare, p. 143.

56 Abstract of Answers and Returns under the Population Act, 3 & 4 Vic. C. 99 (Parl. Papers 1841), p. 322.

57 D. Vaisey, ‘Turner, Thomas (1729–1793)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/48266> [accessed 14 Aug. 2018].

58 Vaisey (ed.), Diary of Thomas Turner, pp. 196, 241, 244.

59 F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor, A History of the Labouring Classes in England (3 vols, London, 1797), ii. 46–100.

60 Eden, State of the Poor, ii. 84.

61 W. Hutchinson, History of Cumberland (2 vols, Carlisle, 1794), ii. 442–4, 451, 468, 657, 664; Eden, State of the Poor, ii. 49, 87, 89, 99.

62 Parson and White, Directory Cumberland, p. 473; <https://www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/township/greystoke> [accessed 8 Feb. 2021].

63 Parson and White, Directory Cumberland, p. 473.

64 CAS, PR5/43, Greystoke, Poor account book, 1740–1812.

65 CAS, PR5/43, Greystoke, Poor account book, 1740–1812.

66 Parson and White, Directory Cumberland, p. 393; <https://www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/township/brampton> [accessed 8 Feb. 2021].

67 A Report from the Committee Appointed to Inspect and Consider the Returns made by the Overseers of the Poor (Parl. Paper 1777).

68 CAS, SPUL/4/1, Report of poorhouses, 1787.

69 Hutchinson, History of Cumberland, i. 131.

70 Abstract … Expence and Maintenance of the Poor, p. 79.

71 CAS, PR60/21/13/6, Public meeting at Brampton Vestry, 3 Apr. 1828.

72 VCH Staffordshire, i. 323–4.

73 Ede, History of Wednesbury, pp. 164–5.

74 The number of workhouse inmates in March 1775 was 71 and 56 in April 1775: Ede, History of Wednesbury, pp. 166–9.

75 VCH Staffordshire, i. 329.

76 VCH Staffordshire, xiv. 87–92.

77 S. Rockman, ‘The paper technologies of capitalism’, Technology and Culture, lviii (2017), 487–505, at 498.

78 A. Tomkins, The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1723–1782: Parish Charity and Credit (Manchester, 2006), p. 4.

79 T. Wales, ‘The parish and the poor in the English Revolution’, in The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in honour of John Morrill, ed. S. Taylor and G. Tapsell (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 53–81, at p. 62.

80 J. Styles. ‘Involuntary consumers? Servants and their clothes in eighteenth-century England’, Textile History, xxxiii (2002), 9–21.

81 P. M. Solar, ‘Poor relief and English economic development before the Industrial Revolution’, The Economic History Review, xlviii (1995), 1–22; S. King, ‘Poor relief and English economic development reappraised’, The Economic History Review, l (1997), 360–8.

82 S. P. Walker, ‘Expense, social and moral control: accounting and the administration of the Old Poor Law in England and Wales’, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, xxiii (2004), 85–127, at 87; Tomkins, The Experience of Urban Poverty, p. 3.

83 Tomkins, The Experience of Urban Poverty, p. 4.

84 Walker, ‘Accounting and the administration of the Old Poor Law’, 85–127.

85 E. Shepherd, Archives and Archivists in 20th Century England (Abingdon, 2009), p. 26.

86 The Parochial Registers and Records Measure (1929) undoubtedly encouraged many parishes to deposit material with the diocesan record office, formally administered by the diocesan registrar. In a few dioceses the county record office was also designated as a diocesan record office. It was not until the measure was revised in 1978 that this became common. Between 1946 and 1951 ecclesiastical archives were surveyed to ensure that future decisions could be taken in a coordinated manner: Shepherd, Archives and Archivists, p. 135.

87 Walker, ‘Accounting and the administration of the Old Poor Law’, 85–127.

88 17 Geo II, c 38.

89 33 Geo III, c 55.

90 ESRO, PAR378/31/1/1/, East Hoathly, Overseers’ account book, 1761–79.

91 Eden, State of the Poor, ii. 653–4.

92 King, Poverty and Welfare, p. 186; CAS, PR83/16/1–7, Irthington, Overseers’ vouchers, 1783–1819; PR156/7/1–17, Kirklinton, Overseers’ vouchers, 1735–1834.

93 CAS, SPUL/4/1, Report of poorhouses, 1787.

94 John Jones was the publican of The Crown public house in East Hoathly where the vestry invariably met. On 3 Mar. 1758 seven men attended the meeting, and the allowance for refreshments was approximately five shillings: ESRO, AMS6532/1–4, Dean K. Worcester, Transcript of Thomas Turner’s diaries, 3 Mar. 1758, pp. 672(1)–673(1).

95 See Interlude 4 (M. Dean, ‘The Wilkinsons and the Griffin Inn, Penrith’) in this volume.

96 Rockman, ‘Paper technologies’, 487.

97 J. Raven, Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2014), p. 184.

98 CAS, Kendal, WPR19/7/1/5/6/19, Kirkby Lonsdale, Overseers’ vouchers, c.1809.

99 P. Hudson, ‘Correspondence and commitment: British traders’ letters in the long-eighteenth century’, Cultural and Social History, xi (2014), 527–53.

100 Raven, Publishing Business, p. 53; P. Collinge, ‘Chinese tea, Turkish coffee and Scottish tobacco: image and meaning in Uttoxeter’s Poor Law vouchers’, Transactions of the Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Society, xlix (2017), 80–9. See also Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London’, Business History (2022), DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2022.2036131.

101 Raven, Publishing Business, p. 7.

102 M. Twyman, ‘Printed ephemera’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, 1695–1830, ed. M. F. Suarez and M. L. Turner (7 vols, Cambridge, 2009), v. 66–82, at p. 74.

103 SRO, D3891/6/34/7/19b, Elizabeth Wetton, 30 Oct. 1829; D3891/6/37/12/8, 9 Apr. 1832; D3891/6/39/1/2, 8 Apr. 1833; D3891/6/39/1/13, 20 July 1833; D3891/6/39/8/48, 23 Mar. 1833; D3891/6/39/8/62, 10 May–25 Aug. 1832.

104 N. Tadmor, ‘The settlement of the poor and the rise of the form in England, c.1662–1780’, Past & Present, ccxxxvi (2017), 43–97.

105 P. Collinge, ‘“Exceedingly obnoxious to others in the trade”: Carlisle bookseller, printer and publisher Charles Thurnam (1796–1852)’, Northern History, lviii (2021), 66–85.

106 See Interlude 4 (M. Dean, ‘The Wilkinsons and the Griffin Inn, Penrith’) in this volume; CAS, SPC21/8/11/13, Griffin Inn, Penrith, c.1800.