In Our Time - The Poor Laws

Episode Date: December 20, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, from 1834, poor people across England and Wales faced new obstacles when they could no longer feed or clothe themselves, or find shelter. Parliament, in line with the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus, feared hand-outs had become so attractive, they stopped people working to support themselves, and encouraged families to have more children than they could afford. To correct this, under the New Poor Laws it became harder to get any relief outside a workhouse, where families would be separated, husbands from wives, parents from children, sisters from brothers. Many found this regime inhumane, while others protested it was too lenient, and it lasted until the twentieth century.The image above was published in 1897 as New Year's Day in the Workhouse.WithEmma Griffin Professor of Modern British History at the University of East AngliaSamantha Shave Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of LincolnAnd Steven King Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of LeicesterProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, from 1834, poor people across England and Wales face new obstacles when they could no longer feed or clothe themselves or find shelter. Parliament, in line with the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus,

feared handouts had become so attractive, they stopped people working to support themselves and encouraged families to have more children than they could afford. To correct this under the new poor laws, it became harder to get any relief outside a workhouse where families will be separated, husbands from wives, parents from children, sisters from brothers.

Many found this regime inhumane, while others protested it was too lenient. It lasted until the 20th century. Win me to discuss the new poor laws of 1834 are Emma Griffin, Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia, Samantha Sheave, a lecturer in social policy at the University of Lincoln, and Stephen King, Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester.

Emma Griffin, how close to subsistence level were many people in the early 19th century? I think in the early 19th century we're still really quite a poor society, very much an agrarian society. The Industrial Revolution is happening, but it hasn't really managed to raise people's income significantly by this point. So food is scarce. We don't have famines, so we have. haven't got, you know, large number of people dying through famine.

So we've got enough, you know, we're providing enough food in some ways. But in many families, there's just really not possible to regularly buy enough food for everybody in the family. And children in particular are a risk of really suffering from chronic hunger. So there's this kind of food scarcity that's kind of ever present in Britain at this time. Just to get behind that for a second, what are the causes? We're just coming to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. enclosures are underway.

If you mentioned the Industrial Revolution, so on, can you give us some context, please? So we're just not really providing quite enough food to feed everybody. All those developments are happening, and population is growing at the same time. In ordinary years, in good years when you've got a good harvest, there's perhaps just enough food to go around. But as soon as you get a bad harvest or you have events like wars that are disrupting trade in some kind of way, the price of bread is going to rise quite significantly. most people have a diet that's largely based around cheap carbohydrates, so bread in our case, porridge in the north.

And as soon as something that causes a price rise, you'll find that families just can't really provide enough food. And the poor law is there, really, for these times of emergency. I mentioned enclosures. Let's start with enclosures. What effect was that having? Well, enclosures have been going on for a very long time, and I think the effect of enclosures is very disputed.

So some historians would argue that it makes agriculture more efficient and therefore provides more food for everybody. Others would say that it takes away food from the poorest and the neediest and it makes food more scarce for those who need it, you know, who are the greatest risk of going without. What about the impact of the Industrial Revolution, which was taking away many cottage-based industries, let's call them? Yeah, so the Industrial Revolution is really starting to change the fabric of society,

but it hasn't had very much effect on agriculture at this time. So it's making, you know, there's a good, relatively well-paid work available in the industrial regions, but in large parts of Britain, the rural south-east of England, for example, is really not a very big effect from industrialisation as yet, because we're still quite early days at this time. But there were differences between the industrial towns, largely in the north, and the rural areas largely in the south. Is that right?

I think that's very much the case. So there's high-wage employment available in the kind of areas of the Industrial Revolution up in Lancashire, but there isn't that kind of high-wage employment available in the south. There's only agriculture, which is very badly paid. And in the industrial areas, families can... Their children can earn from a lot. There are different ways to earn a living. Absolutely.

You've got good, relatively well-paid work for adult men, but you've also got a lot of work for children. And as there's a culture of sending children out to work, that means family incomes can often be quite a lot higher in these industrial areas than they will be in the rural areas, where there's very little work for children. So this doesn't happen in the rural areas. Samantha Sheave, there'd been old poor laws in existence since codified in 16001 towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, but even before then.

Can you tell us about the principles underlying them? Yes, I can. I think the original old poor laws were really about implementing public charity on a large scale. So making it compulsory for all parishes across England and Wales, and that's 15.5,000 different parishes. make it compulsory it that they provide relief for their parishioners. There was a new role with that. Parishes had to have an overseer of the poor, and it was their job with church wardens to levy a tax,

which is a poor rate. That would then be redistributed out to parishioners in need. Parishes could set the poor to work. They could maintain those who are unable to work, and in any ways they wanted to. They could also set up parish, apprenticeships for children. So it's very parish-based, isn't it?

It's an Old England parish-based. Can you tell us what you think, what you think, the advantage of that system were? You would know who in your parish was in need of help, and you could tailor that help to suit that individual or family. So if they just needed a bit of money to get by for a while during a period of unemployment, you could provide that. There were heavy disadvantages.

The old poor law was, stigmatising because in a sense those who weren't going to work, they could put in a house of correction. So people who weren't working, they could punish. They could also decide who wasn't deserving. They would call these undeserving poor and they could not essentially provide relief for those individuals or they can make them work very hard for it. Why did the money come from? It would be based on a poor rate or parish tax. That would be levied on everyone who had a significant property in that parish. What checks did the authorities make to differentiate,

to separate the poor in terms of the undeserving poor and the deserving poor? Were there any rules that we can refer to? There weren't rules as such. It was down to each parish, how they differentiated between those they thought deserving and undeserving. Essentially what would happen is an individual A family would walk to the parish pay table and there in the vestry of a parish in the vestry of a church

they would be quizzed as to their work situation their family circumstances where they live and based on that interview they would then allocate what they thought to be the right amount of relief if any. Was this given any laws? I mean was it whether the parish had to look after the destitute for instance There was a very significant law in 1662, and this was a settlement act.

So this was essentially working out who was entitled to parish poor relief in that parish. I mean, there was an idea, a temptation perhaps of people moving to a parish that was more kind or more generous. Essentially rules came in that meant you only had to provide relief to those people you believed were settled in the parish. They were born there, they'd worked there, they'd been married there, that sort of entitlement. And an overseer was allowed to essentially get rid of any strangers from their parish. Vagrants? Yes, yeah. They were chased from Billy De Boas.

And Irish and Scots didn't come up very well either. No. So they would be interviewed and considered to be a stranger under those settlement acts. Stephen King, all were the practical problems in the old poor laws. You've got the problem of first of all defining who belongs, which Samantha's been talking about. And this is not an easy problem. So you can belong by birth, by marriage, by working for a certain period of time. But these things become ambiguous as more and more people move around.

So you talk about a parochial-based system, and that's entirely right. But by the 18th century, the later 18th century in particular, lots of the people who need relief are not where they have a right to apply for it. which means that either they've got to come home or you've got to come up with some sort of reciprocal arrangement to pay for people who are out of their place in host communities. So you've got that problem. But then the other problem that you've got,

particularly from the 1770s, is a real explosion of the costs of running the poor law. So we start to see this from the early 1770s and then it expands rapidly in terms of costs through the 1790s because you've got significant inflation as well as more poor people associated with the Napoleonic Wars. So by the time we come to the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the 1810s and early 1820s,

there's a real national concern, both about the cost of that relief and about the numbers of poor people that you have. And you talked about Malthus. There's a national conversation going on in the early 1800s about whether the poor, in effect, are breeding more of themselves and about the costs of that,

both to society and to the ratepayers' purse. Have any idea of the numbers involved here? We start to measure it from 1803 and then regularly from 1813 in returns to Parliament. They're not particularly reliable, but in many places in the south-east, you'd have between 10 and 15% of all people on poorly for any one point in time,

but many people over the life cycle would come into contact with the poor law. And that's one of the real concerns by the time you get to the 1830s. Would you say that in the 1820s and into 30s, they grew up a set of ideological objections to the old poor laws? Well, I think many of those existed already. I mean, everyone has been talking through the 18th century about things like who is responsible for poverty. And Malthus was part of the,

that, but you've also got Thomas Chalmers. He said the poor was responsible because they were bred too many people. Well, you've got too many people, and they become indolent when they're given poor relief. And this is one of the narratives behind the reforms of the early 1830s. But you've got a whole lot of thought going on, Thomas Chalmers and others coming from Scotland in this period. And there is a real, I think, sense in which a national commentary on the inability of the poor laws to deal with moral hazard, which is the sense.

of poor laws encouraging people to be indolent has become really ingrained. And this, I'm trying to get at the ideology behind it, because we mentioned Bentham. We've mentioned Malthus. We mentioned Bentham. There's Chadwick. There's people saying, look, we're not, the old poor laws are not going the right way about it. And we will, so it's just, because we come into the new poor laws now. And these are a considerable difference in where they were set up, where they were organized.

So I want to know, I'd like to know, what drove that big difference. There were three essential concerns. The first one is that localism encourages people, local administration of poor law, encourages people to be generous in terms of poor relief. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is that you have the poor who are allowed to be indolent, are allowed to get used to welfare by the poor law system, which acts as a safety net for them in almost all times.

And the third problem is that you've then got a large group of the able-bodied poor, the people that Emma was talking about, who they assume can find work. So basically you have an assumption in this period that work exists, and the only reason you don't have it is because you don't want it. Even though in certain areas there's no work available at all? Well, in many areas there's no work available. So even in industrial areas, for instance, if you're a handling weaver by the 1820s, there is no work,

and what work there is is paid below subsistence level. So it's not just rural areas that there is no work, but lots and lots of people have no work. And in the South East, it's not just that men are paid small wages. It's the disappearance of women's work, which really hits the family economy. Because the women's jobs, straw plating, gleaning those sorts of jobs, are increasingly eliminated in the 1820s. Emma Griffin, can you tell us what principles there were behind the new laws? Well, I think it very much leads on from what Stephen's just been saying. if you think about what people didn't like about the old new poor laws,

those are the changes that are enshrined in the new poor law, as we call. It says it's very much an idea that you need to be punitive. When you give relief, you need to be punitive because if you're not, you'll encourage bad behaviour. Sorry. Excuse me. Is this a new idea? Was this not in the old poor law?

I think it's not embodied in the old poor law. And the discussion that's kind of growing more vociferous through the 1820s and is enshrined in the new poor law is that if you, provide relief on favourable terms, people will choose that rather than work. So the new poor law is very much designed to make it less favourable so that people will choose work instead. So the classic example of this is the workhouse and the workhouse test and this principle of less eligibility.

So the idea there is that if you're claiming relief, your life has to be less eligible, worse, not as good as if you were living independently on your own two feet as you ought to be. So how do you do this? You can't give them less money because these people are kind of at the subsistence level anyway, so you give them less, they're just going to really suffer from malnutrition. So what do you do? You provide relief, but you make it contingent on people going into the workhouse.

Many workhouses were being, part of the new order was that many new workhouses were built. Absolutely. You have to have a workhouse within a certain geographical area so that it's there and so that it's provided. And then the idea is that the conditions in the workhouse, I mean, you're not going to starve, people in the workhouse in theory, you're going to provide them with a bed and with food and with clothes, all of which may be things that people don't have. But you've got to make it slightly more unpleasant than it would be if you were providing your own bed and your own food and your own clothes. So you do that by splitting people up in the workhouse, by splitting up husbands and wives, parents and children, by putting people into a uniform, those little small

dehumanising things so as to make it less attractive. And part of the idea behind this is that if you do this, then of course people will look around and consider their way up their options and those people of whom there is a belief there are a great many didn't really need to claim the relief in the first place will go elsewhere. So you'll be able to cut your costs a lot. It'll be one of those changes that might look expensive, but because it will deter people from applying, it will be cheap in the long run. One of the differences, Samantha, Samantha Shave,

was that it became centrally organised. When the centre took over, it was no longer the parishes, it was no longer the people who knew the people and so on. It was the centre took over. There were council set up, union set up, commissioners set up. It all came from the top. And there was a sense of one size fits all. And that's the workhouses came and you must have a workhouse.

You must build a workhouse. What impact do you think that in itself had on what was going on? Yes, it's right. So there was a polar commission set up. The base was Somerset House. And the commission ordered their assistance to essentially organise parishes into unions. There was a sense of... But in a union, it would have about 12 or 15 parishes. That's one union.

And the few commissioners looking up to many unions. So please go on. Yeah, so assistants had districts. So they would report back to the central authorities on what was happening on the ground. So they would be important in kind of drawing up unions, working with local landowners and that sort of organization thing. There was a sense of One size fits all that everywhere would have a union and in the market town at the centre. A union being in the sense of a union of parishes. That's the union we're talking about. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it's all very much about, you know, part of this change is about moving away from the local face-to-face society where every parish just makes it up as they go along and do whatever they like. I mean, one of the other ideas here is that we're a kind of a modern nation and we want to do things in orderly, systematic, regular way. So it's very easy to get fixated on the workhouses when there's actually a much bigger social change that's going on with these developments as well. And I think there is also a sense, though, in which we need a caution

because one of the key things about the new poor law and these workhouses and the centralisation is how much doesn't happen. So many, many workhouses are not built when they should. The Welsh in particular are extremely resistant to an English imposition and they're very successful in frustrating the activities of commissioners

and other people. So a lot of what we see on paper in practice doesn't happen. Nevertheless, we do have a new system. We do. And responsibility is not vested in the village, it's vested up and up and up, the system which goes to the top where three people are effectively

in charge of the whole thing. So it's a very different system that people are putting into place, and those three people have a unified idea of what should be done. Whereas before there were 15,000 different ideas of what should be done. Is that more or less right? This is the idea of welfare republics.

So basically the idea that even two parishes side by side under the old Paul law can be doing completely different things, in literally a de facto welfare republic. Because it's a discretionary system, you choose to define poverty as you wish, and you raise as much money as you want to deal with it. And so the new Paul then is about trying to get rid of that essential localism. Can you tell us what daily life was like in the workhouses at the time? We have a bit of Dickens. have a lot of letters, but from your studies, what was going on there?

This depends on the period. So initially, when the new poor law is put into place, in the 1830s, in the 1830s, we get a rash of workhouse building, particularly in the south and Midlands. The north is generally later. Many of the buildings are not new. They're inherited by, from the old poor law. So old polar workhouses become new polar workhouses, and they're ramshackle and falling down and all the other things. So in the 1840s, there is a, a belief in the basic principles in some areas of the new poor law. And so they do indeed segregate. They do indeed discipline.

They do indeed put people in uniforms and all of those sorts of things. And they have strict diets. And when unmarried women had to wear a yellow dress, is that right? Something like that. In some places, it's not a uniform thing. But often people wear... It's not a uniform uniform. It's not a uniform uniform.

Exactly right. So you see all of that happening, although there's still much local variation. And so in those places, in that period, then workhouse life can be tough. But maybe not even tough is the right word, but boring, monotonous and boring, which is what Lasselagability was all about. What then happens, of course, is that you start to get all of that localism coming back in and new poor law unions start to do things differently, even though they're side by side.

Let's stick with the new laws, though, because it's quite, I'm trying to differentiate it from, the original, let's say Elizabethan pool, so the listeners know where they are. Emma, what were the objections to the workhouses? We've been told about Wales, but outside Wales, what were the objections? Parishes were quite happy to, many parishes are happy to do things the way they like to do them. So that happens in any organisation or any system where people are used to doing things the way they feel is the right way to do, and you've got kind of a top-down order to do things differently. So there's some kind of objection in being, just, you know, that kind of,

idea of being told what to do. So there's certainly some objection in that way. It's also on paper a very expensive thing to do. To build a workhouse is an expensive thing to do if you haven't got one, particularly one of these modern workhouses that's going to divide everybody up, because we've got workhouses, but they're just buildings where everybody's jumbled in together. So this modern workhouse is going to be quite expensive. And putting a whole family of five or seven or whoever knows, whatever many, inside the workhouse is going to be very expensive because you're then feeding and clothing and housing to seven people. It's really expensive, whereas you could arguably have got away with getting those people two loaves of bread a week,

much, much cheaper and getting through. So there's all sorts of objections that it's going to be very expensive. There's also evidence, obviously, that the poor themselves don't want to be going into workhouses. They certainly don't like this development, but as is always the way, their voices are much less powerfully recorded, so we hear much less about that. But we can infer that they were objecting to workhouses as well. You talked about paying for them. Who's then paying for these new workhouses and the new system?

So it's the same system where rate payers, the wealthiest people within the parish, are being taxed, a local tax that's going to be spent in this way. So they can turn the tap on and off as they wish? Yes, I think there's still a certain degree of discretion even with these reforms. So there's new parameters and expectations that are laid out. There's a new system of observing what they're doing. But there's always still some discretion within side unions as to how they deal with things. Samantha, what's the relationship between the poor laws and healthcare? Well, the New Pool Law really formalised medical health care,

essentially in the union that we just mentioned of lots of different parishes, medical officers would be assigned districts. So medical officers were medical men who were appointed to look after the poor in each area of a union. They would also attend to the infirmary ward in the workhouse as well. That sounds like a super system. Are you idealising it? This is how they wanted medical relief to work at this time.

There were lots of problems with it, especially in the first few years. Standards were very low. There were no doctors at all. In some places, in some rural areas, there was a lack of trained medical professionals. Yes. There were a series of very high-profile neglects and abuses. Scandals? Yes. Some of them reached to the lack of, to the lack of,

level of scandal. One of them was the Bridgewater scandal in Somerset and here essentially the union were penny pinching. They didn't want to pay their medical officers on the annual salary. They wanted to pay them per case. And then they said, please try not to visit too many people. And of course, with that it came death and serious illness of various members of that union. From that scandal and from other similar scandals across England and Wales, essentially it led to the Paul Law Commission, deciding with pressure from the medical professions, telling them to create minimum standards, essentially.

Minimum standards for the medical officers in terms of what they should be paid for and what sort of treatment they should be offering, and also minimum standards for people who were in poverty. So that was the 1840. 42 kind of general medical order. And many people think this is the foundation, really legislation for the NHS and what came later. Stephen, in what ways were the new poor laws more suited to rural and to industrial areas, if they were?

They were set up with rural areas in mind because there was an assumption in these rural areas that you've got lots of unemployed or underemployed people on low wages. and that this is a want of character that explains this situation. So workhouses are for those people, for those people who are going to be long-term, unemployed, able-bodied, those are the people you want to discourage. And so the early thinking on the new poor law is that that's what drove its implementation. And in that sense, if for some areas, the new polar is well suited in terms of its workhouses, in terms of its basic ideology.

But I think we now become quite clear that even in many of these rural areas, take somewhere like Oxfordshire, for instance, where you've got areas of high employment, areas of very low and under-employment. And so you can have, even in a rural county like Oxfordshire, a workhouse situation which fits one part and doesn't fit another, because if you've got people in high employment, why do you need a workhouse? the workhouse is simply going to be there to take the old, the feeble, the insane

so why go to all the trouble of building it? And so even in rural areas, you have these sorts of distinctions. So the ideology, the sense of it, was not played out in practice. I think there was always like a little bit of a fudge as well in this kind of narrative as to why people needed the workhouses,

particularly even in these rural areas where it ostensibly works the best. I mean, the reality in rural areas is you need a lot of people to bring in the harvest but then through all the rest of the year you don't need that many people. In the mid of winter, you don't need all those able-bodied men that you do need in the autumn and at other times of the year to bring in the harvest. So the large employers in a rural area will often have an incentive

to keep families in the village with an eye to the harvest, but it doesn't mean they want to employ them and pay them a wage all through the year. So it was always a bit of a fudge to say these people are indolent. There was always, there's just chronic underemployment in a lot of rural areas, and that's really underpinning the problems that were. seeing. And the way to deal with that is not a workhouse. The way to deal with that is outdoor relief of very small amounts that just tied you over long enough to work to start again. Can we, can you give us some idea? We've had one, one idea from Samantha about the

bridgewater scandal, but about the scandals, because the idea of workhouses in the minds of many people were a place of dread. Now, we've been talking, you've been talking very eloquently about this is well organised, that's well organised, we've always got an NHS if we, and so on, But that wasn't where, how many people, as I understand it, you tell me, perceived it. Why did people fear the workhouse? Why were they, why did they not want to be there? Well, they feared it in part because it's ideology, less eligibility, the idea of splitting up families, the sense they're going to have to wear uniforms,

everything that Emma was talking about. But you're right, they also feared it because of scandals. And these scandals, large scandals, small scandals, and things like riots, which are associated with scandals. these things make their way into the public domain and something which is often not representative suddenly becomes iconic. So Samantha's given you one example.

You could go and look at Great Yarmouth, for instance, where you have high-profile cases of section abuse, people almost starving to death, and many, many people who are left to die because Great Yarmouth after 1832 are the biggest body suppliers to English medical institutions. So they simply sell the bodies of those who are unclaimed. And so you get these scandals and they percolate through the papers,

both regionally and nationally. And that filters into people's imaginations. So even though you may not have that many scandals in reality, even if the workhouse is negotiated on a day-to-day basis in much less clear and much smaller ways, scandals have a longevity. But you've talked about abuse. There are also many instances of cruelty, neglect, and so.

on, especially people who are mentally ill, and there were orphans as well, who were defenseless, and so a lot of people were taking advantage of very cruelly. Is there any sense of getting a sense of the proportion there? A proportion of abuse and all of that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, how many were going, as, how many were working out well and how many were terrible places? There's any way with your research that you can put your finger on that? I think you can't put your finger on that, because, you can't put your finger on that,

because there's no consistency in a workhouse. What will often happen is that you get a scandal or you get abuse and that gets investigated or it gets negotiated at local level. And for the next 10 or 20 years, that workhouse works okay. But in 20 years time, you may well find them back again. But certainly by the time you get to the 1850s, workhouses are not the places that they were in the 1830s and the 1840s. So many of the basic principles have gone. They're better staffed, more than. professionally staffed, better financed. And a lot of women are coming into there. A lot of women are coming in. And also you have a lot. To run them, I mean, not just giving it to the workhouse. Well, you have workhouse mistresses as well as masters. And then crucially, from the 1860s, you've got workhouse visiting committees,

which are largely staffed by women. And that makes a huge difference. And then from 1872 on, which is starting to get female poor law guardians, and that really does feed into some changes. Do you think, that Emma, that these workhouses really helped orphans, mentally ill, women who had children but no husband. Do you think they just contained it? I think the workhouses, both before and after the reform,

had always been, to some degree, places of refuge for people who, for various reasons, couldn't have a home of their own. So orphans are always present in them. Single mothers, maybe with one lone child, might end up in a place like this. the elderly, the sick, the infirm. They've always had this place. If you build these institutions, they will mop up people who, for various reasons,

can't live independently out in the community. Samantha, in the 1870s, there was a crusade against, sometimes referred to this, outdoor relief, Stephen referred to this. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so the economic downturn of the later 19th century really increased the amount of more high,

profile outdoor relief that was given. So money, like we're saying outdoor relief is like money, it's things in clothing, that sort of thing. So we had some, you know, like the Lancashire cotton workers, lots of outdoor relief went to people unemployed through that. But there was a general sense at the time that there was too much outdoor relief being given. And I'm a general sense. I've got the crusade against outdoor relief in inverted commas. So the crusade is an invention of central government, and it's not in any sense legal. It's generated by orders and directions from the centre. And the concern with the crusade against outdoor relief is that the bills,

porlo bills have started rising. And finally, by the crusade period in the later 19th century, people have caught onto the fact that almost all relief under the new Paul law is outdoor relief. It's not working as it was supposed to do. So you don't have to come. That means you don't have to come into the workhouse. You can literally be relieved. in your own home, just as you could have done under the old poor law.

And this then becomes a real problem. And at the same time, you've got a narrative which says, okay, we're giving out lots and lots of charity. People are giving out too much charity in an ad hoc, uninformed way. So you've got two pressures then, rising poor relief bills and this sense that charity is being wasted. So with this campaign, they said that deserving poor should receive charitable relief and that the undeserving should go into a workhouse not receive.

as they thought outdoor relief. So they framed it around this return to the 1834 Amendment Act, the return to the new poor law. Perhaps this is a red herring, but in a way it shouldn't be. The 19th century is a century where the virtues of Christianity, in some courts, are being very heavily proclaimed.

Where was Christianity in the workhouses? Well, I mean, I think there is hostility towards the workhouses from a Christian perspective. Facility from the Christian? There's certainly a Christian narrative. What was the grounds? Partly because, One of the teachings of the Church of England is that one shows charity towards the poor.

And this is punitive intent. So there's certainly a strain there that... I don't quite get it. You say the Church of England is saying you show charity towards the poor, then you say this is punitive in intent. An old tenet of the Church of England is that one shows charity when one is able to. There's a charitable imperative that we still see in the Church of England today. But a good Christian is supposed to look after.

and care for poorer neighbours. So the poor law has punitive intent rather than a charitable intent. So I think there's a kind of a Christian criticism from that perspective. And there's also more simple things such as it splits families up, it splits up husband and wife. And marriage is a sacrament ordained by God,

and then there's questions about whether it's up to man to split apart the married couple. But how loudly is the Christian voice heard, Stephen? This becomes increasingly consistent in the course of the 19th century because it melds with a sense that the causes of poverty are not within the person themselves. So you cannot be blamed for being old,

you cannot be blamed for being a lunatic, etc., etc. And these people are the ones who end up in workhouses. So suddenly you can construct a workhouse as a holding place for all of these people who really shouldn't be there. And then, of course, you get a conversation about, okay, Anglican and Catholic ministers decide that they must be in workhouses. They have to go and minister to their flocks. And there's a lot of disputes as guardians want to keep them out

because, of course, these interfering clergy are going to try and change things. And indeed, that's what they do. And the Catholics work really hard to get their people into workhouses. And as soon as they do, they start to contest everything that could impact on the Christian experiences of people in that workhouse. The idea of paying for this Was that transferred to a broader section of society Who is paying for this?

Because it's more costly rather than less costless It turns out like a lot of things that come in sweepingly new When the new polar first comes in, it's exactly as Emma said Which is to say that you are charged as a parish For your poor people that you send to the workhouse So it's almost like the more people you send The more bill you make for yourself And then from the 1840s.

That's a disincentive. It's a disincentive, of course. Something of a disincentive. Why would you do it? And then from the 1840s, from 47, then again in 1865, they changed the rules so that the taxes raised are based upon unions. In other words, it's a uniform tax across all of the parishes of a union rather than a tax based upon the number of people you send. So over time, you get that flattening out. but then, of course, you also get a rising costs.

Hamill, why did the poor laws start to become irrelevant? I think there are many ways. Why and when, as it were. Yes, exactly. As we move through the 19th century, I mean, this is just a period of phenomenal, social and economic change, and all elements and aspects of life have been changed. I think one of the key things is where we began,

that you've basically got food scarcity, real serious food scarcity at the beginning of the 19th century. We're really not producing enough food. And by the later 19th century, We're a much richer nation. We're producing much more food. We're producing food much more cheaply. And we've got things like the railways,

so we can transport food much more cheaply. We've got at the beginning of mechanised agriculture. So in every way, it's just much easier to get food available to people who need it. So the kind of the rationale of the poor law, which undergoes a significant change. But in some ways it's a continuity, you know, in some ways it's a continuity after 1834 that local parish. is local people are supposed to look after their poor,

but being poor just means something very different by the late 19th century. And we've also got much more kind of formal and professional charity that's stepping in at this time. So we've got soup kitchen, you know, any big city will have multiple soup kitchens and free dinners and free lunches, all sorts of ways of distributing food to the poor on very different kinds of terms. I mean, you've just got poor, ragged children in your city. You just give them food.

You don't fuss too much about eligibility or all the wrong. rest of it. You just have a social problem that needs to be dealt with and you provide boots and you provide shoes. So when you've got these alternative providers helping people who are suffering from poverty, the poor law, the official poor law starts to have a very different place in society. And again, at the early 19th century there was charity, but it was a much poorer society and there was much less charity being given out. And around this time, Samantha, the pensions began to, people began to think of pensions, they began to think of national insurance. So there was

division going on. What do you think the poor laws had achieved in that century? So in terms of across the 19th century, well, it's hard to say, it depends on who you are. I think if the aim was to reduce poor relief costs, there's some mixed evidence whether this actually worked or not. Initially, there were some good, you know, heavy savings. But then there were like loans taken out to build the workhouses. And, you know, these took a while to pay off. And then obviously cost escalation. again as poverty rose during economic slumps. So the workhouse system perhaps wasn't that flexible, though, as we've talked about already, to deal with that.

If the aim was kind of to stigmatise and demonise and suppress the poor, then I think that it is the main, that was the main purpose of the new poor law, then I think that was definitely achieved. Being fearful of the poor laws, being fearful of being poor and being person aware, was achieved. And, you know, people were less likely to revolt, we were less likely to challenge the status quo as they had done during the swing riots just before the new pool laws because of this new fear.

The swing riots, which we didn't touch on, probably as near as to a revolution as we got, really. That's right. Yeah. 1832, wasn't it? But we have more time for that. We have time to ask you, Stephen King. What do you think a legacy of the new pool laws is? So I think there's a legacy on many levels. So you can look at, you can look at you. at the buildings of the new poor law, many of which became part of the NHS. You can look at a legacy of the poor law or the new poor law, which was essentially to break localism. By its end, localism had been broken and centralisation had been established. And without that sort of thing, then it becomes very, very difficult to have an NHS

and welfare state. Was there a different sort of legacy that went on that being poor was a shameful thing, that the poor were to be shuttled out of sight and out of way, and that lasted for a very long time. I think it did, but there are also, I mean, I think that's right. So I think there's a legacy in people's minds about the impact on the new poor law and the shame of poverty. And we see it in our grandparents and all of these sorts of people. On the other hand, in reality, by the time we get to 1913, almost everybody that could have been taken out of the ambit of the poor law, has been taken out of the ambit of the poor law. children, the aged on pensions, all of these people have disappeared from the strict limits of the

poor law. So you don't think the scars still remain? Oh, I think they're very vivid. I think in people's imagination, the workhouse is iconic, the new poor law is iconic. But I think there's a sense in which the reality is very different to that. I think there's a real reframing of our ideas about poverty. And it was a really power. powerful articulation that the poor have themselves to blame and that the more ungenerous we are to them, the better it is for everybody. That's a very powerful argument that's very clearly articulated.

I've been rumbling through for quite a long time, but that's kind of a contradiction to Christian traditions, and that really kind of enters our discourse, and I think we can still see those ideas present in our own society as well. Well, thank you very much, Emma Griffin, Samantha Shave and Stephen King. Next week we'll go to the planet Venus, sometimes called Earth's twin planet. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I think we could say something about where workhouses were actually physically built. You know, often on the edges of towns, not right in the middle of them. It was a real and a suggestive difference or distance and othering of the poor to the rest of society. Yes, exactly, because the old workhouses had often been right. in the middle of the town or something and the new workhouse.

Or even late 18th century. If you built a, it would just be a normal building that would be conveniently located in an urban place. Like prisons are right in the middle of towns as well and jails are in the middle of towns. So there is this kind of. But I think also it's part of that Victorian tradition of building institutions for social problems.

You've got the asylums coming at this time, the building of the prisons, the building of the workhouses. There's a lot of this idea that if you can just build a building. And you put it in sound like, right. You put it in the right place. And it's as a symbolism to it. I think that's entirely right. I mean, one of the things I think we could have talked about is

the extent to which the new poor law actually does, the legislation and its intent gets a grip. Because it's quite clear that for almost all of Wales, the Welsh just say yes, yes, yes, and then do nothing. And the poor law does not get a grip in Wales. And for much of the stuff I've been looking at in terms of of letters and disputes and all of these sorts of things. It's quite clear that in the Midlands and the North,

everything that is supposed to happen. I mean, it really doesn't happen. And the workhouse becomes a place where old people, lunatics and others, get incarcerated or contained to use that word. And it's for that reason that you see the crusade as the last real attempt to implement the poor law. It cannot be implemented if the people in the workhouse are the life cycle poor.

It just cannot work. But if I might chip in my own experience just for a little bit, then you take off from two things. First of all, the workhouse in Wickland, the town of 5,000 people that I was brought up in the far north-north-west of England was on the edge of the town. When it was built, it was probably just outside the town, slightly outside the town.

So that co-caw, it backs up what you say. Secondly, I was born in 39, but in the 40s and 50s, there's still fear of the workplace. I don't want to go to the workhouse. Don't let me end up at the workplace. She's going to go to the workhouse. It was shame and fear was still around. I mean, I don't think I'm misremembering. No, I'm sure you're not.

No, I'm sure you, sorry. No, I was going to say there's quite a lot of controversy over whether we should still have workhouses to visit as museums because people in the local communities, some don't want them there at all. You know, they don't want them there as a reminder of what poverty used to represent. Is that your individual failing? It's certainly true. It's a very interesting workhouse. I have the correspondence from the paupers of Wigtown Workhouse,

and it shows them to be rather less fearful than you suggest. So they're contesting the decisions of Workhouse Masters. They're one of the places where, for instance, the paupers look at the cheese, it's mouldy, they get over the walls, they go to local magistrate, say, would you eat this? And the magistrate goes back to the guardians and say, you've got to change something. But you're right that then you have this enduring public imagination, even though the reality is so very different in many places. And I think the one thing that we did miss out as well is that the poor actually, there is a fear and there is a stigma. But they're also pretty good at using the poor or navigating their way through the pole or even. in ways that we don't imagine.

That's a big thing, because what I enjoy reading, your piece of, the letters that were written by the poor, demanding change, and keeping on about it until they got change.

Demanding their rights. And, you know, popping up at the workhouse, you know, a young woman heavily pregnant, very inconvenient, turns up at the workhouse, stays there for a few months,

sorts out her little problem, and off she goes. Leaving the child behind. It's not often leaving the child behind. They're much more empowered, even with a system that's very hostile to them. They can be,

quite empowering choices out of it. And there are hundreds and thousands of these letters that you like, where they write to the central authorities and they say, you know, these are your rules, these are your structures, now we want them implemented. And they can test absolutely everything. Sometimes through riots and scandal, often paupers are the ones driving the scandal.

But they can test. And you see this. And at one point in 1882, the government is so concerned about the number of letters arriving that the local government board says, sends a memo and says, we really must stop these paupers writing to us because it just encourages more people. And so the clerks and others are tasked with finding a mechanism legally

to stop people writing, to stop paupers writing. And they can't do it because people have a right to petition, they have a right to write on a much wider basis, And to overturn that particular right would involve overturning rights to petition or the rest of it. They can't do it. And then, of course, what happens is the number of letters just doubles and triples and then quadruples. So they were right, but they couldn't stop it. Did we give any impression of the incidents of cruelty in these places,

which is mentioned in several of your pieces about people being deliberately cruel to the mentally ill and being cruel in punishments or something? And how prevalent was that? Is there any sense of... Well, I mean, I think they're institutions, and there's always a risk with institutions. But they're not all bad. I mean, you know, there's always a risk.

There's no doubt. I look at a lot of working class autobiographies, and quite a few of them spent a period in workhouses and often in orphanages as well, which we think of as places of really high risk for abuse. But actually, they're very often quite positive, and it's always a surprise to me. They're quite positive.

They get a bed, it's stable, it's secure, they get hot food, they get all sorts of things that they weren't getting in their very chaotic lives actually before they entered the workplace. So you'd be quite surprised. I don't dispute that there are scandals, but if you're absolutely on the fringes, they can be a refuge as well.

I think it was very common. Sadly, I think it was very, very common for them to always be cruelty and abuse in workhouses. And I think this is something that research, I think, over the next 10 or 20 years or so, we'll start to look at in more detail. You see punishment books. You know that they don't survive well.

And it's quite clear that for every, let's say, for every, say, 100 instance that could be punished, only maybe four or five are. So you've got lots of low level in discipline going on in the workhouse. And if you're going to maintain control of an institution, what you have to do is choose who you're going to punish. And that's an interesting choice.

So one of the people you punish all the time, if you can, are the insane. Because those people are going to be the most refractory. And if you look at some of these punishments, it's often insane people that get punished, but also others, Sam's been Samantha's been doing some work on this too. Punishments as well. I mean, there's a lot of punishment that goes on inside families. So children are very often abused or inside families as well.

So I think we don't want to idealise too much. I mean, I think the punishment is that are very shocking to us in the culture of the time. It's just a punitive society. It's a very different place. There's a lot of violence in my childhood all over. Yeah, absolutely. It's a lot of violence in families. There's a lot of violence in families, I think.

It's about unreasonable chastisement. So that's the key thing. Thank you all very much. I hope you enjoyed it. Here comes the producer. I should fly. If I'm going to get my train. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Saeed Avarsi, and I want to let you know that my new podcast is now available on BBC Sounds.

I'm sick of Muslim women only being heard if we fit some pre-existing narrative. Either we need to be saved by you or you need to be saved from us. I'm tired of only speaking about forced marriages or polygamy or burghers, always burkers. So I've been speaking to seven different Muslim women to hear what they want to say. about the many ways to be a Muslim woman in 21st century Britain. The conversations are intimate, surprising and sometimes shocking. I hope you'll join us and subscribe to How to Be a Muslim Woman on BBC Sounds.