'Context' - A Blog
One of the farms in the village of Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire; the village's economy was famously almost destroyed by the crippling burden of its poor rates in 1831.
The Poor and the Parish Boundary
22/01/2021
When the Poor Laws meant that a parish boundary really mattered
It is a wonder really that parish boundaries are marked on ordinary maps. I mean, who looks for parish boundaries on a map these days? If you want to know what parish you’re in for some administrative reason, then a quick internet search of your postcode will probably tell you. Walkers hardly need them; it is not like they represent great barriers to cross or guides to follow when navigating your way through the British landscape. The faintness of the marking of them on an O.S. map, a point I may have slightly laboured in my last blog, seem to almost imply their fundamental irrelevancy. It is as if they might as well not be there, but some vestige of a voice of authority ringing down from another age obliges the cartographer to leave them on the map, ‘just in case’.
For me, the tracing of the boundary of Talley (which includes the neighbouring hamlet of Cwmdu) is not the first parish for which I have carried out this task. It’s not that there is any pressing need to know where the boundary lies, but I find that it helps to identify an area that has some cohesion (even if often a somewhat inexplicable one) as a historical entity.
I’ll wager that it is an activity that less than one in a thousand have carried out for their home parish, which probably indicates how little relevance it is for most people today. This was not always so. We forget our history at our own peril. Though I’m sure there are many ways in which the location of a parish boundary on a map have mattered, I will cite just one for now.
To do so requires rewinding some 200 years, for me I reckon that takes me back to something like the time of my great grandfather’s grandfather or his great grandfather, which in historical terms doesn’t seem like so very long ago. The countryside, which to us mostly seems like an oasis of calm and an aesthetic emblem of tranquillity and stability, had over the preceding couple of hundred years witnessed changes on a vast scale. One of the most significant, though poorly understood, effects of this was to turn much of the lower levels of rural society from poor wage earners, but with an access to other means of subsistence through direct access to the use of land and its resources, into being purely poor wage earners, without such extra means of subsistence.
This subtle change was to have catastrophic effects. The mechanism for support of the rural poor had not yet changed to take account of this. The poor of the parish were still to be provided for by that parish alone, under the provisions of the original 1601 Poor Law Act.
The needs of the poor 200 years ago were increasing. If wages were not sufficient to buy food, the only option was parish relief to avoid starvation.
In a well meaning attempt to try and help the situation, a meeting of 18 justices in the village of Speenhamland set out a model that required the rate of poor relief to bring all wages up to an amount that was related to the price of bread. What this failed to foresee was the meteoric rise in the prices of this basic and essential commodity over the early years of the nineteenth Century. Thus, by the 1820’s, the rates or taxes collected by many individual parishes (which fell largely on the tenanted farmers of the parish) were so astronomic that it became untenable to farm and pay the poor rate and rent.
As tenants became reluctant to take on farms, land went untenanted and abandoned from production. One of the first things cited in agricultural texts of the time about a given parish is not what the land was like or how advanced the farming was, but what its poor rates were. The poor rates, being directly related to the number of impoverished people living within the parish, were less only where there were less poor people, leading in many parishes to large efforts made to try to reduce the cottages and housing available in an attempt to minimise numbers living within the parish.
To settle in a parish was to establish a right to poor relief from that parish, with the legality of a right to be considered ‘settled’ there being defined by the Settlement Act of 1662; the parish boundary really mattered.
The lengths which were gone to in order to determine whether someone lived in or out of a parish are perhaps best illustrated by a case in the Clerkenwell Sessions, cited as the ‘classic absurd case’ by J. R. Poynter. The pauper in question lived in a home which straddled the parish boundary, as indeed his bed was deemed to. Thus:
“The Court held the pauper to be settled where his head (being the nobler part) lay, though one of his legs at least, and a great part of his body, lay out of that parish”
-J.R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism, English ideas on Poor Relief, 1795-1834 (found in The Agrarian History of England and Wales (J. Thirsk/G.E Mingay))
Things reached a head in the early 1830s. In the village of Cholesbury, near where I used to live in Buckinghamshire, the burden of the poor rates fell mainly on 2 or 3 farmers, the publican and the butcher. The rate was so crippling that in 1831 the village made national news when it was forced to declare:
“The rate could not be collected except only a small portion of it, the land in the parish being almost abandoned”
A fix was sorted out, mainly requiring the surrounding parishes to assist. It is likely that this case may have helped spur the speed of a parliamentary commission to reform the poor laws, which legislated in 1834. The changes that it ushered in were centred around trying to reduce poor relief being given to those in work and spreading the burden of provisions for the poor amongst ‘Unions’ of groups of parishes. In doing so, they largely sorted the problem of individual parishes being pushed towards bankruptcy, but made no material improvement to (and often worsened) the lot of the rural poor.
It seems that there was a time when the location of that little faint dotted line on the map, the parish boundary, really mattered.
For me, the tracing of the boundary of Talley (which includes the neighbouring hamlet of Cwmdu) is not the first parish for which I have carried out this task. It’s not that there is any pressing need to know where the boundary lies, but I find that it helps to identify an area that has some cohesion (even if often a somewhat inexplicable one) as a historical entity.
I’ll wager that it is an activity that less than one in a thousand have carried out for their home parish, which probably indicates how little relevance it is for most people today. This was not always so. We forget our history at our own peril. Though I’m sure there are many ways in which the location of a parish boundary on a map have mattered, I will cite just one for now.
To do so requires rewinding some 200 years, for me I reckon that takes me back to something like the time of my great grandfather’s grandfather or his great grandfather, which in historical terms doesn’t seem like so very long ago. The countryside, which to us mostly seems like an oasis of calm and an aesthetic emblem of tranquillity and stability, had over the preceding couple of hundred years witnessed changes on a vast scale. One of the most significant, though poorly understood, effects of this was to turn much of the lower levels of rural society from poor wage earners, but with an access to other means of subsistence through direct access to the use of land and its resources, into being purely poor wage earners, without such extra means of subsistence.
This subtle change was to have catastrophic effects. The mechanism for support of the rural poor had not yet changed to take account of this. The poor of the parish were still to be provided for by that parish alone, under the provisions of the original 1601 Poor Law Act.
The needs of the poor 200 years ago were increasing. If wages were not sufficient to buy food, the only option was parish relief to avoid starvation.
In a well meaning attempt to try and help the situation, a meeting of 18 justices in the village of Speenhamland set out a model that required the rate of poor relief to bring all wages up to an amount that was related to the price of bread. What this failed to foresee was the meteoric rise in the prices of this basic and essential commodity over the early years of the nineteenth Century. Thus, by the 1820’s, the rates or taxes collected by many individual parishes (which fell largely on the tenanted farmers of the parish) were so astronomic that it became untenable to farm and pay the poor rate and rent.
As tenants became reluctant to take on farms, land went untenanted and abandoned from production. One of the first things cited in agricultural texts of the time about a given parish is not what the land was like or how advanced the farming was, but what its poor rates were. The poor rates, being directly related to the number of impoverished people living within the parish, were less only where there were less poor people, leading in many parishes to large efforts made to try to reduce the cottages and housing available in an attempt to minimise numbers living within the parish.
To settle in a parish was to establish a right to poor relief from that parish, with the legality of a right to be considered ‘settled’ there being defined by the Settlement Act of 1662; the parish boundary really mattered.
The lengths which were gone to in order to determine whether someone lived in or out of a parish are perhaps best illustrated by a case in the Clerkenwell Sessions, cited as the ‘classic absurd case’ by J. R. Poynter. The pauper in question lived in a home which straddled the parish boundary, as indeed his bed was deemed to. Thus:
“The Court held the pauper to be settled where his head (being the nobler part) lay, though one of his legs at least, and a great part of his body, lay out of that parish”
-J.R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism, English ideas on Poor Relief, 1795-1834 (found in The Agrarian History of England and Wales (J. Thirsk/G.E Mingay))
Things reached a head in the early 1830s. In the village of Cholesbury, near where I used to live in Buckinghamshire, the burden of the poor rates fell mainly on 2 or 3 farmers, the publican and the butcher. The rate was so crippling that in 1831 the village made national news when it was forced to declare:
“The rate could not be collected except only a small portion of it, the land in the parish being almost abandoned”
A fix was sorted out, mainly requiring the surrounding parishes to assist. It is likely that this case may have helped spur the speed of a parliamentary commission to reform the poor laws, which legislated in 1834. The changes that it ushered in were centred around trying to reduce poor relief being given to those in work and spreading the burden of provisions for the poor amongst ‘Unions’ of groups of parishes. In doing so, they largely sorted the problem of individual parishes being pushed towards bankruptcy, but made no material improvement to (and often worsened) the lot of the rural poor.
It seems that there was a time when the location of that little faint dotted line on the map, the parish boundary, really mattered.
One of the farms in the village of Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire; the village's economy was famously almost destroyed by the crippling burden of its poor rates in 1831.