Speenhamland
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This article is about the welfare system. For the place in Berkshire after which it is named, see Speenhamland, Berkshire.
Speenhamland was an English system of outdoor relief intended to mitigate rural poverty during the early 19th century.
It is named after the district of Speenhamland in Newbury, Berkshire, where, in 1795, the authorities approved a means-tested sliding-scale of wage supplements in order to mitigate the worst effects of rural poverty.
Unfortunately, it tended to aggravate the underlying causes of poverty in any particular parish. The immediate impact of paying this poor rate fell on the landowners of the parish concerned. They then sought other means of dealing with the poor, such as the workhouse funded through parish unions.
The Speenhamland System appears to have reached its height during the Napoleonic Wars, when it was a means of allaying dangerous discontent amongst a growing rural proletariat faced by soaring food prices, and to have died out in the post-war period, except in a few parishes. (Phillis Deane (1965) The First Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. p. 144)
The Poor Law Commissioners' Report of 1834 called the Speenhamland System one of "bounty on indolence and vice" and a "universal system of pauperism." The system allowed employers (often farmers) to pay below subsistence wages, because the parish would make up the difference and keep their workers alive. So the workers' low income was unchanged and the poor rate contibutors subsidised the farmers.
Thomas Malthus believed a system of supporting the poor would lead to increased population growth rates because the Poor Laws encouraged early marriage. No empirical evidence shows a strong correlation between population rates and Speenhamland though. (ibid. p. 143–144)
This system of poor relief, and others like it, lasted until the passing of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.
Evidence in the last thirty years shows that the bread scale devised during the Speenhamland meeting in 1795 was by no means universal, and that even the system of outdoor relief which found one of its earliest though not the first expressions in Speenhamland was not completely widespread. Allowances, or supplements, to wages were used generally as a temporary measure, and the nature of their execution changed in various regions. Mark Blaug's classic 1960 essay "The Myth of the Old Poor Law" charged the commissioners of 1834 with largely using the Speenhamland system to vilify the old poor law and create will for the passage of a new one. Speenhamland appears to have been one among many systems of bread scales, but it most likely owes its notoriety to Frederick Eden's The State of the Poor (1797). Eden attacked the system as an impediment to agricultural progress. Though some of Blaug's more drastic assertions may be illfounded or overly polemical, it appears evident that Speenhamland was by no means a household name, and that since the practice was by January 1795 (the famous meeting was in May) being used in various villages, usually in collusion with other means of relieving the poor. Because of failed attempts to reform the existing poor law at a national level, the scarcity of 1795 was largely dealt with by innovations in a haphazard way at the local level, and it seems improbable that a national and uniform policy existed.
[edit] Further reading
- Society and Pauperism J.R. Poynter
- The Making of the English Working Class E.P. Thompson
- The Idea of Poverty Gertrude Himmelfarb
- The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi
