Abstract
At the heart of the English and Welsh Old Poor Law (1601–1834) lay a set of timeless questions: who should be eligible for welfare payments; how such payments should be balanced with contribution; and what to “do” about migrants. In recent historiography, answers to these questions have been constructed through the lens of pauper letters: narratives written by or for the poor who were out of their place of settlement. These documents show that the poor had agency in shaping relief practice. Our article puts pauper letters back into their wider context. They were in fact a minor part of the epistolary corpus that ultimately shaped how the poor obtained relief. Within this corpus, the largest group of writers were epistolary advocates—friends, family, officials, doctors, landlords, employers and neighbors—who wrote on behalf of the poor. Classifying and analyzing such letters, we argue: that the parish state was, and was expected, to be malleable in the face of advocates; that a deeply ingrained culture of individual and communal philanthropy ensured that poor law practice was not simply skewed in favor of the interests of ratepayers; and that in responding to the question of what to “do” about migrant rights to welfare, officials and epistolary advocates corresponded across a landscape in which contestability and balance were the key criteria. Even as the political lifeblood of the Old Poor Law flowed away in the 1820s and 1830s, communal attitudes towards migrant welfare needs and parochial duties remained remarkably flexible.
Highlights
The English and Welsh poor law of 1601 created the framework for a national welfare system in which care for the very poorest segments of society was to be delivered at the level of the Anglican parish, by elected officers and using the proceeds of a tax on local property to meet need.[1]
At the heart of this discretionary system lay a set of tensions that we would recognise as essentially modern: Who should be eligible for welfare? How should the benefits associated with eligibility be set against accumulated contribution? How should private philanthropic activities relate to the state welfare system? What should officials and communities ‘do’ about in-migrants? How could the poor learn the rules for navigating a discretionary system? What was the accepted ground of contestability for the decisions of officials? And how malleable should the decision-making system of the local/parish state be in the face of these tensions? The so-called settlement laws of the 1660s provided clarity on some of these issues
We argue that the parish state was, and was supposed to be, malleable in the face of the claims of epistolary advocates; that the words and strategies of such advocates provided important yardsticks to the poor in navigating a discretionary welfare system; and that the often passionate advocacy of the group, even of local officials themselves, points to a strong underlying commitment to the migrant poor which was not generally diluted at parochial level in the later Old Poor Law whatever the wider political narrative might indicate.[21]
Summary
Peter Jones has described the way that paupers used the letter-writing process as a means of “[filtering] their material and practical needs through a fine rhetorical mesh,” so that “such requests to a greater or lesser extent fulfilled, or corresponded to, the expectations and imperatives” of parish officers.[22]. The preponderance of letters from well-connected or influential ‘friends’ as patrons further emphasises the sense that the Old Poor Law was pliable, a work in progress, and that the advocacy of the well-to-do was more than a strategic tool employed by the poor to gain competitive advantage Those in this category who wrote on behalf of paupers – ministers of the church, ‘respectable’ rate payers, retired parish officials and professional men – readily engaged with overseers and vestries precisely because they wished to influence the nature and direction of relief, despite their occasional protestations to the contrary. This complexity is revealed still further in our final typology of advocate’s correspondence: that of overseers and other parish officers
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