Stogumber's Poor: 1601-1834

Against all this background something of a calamity struck the parish in when an outbreak of small pox occurred.The number receiving emergency monthly payments shot up.

The poor bill for the year rose by more than half from £205 the previous year to £310. The number in the poor house also rose dramatically from 13 in 1765 to 30 four years later.

We can get some idea of the crushing blow that this combination of events caused to some people from the circumstances of James Smith, a yeoman farmer at Rowden, who appears in the parish records as a ratepayer contributing to the poor rate until the 1760s; in 1768  he was forced to quit his farm and he disappears from view until 20 years later when he was arrested as a vagrant found begging in the precincts of the Bristol Castle with Ann his daughter described as a lunatic aged 32. He told the Bristol authorities how the last legal settlement of him and Ann was Stoke Gomer in which parish he occupied an estate of his own of the yearly value of £80 upwards of 30 years.

The costs which the parish had to bear increased again shortly afterwards when in 1782 parliament alarmed at the growing number of rural poor introduced an amendment to the poor law act. This effectively introduced what we would now call unemployment benefit or perhaps working tax credit – whereby the able bodied labourer who found himself temporarily out of work, or with wages which were too low to support his family, was able to claim relief from the parish. In Stogumber top up payments were made to labourers with large families.

The effect of this extension of relief was that nationally the amount paid out in poor relief climbed from around £2m in 1785to £7m in 1820. And this was reflected in the poor relief in the parish of Stogumber which had held steady at around £200 a year for decades, rose inexorably until in 1832 it stood at £1,150 per annum.

Faced with an ever more expensive system and ever growing numbers of poor claiming relief, attitudes towards the poor again hardened, and a political backlash grew. The governments response was to set up a commission of enquiry which toured the country taking evidence in the 1830s. Their report makes alarming reading:

It was said that single mothers were better off than married mothers, and that some women deliberately gave birth to 2 or 3 bastard children so that they could live off the income.

It was said that the payment of relief to the able bodied unemployed encouraged idleness and drunkenness and made people dependent on the parish instead of standing on their own two feet.

It was said that the payment of relief to those having large families discriminated against single men and those with smaller families, and that it encouraged families to breed excessively as the more mouths there were to feed the more relief they gained.

Stogumber's overseers  reported no problems with the exisiting system in Stogumber and noted that they paid an allowance for families with 4 or more children.

The Commissioners chose to ignore the evidence which the Stogumber Overseers submitted, and instead chose to include in their report the evidence of a Stogumber resident called Charles Rowcliffe. Rowcliffe was a solicitor, a staunch churchman, and a man who apparently held strong views and views which were very much opposed to the system then pertaining

"An allowance is made, unhappily; beginning at three children. I consider that nearly all the work is partly paid for by the parish, and that this fact is a crying evil, working great mischief, and distress, and carelessness, and indifference about his family, in the mind of the labourer."

This selective use of evidence was very much a reflection of the general approach of the commission of enquiry. It is now widely recognised as having been one of those government commissions which already knows the answer it wants to hear before it begins.

And so it is no surprise to find that their final recommendation was that, apart from medical attention, all able bodied persons and their families should cease to receive 'all relief whatever ....otherwise in well regulated workhouses‘, and that these workhouses should offer an inferior standard of living to the lowest paid worker outside of the workhouse. The intention being to deter people from claiming relief and force them into work. Further they recommended that parish overseers should be abolished, that parishes should join together in unions, and that guardian be appointed to workhouses who would not be locally elected but appointed by a national board.

The act to this effect was passed just two months after the submission of the report in August 1834. And with it was swept away the whole machinery of parish responsibility and parish administration that had been in place since the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First.