Lived experience: the poor ‘speak’

Amongst the most fascinating and highly valued sources for historical reconstructions are witness accounts, broadly construed; for example there is a tradition in Holocaust scholarship that draws upon witness statements, personal memories and trial material.1 Poor law historians follow a similar methodology, using settlement records and other material including contemporary literature and diaries. Those works deconstructed in the previous chapter demonstrate this methodology and, in particular, how historians place stress upon the poor’s own often recorded, widely held belief in their ‘rights’. Almost unanimously, those historians who consider this matter have concluded that the poor are expressing cultural and social norms, not legal rights. Admittedly personal testimony can be problematic, but both groups of historians incorporate the voices of their ‘witnesses’ into their texts. However, it is at this point that these two sub-disciplines of history demonstrate a fundamental methodological split. Holocaust historians argue for the value and ‘truth’ of remembered accounts, as Friedlander says of survivors remembering their lives before 1940: ‘[T]heirs were the only voices that conveyed both the clarity of insight and the total blindness of beings confronted with an entirely new and horrifying reality.’2 There are elements of respect and decency in this perspective; moreover many of these witnesses are still alive. Perhaps this difference is why poor law historians do not seem able to ‘believe’ their witnesses; if so this is poignant, regrettable and misleading. For the poor were more than a static and abstract element of the historical past, poor law is their story and the rights they claim are legal rights. Thus what follows is based upon recognition that the poor often meant rights much as we do today; something to which they were entitled – legal rights. This perspective is adopted to underline one aim of this work; returning law

and legal rights to the heart of poor law studies. To that end, the voices of witnesses, particularly the poor, provide vital evidence of how that law was understood. Significantly, they remind us that law is an integral part of society, both a constituent and a reflection of cultural norms and a mechanism for protection as well as of control. Perhaps historians, in common with many others, understand ‘law’ as predominantly part of the criminal justice system. If so, this

is unfortunate as law is pervasive in society and performs many functions – not least the protection and guarantor of rights. However, if the law-minded reader, fully aware of poor law’s legal rights, obligations and duties, reads poor law reconstructions he or she will find much evidence of law in action unrecognised by their authors. It is within that spirit this chapter reconstructs some aspects of the lived experience of the poor to reveal how the poor and others viewed the relief ‘systems’, including those of the manor, in order to reveal their awareness of legal rights. It will briefly consider the expectations and social opinions of the various participants of the poor law system and how these individuals behaved towards, and understood, each other’s legal rights. In addition, it is important to note that the poor law reforms of 1834 expressed a cultural shift in economic and social relations within English society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This changing social context provided a pre-condition for the creation of a punitive welfare system, whose grundnorm was mistrust of a large section of the poor who many believed, and some still do believe, are responsible for their own destitution. That mistrust was part of a world view increasingly held by sections of the

gentry, a class group who held political power through interests in property and thereby the legal possession of the franchise. It must be emphasised that England is far from a democracy during this period, women do not possess the vote, neither do the labouring classes. Voting reforms in 1832 began the change, but were far from enfranchising the entire population and this was also a time of increasing public protest and disorder. In consequence, an increasing mistrust of the labouring classes by those who wielded both local and national power forms part of a dichotomy of contemporary beliefs which at the same time accepts (with criticism from some quarters) that the poor will be relieved. This dichotomy is fundamental to the local operation of the law of settlement and removal; relieving the settled poor whilst strangers (‘others’) and non-settled poor are to be excluded by operation of law or by other available and permitted methods. These may include: restricting new tenancies, apprenticing children in other parishes, ‘encouraging’ unmarried pregnant women to marry men from other parishes, issuing certificates and so on. Settlement itself possesses its antinomies, protecting and excluding; after 1834 this crystallises into a negative totality expressed within implementation of the new poor law. From that point, the right to relief is nuanced by the administrative requirement that such relief should only be given in the workhouses of the national system of poor law unions. It is that negativity, so long surviving, which made the poor law hated and whose memory, it is suggested, continues to colour historical reconstructions of poor law.