Charlotte Hodgman talks to Peter Higginbotham about British workhouses, and

visits ten locations linked with the provision of relief to Britains poor

Portsea Union Workhouse in St Marys Road

Poor Law, in British history, body of laws undertaking to provide relief for the
poor, developed in 16th-century England and maintained, with various
changes, until after World War II. The Elizabethan Poor Laws, as codified in
159798, were administered through parish overseers, who provided relief for
the aged, sick, and infant poor, as well as work for the able-bodied
in workhouses. Late in the 18th century, this was supplemented by the socalled Speenhamland system of providing allowances to workers who received
wages below what was considered a subsistence level. The resulting increase in
expenditures on public relief was so great that a new Poor Law was enacted in
1834, based on a harsher philosophy that regarded pauperism among ablebodied workers as a moral failing. The new law provided no relief for the ablebodied poor except employment in theworkhouse, with the object of
stimulating workers to seek regular employment rather than charity. The
growth of humanitarian feeling in the 19th century helped to mitigate the
harshness of the law in practice, and the phenomenon of
industrial unemployment in the 20th century showed thatpoverty was more
than a moral problem. The social legislation of the 1930s and 40s replaced the
Poor Laws with a comprehensive system of public welfare
serviceRevolutionary activities

A painting of the Peterloo Massacre by George

Cruikshank, 1819. A crowd of 60,000 had gathered in St Peter's Fields,
Manchester, to hear speeches supporting parliamentary reform. Eleven were
killed and 400 injured after a Yeomanry charge. Against the lowering and
portentous backdrop of revolution in France, the most important influence on
the political lives of two generations of politicians from the younger Pitt (1759-

1806) to Robert Peel (1788-1850), all threats of revolution were taken seriously.
The authorities hastily assembled an extensive spy network. Both the Irishinspired Despard Conspiracy of 1803 and the so-called Cato Street Conspiracy
of 1820 to blow up Lord Liverpool's cabinet - to take only the best-known
examples of revolutionary activity in the period - were forestalled. Their leaders
were executed amid a blaze of publicity designed to confirm the government's
control of the situation. Beneath the surface, however, and despite
overwhelming evidence of support from the propertied classes, politicians were
more concerned than they could admit.
...because support for radical parliamentary reform never
disappeared...
This was because support for radical parliamentary reform never disappeared.
During periods of economic turbulence, such as 1815-20 and during the socalled Reform Act crisis of 1829-32, masses of people could appear on the
streets in support of either democracy or republicanism. The most famous such
occasion was in August 1819 when a large crowd assembled at St Peter's Fields
in central Manchester to hear a pro-reform speech from Henry 'Orator' Hunt,
the most gifted radical speaker of his day. Fearing uncontainable disorder, and
perhaps even revolution, the Manchester authorities over-reacted. They sent in
troops to disperse the crowd by force. Eleven people were killed and the
radicals were given a huge propaganda boost by referring to the event as
'Peterloo', in a grim analogy with the Duke of Wellington's famous victory over
Napoleon at Waterloo four years earlier.
s. See also workhouse.