Opposition to the English poor laws

Of all subjects of legislation on which Governments ought not harshly or prematurely to interfere, without ascertaining, and, if possible, carrying with them the prevailing sentiments of the country, this of the Poor Law appears to me the one on which it would be most undesirable to take a precipitate course.

The act was passed by large majorities in Parliament, but the regime it was intended to bring about was denounced by its critics as (variously) un-Christian, un-English, unconstitutional, and impracticable for the great manufacturing districts of Northern England.

Opposition to the New Poor Law in the looser sense of resistance to (and criticism of) key features of the regime recommended by the Royal Commission persisted and eventually became orthodoxy: for example outdoor relief was never abolished in much of the industrial North.

There was little practical experience to support it - only four of the parishes reporting had entirely abolished out-relief; their problem cases could well have simply been displaced to neighbouring parishes[6]In practice, most existing workhouses were ill-suited to the new system (characterised by opponents as locking up the poor in 'Poor Law bastiles'), and many poor law unions soon found they needed a new purpose-built union workhouse.

There it achieved a considerable reduction in the poor rates with only minor disturbances (In Buckinghamshire when paupers were transported 3 miles from Chalfont St. Giles to Amersham, the Riot Act had to be read.

Not until January 1837 were the first steps taken to introduce the system into the textile districts of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire by setting up 'poor law unions' and electing Boards of Guardians for them.

Inquiries in the West Riding of Yorkshire by an assistant to the royal commission had led him to note that out-door relief was an important (and relatively cheap) way of coping with the trade cycle.

[17][c] Hand-loom weavers, a group of workers now habitually in great distress, had very low earnings; not because their wages were supplemented by out-door relief, but because they were competing with power-looms; nothing would be gained by forcing them into the workhouse or to turn to some occupation for which they would not have the required physical strength.

In the Northern industrial towns, a variety of organisations (trade unions, Short Time Committees, Radical associations )were already in existence whose (often overlapping) memberships were generally opposed to the New Poor Law.

Huddersfield was notably slow to set up an effective New Poor Law administration, large crowds/mobs gathering outside (or breaking up) meetings of the Guardians, but never with enough violence to lead local Tory magistrates to ask for military assistance to preserve order.

(When Whig magistrates were appointed and the military deployed, the Guardians meeting was subject to a large peaceful picket which terminated with the crowd giving a cheer for the troops for having had to turn out on a miserable January night and a whip-round to give them a shilling each to buy something warm and comfortable[20]) John Fielden attempted to prevent the Act from being implemented in his area, threatening to close the family firm down unless the Guardians of the Todmorden Poor Law Union resigned.

The constables were surrounded by a mob summoned from two of Fielden's mills (supplemented by navvies building the Manchester & Leeds Railway), roughly treated and made to promise never to return.

The following week a mob again gathered in the belief that another attempt at distraint was to be made; when this did not happen, they attacked the houses of various guardians and supporters of the New Poor Law, causing damage put at over £1000.

Not all the stories were entirely accurate, and some propaganda was very black; a document recommending infanticide and alleged to be the work of the Poor Law Commission was published as the Book of Murder.

The ease with which the Reform Parliament had passed the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, its refusal to pass a Ten-Hour Bill and the contrast between the zeal with which the New Poor Law was brought in and the failure to enforce the Factory Act 1833 were powerful arguments that only the fundamental political changes sought by Chartism would produce a Parliament which paid more than lip-service to the interests of the working classes.

He called upon his hearers to exercise their right to bear arms (but not to bring them to meetings); he also warned (but was careful not to threaten) that a social cataclysm would result if the government were to further oppress the poor.

J. R. Stephens, a Methodist minister who had been prominent in both the Factory Reform and Anti-Poor Law movements addressed Chartist meetings, giving much the same advice as Oastler, and was a delegate to the National Convention, but later said "I would rather walk to London on my bare knees, on sharp flint stones to attend an Anti-poor Law meeting, than be carried to London in a coach and six, pillowed with down to present that petition - the "national petition" to the House of Commons"[23] Stephens was less prudent than Oastler in his speeches and failed to persuade those coming to his meetings to leave their guns at home.

Consequently, when the Government cracked down on Chartist activity after the Todmorden Riots (in which - despite the insinuations of the Manchester Guardian - Fielden could not be implicated), Stephens was imprisoned for eighteen months for unlawful assembly.

[27] Even after the crack-down, the Commissioners admitted that they were influenced by the agitation: "The depressed condition of the manufacturing population, to which we have already adverted, and the disquietude of the public mind occasioned by the chartist riot at Newport, in Monmouthshire, rendered us extremely unwilling to take any step in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire which might have even a remote tendency to produce a disturbance, or which might be used by designing persons as a pretext for agitation"[28] On two occasions in the 1840s, newly built workhouses were sacked by rioters, but on neither occasion was the riot clearly single-issue: Criticism slowly mounted: when the Whigs introduced a Poor Law Amendment Bill in 1841 to extend the Commission's life, MPs complained of the pettiness of some of the rules called for by the Poor Law Commission (e.g. workhouse inmates to take their meals in silence), of the refusal of the Commissioners to allow Boards of Guardians much discretion, and of the way the Commission had evaded Parliamentary scrutiny.

Whilst there continued to be cross-party Front Bench support for the New Poor Law (in 1844 in Coningsby, Benjamin Disraeli mocked Peel's 'sound Conservative government' as 'Tory men and Whig measures') Conservative malcontents such as Disraeli were alive to the consequent opportunity to undermine Peel by allying themselves with the opposition to unpopular Whig measures.

The previous proceedings of the Poor Law Commission were not endorsed unequivocably : ("My Lords, I don't mean to say that I approve of every act that has been done in carrying this bill into operation.

[e] The Assistant Poor Law Commissioner for the area (a Mr Parker) was sent to investigate, and found the allegations to be largely true, if slightly over-stated.

The Home Secretary had on a number of occasions told the House of Commons that grinding bone was work of too penal a nature to be carried out by workhouse inmates, and the Poor Law Commission would see that his wish that it should cease was acted upon.

[47]) justifying himself and detailing conversations with the Commission and with the Home Secretary which alleged that It was separately alleged that the Commission had attempted to discredit a Yorkshire MP critical of it by sending an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner (Charles Mott) to inspect and unfavourably report upon the conditions in and management of a workhouse of which the MP was a guardian; that report had then been quoted (in good faith) by the Home Secretary in the Commons.

[52] It became apparent that the important business of the Commissioners had not been conducted (as the Act establishing them required) by minuted meetings as a Board, nor had adequate records been kept of their decisions and the reasons for them.

Chadwick's evidence to the Committee confirmed what had previously generally been taken to be a wild allegation by the wilder opponents of the New Poor Law: that in 1834 the Commission had indicated in a secret briefing paper for ministers that they intended to completely taper-out out-door relief for all classes of paupers (not just the able-bodied), to coarsen the diet of paupers, reduce its quantity, and enforce strict regulations.

[54] The Peel administration fell in the aftermath of the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the new (Whig) Home Secretary denied that the Andover Committee had demonstrated malice, recklessness or illegality in the proceedings of the Commission but promised that it would be replaced.

At the end of 1849, the Chartist paper the Northern Star was hopeful of achieving an extension of the franchise, drawing encouragement from the fate of the other great agitations going on when the Star had been founded twelve years before: ..now, when the Ten Hours"Bill" has become an ACT; now, when the Poor Law Commission has become a Poor Law BOARD; and the ultra-Malthusianism of the one has been replaced by a policy more in accordance with humanity and reason".