Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress. : Appendix Volume XII. Memoranda by individual commissioners on various subjects.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress. : Appendix Volume XII. Memoranda by individual commissioners on various subjects. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    regarded as to its 'profitable results; but it should be viewed merely as a condition on which that relief, which their necessities require and which the law allows, is to be administered to paupers. In this circular, road-making, hand corn-mills, and the stone-yard were instructively compared and criticised. The Commissioners con- sidered that the question whether the work performed by paupers was profitable in a pecuniary sense was altogether secondary to the main question, namely, whether as a condition of obtaining relief it operated to discourage pauperism. (c) It has often been doubted if, in modern times, there has been a real case of selling a wife. The following case, given by Mr. Mott, one of the Assistant Commissioners, comes at least very near it. In the Dorking Union, in 1814, a young man called Cook was apprehended, and, in the usual way, hastily married to a woman who threatened him with an affiliation order for a child yet unborn. Six months after, the woman and her child were conveyed to Effingham workhouse. The governor of that workhouse, who had contracted to maintain all the paupers of the parish for a fixed sum of £210 a year, complained of the incumbrance. He was directed by the overseers of Effingham to take the woman to Croydon on next market day in a halter. The husband met them there, and sold his wife to one Earl for Is, (given him by the governor for that purpose). A formal receipt was given, under a 5s. stamp (the original being in Mr. Mott's possession), bearing the words—June 17th, 1815, Received of John Earl the sum of one shilling in full for my lawful wife by me, Henry Cook, and the names of two witnesses are appended, one being the husband of the widow and the other the governor of the workhouse. The governor, by desire of the overseers of Effingham, paid the expenses of refreshments at Croydon. The next day, the new couple departed to Dorking (Earl's parish), at which church, after publication of the banns for three Sundays, they went through the marriage ceremony and were duly registered as man and wife. The parish officers of Effingham provided them with a leg of mutton as a wedding dinner. Earl and the woman lived together many years and had a family of seven or eight, but, in the end, Earl, troubled with religious scruples, one may suppose— like Henry .VIII.—deserted the woman, who was then conveyed back to Effingham with her family and supported thereafter by the parish. The expenses incurred were at the time entered in the parish accounts and regularly passed at a parish vestry. The exquisite effrontery of it all reached its height when the parish officers of Effingham—the parish which had countenanced the second marriage and paid for the wedding dinner—subsequently applied to the magistrates to compel the first husband to maintain the woman and her family ! (d) There is a very long Report by Dr. Kay, on the administration and effects of the old Poor Law on the deeply pauperised counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, which is a worthy supplement to the Extracts of the 1832 Commission. Among other things he contends that the words setting the poor on work,'' of the 43rd of Elizabeth, were never meant to put on the parish the responsibility of finding work for the unemployed, but to indicate the necessity of providing a check to imposture. (e) The qualifications of voters for Guardians are given in Appendix A., pp. 61-62, (/) From Mr. Mott's Report on Middlesex and Surrey :— The best workmen consider that five pints of beer are necessary for a man during a hard day's work, such as mowing, where they are occupied perhaps sixteen hours per day. The pauper washer women of Bulcamp workhouse, Suffolk, were formerly allowed eight pints of beer per day each. App. B., p. 314. (g) The condition of lunatics under the old regime, when whipping, chaining, and solitary confinement were thought the proper treatment for the possessed, is almost incredible. At Tiverton, said one of the Assistant Commissioners, I found a female lunatic in a workhouse who had been there 28 years. She was con- fined in a small room, having neither furniture, fireplace, nor bed ; there was not anything in the room but a bundle of straw. She was without a single piece of clothing, perfectly naked, and had been confined in that state, during winter and summer, for the last 28 years .... At South Molton I found a lunatic, about 28 years of age, in a state of nudity, in a miserable outhouse. There was no fireplace; the aperture that had been a window was stopped up with straw, keeping the room in total darkness. He was fastened by the leg, to the wall, with a chain not a foot in 429. H 2