How dependent were the ‘dependent poor’? Poor relief and the life-

course in Terling, Essex, 1762-1834.

Despite the vast amount of research that has been published on the

life-experiences of the poor in the final century of the Old Poor

Law, historians have only relatively recently begun to undertake

detailed investigations into the functioning of the poor law at a

‘micro-level’ within the parish, and (in particular) whether it was

playing an increasing role in supporting labourers’ household

economies across the life-course after the turn of the nineteenth

century.

While the recent emphasis on the many overlapping and

contradictory ‘experiences’ of eighteenth-century poverty has

brought a welcome focus on particular groups of recipients, such as

female wage-earners1, illegitimate children2, the elderly poor3, or

the chronically sick4, this may have come at the expense of an

understanding of the composition or changing needs of the totality

of recipients in any particular parish. This holistic approach has

been pursued most extensively in the studies of Barry Stapleton,

Thomas Sokoll, Steve King, Pamela Sharpe, Samantha Williams and

Samantha Shave.5 So far, only Susannah Ottaway, Samantha Williams

and Samantha Shave have reconstructed these life-time experiences of

poor relief recipients, by assembling ‘pauper biographies’ and

1

assessing the flows of relief across the life-course between 1760

and 1834.6

Ottaway demonstrates the expansion in reliance on poor relief

among elderly residents in Terling and Puddletown, compared to

Ovenden, Halifax, but also the diminution on the intensity of care

by the end of the eighteenth century.7 Williams and Shave both

conclude that the size and diversity of relief payments expanded in

the period after 1795, but that dependence was by no means uniform

or universal.8 Williams’ study of two Bedfordshire parishes, (rural)

Campton and (small-town) Shefford, emphasized the importance of the

life-course in driving demand for relief. Most regular pensioners

were the elderly and lone parents.9 Their numbers were swelled by

couple-headed families who received family-allowances during the

agrarian crisis between ‘December 1799 and March 1802’.10 However,

she finds that ‘while the secondary literature assumes the

widespread allocation of relief’ to such families after 1795, ‘such

assistance was in fact far more sporadic and limited’ in practice.11

Over time, though, rising levels of illegitimacy brought more lone

women onto the relief lists, while men over 60 years of age were

increasingly crowded out of the over-stocked post-war labour

market.12 Even so, Williams found that ‘the vast majority of poverty

was not inherited by children from their parents’.13 Consequently,

she concludes that ‘the pauper biographies provide strong evidence

2

that such relief was restricted to economic crises and was largely

supplementary in nature’, with only a minority of residents in

Campton and Shefford (albeit a ‘substantial’ one) experiencing

poverty that was more ‘life-time’ than ‘life-cycle’, extending

across concentrated periods of years.14

Shave’s micro-historical investigation into the relief

histories of eight paupers in the Dorset village of Motcombe

questions many existing assumptions about the reasons why

individuals received relief, and whether occasional payments

actually indicated ‘dependence’. She reveals a very complicated

relationship to relief, in which there were ‘notable absences of the

poor law in adults’ lives, absences which complicate the idea of a

blanket dependency’.15 There was no invariable rule that those with

large families would seek relief, or become reliant on it. There was

no certainty that such families would come to depend on regular

weekly or monthly pensions. Indeed, the earning capacity of older

children, or their residence elsewhere could reduce the dependency

of larger families.16 The Motcombe overseers displayed a tendency to

employ single mothers as servants to the parish workhouse, but apart

from that they shared the highly varied and intermittent patterns of

relief experienced by other women, and men.17 Consequently, she

argues that ‘there was no solitary, universal experience of poverty

3

within the context of the parish… [and] many welfares under the

provisions of the old poor law, not just one’.18

Such conclusions remind us that all relief decisions had a

personal, human dimension, however neat and impersonal the records

appear in the surviving Overseers’ account books. They also

emphasize that we can impose distortions when we seek to abstract

general trends from a series of specific and highly individualised

relief decisions. Any assessment of the extent of households’

dependence on poor relief is fraught with issues of definition. As

Karel Williams observed in 1981, the Old Poor Law never resembled a

‘social security system’, because it never comprehended all welfare

needs (sickness, disability and residential care, income support,

unemployment assistance, universal old-age benefits) , and never

attempted the necessary ‘detailed differentiation of

beneficiaries’.19 It provided some of these services, but generally

to only a minority of possible beneficiaries, and did so

intermittently and (often) inadequately. Apart from those profoundly

disabled, chronically sick, or in extreme old-age, almost no-one

depended 100-per-cent on the parish for their subsistence. Instead,

most recipients’ recourse to the parish was infrequent and partial –

during intervals in which earning capacity was reduced by

bereavement, desertion, accidents, sickness, pregnancy, inadequate

employment opportunities, or insufficient wage-rates.20 If the degree

4

of ‘dependence’ was relative, then so must be our judgements about

the adequacy of the institutional response. Unsurprisingly,

therefore, historians have tended to divide between ‘optimists’ and

‘pessimists’ in interpreting the depth of poverty and the

‘generosity’ or otherwise of overseers in the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries.21

As King notes, ‘generosity’ is a difficult analytical concept

because it so open-ended, and potentially subjective – ‘generous’

compared to what, or ‘generous’ according to whom?22 In this study,

we will focus instead on the related concept of ‘dependence’,

because it appears possible to establish whether or not parish

relief became more or less significant in labourers’ household

economies without the having to pass judgement on how such provision

might have been perceived by its recipients. Relative levels of

‘dependence’ can be analysed by examining changes over time in: the

age-, gender-profile and life-course experience of recipients; the

frequency, value and purpose of payments; and the size of relief

payments compared to levels of adequate household income. In doing

so, this study attempts to integrate the approaches of Williams and

Shave, in two ways. The first is to link Shave’s forensic

exploration of family circumstances to Williams’ awareness of the

broader dynamics of economic change and the pressures on relief

expenditure. The second is to try to strike the difficult balance

5

between the depiction and recognition of the sub-atomic oscillations

of individual relief decisions, and the identification of

regularities in some of these movements, in certain circumstances,

for particular categories of recipients, at specific points in the

life-cycle.

1

This study concentrates on a detailed analysis of poor relief

payments in the Essex parish of Terling between 1762 and 1834.

Terling is very well known in the social history of early modern

England, because it was the subject of Keith Wrightson and David

Levine’s pioneering 1979 village study.23 It has also featured in

research on poverty in the eighteenth century, by Richard Smith and

Susanna Ottaway.24 An important legacy of this previous research is

that the Cambridge Group for Population and Social Structure

(CAMPOP) holds a family reconstitution of the village, which has

been consulted for this study.25

In addition, this research is based on a full transcription of

all poor law payments to named individuals in Terling between 1762

and 1834, whether these were in the form of weekly pensions,

occasional payments, or a third category of ‘additional

6

allowances’.26 Weekly pensions, or ‘weekly allowances’ as they were

termed in the overseers’ accounts, were specific sums allocated to

be paid weekly to particular recipients, listed at Michaelmas and

Easter and adjusted through the year. ‘Additional allowances’ were

first listed in 1808, as a form of regular, defined additional

family allowance paid primarily to male householders, and were

recorded for the years 1808-9, 1816-19, 1824-9 and 1832-33

inclusive. All other payments recorded by the overseers, described

here as ‘occasional payments’, were irregular, responsive and

discretionary. As Ottaway has shown, 40-50 per cent of these

payments were made ‘in kind’ in Terling, but almost always had a

cash value attributed to them.27 The analysis is based on these cash

values, throughout. There were 86,545 weekly pension payments

transcribed for the period 1752 and 1834; 48,911 occasional payments

between 1762 and 1834; and 8,345 additional payments between 1808

and 1834. In total, 143,801 payments were transcribed, paid to 1,498

separate recipients.28

These payments were recorded in an MS Access database, with a

number of entry protocols.29 Firstly, all payments were attributed

directly to a single named beneficiary rather than any intermediary

recipient (such as a husband or parent). This might overstate the

total number of recipients, but it avoids inflating the sums

received by each recipient. Secondly, recipients were located within

7

family groups identified by the CAMPOP family reconstitution. This

helped confirm their identity by reference to parents, siblings and

respective ages, as far as possible.30 Inevitably, some of these

identifications remain tenuous, particularly in a village where

there were, for example, eight women called Mary Thurgood and five

men called William White all in residence simultaneously! Thirdly,

the dates of each payment were converted to a weekly number, using a

53-week year to allow for years beginning and ending in mid-week.

Payments were then summed per person, per denominated week, to

create weekly totals that could add together payments of weekly

pensions, occasional payments and additional allowances to the same

person in the same week.

2

Later eighteenth-century Terling was characterised by a sharp

tripartite distinction between landlord, tenant-farmers and waged

agrarian labourers. Although 32 per cent of all household members in

the village were employed ‘chiefly in agriculture’ in 1801, the

majority were either agricultural day labourers, or casual field-

workers. By 1820, the Strutt family owned almost all the land in the

parish. They rented their estate to approximately 20 tenant-farmers,

8

who controlled the parish vestry. In 1800, nine out of the 12

largest rate-payers were John Strutt’s tenants and the parish vestry

was a tightly-knit body in which the voices of 15-20 individuals

predominated, even before it opted for ‘select’ status under

Sturges-Bourne’s Act.31 Although the Strutt family exerted

considerable influence in the village, the vestry was capable of

independent action. For example, in March 1824, the vestry thanked

Col. Joseph Strutt for his offer of a parcel of land ‘rent free for

the purpose of employing the Poor in spade husbandry’, but rejected

it because they were ‘apprehensive that it is not likely to be

beneficial to the Parish’.32

Under the watchful eyes of the Strutts, the vestry attempted

close regulation of the parish’s relief recipients, but generally by

copying relatively widely-adopted initiatives.33 In 1775, it had

echoed its seventeenth-century forebears by cracking down on

‘idleness’ by regulating drinking in the village’s alehouses.34 In

1785, rising relief costs produced a requirement that recipients

were to provide details of their earnings and employment, while the

‘principal parishioners’ were ordered to visit recipient households

to enjoin church attendance.35 As bills rocketed after 1794, the

vestry initiated the first of a series of schemes to provide

subsidised flour to the poor, and restricted gleaning rights to

widows and poor families.36 As in other parishes, in the winter of

9

1800 the vestry provided food supplements and substitutes (herrings

and rice) to paupers, and created a rota by which the vestry members

visited every recipient household each week.37 It conducted surveys

of relief recipients in 1801, 1803, 1809 and 1811, recording the

structure of recipient households, their sources of income, and (in

1801) their state of health, as discussed below.38 As shown above, it

also instituted a ‘family allowance’ system in 1808.

After 1815, the parish provided road-mending work for

unemployed male labourers, and in February 1819 the vestry agreed

that the parish clerk should keep a list of labourers out of work.39

By 1824 the vestry had been re-constituted as a ‘select’ one,40 and

in February of that year agreed to institute a labour rate on

occupiers, by which such householders either employed labourers

directly in proportion to their rateable liability, or reimbursed

the overseers for doing so.41 In 1827 the vestry agreed to rebuild

the parish workhouse, but it remained small and between Michaelmas

1829 and Easter 1830, it accommodated only 9-10 persons.42 After 1830

the vestry took more concerted steps to reduce the total numbers of

recipients and costs, and in March 1835 Richard Ellis, was

congratulated by the vestry for his three years as assistant

overseer, ‘under whose administration with Mr Strutt supported by

the Vestry the rates have been reduced from 8s. 9d. to 4s. in the

Pound’.43

10

The general pattern of poor relief expenditure in Terling

reflected the growth of the agricultural day-labour force, and

supports existing depictions of a narrowing of alternative

employment opportunities, particularly for women and children in

southern and eastern England.44 We can obtain an initial measure of

the proportion of recipients in Terling compared to the total

population by comparing the parochial returns to parliament of the

number and status of relief recipients in the year 1802-3 with

parish population figures for 1801. As Sokoll’s work on the Essex

parish of Braintree suggests, such figures are likely to be

underestimates, but they provide a fairly consistent basis for

comparisons.45 In Witham Hundred, in which Terling was located, the

numbers relieved in the year Easter 1802-3 were equivalent to 21 per

cent of the 1801 population.46 In Terling itself, the figure was 18

per cent. Proportions of between 10 and 20 per cent were common in

south Essex (Barstable, Becontree, Chafford, Havering Liberty,

Rochford, Thurstable, Waltham and Dengie Hundreds), west Essex

(Uttlesford & Freshwell Hundreds), and around Colchester (Colchester

borough, Tendring, Lexden and Harwich boroughs). The highest

proportions of recipients (25-34 per cent of the 1801 population)

were in the populous, former cloth-producing hundreds of Hinckford,

Dunmow, and around Chelmsford, in the north and centre of the

11

county. This echoes the distributions of exemptions observed in the

county in the mid-seventeenth century Hearth Taxes.47

Figure 1 depicts the longer-term dynamic of relief levels in

the parish by illustrating the total amounts paid per year to

recipients of the three types of outdoor relief granted in Terling,

weekly allowances, irregular ‘occasional’ payments and additional

allowances at constant 1778 prices. The chronology of change in

Terling resembles Sokoll’s study of Ardleigh (but not Braintree),

Williams’ Bedfordshire parishes, and Baugh’s figures for southern

England.48 Before 1775, the parish spent generally less than £100 per

annum, and made between 500 and 1,000 relief payments each year in

total.49 Between the late 1770s and the early 1790s, total

expenditure regularly exceeded £100 per annum, with a shallower rate

of increase in the number of payments made each year. With the on-

set of the wartime harvest failures and price inflation from 1794,

total spending immediately doubled to £200 and then rose sharply to

peak at over £500 in 1801. At the same time, the annual number of

relief payments also doubled to over 2,000 per annum. Once the

crisis of 1800-1 had subsided, relief levels stabilised at

approximately double their pre-war level until the winter of 1815.

Relief levels peaked in 1816 at over £850 and nearly 5,000 payments

(almost eight and five times the respective figures for 1760-4).

From then until 1825 expenditure never fell below £500, and was

12

rarely below £600, with more than 3,000 payments per year being made

until 1830.

In general terms, there were similar changes in the numbers of

actual recipients of this relief, shown in Figure 2.50 On average, in

each year between 1770 and 1774 65 persons had received some form of

relief, with around ten receiving regular weekly ‘pensions’. Between

1816 and 1833, at least 150 persons per annum received poor relief

of some sort, of whom over 30 were weekly ‘pensioners’. This total

increase of 230 per cent was rather more than the 137 per cent

increase in the village’s total population (from approximately 650

to 890). On average, between 1820 and 1824, 22 persons per annum

received relief for more than 50 weeks, where only 4 had done so in

the early 1770s (an increase of 550 per cent).

This evidence supports Eastwood’s contention that a

fundamental shift occurred in the extent and patterns of poor relief

after 1795.51 In Terling, during the crisis years 1795-1801 and again

between 1815 and 1818 relief bills and relief rolls ballooned,

because increasing sums of money were paid to a larger number of

people in more weeks each year.

3

13

This secular deterioration provides the background for a more

detailed examination of the potential role of poor relief within

household economies, particularly in the period after 1795.52This

task is made easier because of the recording practices in Terling.

In addition to recording Census returns in the parish accounts in

1801 and 1811 (plus an informal parish census of 1809), the

overseers also surveyed the resident family units of those in

receipt of relief in 1801, 1803, 1809 and 1811.53 In doing so, they

recorded the composition of the resident family members, including

ages, state of health (1801) and the number of children still at

home.54 They also required relief recipients to report their

earnings, and distinguished between those of men, women and

children, as well as allowances received from the parish.

This information provides a preliminary definition of the

notion of ‘dependence’ in the village. The 1801 listing recorded 70

family groups, comprising 250 individuals. This represented 42 per

cent of the 168 family units listed in the 1801 parish census, and

35 per cent of the 708 inhabitants.55 In fact, as Sokoll has

observed, such a snap-shot measure under-records the total number of

inhabitants exposed to poor relief within Terling.56 Over time, 94

families (55 per cent) in the 1801 Census, comprising as many as 367

individuals (52 per cent) received some kind of parish relief.

14

Of the 69 pauper families listed in 1801, 15 were headed by

women (21 per cent), mostly widows, seven of whom were aged over 60.

The 54 male-headed family units reflected a broader age-range. Four

were headed by men aged under 30, 20 by men aged between 30 and 40

years, 6 by men aged 40 to 50 years, 5 by men in their 50s, and 19

by men aged over 60 years. The proportion over 60 years old (38 per

cent) was in line with the average of 34 per cent given by Ottaway

for southern and eastern England.57 This relatively wide spread of

ages among male householders hints at the new situation in the

parish after 1795, in which a majority of regular male recipients

were able-bodied, wage-earners, whose poverty was a result of

changing economic circumstances rather than personal misfortune. In

fact, only two out of the 35 male householders aged below 60 years

were recorded as not being in ‘good’ health. By contrast, only four

out of the 19 aged over 60 enjoyed such ‘good’ health.

Similarly, in 1801, although some pauper families were big,

their mean size was little different to that of the entire parish,

unlike in Ardleigh.58 In 1801, the mean size of the 94 units who had,

or would, receive relief was 4.3 (with a median of 4), while for the

74 families who never received relief it was 4.9 (median also of 4).

The difference was probably caused by lower number of resident

adolescent children in recipients’ families. In the pauper list of

1801 no resident child was over 15 years old.59 These figures were

15

somewhat lower than in 1778, when Ottaway found that male-headed

pauper households had 5.4 residents and female-headed households had

5.1. Perhaps adolescent children were being bound out to service

more systematically in 1801, as Sokoll suggests in Ardleigh.60

The 1801 listing also detailed earnings per household,

including casual earnings by women and children, a practice repeated

in 1803, 1809 and 1811. Obviously, there was an incentive to

understate earnings. However, given that at least 66 out of the 94

pauper family units in 1801 (70 per cent) were employed in

‘husbandry’ by the farmers who made up the parish ‘committee’ the

overseers could easily have checked these stated earnings.

Such considerations are important, because the figures

reported in the 1801 pauper list appear relatively high, compared to

other estimates for the county. The figures were gathered in

January, so should not be distorted by harvest bonuses.61 Among male

householders aged 22-39, mean weekly earnings were 9.58s. per head,

and mean total household income per week was 11.9s., compared to

Richardson’s findings of a mean of 8s. 8d. for agricultural labourers

in Essex in 1801.62 Among men aged between 40 and 59 years the

figures were 10.1s. earnings and 13.1s. per week household income.

This suggests that labourers achieving total household income levels

in excess of county means were still in need of income supplements

from the parish.63 These high male wage-rates echo the conclusions of

16

Snell, Horrell and Humphries, and Burnette that over the same period

employment opportunities and wages were increasingly concentrated on

the male ‘breadwinner’.64 This may not fully have compensated for the

corresponding reduction in women’s and children’s earnings, in the

absence of by-employments such as straw-plaiting, stocking-knitting

or spinning in mid-Essex.65

The survey suggested that poor relief comprised only a small

percentage of household income, making up only nine per cent of

income for households headed by men aged 22-39 years (the same

contribution as women and children’s earnings), and only two per

cent for those headed by men aged 40-59 years (compared to 13.5 per

cent from women and children’s earnings). Relief was more

significant among households headed by men aged over 60 years, but

still comprised only 27 per cent of total household income, similar

to proportions in Campton and Shefford.66 Even among this group male

earnings made up 63 per cent of total income. In 1809, relief was

still relatively marginal to the total household incomes of working-

age men. Male householders aged 30-39 received only five per cent of

their income in relief payments, while those aged 40-59 years

received only 10 per cent of their income in relief, compared to 18

per cent from women and children’s earnings. By contrast those aged

over 65 now received 75 per cent of their income in relief payments,

17

closer to the 90 per cent of ‘minimum wages’ observed by Ottaway

among recipients of formal weekly ‘pensions’ in Terling, 1770-94.67

Women’s and children’s earnings in family units headed by men

in 1801 amounted to only 1.8s. per unit in the 25 families (out of

55) in which they were recorded – or 16 per cent of total household

income, in line with Verdon’s findings for Essex in the period.68 The

situation was even bleaker in 1809. Even for women of working age

(aged 30-59 years), earnings made up only 7 per cent of their total

household income. Children added another 10 per cent, but the

remaining 83 percent came from the parish, in line with the findings

of Snell and Millar.69 Only the contribution of children lifted these

women out of the same plight as those in their 60s and 70s, who

received 93 per cent of their household income from the parish.

Given these findings, how should we begin to define

‘dependence’ on poor relief? The outer parameters seem fairly clear.

Female-headed households who derived 80 or 90 percent of their

income from poor relief were clearly dependent on the parish for

their basic daily subsistence. Their situation was fundamentally

different from that of households headed by men aged less than 60

years, where relief provided less than 10 per cent of household

income. However, we should perhaps distinguish between dependence

(poor relief as the largest single source of subsistence) from

reliance (poor relief as a significant and recurrent, but not

18

sufficient, component of household income). Dependence and reliance

can only be reconstructed through a dynamic rather than a static

analysis, which assesses how often (as well as how much) relief was

received in each year. The dataset enables this analysis to be taken

further than in previous studies, because allows us to calculate the

precise number of weeks in which relief was received, by every

recipient across the period 1762-1834. The patterns revealed also

imply a deeper reshaping of household economies, particularly a loss

of resilience (through declines in the value of alternative sources

of income, from women and children), and the devotion of an

increasing proportion of the weekly wage to food.

4

We can obtain a more detailed understanding of these dynamics by

examining three groups of listings of inhabitants or relief

recipients, for whom more detailed age and life-course information

is available. The first, taken in 1775, lists 93 family groups, plus

14 families being relieved in outlying parishes and four fractured

families in the workhouse.70 Of these, 126 women and 108 men can be

identified in the database, and baptism dates attributed to them.

The second is the 1801 listing discussed above.71 The third

19

incorporates all those who received relief in the database in 1810,

cross-referenced with listings of family groups taken on 4th Feb.

1809 and 4th May 1811.72 It records the baptism dates of 40 women and

girls, and 56 men and boys, of whom, 72 can be identified.

This additional information allows us to examine the relative

value and intensity of relief for recipients from across the age-

spectrum among these two groups. Figures 3 & 4 illustrate the mean

values for women and men in the 1775, 1801 and 1810 groups of each

individual payment received by each person in each year between 1770

and 1835. These means have been distributed across the age-range in

each year, and controlled for the effects of inflation. While they

follow the classic Seebohm Rowntree profile of increased expenditure

in late adolescence, they also support George Boyer’s argument that

the real value of per capita relief did not increase in southern

England during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,

contrary to Baugh’s findings.73 If anything, the real per capita

value of each payment declined slightly between 1775 and 1810, and

tended to remain between 3 s. and 4s – that is, at approximately 25

per cent of total household income.74 Although total relief bills

increased enormously this was not because relief was being paid out

to individual recipients in larger amounts.

Consideration of the proportion of the total sums paid to

different age categories of women and men in the 1775, 1801 and 1810

20

groups reveals several changes over time. Firstly, as Ottaway found,

until the mid-1790s women in all three groups tended to receive a

higher proportion of the value of poor relief than did men.75 The

total proportion of relief allocated to women peaked in the period

1790-1804, whereas for men the peak came between 1805 and 1820.

After 1800 female recipients never received a greater proportion of

the value of relief than men. Women may have sought relief more

often between 1794 and 1800 because their earnings suffered more

than men’s in the first round of wartime inflation, possibly because

men and boys took on their tasks as real wage costs fell. This shift

might have been exacerbated after 1800 if payments to women were

increasingly subsumed within ‘household’ relief payments to men.

Even so, between 1800 and 1825 the largest share of the value

of relief clearly went to working age men, aged 25-44 and 45-59.

Relief was paid to these men primarily in the form of occasional

payments (income supplements) plus ‘additional allowance’ payments

based on family size after 1808, rather than weekly pensions. As

male householders in each of these groups reached old age in the

1820s and early 1830s, they received larger proportions of the total

value of relief, whereas their female peers generally did not.

The cause of the rises in relief costs is suggested by one of

the key findings of this research, shown in Figures 5 and 6. These

depict the percentage of weeks per year in which relief was received

21

by each age group. The contrast between the experiences of women and

men is instructive. All other things being equal, we might expect

the relief pattern for all recipients to match that of the women in

these two groups. Figure 5 shows a relatively linear increase in the

frequency of relief for women, from low levels of less than 5 weeks

per annum before the mean age of first marriage (except for the

spikes associated with leaving for service), to 10-15 weeks per

annum in child-bearing years, to 20-25 weeks in later middle age,

and 30-40 weeks per annum once over the age of 75 (the latter in

line with Ottaway’s findings).76 The same pattern recurs among the

other two groups, although adolescent girls in the 1810 group were

much more likely to receive relief than their peers in the 1770s and

1780s, implying a diminution in either work opportunities or

families’ capacity to equip them for service.

Significantly, the male recipients in Figure 6 contradict this

relatively linear picture. The 1775 group illustrate a more expected

trend, of relatively infrequent relief until the onset of illness

and infirmity after the age of 60, with rapid rises thereafter, to

an earlier peak than for women – reflecting lower adult male life

expectancy. The 1810 group follows the same overall trend, but with

substantial increases in the frequency with which relief was

received. The increases are most striking among working-age men,

whose relief trajectory might have been expected to follow that of

22

the 1775 group. Men aged 28 to 38 and 44 to 58 years received relief

in twice as many weeks as their peers in the earlier group, and about

as often as women in the same group. Figure 6 also supports the 1809

income survey, by indicating that men over the age of 70 were now

wholly excluded from the labour market in ways that had not been the

case among the 1775 group.77

Receiving relief for up to five weeks per annum cannot be

equated with ‘dependence’, nor does it represent significant

‘reliance’. Instead, it is a short-term measure to plug a hole in

the family finances. This appears to have been the character of

relief for working-age men in Terling in the later eighteenth

century. We might define ‘reliance’ on relief as the need to claim

it for more than one-in-three, or one-in-two weeks per annum, so

that it became a regular, unavoidable component of household

budgets, even if it was not the primary source of subsistence. For

men among the 1775 listing, this need was incurred after the age of

60 years, and for women (particularly widows) after about the age of

45 years. For men among the 1810 group, such reliance was reached in

the same age-range as for women, and even occurred in their late

20s, the age at which their daily labour capacity must surely have

been at its maximum. Such men were not receiving more relief per

payment in each age range, but they were now receiving twice as many

payments per annum than the previous generation.

23

5

If the total income of a male-headed household after 1800 in Terling

was approximately 12s. per week, what levels of relief indicate

‘reliance’ and ‘dependence’? We can draw arbitrary distinctions at

the levels of 4s. per payment per person, and 8s. The long-term,

inflation-adjusted mean figure of 4s. per payment equates to a

quarter of this weekly income for male households, but perhaps half

the income allocated to large female-headed households, and more

than the maximum normally allowed to lone males or females. A figure

of 8s. per payment, equates to 50-75 per cent of male-headed total

household income, and the maximum normally allocated to larger

female-headed households. If sustained over 10 or 20 weeks per

annum, the former sum implies ‘reliance’ on relief for a regular,

substantial portion of household income, while the latter suggests

significant dependence.

There were significant trends in the distribution of the total

value of payments above 4s. per week to recipients of different ages

within these three recipient groups. The distribution of the total

value of payments over 8s. per week follows a pattern illustrated by

Sokoll in Braintree, because it suggests that those under 25 tended

24

to receive the biggest share of the value of these payments, rather

than middle-aged men and women with families.78 In Terling, payments

for adolescents were often inflated by clothing costs, and ‘boarding

out’ payments incorporating subsistence. The value of payments to

men in middle-age increased after 1800, reflecting wartime inflation

and the gradual ageing of the sample groups. By contrast, throughout

the period, adult women rarely received payments equivalent to more

than 50 per cent of the adult male wage, except for one-off costs

such as clothing or medical bills.

Men aged over 45 years absorbed the largest proportion of the

value of payments of 4-8s. per week after 1800, particularly those

recipients listed in 1801 and 1810. Again, this distribution may

reflect both the gradual increase in the mean age of the sample over

time, and also the crowding-out of older workers in an over-stocked

rural labour market after 1815. This is more noticeable, because it

does not occur among female recipients, whose share of the value of

these payments dropped significantly in the years after 1800. Again,

this highlights a wider shift of payments away from women in the 22-

59 age ranges and towards men of the same age. While this may

reflect growing dominance of the idea of the male ‘breadwinner’, it

might also reflect changes in the patterns of need created by

falling real wage levels.

25

Relief payments proliferated among labouring families in

Terling not as a substitute for wages, but rather as a less dramatic

supplement to household incomes. The pressure on household incomes

came not from dramatic shifts, but by the slow and inexorable

increases in the proportion of relief paid at 4-8s. per week to male

household heads aged 45-59, and 60-74 years. Among recipients in the

1775 group, approximately 10 per cent of the value of such payments

had gone to these two age groups between 1770 and 1794. Between 1800

and 1820 the proportion was 40-50 per cent. Among the 1801 group,

the proportions were closer to 70 per cent between 1820 and 1834,

and were similar among the 1810 group. Some of these increases

reflected the ageing sample groups, but they also demonstrate that

poor relief was becoming an increasingly indispensable and

unavoidable part of their household budgets.

6

We can get a better sense of some of the reasons for these shifts,

and the place of relief within labourers’ household economies, by

focusing in detail on one of our three sample groups, the 1801

pauper listing. This group was recorded mid-way across the time-

period, allowing us to observe its fortunes for equal lengths of

26

time back to 1762 and on towards 1834. It also experienced the brunt

of the price rises after 1794 and was still economically active in

the difficult decade after 1815. Consequently, this group provides a

valuable case-study of the relief history of a particularly

vulnerable population.

Figure 7 applies the 8s. per week threshold to women and men in

the 1801 pauper list and reveals a sharp distinction between their

experiences over time. For women, the peaks in relief came earlier,

after the first price shock in 1794 and again in 1801. For men, the

highest frequency of relief at this level was in the post-war slump

after 1815, as in Campton and Shefford and most of southern

England.79 Figure 8 illustrates the 1790s in greater detail. It shows

that between the autumn of 1794 and the summer of 1797 half the

payments to women in this group were at, or above, 8s. per week. By

contrast, in the subsequent two years almost all payments were below

this threshold. Much of the increase in these payments came from a

larger amount of money being paid to widows in the form of

additional ‘occasional payments’, with the largest increases being

incurred for ‘general allowances’ to this group. In the five years

after 1794 the largest increase in relief payments to the 1801

pauper list women was in the 40-59 and over-60 age groups. In fact,

the short-term ‘emergency’ occasional payments which began in the

27

autumn of 1794 and spring of 1795 were eventually translated into

increases in ‘weekly allowances’ by the winter of 1796-7.

The crisis was also felt particularly acutely by widows such

Hannah Tyrrell, whose husband John died in the spring of 1796, when

Hannah was aged 40, with four children under 11 years of age.

Although she was in good health in 1801, her earnings amounted to

only 3s. per week, and she received 8 to 9s. per week in relief in

1796, settling to 7s. per week after June 1797. Her subsequent

history is instructive, because it indicates the significance of

these sums. ‘Widow Tyrrell’ continued to receive weekly allowances

every year until 1829 (for more than 45 weeks per year in each

year), and occasional relief until her death in 1831. Until

September 1802, she received 6s. 6d. per week, which was then

reduced to 4s. 6d., and then to 3s. 6d. per week in April 1803. In

that year, three of her six children resided with her, undertaking

husbandry tasks and earning 2s. per week, which supplemented the 1s.

2d. she earned by weeding.80 This gave the four of them a combined

weekly income of 6s. 8d. week, equivalent to the sums she had

received before 1802, when her son John (born in 1795), and possibly

her twin daughters Hannah and Rhoda (born in 1791) were too young to

work.

Until September 1807, Hannah continued to receive 3s. per week,

falling in stages to 1s. 6d. after April 1809. That year, 14-year old

28

John Tyrrell was still living with his mother, and was earning 3s.

6d. per week.81 Hannah was not recorded as having any earnings, but

was paid a 3d.per week supplement because of the prevailing high

prices, giving them a total weekly income of 5s. 3d. Hannah continued

to receive 1s. 6d. per week until December 1817, presumably because

(as in May 1811) she was able to earn an additional 2s. per week in

husbandry.82 Thereafter, at the age of 61, Hannah received between

2s. 6d. and 3s. per week each week until 1829, which probably

represented her sole source of income. The payments to other widows,

without resident children, support these assumptions.83

This trend may indicate that female householders, whose

incomes in 1801 averaged only 3.1s. per week, were the most

vulnerable to the first wave of price increases after the autumn of

1794. For women in middle age with dependent children, or over 60

and in ‘indifferent’ health in 1801, this price shock may have

changed their relationship to the poor relief system from one of

marginal need (particularly for more expensive items of clothing),

plus periods of intermittent dependence (during illness), to more

persistent reliance on pensions or supplements – albeit, not

outright dependence until the onset of old age. Where this most

marginal income group led, much of the rest of the village’s male

labouring population followed.

29

7

Once again, Figure 9 focuses in detail on the 5-year period in which

large payments to men were most pronounced, between 1815 and 1819.

It is clear that there was a prolonged rise in the number of

payments to male recipients in the 1801 pauper listing between the

autumn of 1815 and the spring of 1818. From the summer of 1816 to

the spring of 1818, the group received at least half of the value of

their relief in payments of 8s. or more. In the winter of 1817-18,

between a third and a half of the value of these payments were for

sums of 12s. per recipient per week. In fact, this 1801 group

regularly received 25 to 30 per cent of all payments in excess of

8s. per week in this period, despite comprising only 14 per cent of

all recipients in this period.

These sums imply that all these men were either completely

without work or able to earn less than half their normal income

between the autumn of 1816 and the spring of 1818.84 More

speculatively, Figure 10 implies that if relief payments of 8s. per

week to adult males indicate an income deficiency of 75 per cent,

and payments over 12s. suggest deficiencies close to 100 per cent,

then the winter of 1816-17 stands out as one in which as many as 20

per cent of all relieved family units in the village (not just the

30

1801 cohort) repeatedly required relief payments equivalent to 75

per cent of their weekly income, with half of all recipients

requiring payments equivalent to 50 per cent of income. The former

figure was perhaps double the usual level in the five-year period as

a whole.

Many of these men were regular relief recipients throughout

the period after 1801. Despite their relatively high wages, all were

caught in Rowntree’s mid-life ‘poverty trap’, created by large

numbers of resident, non-wage-earning children. In 1815 Thomas Cole

was 60, John Doe, 45, John Royce, 48, and James Valentine, 47. All

were recorded as ‘husbandmen’ (that is, waged agricultural

labourers), but each had a family of nine to eleven surviving

children. Each earned between 12 and 15s. per week in 1811, which

for Royce and Valentine was supplemented by income from women’s and

children’s earnings of 2s. per week respectively.85 Their total

household income, including relief (stated in each case as 2s. per

week) was between 14 and 17s. per week. If sums of this size

represent a ‘target’ for the total income necessary to support each

family, the detailed relief histories of these able-bodied, working-

age men allow us to determine whether this mid-life poverty trap was

characterised by ‘reliance’ or ‘dependence’.

Two patterns are apparent. Firstly, Cole, Doe and Royce all

had periods of months or years in which they received regular relief

31

amounting to approximately 25 or 50 per cent of their ‘target’

household income, but particularly between 1800-2, 1816-20 and 1820-

4. Royce received relief equal to nearly half his ‘target’ income

between 1800 and 1802 and to approximately a quarter over a period

extending from 1805 to 1810. Cole experienced the most reliance, but

at a relatively low level (approximately 20 to 25 per cent of

‘target’ income) between 1799-1802, 1803-13, 1816-20, 1821-9, and

1834-5. Doe received approximately 25 per cent of ‘target’ income in

relief between 1808 and 1815, but was much more dependent (at times

for perhaps 75 per cent of his ‘target’ household income) between

1816 and 1820, and between 25 and 50 per cent of ‘target’ income

from 1820-1825. Of the four, perhaps unsurprisingly, Cole had the

most complicated family history. He had married John Royce’s older

sister Anne in 1784, and had fathered five children before her death

in 1798 at which time only three (aged 13, 8 and one) were living.

Cole had remarried in 1803, and his second family eventually

amounted to a further six children, the youngest born in 1816. This

fractured history and extended reproductive span (of almost 30 years

as opposed to 20 for an unbroken family) may have left Cole’s family

more reliant on income supplements from the overseers.

Secondly, each household also required one-off payments that

might match or even be far in excess of an individual week’s income.

Many of these peaks were associated with periods of illness. John

32

Royce received 8s. 9d. in January 1800, and 20s. 6d. the following

month, and sums of 10-12s. per week in three weeks in June 1812,

between 9s. and 39s. in March 1814, and four weeks’ payment at 7s per

week, and 7s. 6d. per week in August 1821 and February 1826. Thomas

Cole received 33s. in November 1812, when it was noted that he was

unable to work because of broken ribs. He was ill again in January

1818 and received between 15s. 6d. and 17s. over four weeks. In

December 1826 he required a truss to deal with a hernia, and the

parish made six weekly payments in January and February 1827 of

between 8s. and 9s. In the spring of 1832, the now elderly Cole was

described as ‘very ill’ and received regular weekly payments of 5s.

6d.

For adult ‘breadwinners’, poor relief functioned primarily as

an income supplement, even in years as difficult as those

immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. However, there were times

when they had to draw on it to supply a full week’s wage, generally

when incapacitated by illness or injury. In Terling, at least, the

sums provided by the overseers seem to have been paid at realistic

replacement levels: 12-15s., or more, for a family of five to seven

members, 6-7s. for a family of three or four, and 4-5s. for an

elderly husband and wife. These sums also support the general

contention of Morgan and Ó Gráda that ‘expenditure per head tended

to be higher in the high-wage parishes’.86

33

The fact that such payments were needed implies that the

larger labouring families in Terling lacked significant financial

reserves. These four household heads had at least one decade in

which they had five to seven mouths to feed. Normally, they had to

resort to poor relief perhaps only once every couple of months, when

family illness, or abnormal expenses, exceeded their weekly budgets.

However, they seem to have coped by devoting all their income to

immediate needs, and were unable to build up savings to deal with

sudden shortfalls. It is clear that in relatively short-lived, but

acute ‘crisis’ periods, such as 1794-5, 1799-1801, or 1815-17, many

of these families may have become ‘dependent’ on the parish for the

bulk of their income. At other times, they were much more likely

than their parents or grand-parents had been to receive ‘occasional’

relief from the parish in perhaps 10 to 20 weeks per year.

8

Clearly, in Terling between 1762 and 1834 there were substantial

changes in the size and regularity of poor relief payments, and the

profile of their recipients. These reflected a real, and

appreciable, growth in ‘reliance’ on poor relief by a substantial

section of the agrarian labour force. Even so, we can agree with

34

Shave and Williams that the significance of these changes should not

be exaggerated. The dramatic increases registered in Figure 1

reflects the fact that an average of just under 50 people required

substantial relief for 30 weeks or more each year after 1810,

compared to an average of eight per annum who had such a need in the

early 1770s. Similarly, except in the crisis years between 1794-6,

1800-1, and 1816-8, most recipients received individual sums that

amounted, at most, to perhaps only one-third or a half of adult male

weekly earnings. The majority of recipients undoubtedly received

sums that made a substantial contribution to their household budgets

(of up to 6 or 7s.), but only for a week or two in each year.

As Williams has emphasized in Bedfordshire, most relief went

to the same categories of recipients as it had always done: orphaned

children, single-parent families, large and sickly families, those

with chronic illnesses or disabling injuries, and the elderly who

were no longer capable of work. Although the numbers in most of

these categories increased over time and the sums expended rose

substantially, this represented a simple intensification of the

existing system.

However, the Terling evidence also qualifies Williams’

conclusion that ‘the huge shift in welfare provisioning in favour of

families, assumed as a given in the secondary literature, is simply

not evident at the micro-level’.87 Clearly, as Williams and Sokoll

35

have shown, the welfare regime of every parish differed slightly,

according to local needs and the ‘welfare cultures’ that emerged

through the dialectic between ratepayers and recipients. Terling was

more like Ardleigh than it was like Campton or Shefford, because the

vestry favoured extensive occasional relief over intensive pension

payments. Like Ardleigh, and unlike Braintree or the Bedfordshire

parishes, it lacked much non-agricultural employment, and possessed

few jobs for women and children.

Even so, the development of regular payments to able-bodied,

working age individuals and families was a new, and highly

important, feature in the parish’s relief system after 1795. The

expansion in expenditure after 1800 was driven by profound but

subtle changes in the frequency with which working-age families

required relief. These had knock-on effects for existing groups of

recipients, diminishing the proportions of relief paid to the

elderly, and (above all) directly to women. While male householders

only slipped into outright ‘dependence’ during acute familial or

economic crises, they experienced a creeping ‘reliance’ on relief

through ‘family allowances’, equivalent to 20-30 per cent of

anticipated family income, for 10 or 20 weeks per year. For others,

the need to devote more and more income to the purchase of food

resulted in a greater intensity and value of ad hoc payments in each

year. As in much of southern England, this pattern was at its most

36

pronounced in the dreadful period between the autumn of 1815 and the

autumn of 1817, when a deep but predictable post-war agrarian

depression was amplified significantly by the consequences of a

freak climatic conditions experienced in 1816 (‘the year without a

summer’). Then, the parish was forced into the unprecedented step of

providing sums equivalent to 50-75 per cent of household income for

perhaps half the families on relief.

If we take this period as the absolute nadir of dependence,

then it represents the effects of persistent unemployment among

perhaps 14 per cent of family groups, and 17 per cent of the

population (that is, approximately 21 family heads, out of a total

of 148 families in 1811, and 131 inhabitants out of a total of 759).

This may have represented 20-25 per cent of the adult wage-earning

population of the village at this time.88 This was a real, and sharp,

economic crisis, that exacerbated a situation in which perhaps 5-10

per cent of the household heads found themselves regularly, and

significantly, short of funds at the end of each week.

This research supports the verdict of other local studies, and

of Karel Williams, that the Old Poor Law never became a

comprehensive welfare system providing substantial long-term

assistance to the working age population of southern England after

1795. However, it also shows that the relative levels of dependency

represented by payments to labouring families are less important

37

than the absolute fact that relief was now being paid intermittently

to working-age men, who had only ever received it in emergencies in

the generation before 1795. This relatively undramatic re-drawing of

the boundaries of entitlement still resulted in 230 per cent

increase in the numbers of recipients, and a 300 per cent real-terms

increase in relief bills between the 1770s and 1810s. As in other

agricultural parishes, after the price-shocks of the late 1790s the

ratepayers of Terling preferred to substitute individual relief

awards for a general increase in wage-rates, despite their

apparently high level.89 Reliance on relief accumulated silently in

Terling, without ever registering a ‘huge shift’, but it tipped the

balance in the pattern of dependence nonetheless.

38

1 K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: social change and agrarian England, 1660-1900

(Cambridge, 1985); S. Horrell & J. Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation

and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790-1865’, Economic History Review,

xlviii (1995), 89-117; J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial

Revolution (Cambridge, 2010); J. Broad, ‘Parish economies of welfare, 1650-1834’,

Historical Journal, xlii (1999), 985-1006; N. Verdon, Rural Workers in Nineteenth-Century England:

Gender, Work and Wages (Woodbridge, 2002); J. Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial

Revolution Britain (Cambridge, 2007); S. Williams, ‘Poor relief, labourers’ households

and living standards in rural England, c. 1770-1834: a Bedfordshire case-study’,

Economic History Review, lviii (2005), 485-519; S. Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle

under the English Poor Law (Woodbridge, 2011); G. Shepherd, ‘Income, Domestic Economy

and the Distribution of Poverty amongst Labouring Families in the Parish of

Cardington, Bedfordshire, in the 1780s and 1850s’, Family and Community History, 13, 2

(2010), 128-43.

2 K. Honeyman, Child Workers in England, 1780-1820: parish apprentices and the making of the early

industrial workforce (Aldershot, 2007); T. Hitchcock, “‘Unlawfully begotten on her

body”: illegitimacy and the parish poor in St. Luke’s, Chelsea’, in Hitchcock, King

& Sharpe, Chronicling Poverty, 70-86; P. Sharpe, ‘Poor children as apprentices in

Colyton, 1598-1830’, Continuity and Change, vi (1991), 253-70; S. King, The bastardy-

prone sub-society again: bastards and their fathers and mothers in Lancashire,

Wiltshire, and Somerset, 1800-40’, in A. Levene, T. Nutt & S. Williams (eds),

Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700-1850 (Basingstoke, 2005), 66-85; T. Nutt, ‘Illegitimacy,

paternal financial responsibility, and the 1834 Poor Law Commission Report: the

myth of the old poor law and the making of the new’, Economic History Review, lxiii

(2010), 335-61; A. Levene, ‘Family breakdown and the “welfare child” in nineteenth

and twentieth-century Britain’, History of the Family xi (2006), 67-79; S. King, Poverty

and Welfare in England (Manchester, 2000), 144.

3 T. Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle: some evidence from

seventeenth-century Norfolk’, in R. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-cycle (Cambridge,

1984), 351-404; L. A. Bothelo, Old Age and the English poor law, 1500-1700 (Woodbridge,

2004); S. R. Ottaway, The Decline of life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge,

2004); T. Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty: the record of Essex pauper letters, 1780-

1834’, in T. Hitchcock, P. King & P. Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty. The voices and

strategies of the English poor, 1640-1840 (Basingstoke, 1997), 127-54; N. Goose, ‘Poverty,

old age and gender in nineteenth-century England: the case of Hertfordshire’,

Continuity and Change, xx (2005), 351-84; R. M. Smith, ‘Ageing and well-being in early

modern England: pension trends and gender preferences under the English old poor

law, c. 1650-1800’, in P. Johnson & P. Thane (eds), Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity

(London, 1998), 64-95; D. Thomson, ‘The welfare of the elderly in the past: a

family or community responsibility?’, in M. Pelling & R. M. Smith (eds), Life, Death

and the Elderly: historical perspectives (London, 1991), 64-95.

4 S. King, ‘Sickness and Old Age’, in S. King, T. Nutt & A. Tomkins (eds), Narratives

of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England, i (London, 2006); T. Sokoll, Household and Family

among the Poor: The case of two Essex communities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

(Bochum, 1993); S. Williams, ‘Caring for the sick poor: poor law nurses in

Bedfordshire, c. 1770-1834’, in P. Lane, N. Raven & K. D. M. Snell (eds), Women,

Work and Wages in England, 1600-1850 (Woodbridge, 2004), 141-69; E. Miller, ‘English

Pauper Lunatics in the era of the Old Poor Law’, History of Psychiatry, 23, 2 (2012),

318-28; A. Levene, J. Reinarz & A. Williams, ‘Child Patients, Hospitals and the

Home in Eighteenth-Century England’, Family and Community History, 15, 1 (2012), 15-33.

5 B. Stapleton, ‘Inherited poverty and life-cycle poverty: Odiham, Hampshire, 1650-

1850’, Social History, 18 (1993), 339-55; S. King, ‘Reconstructing lives: the poor, the

poor law and welfare in Calverley, 1650-1820’, Social History 22 (1997), 318-38; P.

Sharpe, Population and Society in an East Devon Parish. Reproducing Colyton, 1540-1840 (Exeter,

2002), 234-49; S. Williams, ‘Poor relief, labourers’ households and living

standards in rural England, c. 1770-1834: a Bedfordshire case-study’, Economic History

Review, lviii (2005), 485-519; S. Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle under the English Poor

Law (Woodbridge, 2011); S. A. Shave, ‘The dependent poor? (Re)constructing the

lives of individuals “on the parish” in rural Dorset, 1800-1832’, Rural History, xx

(2009), 67-97.

6 Williams, Poverty, 101-19; Shave, ‘Dependent poor?’, 77-88; Ottaway, Decline of Life,

204, has reconstructed the relief histories of a limited number of elderly paupers,

in addition to longitudinal surveys in Terling and Puddletown, 1770-94.

7 Ottaway, Decline of Life, 189-220, 221-46.

8 David Eastwood has emphasised 1795 as a pivotal moment in provision of poor

relief nationally, see D. Eastwood, Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation in

Local Government 1750-1840 (Oxford, 1994), 121.

9 Williams, Poverty, 56.

10 Idem, 58.

11 Ibid, 102.

12 Id., 101, 107, 114.

13 Id., 119.

14 Williams, Poverty, 130.

15 Shave, ‘Dependent poor?’, 86 [italics as per original].

16 Idem, 85.

17 Ibid, 86-7.

18 Id., 89.

19 K. Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty (London & Boston, 1981), 41.

20 J. P. Huzel, ‘The Labourer and the Poor Law, 1750-1850’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.),

The Agrarian History of England and Wales Volume VI 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1989), 772.

21 S. King, Poverty and Welfare in England 1700-1850 (Manchester, 2000), 48-77.

22 Ibid., 54-5.

23 K. Wrightson & D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (New York &

London, 1979).

24 Smith, ‘Ageing and well-being’, 64-95; Ottaway, Decline of life, 184-6, 198-202, 207-

214, 222-39.

25 Ottaway, Decline of Life, 191. The reconstitution extends from 1537 to the mid-

nineteenth century, but the quality of marriage and burial data declines after

1788.

26 This is a different methodology to that adopted by Williams, whose cross-

sectional analyses focus primarily on recipients of regular weekly payments in

Campton and Shefford, because these comprised a larger proportion of total relief

than in Terling. This tends to favour ‘pensioner’-groups (the young, lone parents,

and the elderly), over ‘non-pensioners’ (couple-headed, working-age households).

Her qualitative surveys cover a much broader spectrum of relief. Williams, Poverty,

54-66.

27 Ibid., 235.

28 There were few parish charities in Terling to supplement statutory provision,

only clothes supplied by Henry Smith’s Charity and two parish almshouses. Idem,

213, 215.

29 Rules for nominal linkage were that the identity of each person could be

established only if they had two separate familial identifiers between the

overseers’ records and the FRF (e.g. reference to spouse of same name, plus

children of same name and age-range; reference to parent of same name, plus

siblings; payments for death of spouse linked to burial register/FRF event, plus

remarriage or further named children). This produced positive identifications

(1,339) and negative ones (169). The latter (11 per cent of all recipients

recorded) formed a residual category where the linkage rules demonstrated that

Person B was definitely not Person A. Once identified (positively and negatively),

each individual was given a unique serial number linked to their pattern of relief

recorded in the MS Access database.

30 Very occasionally, details of family structure recorded in the overseers

accounts appear to contradict the CAMPOP reconstitution (for example, by revealing

the existence of additional children within a family born outside the parish).

31 See H. R. French, ‘’Living in Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Terling’, in S.

Hindle, A. Shepard & J. Walter (eds), Remaking English Society. Social Relations and Social

Change in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2013), 290-1.

32 ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Parish Vestry Book, 3 Mar. 1824.

33 William, Poverty, 91-2, 99-100.

34 ERO D/P 299/8/1 Terling Parish Vestry Book, 1 May 1775; French, Living in Poverty’,

291.

35 ERO D/P 299/8/2 Terling Parish Vestry Book, 20 Nov. 1785.

36 ERO D/P 299/8/2 Terling Parish Vestry Book, 25 Mar., 6 Jul. and 21 Jul. 1795.

37 ERO D/P 299/12/3 Terling Parish Overseers’ Accounts, 31 Jan. 1801; D/P299/8/2

Terling Parish Vestry Book 14 Nov. 1799.

38 ERO D/P 299/12/4 Terling Parish Overseers’ Accounts, Jan. 1801, 2 Oct. 1803, 4

Feb. 1809; D/P 299/12/5, 27 May and 30 Oct. 1811.

39 ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, surveyors to set unemployed to work, 19

Feb., 6 May and 23 Jul. 1816; list of labourers out of work to be kept by parish

clerk, 1 Feb. 1819.

40 See Shave, ‘Sturges Bourne’s Poor Law Reforms’, 414-20.

41 ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, 5 Jan., 3 Feb. and 12 Feb. 1824; Karel

Williams suggests that the proportion of parishes instituting labour rates in

England and Wales may have declined between 1822 and 1834. Williams, Pauperism, 47.

42 ERP D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Book, 26 Feb. 1827; ERO D/P 299/8/5 Terling

Vestry Book, 1828-36.

43 ERO D/P 299/8/5 Terling Vestry Book, 25 Mar. 1835.

44 S. Horrell & J. Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation and the

transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790-1865’, Economic History Review, xlviii

(1995), 89-117; J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution

(Cambridge, 2010); J. Broad, ‘Parish economies of welfare, 1650-1834’, Historical

Journal, xlii (1999), 985-1006; N. Verdon, Rural Workers in Nineteenth-Century England: Gender,

Work and Wages (Woodbridge, 2002); J. Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution

Britain (Cambridge, 2007).

45 Sokoll, Household and Family, 215.

46 ‘Abstract of the answers and returns made pursuant to an act passed in the 43rd

year of His Majesty King George III’, (P.P. 1803-4, XIII.1), 152-171, compared with

‘Census of Great Britain, 1851. Population tables I. numbers of the inhabitants, in

the years 1801, 1811, 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851 England and Wales, IV Eastern

Division (1852), (P. P. 1852-3, LXXXV.1), 20-1.

47 See C. Ferguson, C. Thornton & A. Wareham (eds), ‘The Essex Hearth Tax Return

Michaelmas 1670’, The British Record Society Hearth Tax Series Volume VIII (London, 2012),

Map 6, 22.

48 Relief levels remained relatively constant, but extremely high, in Braintree

after 1800. Sokoll, Household and Family, 138, 223; Williams, Poverty, 36-8; D. A.

Baugh, ‘The cost of poor relief in south-east England, 1790-1834’, Economic History

Review, 2nd ser., 28 (1975), 60.

49 Figures for the 1760s probably reflect a doubling in total relief levels since

1700. Ottaway found that annual per capita relief levels doubled from 4s.between

1700 and 1705 to 8s. between 1770 and 1774. Ottaway, Decline of Life, 222.

50 Figure 2 charts the total numbers of recipients for each form of relief. It does

not discount those who received more than one type of relief per year (i.e. weekly

recipients who also received ‘occasional allowances’).

51 See above note 8.

52 For an examination of the general trends among all recipients of poor relief in

Terling 1762-1834, see H. R. French, ‘An irrevocable shift: detailing the dynamics

of rural poverty in southern England: a case study’, Economic History Review, lxviii

(2015), ?

53 ERO D/P 299/12/4 & 5 Terling Overseers’ Accounts 1801-9, 1809-18.

54 ERO D/P 299/12/3 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 1790-1801, ‘Return of the Poor

Inhabitants of the Parish of Terling Taken in the Month of January 1801’. The high

degree of organisation of poor law payments and the detailed surveys of the poor in

Terling echo Shave’s observations about the effects of Sturges Bourne’s Act, but

they prefigure the Act and Terling only convened a select vestry in January 1824.

Shave, ‘Sturges Bourne’s Poor Law Reforms’, 414-20; ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry

Minutes, 1815-27, 29 Jan. 1824.

55 In Ardleigh in 1796, Sokoll found that those in receipt of relief comprised ‘40

per cent of the population’. Sokoll, Household and Family, 127. Paupers comprised only

12-17.3 per cent of the population in Shefford between 1801/3 and 1820/1. Williams,

Poverty, 72.

56 Sokoll, Household and Family, 51-89.

57 Ottaway, Decline of Life, 184-7.

58 Sokoll, Household and Family, 154-81.

59 Ibid., 276.

60 Ottaway, Decline of Life, 210; Sokoll, Household and Family, 180; Williams, Poverty, 105.

61 Sokoll notes that in Ardleigh in 1790 adult males earned 8s. per week in winter,

9s. in summer, and 15s. in harvest, an average of 8s. 9½d per week. Sokoll, Household

and Family, 118.

62 T. L. Richardson, ‘Agricultural Labourers’ Wages and the Cost of Living in

Essex, 1790-1840: A Contribution to the Standard of Living Debate’, in B. A.

Holderness & M. Turner (eds), Land, Labour and Agriculture, 1700-1920. Essays for Gordon Mingay

(London & Rio Grande, 1991), 90.

63 Under the parish employment scheme adopted by the parish in Feb. 1824, pay rates

were 9s. per week for able-bodied men, 6s. per week for ‘old men’, and 3s. per week

for ‘lads’. These rates may have reflected both lower post-war male earnings

levels, and the desire to impose a financial disincentive on parish employment. ERO

D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, 12 Feb. 1824.

64 Snell, Annals, 45; Horrell and Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force participation’,

105; J. Burnette, ‘The wages and employment of female day-labourers in English

agriculture, 1740-1850’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., LVII (2004), 664-90.

65 C.f. Shepherd, ‘Income, Domestic Economy and the Distribution of Property’, 141;

Snell, Annals, 21-2; S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Women’s labour force

participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790-1865’, Economic

History Review 2nd ser., XLVIII (1995), 101-5; P. Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working

Women in the English Economy, 1700-1850 (Basingstoke, 1995), 135; Verdon, Rural Workers, 99-

102; Ottaway, Decline of Life, 217.

66 Williams, Poverty, 65.

67 Ottaway, Decline of Life, 231.

68 Verdon, Rural Workers, 60.

69 K. D. M. Snell & J. Millar, ‘Lone-parent families and the welfare state: past

and present’, Continuity and Change, ii (1987), 395-409.

70 ERO D/DRa E16 List of Labouring Families in the Parish of Terling, 5 May 1775.

71 195 of the 250 individuals listed in 1801 can be identified in the MS Access

Database. Of these, dates of birth can be found or estimated for 173 (or 89 per

cent).

72 ERO D/P 299/12/4 Terling Parish Overseers’ Accounts, 4 Feb. 1809; ERO D/P

299/12/5 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 4 May 1811.

73 B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: Study in Town Life (London, 1901), 137; Baugh, ‘Cost of

Poor Relief’, 57-62.

74 These figures are higher than Ottaway’s mean ‘pension’ sums of 29d (2s. 5d) for

all female recipients in Terling 1791-1800 and 27.1d (2s. 3d) for men, because they

include the values of all ‘occasional payments’ per annum. Ottaway, Decline of Life,

228.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid., 243-4.

77 Ottaway’s finding for the period 1770-94 is that the age of 70 ‘was a very

common marker of male dependency’, whereas women’s dependency varied by location.

Ibid., 202, 240-1.

78 Sokoll, Household and Family, 265-6.

79 Williams, Poverty, 132-3, Baugh, ‘Poor Relief’, 55-63.

80 ERO D/P 299/12/4 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 19 June 1803.

81 Idem, 4 Feb. 1809.

82 ERO D/P 299/12/5 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 4 May 1811.

83 Widows such as Sarah Cutler (aged 50) and Mary Chalice (aged 67) had previously

received occasional payments primarily for the costs of clothes, shoes or food and

drink, but in the period from spring 1795 they received regular additional payments

of 1-3s. per week until the summer of 1796. Thereafter, both moved to receiving

weekly allowances (in more than 50 weeks per annum), receiving 2s. 6d. per week

until the spring of 1802.

84 ERO D/P 299/8/4 Terling Vestry Minutes, 1815-27. The vestry recorded that men

and women were ‘out of employ’ in Feb., May and July 1816; Apr. 1817; Nov. 1818;

Feb. 1819; Mar. 1822; Mar. & Dec. 1823, and Jan. & Feb. 1824. In Feb. 1824 the new

select vestry resolved to follow the model of the parish of Oundle, by requiring

householders contribute to labourers’ wages according the size of their rating

assessments, with the rates of those who took on unemployed labourers being reduced

accordingly. Idem, 3 Feb. 1824.

85 ERO D/P 299/12/5 Terling Overseers’ Accounts, 4 May 1811.

86 K. Morgan & C. Ó Gráda, ‘The Poor Law of Old England: Institutional Innovation

and Demographic Regimes’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History XLI, 3 (2011), 352.

87 Williams, Poverty, 135.

88 Williams gives figures of 3-25 per cent of the population in Bedfordshire in the

1830s. Ibid., 134-5.

89 C.f. Shepherd, ‘Income, Domestic Economy and the Distribution of Property’, 140-1.