ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs poor law administration within its legal context from the perspective of those who implemented, paid for and administered the system: local vestries, ratepayers, officials, Justices and poor law guardians. As we have seen in Chapter 3 settlement and the legal right to relief provided both the overarching legal framework and the explanation why each autonomous parish relieved its settled poor. What follows illustrates how differences and variations in local practices, adapting to social, economic and other pressures unique to each place, still fall within that legal framework. This chapter will consider parochial legal autonomy, with a brief case study of the operation of Tranmere Township on the Wirral. This is followed by consideration of the establishment and operation of the Wirral Poor Law Union and concludes with a reconstruction of the successful resistance of the ports of Chester and Liverpool to the imposition of the terms of the 1834 Act. These local studies serve as exemplars of law in action, they are not ‘typical’ of local practice but demonstrate the larger common law framework that both permitted and was built upon the principle of local autonomy. It is this long-standing self-funding character of a rights-based poor law legal system embedded within the localities that provides an explanation for the noticeable divergence between American and English welfare systems and rebuts tenBroek’s assertions that the 1601 Act is purely negative.
