Poor laws, witches and welfare: why private initiative should be part of a good system of poverty relief

The ‘Old Poor Laws’ gave parishes a duty, they didn’t make a single national system preferring instead to rely on the good sense, organisation and responsiveness of local people

The passing of the Poor Relief Act in 1601 - the ‘Old Poor Law’ as it came to be known - had a profound effect on the relationship between poor people and their neighbours. Up to that point relief had fallen upon individuals as a Christian duty although, prior to their confiscation under Henry VIII, monasteries had also provided alms and other support to the poor and indigent. The state preferred to beat beggars (or at least the ‘sturdy’ ones) rather than feed them. The ‘Old Poor Law’ shifted responsibility from individuals and placed it with a part of the state, the parish. The main requirement was for parishes to levy a rate on house- and land-owners which would be used for the relief of the poor. In essence parishioners paid via a tax rather than through their own charity meaning that when the poor continued to request alms door-to-door, it became more common for this to be refused.

In “Religion and the Decline of Magic”, Keith Thomas remarks on allegations of witchcraft. Thomas observes that these allegations were most commonly directed at women, especially older women. Looking through cases, Thomas also notes the repeated connection between refusal of alms to widows and later allegations of ensorcelling and witchcraft. We read Thomas Ady explaining:

“Presently he cryeth out of some poor innocent neighbour that he or she hath bewitched him. For, saith he, such an old man or women came lately to my door and desired some relief, and I denied it, and, God forgive me, m heart did rise against her…and presently my child, my wife, myself, my horse, my cow, my sheep, my sow, my hog, my dog, my cat, or somewhat, was thus and thus handled in such a strange manner, as I dare swear she is a witch, or else how should these things be?”

Thomas reports that the majority of fully documented witch cases fall into this pattern: “the witch is sent away empty-handed, perhaps mumbling a malediction; and in due course something goes wrong for the household, for which she is immediately held responsible.” Most witches were older, poor women who had, prior to the Poor Relief Act, reasonably expected relief and support from their community but now, with the parochial system of outdoor relief, could be turned away by individuals unwilling to share food, drink or clothing. While grand gestures of charity from the wealthy continued with the construction of alms houses, work houses and hospitals, the implementation of a formal welfare system reduced levels of individual almsgiving.

It has been argued that the ‘Old Poor Laws’ represented the first genuine attempt at introducing a welfare state where it was ‘illegal to let people starve’, that this change encouraged rural-urban migration and was, to a considerable extent, a factor in England’s economic success:

“The country experienced exceptional growth between 1600 and 1800, with the proportion of urban residents growing by 350 percent. This was ten times greater than anywhere else in Europe, even the Netherlands. It transformed the economy.”

The authors here, Simon Szreter and Hilary Cooper, suggest that the success of the Elizabethan poor laws provides lessons for modern government (and for them the problem with ‘austerity’) and that a renewed welfarism is essential because of “...the challenges – of poverty, inequality and global warming – we will face during the rest of the 21st century”. Yet the idea that the ‘Old Poor Laws’ were universally applied or economically significant is, I suspect, overstating their impact. By the end of the 17th century most parishes were levying a rate for relief but the 1796 Board of Trade estimates suggest that, at best, this relief represents 1% of national income. Comparing it to 21st century welfare systems that account for at least 15% of GDP (and more if we include health and education entitlements that didn’t exist in 17th century England).

Nevertheless we will take as read the claim that 17th century welfarism was a good thing at face value as well as the idea that ‘outdoor relief’ isn’t just morally right but is economically important despite our doubts about its negative effect on community, social relations and individual charity. If we are to learn lessons from the ‘Old Poor Laws’ perhaps we should look first at how they differed from modern welfarism. There are two significant features where this difference probably matters: the inclusion of private (and charitable) initiatives within the system and the administration of welfare at a hyperlocal level, the parish. Of course the criticism of these differences led, in part, to the more draconian 1834 Poor Law with its whiggish idea (one many still believe) that able bodied people should receive relief only in exchange for work.

The popular view of food banks helps us to understand how modern welfarism is ideologically and administratively very different from the ‘Old Poor Laws’. Under those ancient laws nobody would have seen an organised way of distributing food relief to the hungry as anything other than a good and efficient way of administering a community’s charity. People wished, as part of their duty as Christian men and women, to give relief to their poor neighbours (hence the evidence of what we might call ‘witch guilt’) and today many people retain this charitable desire. Just as with the witches though, there are also still those who see the dependent as scroungers, ungrateful and weak, as well as seeing their existence as something of a threat.

Because the 17th century system was administered at such a local level, it was easy to see when it failed and to rectify this failure through a combination of public authorities and individual charity. Today the existence of organised individual charity is seen as a system failure rather than as a flexible, innovative way of providing relief to our needy neighbours. Even the organisers of charitable relief see the success of their work as some sort of broader societal failure rather than as a demonstration of how we can, as communities, relieve poverty through our own actions.

Welfare in the 17th century was a local, often personal, matter. This helps explain those allegations of witchcraft but also means that the people being supported by the rates and alms of a community were part of that community. People knew the names and often the history of the widows, cripples and orphans supported by the parish, meaning that they weren’t anonymous. Keith Thomas describes how nearly every person making accusations of sorcery was able also to name the person responsible for the witchcraft. The same will have been true for those receiving outdoor relief (or most of such people). We weren’t talking of anonymous caricatures of Welfare Queens or Benefit Scroungers but people who the ratepayers knew by name and reputation. You can hear the 17th century equivalent of the bloke at the saloon bar as they mutter about ‘Mary Tucker asking food alms at everyone’s door when she’s had all the relief she needs from the parish’ even when they weren’t suggesting that their stillborn lambs were down to Mother Tucker ‘cursing us for not giving her a pail of milk’.

Welfare is a fraught subject since most of us expect to receive some (‘I’ve paid in all these years, I’m entitled to that money’) but we also see the typical welfare recipient as either a victim entirely free of any agency or else as a lazy, feckless exploiter of society’s generosity. While both of these people exist, the majority of welfare recipients look a lot more like us that we are minded to admit. The biggest welfare benefit is the old age pension meaning that the typical beneficiary looks like your mum, grandma or next-door neighbour. And the next biggest collection of beneficiaries are mums via child benefit, child tax credits and free childcare. Yet we do not see this as welfare but as an entirely justified, even essential, entitlement.

I do not think that, of itself, the welfare state promotes economic growth nor do I think that there is much comparison between the ‘Old Poor Laws’ and 21st century universal credit, but I do think we need to think about how to make the manner in which society supports the needy more flexible, responsive and innovative. The orthodoxy of a single national state system administered according to an unresponsive set of rules needs to be challenged not merely because the existence of food banks tells us it doesn’t work well enough, but because it favours those with the skills or connections to play the system over those without these advantages.

The essential truth about food banks (and a whole load of other sorts of relief and support created by individual charity and initiative) is that communities can provide part of the welfare system without the need for it to be managed through a centralised, nationalised system of welfare. The ‘Old Poor Laws’ gave parishes a duty and set out what that duty meant, they didn’t make a single national system preferring instead to rely on the good sense, organisation and responsiveness of local communities. And the leaders in those local communities couldn’t hide away behind a vast bureaucratic screen or impenetrable screens of unclear, impersonal data. Those leaders would be cornered by both the bloke moaning about witches and by people who wanted to know why their aunty didn’t get the relief she needed.

Perhaps, instead of more computers, more analytics and more impenetrable bureaucracy we need to build in something more personal and more accountable. Perhaps, to paraphrase the opening of Anna Karenina, we should note that each poor person is poor in their own way. Britain spends a huge amount of money on the relief of poverty through the benefits system, more than we have ever spent in our history, but poverty remains like death and taxes a constant problem. And to say to those running charities and relief organisations that they should stop wishing themselves away, that they have always been a part of welfare provision. This isn’t a case for state funding either but for us to recognise that private initiative is more responsive, more local, more flexible and more trusted that any government welfare system, however well-funded - can ever be.