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The Old Poor Law and the Agricultural Labor Market in Southern England: An Empirical Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

George R. Boyer
George R. Boyer
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Labor Economics at New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14851–0952
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Abstract

The paper examines the economic role played by poor relief in early nineteenth-century England. A three-equation model is estimated to explain cross-parish variations in per capita relief expenditures, agricultural laborers' annual wage income, and unemployment rates. Relief expenditures are found to be related to crop mix, the political power of labor-hiring farmers, distance from London, and employment opportunities in cottage industry. The results strongly support the revisionist analysis of the Old Poor Law, and reject the analysis contained in the Report of the Royal Poor Law Commission.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 113 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1986

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References

1 To date the only attempt to determine the causes of cross-sectional variations in per capita relief expenditures during this period has been by Tucker, G.S.L., “The Old Poor Law Revisited,” Explorations in Economic History, 12 (1975), pp. 233–52. Tucker's analysis is at the county level of aggregation, while poor relief was administered by the parish. Because relief administration and economic conditions were not uniform across parishes within a particular county, his analysis has serious shortcomings. Moreover, Tucker did not make use of the Rural Queries, and thus was unable to test several prominent hypotheses concerning the causes of cross-sectional variations in relief expenditures.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Royal Commission to Investigate the Poor Laws, Report on the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws (London, 1834), pp. 68–70, 233–37, 59.Google Scholar

3 Malthus, T. R., An Essay on the Principle of Population (1st ed., 1798; reprint, New York, 1970), pp. 98, 97;Google ScholarRicardo, D., The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817; reprint, London, 1912), p. 61.Google Scholar

4 Davies, David, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry (Bath, 1795), p. 57.Google Scholar

5 Eden, Frederic Morton, The State of the Poor, 3 vols. (1797; reprint, London, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 2, 471, 687; vol. 3: p. 796.Google ScholarDavies, The Case of Labourers, pp. 84–86.Google Scholar

6 Eden, State, vol. I, pp. xx;Google ScholarDavies, The Case of Labourers, pp. 102–3;Google ScholarBarnett, D. C., “Allotments and the Problem of Rural Poverty, 1780–1840,” in Jones, E. L. and Mingay, G. E., eds., Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1968), p. 175.Google Scholar

7 Young, Arthur, Inquiry into the Propriety of Applying Wastes to the Better Maintenance and Support of the Poor (London, 1801), p. 509.Google Scholar On the other hand, Malthus argued that the ready availability of allotments “would be incomparably more powerful in encouraging a population beyond the demand for labor than our present poor-laws.” Malthus, T. R., A Letter to Samuel Whitbread … on His Proposed Bill for the Amendment of the Poor Laws (1807), 2nd ed., reprinted in The Pamphlets of Thomas Robert Maithus (New York, 1970). p. 396.Google Scholar

8 For example, Eden concluded that the existing system of poor relief was “the parent of idleness and improvidence,” and thus had “a tendency to increase the number of those wanting relief” (State of the Poor, pp. 481, 450).Google Scholar

9 Malthus wrote that “it would appear from the different prices of labour in different parishes, and the different proportions of population relieved, that the farmers, although they bear themselves a large proportion of the assessments, have already learned in some places to prefer low wages and high rates, to low rates and high wages” (A Letter. p. 49).Google Scholar

10 Two major interpretive studies of the Old Poor Law were published between the 1834 Poor Law Report and Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (New York, 1944)—namelyGoogle ScholarHammond, John and Hammond's, BarbaraThe Village Labourer, 1760–1832 (1911; reprint, New York, 1967),Google Scholar and Webb, Sidney and Webb's, BeatriceEnglish Local Government: English Poor Law History: The Old Poor Law (London, 1927).Google ScholarWhile these two works are extremely important in the historiography of the Old Poor Law, they added little to the list of determinants of increased relief expenditures. The Hammonds maintained that the rapid increase in relief expenditures at the end of the eighteenth century was caused by the enclosure movement, which robbed laborers of their land, and by a simultaneous decline in real wage rates (pp. 106, 111). The Webbs' explanation was essentially the same (pp. 419–21). Both the Hammonds and the Webbs accepted the traditional hypothesis that outdoor relief policies caused “the destruction of all motives for effort and ambition” and hence that the continued increase in relief expenditures up to 1834 was due, in part, to the manner in which relief was administered (Hammond and Hammond. pp. 225, 231: Webb and Webb, pp. 172, 191, 194).Google Scholar

11 Polanyi, Great Transformation, pp. 94, 297–99, 78.Google Scholar

12 Blaug, Mark, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New,” this Journal, 23 (1963), pp. 151–84, especially 161–62, 154–55.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., pp. 170–72.Google Scholar

14 Taylor, J. S., “The Mythology of the Old Poor Law,” this Journal, 29 (1969), pp. 292–97, especially p. 295;Google ScholarBaugh, Daniel A., “The Cost of Poor Relief in South-East England, 1790–1834,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 28 (1975), pp. 50–68, especially p. 61.Google Scholar

15 Digby, Anne, “The Labour Market and the Continuity of Social Policy After 1834: The Case of the Eastern Counties,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 28 (1975), pp. 69–83,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Pauper Palaces (London, 1978), p. 105.Google Scholar

16 McCloskey, Donald, “New Perspectives on the Old Poor Law,” Explorations in Economic History, 10 (1973), pp. 419–36, especially p. 427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Boyer, G. R., “An Economic Role of the English Poor Law circa 1780–1834,” Explorations in Economic History, 22 (1985), pp. 129–67, especially pp. 154–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Ibid., pp. 156–60.Google Scholar

19 For the sample of southern agricultural parishes used in the empirical analysis here, the average number of labor-hiring farmers per parish was 16 in 1831. There is no reason to believe that farmers would not have been eager to form a cartel to reduce wages rather than relief expenditures, since the method for financing poor relief ensured that all labor-hiring farmers would benefit from such a policy. Note that I am assuming that workers made decisions concerning migration based on their total compensation package rather than simply on their wage income in agriculture. In other words, I claim that it was not necessary to pay workers their marginal product in wages. It follows that a worker receiving poor relief should be indifferent between a reduction in wage income or in relief benefits.Google Scholar

20 Parliamentary Papers, Report Frotn His Majesty's Commissioners for Inquimy into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws. Appendix BI, Answers to Rural Queries (1834), vols. 30–34.Google Scholar

21 Blaug, Mark, “The Poor Law Report Reexamined,” this Journal, 24 (1964), pp. 229–45.Google Scholar

22 The sample of 329 parishes was chosen from the 735 responses to the Rural Queries by southern parishes, on the basis of the completeness of their returns. All parishes that responded to each of a selected subset of questions deemed necessary for the statistical analysis were included in the sample.Google Scholar

23 Parliamentary Papers, Census of 1831, Enumeration Abstract (1833).Google Scholar

24 By using distance from London as a proxy for the cost of migration, I am assuming that London was the destination for all potential migrants from the agricultural South. The assumption may be incorrect for rural areas close to other southern cities. During the period 1801–1831, the combined populations of Bath, Brighton, Bristol, Norwich, Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Southampton increased by 174,000.Google Scholar However, over the same period, the population of London increased by 790,000 (Mitchell, B. R. and Deane, P., Abstract of British Historical Statistics [Cambridge, 1962], pp. 19, 24–27).Google Scholar Deane and Cole found that all southern counties outside the London area experienced net out-migration from 1801 to 1831, while London experienced heavy in-migration (Deane, P. and Cole, W. A., British Economic Growth, 1688–1959 [2nd ed., Cambridge, 1967], p. 115).Google Scholar Thus, the attraction of, say, Bristol was not strong enough to keep Gloucester from losing workers to London. Moreover, Redford, Pollard, and Hunt agree that there was very little migration from the rural South to the industrial cities of the Northwest during this period. This suggests that London was indeed the major destination of southern migrants. Hunt concludes that “a large part of the southern labor force appears to have operated in a particularly restricted market. They moved overwhelmingly in one direction—towards London” (Hunt, E. H., Regional Wage Variations in Britain 1850–1914 [Oxford, 1973], pp. 281–84).Google Scholar See also Redford, Arthur, Labour Migration in England, 1800–1850 (2nd ed., New York, 1968);Google ScholarPollard, Sidney, “Labour in Great Britain,” in Mathias, Peter and Postan, M. M., eds., Cambridge Economic History of Europe, (Cambridge, 1978), vol. 7, part 1.Google Scholar

25 A negative correlation between distance from London and relief expenditures or wage income might be explained by regional differences in the cost of living rather than by my hypothesized cost of-migration effect. In other words, real wage income and per capita relief expenditures might not have varied inversely with distance from London even though nominal wage income and relief expenditures did. Unfortunately, there is little available data with which to test this hypothesis. The only attempt to measure regional variations in the cost of living has been by N.F.R. Crafts for the year 1843. He found that although the cost of living was indeed higher in London than in the rural South, there was no evidence of an inverse relationship between cost of living and distance from London. One can question this result, since Crafts assumes that rural rents were equal throughout England (see Crafts, N.F.R., “Regional Price Variations in England in 1843: An Aspect of the Standard-of-Living Debate,” Explorations in Economic History, 19 (1982), pp. 51–70, especially pp. 62, 61).CrossRefGoogle Scholar However, this assumption is supported by evidence cited in Hunt (Regional Wage Variations, pp. 79–80). In order to take account of the regional cost-of-living differences found by Crafts, I deflated nominal wage income and per capita relief expenditures using his indices.Google Scholar

26 Grain is omitted because it should affect relief expenditures only through its impact on the unemployment rate.Google Scholar

27 Of course, the recipients of poor relief included widows and old, sick, or infirm persons as well as able-bodied laborers and their families. Thus, cross-parish variations in per capita relief expenditures could be caused in part by differences in the proportion of widows and so forth in the parishes' populations. Unfortunately, lack of data made it impossible to control for such differences.Google Scholar

28 The payment of poor relief to privately employed laborers occurred under the allowance system, which guaranteed laborers (whether employed or unemployed) a minimum weeky income, determined by their family size and the price of bread. The roundsmen system and the labor rate were methods for dealing with seasonal unemployment. Under the roundsmen system, seasonally unemployed laborers were offered to farmers at reduced wage rates, with the parish making up the difference between the laborers' wage income and subsistence. Under the labor rate, the parish's total wage bill for the slack season was computed, and divided among the rate-payers according to their poor rate assessment. A rate-payer could pay his share either by hiring laborers at the wage rate set by the parish or by paying the amount to the parish as a poor rate. For more details on these methods of outdoor reliefGoogle Scholar, see McCloskey, “New Perspectives,” pp. 430–36;Google Scholar and Boyer, G. R., “The Economic Role of the English Poor Law circa 1780–1834” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1982), pp. 34–56.Google Scholar

29 Alternatively, agricultural laborers might have voluntarily reduced their labor supply in response to the existence of cottage industry or allotments. See footnote 31.Google Scholar

30 One possible reason for this result is that the average allotment was simply too small to have a noticeable impact on relief expenditures. This hypothesis is supported by the responses to question 20 of the Rural Queries. In over 80 percent of the parishes in which laborers rented allotments, the typical allotment size was smaller than a quarter acre, the minimum size recommended by most contemporary proponents of allotment schemes. See Barnett, “Allotments,” p. 175.Google Scholar

31 As mentioned above, there is another possible interpretation for the positive impact of cottage industry and allotments on the unemployment rate. Alternative sources of income might have caused agricultural laborers to voluntarily reduce their labor supply. We can distinguish between these two hypotheses by determining the effect of cottage industry and allotments on weekly wage rates. A reduction in labor supply in response to other sources of income should have caused agricultural wage rates to increase. However, estimation of both models using agricultural laborers' summer wage rates instead of annual earnings yields the opposite result; weekly wage rates were lower in parishes containing cottage industry and allotments, other things equal. This result supports my hypothesis that labor-hiring farmers increased seasonal layoffs in response to alternative sources of income for laborers' families.Google Scholar

32 Child allowances also had a significant positive impact on per capita relief expenditures in the reduced form model. Parishes that granted relief to laborers “on account of their families” spent on average 5.2s. more per capita on relief than parishes without child allowances, other things equal. The mean level of per capita relief expenditures for the sample was 18. 1s.Google Scholar

33 The mean expected annual income for our sample of parishes was £29.7. None of the other three specific forms of outdoor relief (namely, the payment of wages out of the rates, roundsman system, labor rate) had a significant impact on either wage income or per capita relief expenditures.Google Scholar

34 Snell, K. D. M., “Agricultural Seasonal Unemployment, the Standard of Living, and Women's Work in the South and East, 1690–1860,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 34 (1981), pp. 407–37.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., p. 411.Google Scholar

36 Boyer, “An Economic Model,” pp. 140–42.Google Scholar

37 Evidence that wage rates in cottage industry had been declining for some time prior to 1832 can be found throughout the Rural Queries (Parliamentary Papers, 1834, vol. 30, pp. 7, 31, 41, 178, 217, 226, 332, 334, 340, 369, 372, 409, 582). For a discussion of the long-term decline in wage rates and employment opportunities, see Pinchbeck, Ivy, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (reprint, London, 1981), pp. 138–45, 208, 220–21, 225.Google Scholar

38 Chambers, J. D. and Mingay, G., The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (London, 1966), p. 92.Google Scholar

39 Brundage, A., The Making of the New Poor Law (New Brunswick, N.J., 1978), pp. 7, 10.Google Scholar

40 Bowley, A. L., Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1900), pp. 81–83, table at end of book.Google Scholar

41 Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb maintained that the Commission's “investigation [of the Poor Law] was far from being impartially or judicially directed and carried Out”; see English Local Government: English Poor Law History: The Last Hundred Years (London, 1929), pp. 85–86. The hypothesis would appear to be supported by the 1834 Report's selective use of information from the Rural Queries.Google Scholar