‘It is impossible for our Vestry to judge his case into perfection from here’: Managing the Distance Dimensions of Poor Relief, 1800–40

Abstract

This article addresses the way in which officials in the last decades of the Old Poor Law thought about and addressed the problems posed to the poor relief process by the migration of paupers. Focusing on the so called out-parish relief system, the article uses rich overseer correspondence and supplementary pauper letters from the northwest of England to explore several key themes in the period 1800–1840: the nature of money transmission where allowances had to be paid at a distance, issues of administrative competence and incompetence, the nature of relationships between parishes and between parishes and their distant poor under the out-parish relief system, and issues of trust and reputation between parishes and between parishes and paupers. The article will show that the out-parish system was vital to the stability of the Old Poor Law and that its apparent fragility and susceptibility to fraud and mistrust is to some extent belied by the fact that robust and long term relationships developed between parishes under the out-parish system.