Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain, 1290-1834 by Chris Briggs P.M. Kitson S.J. Thompson

Author:Chris Briggs, P.M. Kitson, S.J. Thompson [Chris Briggs, P.M. Kitson, S.J. Thompson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Finance, Economics, Economic History, Nonfiction, History, British
ISBN: 9781782043942
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2014-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

There can be little doubt that workhouses distorted patterns of poor relief in the eighteenth century. The evidence presented here shows quite clearly that the number of outdoor pensions and the volume of outdoor relief fluctuated significantly over the eighteenth century and that their number never recovered to pre-workhouse levels. Historians of welfare must surely do more to uncover the dynamic relationship between indoor and outdoor relief, particularly when their arguments revolve only around changes in the volume and level of outdoor relief.

What is also clear, however, is that the influence that this workhouse had on outdoor relief was not always predictable or consistent. The dramatic abolition of parish pensions in 1725 proved to be relatively short-lived. As other studies have found, parish pensions returned, but why? One of the wider questions this research raises is why outdoor pensions proved such a resilient form of poor relief.

Explaining the survival of parish pensions is particularly difficult given the huge investment represented by the building and especially the running costs of the workhouse. Indoor relief was more expensive than outdoor relief. Between 1765 and 1824, for example, the workhouse of St Martin’s absorbed the gigantic sum of £482,099 out of a total poor relief expenditure by the overseers of £771,319 (63 per cent), easily dwarfing the money spent on outdoor relief (see Figure 6.3).66 A satisfactory answer to this attachment to outdoor relief in the face of this huge investment would probably require a detailed analysis to undercover the backgrounds of parish pensioners: were they thought too respectable to enter workhouses, for example?67 The attitudes of local officials to both indoor and outdoor relief would also be important. The attachment of overseers to out-relief may explain many decisions to continue out-payments. Even the usually triumphalist Account of workhouses, which was intended to advertise the savings that new workhouses made, included reports that revealed the survival of regular outdoor relief. The Maidstone report blamed overseers explicitly for the continuation of outdoor pensions.68 More work, too, is clearly needed on the nature and experience of workhouse life and on the attitudes of the parish poor to such institutions. It may be, too, that parochial authorities in London welcomed the deterrent effect that workhouses represented to the casual and immigrant poor. What is certain is that any explanation for their continual use in London must encompass the survival of significant volumes of outdoor relief in its various forms.69

Another point that is worth highlighting is the very significant welfare problem represented by London’s adoption of large-scale indoor relief in the first half of the eighteenth century. Particularly when workhouses were first built, but also at other points in the eighteenth century, large numbers of often elderly poor faced cuts to or abolition of their outdoor relief. Although many either entered the workhouse or survived on lower volumes of casual relief, many others seem to have got by without recourse to parish relief at all. Was this because London’s economy provided more opportunities? Was it peculiarly easy

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