ABSTRACT
Today the workhouse and the [new] poor law are part of Britain’s ‘heritage’, so much so that the National Trust has restored Southwell Poor Law Union, Nottinghamshire, for public enjoyment; it opened (again) in 2002. Fundamental to that heritage, supplying a delicious frisson of vicarious empathy to the paying visitors as they wander through Southwell, are the ghosts of former residents. Their shadows enable visitors to recapture some of the cruelty, social stigma and fear that surrounded the new poor law, a hated cultural norm they still recognise. This is hardly surprising, for that norm survives as powerful folk memory and continues to (negatively) influence aspects of modern welfare provision. It was that norm which influenced a desire for reform leading to the Beveridge Report of 1942. This, in turn, produced the modern Welfare State, in revulsion against a poor law whose memory attracts visitors to Southwell to wonder at the cruelty of a prison for the poor. There are other consequences to such powerful memories and this work has discussed the most damning; the forgetting of those positive elements in poor law’s and, hence, welfare’s legal rights-based past. It is not just historians who have forgotten, modern welfare itself is now disconnected from those original poor law personal rights, duties and obligations protected and enforced under the law of settlement and removal. There was not and may never be a revival of an immediate personal legal right to relief once possessed by the settled poor. This is unsurprising, as this work reveals how that right has been consistently undervalued, marginalised, denied and, finally, forgotten. However, this account does not minimise those subjective elements in the manner and amounts poor relief was given or deny that proving destitution allowed discretion to parish officials; elements today understood as ‘conditionality’. However, these negativities do not erase positive elements embedded within an entire legal structure containing enforcement mechanisms and sanctions to protect the right to relief. The nightmare of the Great Famine in Ireland under a poor law without settlement and legal rights illustrates how little relief might have been given to the poor if relief was ‘customary’ or ‘politically negotiated’ as so many historians believe.
