I hope my readers aren’t tired of the English poor laws because, after a year or two of research, something has occurred to me that I had completely missed. There is a flaw I didn’t see.
A short recap: England was the first European country to make relief of the poor a government responsibility; the first major poor law was adopted in 1601, under Elizabeth I. The residents of each parish who had the means paid taxes (“rates”), which were distributed to the deserving poor.
Many people have praised that and the subsequent laws that made up the “poor laws,” as a noble and prescient step. Certainly, the laws long preceded welfare in most other countries, and they may well have been noble.
But they had a fateful consequence. And I don’t mean Tocqueville’s argument that (like modern welfare in some countries) the law may have increased the number of the poor rather than reduced it. I discussed that in a previous column.
This is worse. Remember the “pauper apprentices”? The children, sometimes as young as seven, who worked in the early textile factories? They were brought from many miles away, some from the dregs of London, and left in the care of often negligent “overlookers” in workhouse-like factories.
“[T]he exploitation of little children, on this scale and with this intensity, was one of the most shameful events in our history,” wrote British historian E. P. Thompson.[1] For the past year or two, I have been wondering how it could have happened. Now I see.
The first textile mills were built soon after the advent of mechanized spinning. The water-frame was invented in 1768 and the “mule” in 1779. These spinning machines vastly increased the production of yarn, but they required motive energy, and James Watts’ steam engine was still an experiment.
So, to power the mills, owners located them on rivers or streams, often in isolated places like New Lanark, Scotland, or Cromford, Derbyshire. The mill owners needed workers to monitor the machines. Where would they come from?
This is where the poor laws came in. The parishes had a problem—constantly rising expenditures on relief.[2] One traditional way to help children (and keep down parish expenses) was to apprentice young people with craftsmen such as printers or carpenters. But the parish overseers, who were responsible for relieving the poor (while also keeping rates down), had trouble finding masters who wanted to take on apprentices.
Suddenly, around 1780, they had a windfall. Factory owners needed workers (and children were often more docile and agile than adults); parish overseers needed places for children, both orphans and those with parents.
“The movement from one system, which was overburdened with needy children, to another, which required large numbers of young people, eased pressures on both,” wrote Katrina Honeyman in a book about the apprentices. [3] In other words, the advent of factories “saved” a practice established by the poor laws dating back to the seventeenth century, a practice that was increasingly difficult to carry out.
The question I ignored for a year was, what would the owners have done without the pauper apprentices who were provided under the poor laws? Of course, we don’t know. We do know that Sir Robert Peel, a successful mill owner and subsequently member of Parliament, said many years later that the first mills had to be located in “country places where there were great waterfalls, and consequently could not have any other than apprentice labour.”[4]
But what if there had been no apprentices? What would he have done? Let’s see.
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- He and others might not have invested in mills, and the Industrial Revolution might have taken a bit longer.
- (Let’s assume that the distasteful British practice of impressment into Navy ships would not be applied to factories.)
- He could have enticed families to move to his mills, bringing their children.
Indeed, Robert Owen did encourage families to come to his mills and so did Samuel Oldknow. Owen had nice houses built in the village of New Lanark, Scotland, and provided education for the children; Oldknow made sure that there was work (often in construction and maintenance) for the fathers so that they could send their wives and children to his mill at Mellor in Derbyshire.[5]
Without the poor laws, things would have been different. Children would still have worked long hours, at the behest of their parents, but the “shameless” exploitation would not have occurred. Am I right?
[1] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House [1963] 1964), 349.
[2] Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550-1750. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[3] Katrina Honeyman, Child Workers in England, 1780-1820, Child Workers in England, 1780-1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force (London: Routledge, 2007), 15.
[4] Quoted in T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830. (London: Oxford University Press, [1948] 1968, 79..
[5] See George Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights (Manchester: University Press), 1924.
Image by Tim Hill of Pixabay.
All we can do is guess. So much in life is a matter of luck. Who is the decision maker at the time. What did he or she have for breakfast. Which side of the bed did they get out of. It is all great fun. And perhaps it is even scholarship. But history is a humanity. Not a science. Not even a political science. Or a social science. But you have to love and respect the speculation that stimulates the little grey cells. Thank you all.
I’m convinced by your argument–unintended consequences of the Poor Laws. Alternatives are easy to imagine looking backward (you know, the way modern protestors look backward and tell us how Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, shoulda coulda behaved).
I meant to add that if only the English government had looked into the future, they might have invested in human capital by creating trade schools and vocational ed programs. Same for the factory owners–bring ’em up through the ranks, pay them higher wages so like H Ford’s workers they could buy their employer’s products.
Well they didn’t do that, so they might soon be yet one more proof of capitalism’s failures.
Wallace, you seem to be implying (with a little sarcasm) that the purpose of studying history is to identify what should have been done. No, in my view, we need to understand the unintended consequences of decisions that have been made. That doesn’t mean that the actors are aware of them as they are making decisions. Maybe it is impossible! As you will see (or have seen) in my next post, there were benefits to the poor law, too. They may have outweighed these defects.
I like your reasoning Jane. The lives of the poor would have been different–and perhaps the price of textiles higher.
France was slower industrializing if my recollection is correct. Would lack of similar “poor laws” and hence less labor supply have been a reason?
Yes, France industrialized later. I would love to study the Industrial Revolution in France but it would be an enormous undertaking. You may be on to something there: no poor laws, no factory workers! The French were also much more tied to the land, and finding workers would have been difficult for that reason.