The Old Poor Law in Historical Perspective

Abstract

The debate over the economics of the Old Poor Law began before the adoption of the famous relief scale at Speenhamland in 1795 and has continued to the present day. There have been three distinct phases to the debate. The first, which involved the building up of what I shall call the traditional critique of the Old Poor Law, began sometime during the second half of the eighteenth century and culminated in 1834 with the Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Poor Laws. The literature during this period focused almost entirely on the supposed disincentive effects on labor supply (and the subsequent effects on wages, profits, rents, and morals) created by the policy of granting outdoor relief to able-bodied laborers. It made no attempt to discern the reasons why the system of outdoor relief had been adopted in the late eighteenth century, or why it had continued to exist for more than 40 years. The second, or neo-traditional, phase of the debate was ushered in by the publication of John and Barbara Hammond's The Village Labourer in 1911, and includes the Webbs' English Poor Law History (1927; 1929), and Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944). Rather than simply focusing on the economic effects of outdoor relief, the neo-traditional literature provided explanations for the system's adoption and persistence. The Hammonds, the Webbs, and Polanyi accepted several of the major tenets of the traditional analysis, however, so that their work should be considered extensions of the traditional literature rather than early pieces of revisionism.