ABSTRACT
Settlement law: ‘has (perhaps) been more profitable to the profession of the Law than any other point in English jurisprudence’.1
This chapter reconstructs the legal foundations of poor law taking a longitudinal perspective in order to recover its ‘forgotten’ history. For legal scholars who write in and of the present, law is experienced by and familiar to their readers. However, as poor law is an abolished legal subject, this chapter provides a route through the legal sources, statutes, cases and textbooks following the lawyers’ technique of tracing the relevant legal authorities chronologically. Unlike current law subjects, there is no introductory text to which the reader can be directed, moreover this reconstruction requires consideration of poor law’s common law establishment from the sixteenth century. However, these events did not occur in legal isolation; therefore the following analysis also includes a survey of some earlier ecclesiastical and manorial sources of welfare. In addition, as poor law retains many of those early legal presumptions and ‘rules’ expressed in statutory form and case law until abolition in 1948, this has required discussion of developments over a broad sweep of time. In consequence, this work will focus upon the basic legal principles of poor law, the foundational elements of the Law of Settlement and Removal, and not the vast complexity of the legal doctrines found within that law. Finally, as this work is within the liberal paradigm it constitutes a celebration of the value of a right to relief from poverty for the labouring classes of England and Wales. In one sense, that long legal history bears witness to welfare’s importance
structurally in the development of cultural norms in English society. However, the right to relief is more than a liberal ideal, it constitutes a doctrinal black letter right. Consequentially, ‘forgetting’ denies this foundational legal value in our society. In summary, this chapter suggests that when the early history of the relief of poverty is reconstructed through the lens of law, it reveals the existence of a ‘legal economy’ of entitlements, duties and obligations hitherto disregarded, marginalised or mis-stated in poor law reconstructions. The chief of these entitlements lies in the legal right of settled poor to be relieved when destitute at the cost of their settlement parish. The corollary to that right lies in the obligation of each parish, township or place
that maintains its poor, to raise a poor rate on a demand-led basis in order to fulfil that legal obligation to relieve.
