Abstract
‘The whole business of settlements, even in its present amended form, is utterly contradictory to all ideas of freedom. The parish persecution of men whose families are likely to become chargeable, and of poor women who are near lying-in, is a most disgraceful and disgusting tyranny.’ In these forthright terms, the Reverend T. R. Malthus condemned the laws relating to the settlement and removal of the poor. His words echoed those of Adam Smith, who more than twenty years earlier had maintained that ‘there is scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age … who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill contrived law of settlements’.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliographical Notes
1. Contemporary Material
A large amount of printed material on settlement and removal, much of it highly critical of the system, exists for the nineteenth century. Here we can only indicate the main areas where this is located. A useful introduction to the complex state of settlement law can be found in J. R. McCulloch, Statistical Account of the British Empire, 4th edn (1854) vol. II, pp. 652–3. Sir George Nicholls, History of the English Poor Law, vol. III by T. Mackay (reissued, 1904), ch. XVI offers a fuller but equally clear exposition of the State of the law and the problems involved in its reform, as does P. F. Aschrott, The English Poor Law System, Past and Present, 2nd edn (1902) part II, ch. 1, sec. III. Details of the various statutes affecting settlement and removal, and of some of the more important legal cases involving settlement, can be found in the numerous legal textbooks on settlement published to help parish and union officials and others involved in settlement litigation find their way through the tangle of statute and case law on the subject. J. F. Archbold, The Poor Law Comprising the Whole of the Law of Settlement and All he Authorities, 15th edn (1898) which went through ten editions between 1850 and 1898, J. F. Symonds, The Law of Settlement and Removal, 4th edn (1903) and Herbert Davey, The Law of Settlement (1908) are good examples of this, whilst E. Lidbetter, Settlement and Removal (1932) shows that, even after the disappearance of the unions and the boards of guardians, a knowledge of the law of settlement was considered essential for aspiring candidates in local government service.
George Coode, Report to the Poor Law Board on the Law of Settlement and Removal of the Poor (1851), and Robert Pashley, Pauperism and Poor Laws (1852), constitute the two most comprehensive critiques of the law of settlement as it existed at mid-century. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900, vol. I (1966) vol. II (1972) provides a useful aid to tracking down some of the numerous articles on settlement and removal which appeared in nineteenth-century periodicals. Sir Edmund Head’s article of 1848 in the Edinburgh Review has recently been reprinted in A. W. Coats (ed.), Poverty in the Victorian Age, vol. II (1973). Discussions of settlement and removal also figure prominently in the voluminous pamphlet literature on the Poor Law.
An indispensable source of information and opinion is of course the great mass of evidence collected by the many nineteenth-century parliamentary select committees on settlement and removal, particularly those of 1847 (P.P., 1847, XI); 1854 (P.P., 1854, XVII); 1857–60 (P.P., 1857–8, XIII); (P.P., 1859 [sess. 2] VII); 1860 (P.P., 1860, XVII) and 1878 (P.P., 1878–9, XII), together with the evidence on, and discussion of, the problem of settlement in the reports and appendices of the Royal Commissions of 1832–4 and 1905–09.
2 Recent Works
In contrast to the spate of nineteenth-century writing on settlement and removal, the question has been relatively neglected by modern social historians, particularly with regard to developments after the 1834 Act. Inevitably S. and B. Webb, English Local Government, English Poor Law History, Part II, The Last Hundred Years, vol. I (1929; reprinted, 1963) provides the basic account of the reforms of the law of settlement and their effects after 1834. Arthur Redford’s pioneering Labour Migration in England 1800–1850 (1926; 2nd edn with introduction by W. H. Chaloner, 1963) contains a valuable discussion of the operation of the law of settlement and its effect on labour mobility. More recently, historical geographers and economic historians have begun to show a renewed interest in Poor Law settlement and removal as it affected the pattern of settlement and population distribution in rural areas. Dennis R. Mills, ‘The Poor Laws and the Distribution of Population, c. 1600–1860, with Special Reference to Lincolnshire’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, XXVI (1959) pp. 185–95, marks the beginnings of this type of study, and chapter 8 of his English Rural Communities: The Impact of a Specialised Economy (1973) continues the analysis with reference to Nottinghamshire. Another article by the same author, ‘Francis Howell’s Report on the Operation of the Laws of Settlement in Nottinghamshire, 1848’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, LXXVI (1972) pp. 46–52, examines the report of one of the Poor Law Board’s inspectors on the effects of settlement and removal in his area.
B. A. Holderness, ‘“Open” and “Close” Parishes in England in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, Agricultural History Review, XX (1972) pp. 126–39 contains a valuable discussion of the number, distribution and effect of ‘close’ parishes in rural areas. Dennis R. Mills,’ spatial Implications of the Settlement Laws in Rural England’ in Poverty and Social Policy, 1750–1870, Open University Arts Fourth Level Course, Great Britain 1750–1950: Sources and Historiography Block IV Units 12–16 (1974) provides an excellent brief summary of the changes in the law of settlement between 1834 and 1865, and also makes suggestions as to the possible design of further local research into questions of settlement, ‘close’ and ‘open’ parishes and population distribution in rural areas, which may go some way towards remedying the relative neglect of nineteenth-century settlement and removal by historians.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 1976 David Ashforth, Anne Digby, Francis Duke, M. W. Flinn, Derek Fraser, Norman McCord, Audrey Paterson, Michael E. Rose
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rose, M.E. (1976). Settlement, Removal and the New Poor Law. In: Fraser, D. (eds) The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15643-6_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15643-6_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-16656-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-15643-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)