Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Dramatic reform of the Old Poor Law (ca. 1598–1834) had been on the philosophical and political agenda since at least the 1780s. The collapse of the English rural economy in the aftermath of the cessation of hostilities in continental Europe in 1815 and the central role played by the Poor Laws in motivating activists in the Swing Riots of 1830 raised such calls to a fever pitch. The result was the Poor Law Amendment Act, or New Poor Law (NPL) of 1834, which arranged all parishes into workhouse-focused unions answerable to the London-based Poor Law Commission (PLC). The NPL thereby broke with over 300 years of parochial independence in the provision of statutory welfare. The Act also intended to enforce the principle of “less eligibility” – that the workhouse should be less desirable than the conditions experienced by the poorest laborer -and attempted to forbid relief to those who refused to enter the workhouse. The first NPL union was founded at Wallingford, Berkshire, on January 1, 1835. By the 1839 publication of the Fifth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commission, 95 percent of all English and Welsh parishes had been placed into 583 functioning unions. The PLC encountered considerable opposition from the local authorities in their attempts to found unions. In the south, this mainly came from urban incorporations that refused to dissolve – Brighton and Exeter, for instance, ... log in or subscribe to read full text