Refereed paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference University of Newcastle 25-27 September 2006

Lessons from the English Poor Laws

Victor Quirk Centre of Full Employment and Equity University of Newcastle1. Abstract
The English Poor Laws are reviewed to illustrate a model of social domination based around the metaphor of the toll bridge, in which a controllable threshold separates a relatively repulsive situation from a relatively attractive one. The morphing of feudal servitude into waged labour progressively confronted the peasantry with a threshold separating food and shelter on one side from unemployed destitution on the other. Those controlling the threshold manipulated the repulsiveness of non-work to produce the optimal degree of pressure, enhancing employer power over setting terms of employment while minimising risks of crime and insurrection.

1. Introduction This paper reviews developments in the English Poor Laws to illustrate a model of social domination: the strategic management of a threshold separating a relatively repulsive situation from a relatively attractive one (Quirk, 2005). In this model, based on the metaphor of the toll bridge, power accrues to those who can determine if and when others may cross the threshold, which allows them to impose conditions of passage, such as the payment of a toll, or to continue imposing a charge for the right to remain on the attractive side of the threshold (eg., the landlords rent). This arrangement enables the imposition of a higher toll where: 1. The desperation to cross the threshold and remain on the attractive side is increased, as when one side becomes relatively more repulsive or the other relatively more attractive, or both. 2. Opportunities to by-pass the threshold are restricted. 3. The threshold is sufficiently secure from gate-crashing or usurpation of control. I apply this model to the political economy of the employment threshold, and in this instance, to 700 years of English labour history as a preliminary to an analysis of the management of unemployment in Australia. Most of the principles and practices applying to the management of the unemployed in contemporary Australia were originally developed under the Poor Laws, so understanding how and why they were developed could enhance our understanding of why they are deployed today. The great advantage is that the original proponents of these policies were less conscious of the need to disguise their strategic intent than are their modern counterparts, who hold office only with the electoral support of the people these policies are designed to disempower.

This is a distillation of a Phd chapter currently under construction.

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The difficulty of using the extensive and richly detailed body of scholarship available on the poor laws as a testing range for a political economic model is that any summarisation unavoidably loses important details and nuances, at the risk of biased selectivity. Nevertheless, examining the management of unemployment over a millennium reveals a pattern of social domination that is difficult to ignore, where some people were pressured to produce more than they consumed by others who consumed and accumulated more than they produced. The real innovations in todays labour market and welfare reform policies, are not the policies themselves, as these have been in use for hundreds of years, but the politically acceptable reasons modern policy makers have contrived to justify using them.

2. The creation of the employment threshold. a. Feudalism By the 14th century, the enslavement of indigenous Britons by a succession of invaders (Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans) had resulted in a power structure where agricultural production was undertaken by peasants bound to feudal lords under various forms of enforced servitude (Eden, 1966:8), the burden of which was generally inherited by the bonded persons offspring in perpetuity (Anderson, 1974:147). An extensive body of traditional practices and laws ensured that large manorial landholders maintained economic advantage over peasants (of various status) in their domain, primarily by denying them the right to travel elsewhere in search of work, legally obliging unpaid work for several days per week on the manorial demesne, and by strategically monopolising aspects of village production (banalities) such as requiring all to mill their grain (for a fee) at the Lords mill, or bake their bread in the lords oven-house (Anderson, 1974:184). Socio-economic domination by the feudal lords, along with their integration within the military / magistracy / legislature, provided little hope of withstanding or confronting their exploitative oppression. Nevertheless, for several reasons feudal bonds between master and servant were sufficiently loosened during the course of the 14th century to enable the capitalist seed to flourish. b. Emergence of waged labour Over several generations, as the Norman conquest diminished in its ferocity, the means of replenishing the ranks of absolute bondage through capturing prisoners declined, and as the races intermingled, the racial justification for slavery gradually disappeared (Eden, 1966:9). Productivity grew across western Europe following the demise of Roman-style agrarian slavery, as the claims of the lord over their bonded workforce became increasingly specified, setting out particular tasks and days of service, enabling the peasant to produce more for their own consumption or exchange (Anderson,1974: 182-5).The revival of commerce in Europe after 1100 brought increasing numbers of commercial travellers, traders and markets. Commerce was greatly stimulated by the encouragement of Edward III in the 1330s for a Flemish woollen manufacturer and his workers to establish operations in England which prompted others to follow, leading to a rapid expansion in textile manufacture. Indigenous animosity to the foreign traders caused them to remain within the safety of walled cities, attracting workers and buyers into these commercial centres (Eden, 1966:27). We have the evidence of wage control legislation in the mid 14th century as proof that a significant number of people received wages for their labour by that time (Quigley, 1996). Successive sovereigns had granted the growing cities the right to make and police their own by-laws, making them a refuge for peasants fleeing their traditional masters. Bonded villeins extinguished their bonds of servitude after one year of absence from

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their masters service without recall (Eden, 1966:30). Runaways lost themselves in the growing anonymity of distant cities. Given that areas closest to major markets were among the slowest to abandon Feudal social relations of production, the transition to capitalism in England appears to have advanced in a patchwork manner, in stages, in different places at different times (Dobb, 1963:39). The exodus from the countryside and serfdom was however well underway when the crunch came for Feudalism in England: in 1347-8 two years of crop failure were immediately followed by the arrival of the bubonic plague, which had swept through Europe from Asia killing a third of the population. c. The problem of full employment It was at this moment in history that the consequences of full employment became painfully evident to the feudal ruling class: the decimation of the English peasantry produced a profound shortage of labour. The problems this caused are reflected in legislative efforts to control the consequent wage-push inflation. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 proclaimed: Whereas to curb the malice of servants who after the pestilence were idle and unwilling to serve without securing excessive wages, it was recently ordained by our lord the king [that]servants, both men and women, should be bound to serve in return for the salaries and wages that were customary in those places where they were obligated to serve during the twentieth year of the reign of our said lord the king, that is to say, five or six years earlier; and whereas the same servants, on refusing to serve in any manner, were to be punished by imprisonment of their bodies (Stephenson & Marcham, 1937:225) This attempt at wage control also sought to enforce class solidarity among employers, so that in addition to gaoling anyone who refused work at pre-plague wage levels, any employer could prosecute any other who could be proven to be overpaying workers (Bland, et al., 1937:165). Servants continued to abandon their servitude and travel in search of better remuneration, begging for alms along the way (Nicholls, 1854:58-59; Leonard, 1965:4). These changes gave rise in 1376 to the first laws barring alms-giving to those able to work, which ordered the imprisonment of vagrants until they agreed to return home, and imposed a fine of 10 on anyone caught harbouring a runaway servant (Eden, 1966:42-43; Leonard, 1965:4 - 5). Peasant resentment with their unpaid service obligations to the lords was intensified by the imposition of a poll tax on everyone over the age of 14 on three occasions during the 1370s. By increasing the net scarcity of money, this would have increased the demand for waged work and the desire to abandon traditional obligatory service. It was a poll tax collector that sparked the anti-feudal revolt of 1381. Led by several charismatic tacticians, notably Walter (Watt) Tylor of Kent, tens of thousands of villagers and townsfolk systematically swept through the countryside burning the manorial records that specified the terms of their bondage to the landholding class and strategically executing senior figures in the administration of Richard II involved in the imposition of the poll tax. As arguably the most serious threat posed to the stability of English government in the course of the middle ages it was a warning to Englands ruling landholding class (Ormrod, 1990; Eiden, 1998). The rebels demands were: the abolition of slavery; freedom of commerce in market towns, without tolls or imposts; and a fixed rent on lands, instead of services due by villeinage (Eden, 1966:53)

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Though the rebellion was brutally suppressed, the nobility remained under pressure to relinquish their rights to bonded labour (Eiden, 1998:30). To insulate themselves from the risks of production associated with labour shortages and rising costs, landowners increasingly chose to lease their manorial demesnes to tenant farmers rather than farm them themselves. Initially, these were let to small farmers thus preserving a semblance of the traditional relationship of peasant small-holders to the manorial estate. Over time, to achieve greater commercial viability, demesnes were leased as a whole to large scale farmers, or to absentee investors who employed managers to run their enterprise. This new class of people were insensitive to the traditions of feudal community and their profit-seeking practices undermined social stability. Convertible husbandry, where land was alternatively cropped for corn, etc., and then sewn with nitrogen fixing grasses and fertilised by grazing sheep and cattle, boosted output but required the consolidation of dispersed manorial paddocks into a single block, involving hedging and ditching its perimeter. Manorial enclosure removed traditional rights of passage of peasants and small tenant farmers to the commons, and impacted on other practices that enhanced the small-holders viability, such as the gathering of firewood, or the gleaning of stubble from the demesne post-harvest (Manning, 1988:16-17). Without the means to live off the land, increasing numbers of peasants were forced to seek waged work in order to survive, giving rise to mass unemployment. 3. The states response to mass unemployment Unemployment became endemic by the early 16th century as the rural labour force was rationalised by commercial methods of agricultural production, private and public armies were disbanded, and population growth resumed following the plagues and wars of the 14th Century (S&B Webb,1927:42-43). A growing army of landless peasants wandered from district to district begging for food and work (Leonard, 1965:15-17). As the feudal estates withered away, unemployed destitution became the alternate to waged employment instead of feudal servitude. Those without work begged or stole or starved (Leonard, 1965:225). While property owners could employ labourers for crusts of bread, the desperation of the poor also made them a social menace. Robbery was punishable by death, so victims were routinely killed to prevent their bearing witness to the crime. With violent attack an ever present consequence of refusing a plea for alms, confrontation by a beggar was fearful in itself. Even when violence was unlikely, with plagues a constant fear, the unsanitary and diseased condition of the poor terrified those forced into contact with them on a regular basis (Garratty, 1979:23)2. a. Early Tudor Poor Law Begging had become a problem throughout Europe. In 1516 Thomas Moore acknowledged that violent suppression of beggars did not work, and the Scottish philosopher John Major while at the University of Paris argued that to eliminate begging the state would have to provide for those who cannot work. At Leisneg in Saxony, under the Ordinance of the Common Chest of 1523, Martin Luther placed a total prohibition on begging and established guardians of the poor to raise and dispense relief through centralised collection, funded from ecclesiastical rents and a parish rate. This model was adopted in other European cities between 1522 and 1530 (S&B Webb, 1927a: 31-32).
2

Suppose there is at some Church or other a high festival drawing great crowds: one has to make ones way into the building between two lines of disease, vomitings, ulcers, or other afflictions disgusting even to speak of. One would have to be made of iron not to be disturbed, especially when ulcers of this sort are not only forced upon the eyes, but upon the nose and mouth, and are almost touched by the hands and bodies of passers-by, so insolent are they in their begging (Garratty, 1979:23)

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The influential Spanish scholar Juan Luis Vives proposed a systematic response to the problem in an influential pamphlet De subventione pauperum in March 1526, based on his observations in France, Belgium and England. Vives was a refugee from the inquisition, a friend of Thomas More and a favoured intellectual of Henry VIII, and his ideas are evident in subsequent Tudor legislation for the provision of education to pauper children, the use of workshops to foster industriousness in the poor, and the practice of classifying and managing the poor according to their circumstances (S&B Webb,1927:31-39). Vives reconciled early Christian principles of collective sharing with the less Christian society of his day where even the Church expected payment for its services. Without seeking to displace ecclesiastical charity, Vives saw a greater role for the state in addressing the needs of the poor, arguing that cities and states exist because no human is entirely self-sufficient, and that everyone needs either material or spiritual help from someone else. The state had a Christian duty to remove the need for people to beg by ensuring all, even the aged and disabled, were made to work to their capacity to provide for themselves (Tournay, 2001:266-272). Although many of Vives practical suggestions were gradually implemented, the Christian love and charity he advocated was rarely in evidence in the poor laws of the 16th century. Given the traditional role of the church as a provider of alms to the poor, Henry VIIIs dissolution of the monasteries (1536-1540) intensified the problem for the unemployed by removing a significant traditional source of welfare (Hoyle, 1995; S&B Webb,1927:44-46). Anticipating an increase in begging following their closure (Elton, 1953:66), Henry legislated For the Punishment of Sturdy Vagabonds and Beggars in 1536 (Stephenson & Marcham, 1937:313-314). Officials were ordered to collect charitable donations and dispense them to those who could not work so they would not need to beg. Any residual donated funds were to be used so that those who could work were daily kept in continual labour, whereby every one of them may get their own substance and living with their own hands (Slack,1990:59-61; Stephenson & Marcham, 1937:314). The funds raised were, of course, insufficient to meet the need. This failure of legislative design is all the more telling when we learn that a detailed earlier draft of this act survived, stored as an official document from Thomas Cromwells administration, authored by an undisclosed and unofficial source3. Its most striking feature is its detail of a system for guaranteeing paid work for the unemployed. It proposed that eight commissioners of public works be empowered to initiate projects to build or improve harbours, bridges and roads, etc. (Elton, 1953:53). A week before such works were to commence in a given district, a proclamation would summon all able bodied poor (ie, the unemployed) to report to work on the projects for a reasonable wage. Anyone seeking charity who did not attend was to be seized and taken to the place of work, gaoled if they continued to refuse to participate and branded on the thumb to enable detection for subsequent non-attendance (deemed a felony). Those not attending for reason of illness were to be given free medical care until they were fit to work. It was to be funded by levying a progressive income tax (Elton, 1953:58-59). The final draft of this act was expunged of this public sector job creation plan, yet the draft appears to have been well known to subsequent policy makers, because passages are reproduced in
3

Elton makes a case that its author was printer and pamphleteer William Marshall, a known correspondent with Thomas Cromwell who also undertook printing work for him. Marshall had earlier translated a poor relief law from Ypres and expressed an active interest in the subject. Elton suggests the impending dissolution of the monasteries necessitated a new poor law and that Cromwell, the likely author of the final act, was prompted to offer Marshall the commission given his expertise and interest in the subject(Elton, 1953:65-66).

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subsequent acts and to have informed the more humanistic elements of the famous Elizabethan acts of the second half of the 16th century (Elton, 1953:63). The reasons for rejecting the public works scheme are unknown: Elton speculates that parliamentarians would be expected to reject the taxation measures, which is plausible, but additionally we need to acknowledge that policy makers were aware of the consequences of full employment recorded in the Statute of Labourers. Englands rulers were unlikely to support a plan that they be taxed in order raise the market power of their servants. It took the failure of the act of 1536 to curb begging and a further 11 acts over the next 65 years before policy makers fully accepted that people will beg and steal if their only alternative is to starve (Slack,1990:51-53).

b. Early Elizabeth I In 1572 Elizabeth I enhanced the centralised collection and distribution of charity introduced in 1536 by removing the voluntarism of its collection. In parishes where there was insufficient collection, officials were to levy a tax on all dwelling in their locality and appoint overseers to distribute the collection (Bland, 1937:372; S&B Webb,1927:51-51). Recipients of poor relief who did not wear a coloured badge with the initial of their parish indicating they were paupers would have a hole burned through the gristle of their ear (Longmate,1974:14). In 1576 a further statute was enacted requiring those who could work to be given raw materials (wool, flax, hemp, iron etc.) and paid for what they produced. The officials were then charged with selling the output in order to pay for more materials. Anyone refusing work was to be sent to a house of correction. People over the age of 14 caught begging were, for a first offence, grievously whipped and burnt through the gristle of their ear with a hot iron unless they could find someone to take them into service for one year, and second offenders over 18 were executed unless someone was willing to employ them for two years (Eden, 1966: 127-8). c. The development of the Act of 1601 The late Elizabethan era saw numerous attempts to violently suppress vagrancy as the fear of a rising tide of masterless men in and around London fed ruling class insecurities. There were frequent riots over issues such as food prices (which had risen continuously after 1573), the mistreatment of apprentices and in protest against the progressive enclosure of common land (Manning,1988:221 252; S&B Webb,1927:6162). The central elements of the famous Act of 1601 were practically established with the Act for the Relief of the Poor of 1597-8: Parish-based collection of rates to provide for the poor, including the able-bodied, child and adult relief recipients set to work, the binding of pauper children as apprentices, and begging prohibited apart from the begging for food. The generosity of its provisions reflected deep fears as to the public order consequences of high food prices during the year of dearth (1597), blamed at the time on the decline of tillage (small scale agricultural self-sufficiency) arising from enclosures, which had been the chief complaint of those behind the Enslow Hill Rebellion of 1596 (Manning, 1988:221-229). d. The Act of 1601 in operation The famous Act of 1601 was the final statement of this period of legislative development. It was essentially the 1597 Act with begging completely forbidden and more detail as to how rates were to be collected. Notwithstanding various amendments and extensions, this act stood for 233 years. The Blessed 43rd4, required that each
4

So named because it was enacted in the 43rd year of Elizabeths 45 year reign.

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parish hold an annual meeting of rate-payers and appoint two ratepayers to serve for a fixed term (usually a year) as unpaid overseers of the poor. They were to collect rates from each land-occupying (as opposed to land-owning) parishioner according to their capacity to pay, and then use these funds to relieve the poor people of their parish (Oxley, 1974:34-50). Relief took many forms: the direct payment of money (in the form of weekly pensions or doles), provision of goods such as food and clothing, shelter and (later) medical treatment to the impotent poor (the sick and elderly). Unmarried mothers were catered for under provisions for bastardy that required the overseers to locate the fathers and force them to contribute to the upkeep of their offspring. Apprenticeships were arranged for pauper children to reduce the likelihood of them becoming a future burden on the poor rates. Rent assistance was paid or shelter provided for the homeless. The able bodied poor, ie. the unemployed, were paid a dole (the word used in the act) on the proviso that they each day worked on a stock of materials (eg., flax, hemp, wool) supplied by the parish from the poor rates (Oxley, 1974:51-57). Magistrates were responsible for ensuring each parish met their responsibilities, and elaborate systems of penalties and fines existed to punish omissions of reporting or failure to carry-out of responsibilities, such as the setting of the able bodied poor to work (Leonard, 1965:178-183). Direct pressure was put on employers by the courts to retain their workforces during trade slumps and other crises, reflecting a traditional expectation that the master be responsible for the welfare of the servant (Leonard, 1965:226-236). Implementation of the act was uneven because funds were raised, expended and administered locally, yet at the same time, this decentralised structure enabled the system to operate even when central government was preoccupied with the 17th century constitutional crises (S&B Webb,1927:80, 95-06). For their part, the ratepayers who administered this system balanced the inconvenience of their unpaid obligation with the cost (in increased rates) of taking the path of least time and stress, ie., meeting all requests for relief with grants of dole money to avoid the threats and remonstrations occasioned by refusal. The act required the able bodied to be given work to offset the cost of their relief, and as a disincentive to malingering, but the discouragement of relief applicants could also entail discouraging potential claimants from entering the parish, by specifying minimum permissible acreages for new dwellings, and refusing assistance to paupers who could be the responsibility of another parish. The determination of a paupers correct parish became a torturous process following notorious legislation of 1662 that drew on ancient laws of feudal settlement, whereby those without the means to provide for themselves were often expelled to the parish in which they were born, despite having not lived there for decades (Leonard, 1965:168-169) Poor parishioners were also encouraged to emigrate to other parts of England and the Empire, particularly the colonies of Virginia and the Barbados Islands. Poor Law overseers were also charged with ordering employers to find work for people, and several parishes required dole recipients to obtain the signatures of a list of ratepayers from whom they sought work as a condition of receiving their dole, or perform unpaid work for them in the manner of the later Roundsman system(Leonard, 1965:226-236). d. Evolution of workhouses The Act of 1601 directed that the unemployed receive a dole provided they undertook work assigned to them by the parish overseer. In some places the work entailed outdoor labour such as quarrying and compounding rock for road maintenance, or animal husbandry, but the more common arrangement was to have them spin or weave textiles and other materials. By the late 16th Century some towns and parishes had already been in the practice of raising money to buy materials on which the poor could work. Leonard

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reports the practice appearing as early as 1581, but becoming more widespread after 1630 (Leonard, 1965:224-225), encouraged by the interest Charles I took in the improvement of the parish relief system (Oxley, 1974:17). Sometimes established through private bequests5, this practice became more widespread following the Act of 1601, which allowed parish rate money to be used to purchase a stock. Initially, it was rare for the work to be done in a public building, although stocks of textiles were sometimes maintained by a municipal authority, or entrusted to the safe-keeping of a local merchant who took responsibility for allocating work to the poor who worked on these materials in their homes. Growing concern that this created a temptation for embezzlement led to the practice of using a house owned by the parish as an early form of workhouse, and in several locations from 1630 onward, to the erection of purposebuilt workhouses. While the early workhouses were intended to deter malingering they were not intentionally punitive. Apart from storing the stock and tools, they were venues for the imparting of vocational skill and were hoped to offset the cost of provision through the sale of produce (Slack, 1990:32-33; Leonard, 1965:226). Other institutions existed at this time for disciplining the poor, known as Houses of Correction, which provided a temporary lodging for stranger vagrants and a house of detention in which the idlers and offenders convicted of small causes could be made to work hard and were possibly reformed (Leonard, 1965:229). Claims for relief rose steadily in the later 17th Century on account of the demobilisation following the English civil war, the continuing rationalisation of the agricultural labour force, and the growing population of cities where people lost their communal supports. Between 1659 1704, some reformers responded to the problem with proposals to organise pauper labour to be more efficient and to make them people of better character and profitable for the parish as a way of reducing the cost of their maintenance (S&B Webb, 1927a:102-108). Proposals for workhouses (eg., by Richard Haines in 1678) and joint stock companies that would manage pauper production to profitability were numerous. Philanthropist Thomas Thirmin built and operated his own pauper business between 1676-1697 employing as many as 1700 people (S&B Webb, 1927a:105-106). The culmination of this phase of policy development was John Careys Corporation of the Poor established in Bristol in 1696 which provided relief on the condition that people enter and remain in the workhouse. Whereas the profitability of their labour was hardly sufficient to cover the investment of building the workhouse, the workhousetest was found to be valuable for another reason: it deterred all but the most desperately poor from seeking assistance (S&B Webb, 1927a:119-121). 4. Deterrence Careys discovery of the workhouse test coincided with an emerging sentiment for greater deterrence of relief applications. Concerns over the rising cost of provision (S&B Webb,1927:109) prompted efforts to reduce pension lists, and following a request by William III, legislation was enacted in 1697 requiring annual investigation of the circumstances of relief recipients and the culling of those no longer deserving assistance, the publication of recipients names in public notices and newspapers and the reinstatement of the practice obliging recipients to wear a patch with the initials of their parish. Though largely justified as fraud control measures, they undoubtedly also served as shame sanctions to deter people from applying for relief until they were extremely

Leonard (1965: 222) reports that some of these bequests were still providing for this purpose centuries later. Andrew Windsor left 200 in a will in 1621, generating 14 P.a. from interest which was intended for setting the poor to work spinning cloth. In 1829 this money was still providing for the poor to be spinning sheeting.

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desperate (Oxley, 1974:53-55; Slack, 1990:32). The legislation of 1697 coincides with a report by John Locke on behalf of the Board of Trade, in which he asserts that the: evil has proceeded neither from a scarcity of provisions, nor for want of employment for the poor, since God has blessed these times with plenty, not less than the former. The growth of the poor must therefore have some other cause; and it can be nothing else but the relaxation of discipline, and the corruption of manners(as cited in Eden, 1966: 245)6 He advocated the whipping of any poor person who refused to work and the incarceration of beggars in contracted workhouses (beggars under 14 to be soundly whipped). Children aged 3 to 14 would be made to work for their food and shelter in factory-like working schools, and large landholders would be obliged to indenture those over the age of 14 as apprentices until they turned 23. Employers were to be obliged to employ the poor at a discount wage (Eden, 1966: 245; S&B Webb, 1927a:109-110). The movement to profitably organise pauper production was finally buried (until its resurrection by Bentham a century later) with Sir Humphrey Mackworths 1704 Bill promoting the establishment of houses of industry throughout Britain. Mackworths Bill was initially warmly endorsed by the Parliament until Daniel Defoe weighed into the debate, arguing that the poor should not be assisted to produce what private employers were already making as the unfair competition would drive them out of business, resulting in unemployment simply shifting from one region to another7. Defoe deplored the availability of parish relief because it raised the reserve price of workers (an alms ill directed may be charity to the particular person but becomes an injury to the public) and had not eliminated begging. I affirm of my own knowledge, when I have wanted a man for labouring work, and offer'd 9s[hillings] per week to strouling fellows at my door, they have frequently told me to my face, they could get more a begging, and I once set a lusty fellow in the stocks for making the experiment (Defoe, 1704). Defoe argued that the poor did not need to be given work because the whole problem of unemployment, parish rates, surly labourers, and poverty only required that the poor be subjected to better regulation (Defoe, 1704; Eden,1966:260). He did not suggest how they should be better regulated to achieve this miracle, but his argument carried the day and Mackworths bill was defeated (S&B Webb, 1927a:115-116). Defoes victory against pauper production seemed short-lived, however, as other towns and parishes built workhouses to emulate John Careys success in lowering the rates in Bristol, but it was not the promise of pauper production they were embracing, it was deterrent effect of the workhouse test. Many towns established their right to apply the workhouse test under an increasing number of Local Government Acts until Knatchbulls Act of 1722

The original document is available in: Locke, J.(1999) Report to the Board of Trade to the Lords Justices 1697, Respecting the Relief and Unemployment of the Poor. Reprinted as An Essay on the Poor Law In Locke: Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 7 The original title page:Giving Alms no Charity and Employing the Poor A Grievance to the Nation, Being an Essay Upon this Great Question, Whether Work-houses, Corporations, and Houses of Correction for Employing the Poor, as now practis'd in England; or Parish-Stocks, as propos'd in a late Pamphlet, Entituled, A Bill for the better Relief, Imployment and Settlement of the Poor, etc. Are not mischievous to the Nation, tending to the Destruction of our Trade, and to Encrease the Number and Misery of the Poor. Addressed to the Parliament of England. London: Printed and Sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster. MDCCIV

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gave all parishes the right8. This act ushered in a period thought to be the harshest under the old poor law by facilitating the use of the workhouse as a deterrent to claims and allowing the administration of parish poor relief parish to be contracted out to entrepreneurs for an annual fee set by competitive tender.9 Contractors such as Matthew Marryott, who operated several contracts between 1714 and 1722, soon realised that their profit margin depended on deterring all but the most desperate from seeking assistance by making relief conditional on recipients entering the workhouse, and making the workhouse a fearful option (Poynter,1969:16). In 1773 John Scott observed: These wretched receptacles of misery, or rather parish prisons, called workhouses, are scenes of filthiness and confusion; that old and young, sick and healthy, are promiscuously crowded into ill-contrived apartments, not of sufficient capacity to contain with convenience half the number of miserable beings condemned to such deplorable habitation (as cited in S&B Webb, 1927a:248) The work-house test was credited with a rapid reduction in poor rates where it was applied at different times and places throughout 18th century (S&B Webb, 1927a:244245). Parish officials wilfully turned a blind eye to the excessive brutality of these contractors, particularly when rates were halved within only a few years (S&B Webb, 1927b: 64-65; Poynter,1969:16-17). The workhouse test swung in and out of vogue in many parishes throughout the 18th century as circumstances and parish administrations changed in character, with contractors used more frequently in its latter half as the agricultural revolution continued to remove people from the land and pauperism increased (Marshall, 1937:45-6). b. Poor law reformers and abolitionists Against this trend, evangelical reformer Thomas Gilberts Act of 1782 enabled groups of parishes that agreed to implement its provisions (by a two-thirds majority of a meeting of all ratepayers) to unite for the purposes of operating a joint workhouse, but significantly, also provided magistrates with the power to order that unemployed labourers be given work or relief without entering the workhouse. This reform prompted The Rev Joseph Townsend to criticise the poor laws for removing the threat of starvation: hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions (Townsend, 1786)

Section IV of the act:and in case any poor Person or Persons of any Parish, Town, Township or Place where such House or Houses shall be so purchased or hired, shall refuse to be lodged, kept or maintained in such House or Houses, such poor Person or Persons so refusing shall be put out of the Book or Books where the Names of the Persons, who ought to receive Collection in the said Parish, Town, Township or Place, are to be registred, and shall not be entitled to ask or receive Collection or Relief from the Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor of the same Parish, Town or Township (Higginbotham, 2004). 9 Section IV of the act empowered parishes: to purchase or hire any House or Houses in the same Parish, Township or Place, and to contract with any Person or Persons for the lodging, keeping, maintaining and employing any or all such Poor in their respective Parishes, Townships or Places, as shall desire to receive Relief or Collection from the same Parish, and there to keep, maintain and employ all such poor Persons, and take the Benefit of the Work, Labour and Service of any such poor Person or Persons, who shall be kept or maintained in any such House or Houses, for the better Maintenance and Relief of such poor Person or Persons, who shall be there kept or maintained (Higginbotham, 2004).

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He criticised Gilberts Act for legislating an obligation to give the unemployed work because it would undermine social domination: Among the first of these relations stands the relation of a servant to his master; and the first duty required from a servant is prompt, cheerful, and hearty obedience. On this condition alone can the connection be preserved, as without due subordination all government must end. But our laws tend to weaken these bonds, and to destroy this subordination, by compelling the occupier of land to find employment for the poor. With this provision, what have they to fear when discharged from service? If one will not employ them, another must. If the work be slighted or neglected, if it be deserted in the pressing hour, or spoiled in the execution, it is to little' purpose for the master to complain; he can have no redress (Townsend, 1786). By 1795 food shortages had driven up prices and farmers refused to pay harvest labourers sufficient wages to prevent hunger. Mindful of the French Revolution underway across the channel, and food riots and insurrection occurring across the English countryside, the magistrates in several counties, most famously in Speenhamland, defined a basic income level relative to the price of bread, and directed that parish rates be paid to workers to supplement insufficient wages to bring all incomes up to this specified minimum. The power of magistrates to order outdoor relief, as in parish unions formed under Gilberts Act, was extended to all magistrates by William Youngs Act of 1797, which lead to widespread adoption of the use of outdoor relief as a supplement to inconsistent or insufficient wages. Where grain farmers controlled the administration of poor relief they allowed labourers to be paid allowances between harvest seasons to prevent the loss of their labour force to the industrial towns (Boyer, 1990:267-8). These developments led to significant growth in the provision of non-workhouse-tested (outdoor) relief between 1795 -1800. Rate levels increased in the absence of the workhouse-test, and because farmers and other employers were using them to offset their labour costs, prompting public debate and proposals to abolish poor relief. In 1798, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus launched an ideological attack on the old poor law in an Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus reiterated Joseph Townsends argument that the alleviation of poverty and hunger only created more future suffering, because it encouraged the poor to breed beyond the limits of what the food supply could support (Malthus, 1959; Marx, 1976:801n). He called for the abolition of poor relief, apart from cases of extreme distress that he thought should to be sent to workhouses: places where the fare should be hard. In 1803 he proposed that children born a year after a specified date should be denied poor relief for the rest of their lives (Knott, 1986:41). While his argument was embraced as irrefutable science in influential circles, eventually even by the Clapham evangelicals whose mentors once led the movement for humanitarian reform (Cowherd,1977:67), caution dictated policy while England was at war with Napoleon (Garratty, 1979:81; Gordon, 1976:121). When the end of the war, in 1815, triggered a severe depression and a consequent rise in the rates, interest in the application of Malthusian population theories increased. c. Starvation without abolition The old desire to make the poor starve in order to make them work, now justified by Malthus as crucial to the prevention of a future crisis of over population, still faced the problem of how to suppress the crime, begging and insurrection that would accompany the abolition of parish relief. Whig parliamentarians of Jeremy Benthams acquaintance

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championed the principles of his Pauper Management Improved as the solution. Bentham proposed that the poor (all people without property or a profession) without employment (he estimated one million people) be incarcerated in 500 prison-like panopticon workhouses run by a private joint stock company. Husbands would be separated from wives, children from parents, and all put to work in an elaborate division of labour. A strict and austere diet would be supplemented with rewards for good conduct. He thought it most critical that the unemployed be kept in a condition less eligible than the poorest worker. By incarceration and strict discipline the poor would be made productive, sober, and well mannered, and achieve the population restraint otherwise advocated by the Malthusian poor law abolitionists (Cowherd, 1977:82-98). A Commission of Inquiry was established to find scientific proof that the current poor law, particularly its use of relief to supplement wages, was undermining the productivity and morality of the working classes, and (unscientifically) found what it was looking for (Knott, 1986:52; Blaug, 1974; Digby, 1975; Cowherd, 1977:239). It also sought examples where the imposition of discipline and management of the poor had reduced the parish rate and found one in Southwell, where the Reverend Thomas Becher applied the workhouse test by regimen, a strict system of classification, separation of men women and children, routinised hard work and strict diet (Knott, 1986:48). This then was the favoured model for a new system of relief. The Commissions report informed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which established a central commission with the power to direct parishes and unions of parishes to build workhouses, impose the workhouse test as a condition of relief, and forbid the use of outdoor relief(Boyer,1990:210-202). The use of contracted workhouse managers was encouraged. Benthams scheme was largely ignored: of the hundreds of workhouses built not one was of his famous panopticon design (Longmate, 1974:289). The system of classification and separation of different types of pauper soon broke down due to its impracticality, especially in small parishes. Benthams concept of inspection was disregarded when the number of assistant commissioners was reduced to seven after a few years. For the remainder of the 19th century the working people of England were subjected to the brutilitarianism (Disraelis term) of the new poor law. In most districts in which workhouses were erected worker opposition was fierce, and in some parts of Britain attempts at implementation were abandoned (Knott, 1987). In time its harshness produced scandals that could not be suppressed. The commission created by the act of 1834 was replaced in the wake of the Andover workhouse scandal of 1846, in which half-starved inmates in the bone-crushing yard were reported as fighting like dogs over rancid bones with scraps of meat and marrow left on them (Anstruther, 1973). This and other real and imagined stories of brutality by workhouse managers prompted the replacement of the original commission by the Poor Law Board, though did little to moderate the harshness of the system, and indeed probably strengthened the desired deterrent effect of the workhouse test. From 1847 to 1871 the Poor Law board continued to urge the prohibition of outdoor relief , the use of the workhouse as a deterrent, and the notion that those on relief be kept less eligible than the lowest paid worker. In some areas, such as in Lancashire during the Cotton Famine of 1863-6, long over-due public works were undertaken, instigated in recognition of the inadequacy of the workhouse system to cope with total labour market collapse (S&B Webb,1929: 92 -94).

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d. Suppression of indiscriminate alms-giving The Poor Law authorities continually sought to make the workhouse the only means by which a poor person could survive without a job. In November 1869, the activities of private charities came under the scrutiny of the President of the Poor Law Board, George Goschen, who issued an influential minute on poor relief in London calling for greater co-ordination between the charities and the Board (Rose, 1971: 222, 226 227). The minute condemned any hint of the allowance system, even when insufficient wages were being topped up by charities: Still it is certain that no system could be more dangerous, both to the working classes and the ratepayers, than to supplement insufficiency of wages by the expenditure of public money (Rose,1971: 227). The Charity Organisation Society, founded in 1869, shared Goschens concern and sought to draw together the various charities that had formed to fill the vacuum created by the failure of the poor law authorities to adequately relieve poverty. Central to the aims of the C.O.S. was the discouragement of indiscriminate almsgiving, maintaining the infamous distinction of the deserving and the undeserving poor. The Salvation Army created in the 1880s by William Booth made no such distinctions but The Charity Organization Society, by contrast, was more selective, and referred clients with a past history of drink, debt or irregular working habits to the tender mercies of the poor law (Whiteside, 1991:44). Charles Booth reviewed 80 instances where the Stepney committee of the London C.O.S. routinely went into peoples homes, witnessed women and children in utter destitution and refused any help because the father was known to drink, or because a person had denied having received help on occasions in previous years, or because neighbours said a widow was noisy and a nuisance (Lees, 1998:271272). e. Making the unemployed work without paying them. Rising vagrancy and riots, such as that which began as a rally of 20,000 unemployed and casual labourers in Trafalgar Square of February 8th, 1886 (that subsequently marched off to stone various gentlemens clubs), alerted Englands rulers to the need for greater action to relieve the distress of the unemployed (College, 1989:7). The closing decades of the 19th Century saw some attempts to provide the unemployed paid work to do, such as Joseph Chamberlaines repeated, though largely ineffectual, attempts to persuade Town Councils to undertake public works schemes between 1886 - 93. Many requests for funds to perform such work were turned down by an unsympathetic Local Government Board (Burnett,1994:194). While paid employment was not on the agenda, a new method of compelling unpaid work emerged under the poor laws of this period: the labour camp. It was championed by the Salvation Army in the 1880s and 90s as embodying the ethos that work was to be redemptive, to change character as it filled purses. It was to discipline, punish, and test true character, and true need (Lees, 1998:293). The Fabian Society also extolled their value in a pamphlet in 1905: There are those whose destitution is caused by the fact that they are idle and incompetent they must be dealt with under some form of the criminal law.the weak minded and incompetent must be dealt with in farm colonies (College, 1989:9). Labour camps assumed the deterrent role of the workhouse throughout the 1930s depression. 120,000 men were separated form their families for several months, sent to far off districts to cut timber and build roads under the threat that absconding would result in their wives and children having their relief payments stopped. Camp life during the depression years was highly routine and the discipline strict. Inmates were deloused on arrival and issued a uniform to identify them as camp dwellers. Tobacco was a tradable commodity and a

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prize for fighting. In some camps staff siphoned-off allowance money intended for inmates, read their private correspondence. The loneliness and brutality of the camps drove some to suicide. (College, 1989). Conclusion The English Poor Laws reflect centuries of experimentation in social domination, whereby the dominant social strata sought to accumulate the fruits of their subordinates labour by compelling them to produce more than they consumed. They learned in 134951 that full employment empowered workers and drove up wages. With the exodus of the peasants from the land, starvation drove down the price of waged labour. 16th century policy makers came to realise that while starvation drove people to work for crusts of bread, their desperation also drove them to steal, beg or revolt. If social stability necessitated feeding the poor, new forms of repulsive incentive would have to be found. Work for the dole was the solution of 1601, while other methods ranged from simply denying relief recipients free time, to subjecting them to the cruellest suffering and indignities imaginable. The severity of treatment changed significantly in different places at different times. Fear of begging, theft or insurrection generally prompted more lenient treatment of the poor (S&B Webb, 1927:404-405), while rising rates (as in depressions) or increased labour costs generally prompted harsher measures. The elimination of unemployment was never embraced as an objective, since any policy maker aware of the Statute of Labourers knew that full employment had empowered workers and increased the cost of their labour. The assertion that reducing wages lowers unemployment seems absurd in this context, since wages rarely rose above starvation level during the period under study, and even when they fell below it, mass unemployment remained. The willingness to work has to be understood as the willingness of workers to accept the terms and conditions of employment being offered them. The use of repulsive incentives to drive people to seek work is about lowering labour costs not unemployment. Had full employment been a desirable goal for policy makers, the provision of work would have been their priority, but we see that detailed plans to provide paid work to the unemployed by public works (eg., 1536, 1886-93), or by obliging employers to employ people by legislation (eg., 1786) were mostly ignored or opposed, just as public sector employment is opposed today in Australia, despite its being the basis for the 25 years of full employment that followed World War II. Finally, this brief survey of the English Poor Laws illustrates that greater advantage is derived from controlling the strategic threshold between unemployment and employment when unemployment is a harsher experience, and when access to other avenues for survival (eg. self-sufficient farming, charity) is removed. The more secure the controller is, the more ruthless they can afford to be in forcing others to accept their terms of employment. The great innovation of the modern era is that greater use is made of virtual / ideological methods of securing the threshold from attack or evasion. These are more efficient than other means because a belief planted in childhood that the controller is good and their incumbency legitimate, or a fear of being detected and punished by God or A Current Affair10 for immoral non-compliance, are infinitely reproducible and thoroughly invasive. By these means, the repulsive side of the employment threshold can be intensified and the toll fee increased with minimal risk of inducing social instability.

10

This program has conducted numerous investigations of the undeserving poor, such as the controversial Paxtons saga that aired in the lead-up to the 1996 election.

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We see much that is familiar in the poor laws, prompting us to acknowledge the otherwise obscured connections between the modern controllers of the employment threshold, their management of repulsive and attractive incentives to work, and the toll they collect from those that work for them. We also see the necessity of preserving unemployment as a key to social domination, for without it there is no threshold to control and no toll to pay. References Anstruther, I. (1973) The Scandal of the Andover Workhouse, Geoffrey Bles, London. Blaug, M. (1974) The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New, in M.W. Flynn & T.C. Smout (eds) Essays In Social History, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Boyer, G.R. (1985) The economic role of the English Poor Law, 1780-1834, The Journal of Economic History, Vol 45, No.2, The Tasks of Economic History (Jun 1985), pp.452-454. Burnett, J. (1994) Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790 - 1990, Routledge, London, Colledge, D. (1989) Labour Camps: The British Experience, Sheffield Popular Publishing, Sheffield, Cowherd, R. (1977) Political Economists and the English Poor Laws, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio. Digby, A (1975) The labour market and the continuity of social policy after 1834: The case of the Eastern Counties, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol.28, (Feb) pp. 69 83. Dobb, M. (1963) Studies in the Development of Capitalism, International Publishers, New York Eden, F.M. (1966) The State of the Poor: or a History of the Labouring Classes in England from the Conquest to the Present Period, Frank Cass & Co, London (First published 1797). Eiden, H.(1998) Joint Action against Bad Lordship: The Peasants revolt in Essex and Norfolk, The Historical Association, Blackwell Publishers,Oxford Elton, G.R. (1953) An Early Tudor Poor Law, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol 6. No.1, pp.55-67) Garraty, John A. (1979) Unemployment In History: Economic thought and Public Policy, Harper and Row, New York. Gordon, B. (1976) Political Economy in Parliament 1819-1823, MacMillan, London. Gregory, T.E. (1921) The Economics of Employment in England, 1660-1713, Economica, No.1, (Jan 1921) pp37-51.

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Hammond, J.L and Hammond, B. (1966) The Village Labourer, Longmans, Green and Co., London. (First published 1911). Higginbotham, P. (2004) Transcription of the Act for amending the Laws relating to the Settlement, Imployment, and Relief of the Poor, 1722. Accessed on 27/7/2006 at: http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Epeter/workhouse/index.html King, S.(1997) Poor relief and English economic development reappraised, Economic History Review, L, 2(1997), pp360-368. Knott, J (1986) Popular Opposition to the 1834 Poor Law, Croom Helm, Beckenham, Kent. Leonard, E.M. (1965) The History of the English Poor Relief, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd Locke, J.(1999) Report to the Board of Trade to the Lords Justices 1697, Respecting the Relief and Unemployment of the Poor. Reprinted as An Essay on the Poor Law In Locke: Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Longmate, N. (1974) The Workhouse, Temple Smith, London. Malthus, T.R. (1959) Essay on the Principle of Population, University of Michigan Press. Manning, R.B.(1988) Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbance in England 1509 1640, Clarendon Press, Oxford Marshall, D (1937) Revisions in Economic History: VII. The Old Poor Law, in The Economic History Review, Vol 8, No.1., November 1937, pp38-47. Marx, K. (1976) Capital, Vol 1, Penguin, London. Nicholls, G. (1854) A History of the English Poor Law, Knight & Co, London. Ormrod, W.M. (1990) The Peasants Revolt and the Government of England, Journal of British Studies, Vol 29, January. Poynter, J.R. (1969) Society and Pauperism: English ideas on poor relief, 1795-1834, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria. Quirk, V. (2005) Methods and Motivation of Social Domination, CofFEE Working Paper No. 05-17, Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), University of Newcastle. Available at: http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/wp.cfm Rose, Michael E. (1971) The English Poor Law 1780 - 1930, David & Charles, Devon, 1971 Slack, Paul (1990). The English Poor Law 1531- 1782, Macmillan Education Ltd, London. Smith, A. (1993) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Solar, P.M.(1995) Poor relief and English Economic Development, Economic History Review, XLVIII (1999), pp. 1-22 Stokes, P.M. (2001) Bentham, Dickens, and the uses of the workhouse, SEL 41, 4 (Autumn 2001) Thompson, E.P. (1991) The making of the English working class, Penguin, London. Tournay, G (2001) Toward the roots of social welfare: Juan Lluis Vives De subventione pauperum, City, Vol 8, No. 2. Townsend, J. (1776) A Dissertation on the Poor Laws Webb, S. & Webb, B. (1929a) English Poor Law History: Part 1: The Old Poor Law, Frank Cass & Co Ltd., London. Webb, S. & Webb, B. (1929b) English Poor Law History: Part 2: The Last Hundred Years, Frank Cass & Co Ltd., London. Whiteside, N, (1991) Bad Times: Unemployment in British Social and Political History, Faber and Faber, London,