by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
February: 9 ½ d
April: 10d
November: 14 ½ d
December: 17d
These increases meant less demand for manufactured goods and raw materials, which fell in price after 1815, causing more unemployment and thereby making it even more difficult to buy basic foodstuffs. It is not an accident that food prices were on the front page of Regency newspapers; these were vitally important, and they changed regularly – usually upwards.
By August 1816 the price of domestic wheat had risen to 80s a quarter, the price at which imports were allowed. However, even with the increase in imports in the latter part of the year, prices did not fall. Foreign imports had stopped by December because the catastrophically poor weather had led to shortages in Europe as well. There were no available surpluses in the USA either. The domestic harvest for other foodstuffs had also been mediocre and this exacerbated the situation. In Oxford, the quartern loaf was 8d in January 1816; by December it had increased to 14d and wheat reached 94s. Conditions were much worse in France and the rest of the continent, as the British papers gleefully reported: ‘In many parts of France bread is absolutely twice dearer than in England’.4
It was clear that this was a food crisis all over Europe, perhaps the last one in Western Europe where people starved in significant numbers all over the continent.
Potatoes were suggested as an alternative to bread but they were regarded as low status food, especially in the south of England. The poor, the friends of the poor, and the apologists for the suffering of the poor, all took a moral position against the lowly tuber. To the poor, potatoes were a food fit only for hogs, possibly poisonous, the content of charity soups, and the staple diet of the Irish.
Cobbett, a vocal critic of the system and the sufferings caused by it, concurred, calling it ‘Ireland’s lazy root’, believing that the potato diet would be a race to the bottom for the English poor, who would not ever see bread, beef, and beer again. In his book, Cottage Economy he continued his prejudices by stating the potato ‘reduced the English labourer down to the state of the Irish’, whose diet is ‘but one remove away from a pig, and an ill fed pig too’.
Malthus, who fretted about the rapid rise in population, believed that the crop was the cause of early marriage, rapid population growth, and by implication, too many Catholic Irish of doubtful loyalty. Adam Smith, the economist, took a rational, evidence-based view; he had seen many Irish, mostly porters and prostitutes, and they were much better physical specimens than those brought up on wheaten bread in England.
The lower orders were blamed for their ignorance about food preparation. On 28 December 1816, a letter in the Northampton Mercury suggested that the poor were not cooking their potatoes well enough – it was only ‘done well in Ireland and Lancashire’ – a reference to the poor Irish peasant and the Irish diaspora in Liverpool and Manchester. Critics pointed out that too much of the potato was peeled away before cooking, that people could not spot a good quality potato from a poor one, and they were ignorant of the fact that it needed to be dry when stored.
The crop was also unpredictable. This situation was made worse by the damp rainy summers in the years after 1816 and the potato failed in Ireland in 1817 and at regular intervals after that. Even years of surplus were not very valuable, because the crop could not be stored for any length of time. Attempts to store potatoes in underground pits were unsuccessful. The difficulty of storing was made worse by the fact that they did not crop throughout the year. There would be a few months of scarcity, but this only mattered to those who did not have other options.
In a good year, the Irish peasant would have milk with their potatoes; the Reverend David Davies, who studied the poor of his own parish in 1797 noted:
Wheaten Bread may be eaten alone with pleasure; but potatoes need either milk or meat to make them go down; you cannot make hearty meals of them with salt and water only. Poor people indeed give them to their children in the greasy water they have boiled their greens and their morsel of bacon.
The newspapers had mixed feelings about the potato. ‘We use the potato, we abuse it and despise those who eat it.’ The paper went on to do some despising – with the price of potatoes being so cheap:
[Potatoes are sent to] Spitalfields, to sell at 3s and 4s per cwt., or 5 or 6lbs. of good food for 2d? Who need to starve? Another serious consideration arises, – who need to work, when the chief sustenance of a family can be procured so cheaply?
In 1815, in Hampshire, this was felt: 14lbs. of potatoes for 4d. made the labourer too careless. Have you got the potatoes? was the only question of the morning, for the provision of the wife and four or five children of the cottage
The bountiful nature of the potato brought a moral problem. It would stop the lower classes working. This opinion would have been particularly galling for those who had been rioting for food for the past two years. Cobbett would have been outraged by the establishment newspapers’ invitation to the lower orders to subsist miserably on potatoes while feeling guilty at the same time. The report continued to reference a beggar woman who regularly earned 8s a day, made herself fat on cheap potatoes but stayed poor, ‘as it was gin and brandy that impoverish’ – once again, cheap food was a problem because it led to vice, idleness and drunkenness.5
Despite everything, there was a shift towards the potato during the Regency for the practical reason that it filled the belly of people who could not afford bread. In places such as Manchester and Liverpool the diet of the urban poor was potatoes, oatmeal and bacon by 1815. If Cobbett had travelled to any of these places he would have realised the potato (‘the root of extreme unction’) was linked more with exploitation than religion. The Irish handloom weavers in Manchester in 1820 were living on salt and potatoes because of their occupation, not their religion.6
An advantage of the potato was that it could be grown in a poor person’s garden. Despite Cobbett’s doubtful assertions about the nutritional value of the tuber, common sense and experience suggested that it could feed the most family members with the least amount of land, as the poor Irish survived in this way. According to one newspaper correspondent it produced other advantages: 7
Mr Cobbett has forgot to state, that in the country a great majority of the working classes have a small garden in which they cultivate Potatoes with their own hands in over hours, literally, without expense. No money goes out. It is all amusement and clear gain. By this their homesteads are endeared to them, and they are kept from the alehouse.
Growing your own food was a source of satisfaction for the lower orders, he continued. The correspondent also challenged Cobbett’s arguments that the potato needed 500 fires a year and therefore wasted fuel and time. The paper’s correspondent pointed out that the urban poor would usually have a non-working member of the family at home and that a fire was lit for other purposes such as cooking other foods and keeping warm in winter. If fuel was short, men would make a sandwich of dry bread and cheese for their lunch before leaving for work in the morning to save the wood or coal for their family in the evening. It was also pointed out that the worst cuts of meat end up with the poor, that no additional fuel was needed to boil or roast potatoes, and they were an ideal complement to a stew or a cheap joint and then ‘add a herring and the meal is sumptuous’.
In 1819 there was a flurry of charitable societies who tried to create allotments and cottage gardens for the poor. The growing of potatoes, including cultivation of early crops and better preservation of surpluses became a hobby for the rich, even if they did not eat the produce themselves. Some people asked the landowning aristocracy to give up land to create small farms. Mr Phillips, a regular correspondent to newspapers, had written an essay on ‘Relieving the Distresses of the Labouring Poor’ and now wanted to do more: 8
At present he is pursuing a plan in which we most heartily wish he may succeed: he is confident the liberality of the Nobility and Gentry will raise a fund sufficient for the hire of large quantities of land in differ
ent parts of England, for the purpose of re-letting, in small farms, plots of land to the cottagers, and pasturage for cows, sheep, etc. When we reflect how many thousand families may be replaced, from a state of pauperism and misery, to profitable pursuits and employment, we cannot too often or too loudly call the attention of the Public to the question.
Some cynical observers commented that the nobility and gentry were merely giving back, as an act of charity, land that had been cultivated by the rural poor as a matter of custom and right a mere thirty years earlier. In April 1819 the Poor Law authorities in Titchfield, Hampshire tried to use enclosed land to allow paupers to grow potatoes – in other words, to allow it to return to its historic and customary use. However, the plan was successfully challenged by the new owners; new property rights trumped the need to help the poor.
When the potato crop failed in the United Kingdom in 1844, it was first spotted in the Isle of Wight, not Ireland. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel’s first concern was the diet of the English working class, who were eating potatoes every day by this time. Peter Gaskell, in his Condition of the Manufacturing Population (1836) suggested that the ‘staple diet of the townmill artisans is potatoes and wheaten bread, washed down by tea or coffee’.
Apart from coffee and a little more tea, it was still mostly bread and potatoes for the lower orders thirty years after the Regency.
Chapter 6
The Poor Law
Although it was called the Poor Law, it was a law about the poor, not a law against poverty. There was no concern in Regency Britain about people being poor; it was considered a natural state, and it allowed others to live in luxury, which was another natural state. Poverty encouraged social order – it was believed that people could escape the worst of their condition by sobriety, obedience and constant hard work every day of the week except Sunday. People could be as poor as they could bear, and they were obliged by God to bear it. It only became a problem when the people became indigent – unable to survive without help.
Britain’s system of looking after the poor was falling apart by the late Regency period. Over the centuries, a local system had developed whereby money was collected by a ‘poor rate’ and distributed according to need. It worked well when there was shortage of labour, because it made economic sense to retain a skilled workforce even if they went through a temporary bad patch. It was an inexpensive system when bread was cheap and work was regular. It was popular when it was clear that local people rather than strangers were being helped. All these conditions reversed by 1790, the cost of helping the poor increased far faster than anybody’s income. The apparent generosity of the system was ended by a new, harsher Poor Law in 1834, which introduced the workhouse as a deliberately cruel punishment and abolished other payments to the poor.
Lots of experiments were tried before this harshness was implemented in 1834. A minimum wage for all citizens may seem a modern idea, but it has been tried before. It started in the Pelican public house in Speenhamland, Berkshire on 9 May 1795. Officials had used locally raised taxes to help the poor of their parishes for centuries, and this was an attempt to regularise the system. The meeting started with a request from concerned magistrates to employers to pay their labourers better wages ‘to enable them to provide for themselves and their families…in proportion to the present unavoidable price of bread’. Wages were falling in the countryside as land was enclosed and rural employment fell. High bread prices meant that the locals were starving, while those who owned the land were thriving.
Despite the exhortation to the rich to pay more, the magistrates then did something that stopped employers increasing wages and arguably led to rural poverty wages for the next forty years. They offered to subsidise labourers’ wages based on the price of bread. Each man would receive 3s, and his wife and children 1s 6d when the price of two quartern loaves (often called a gallon or half peck loaf) reached 1s. This money would only be available to the poor who were industrious and who ‘endeavoured as far as they can to support and maintain their own family’ – but it was still an indexed-linked minimum wage over 200 years before it was officially introduced in the United Kingdom. The money would be raised by a Poor Law rate, paid by the wealthier members of the local community. However burdensome the Poor Law rates were, this was still cheaper for the employer than raising wages or offering regular employment.
It was unintentionally ironic that the Pelican Inn was the site of this important decision. The pelican, in Christian mythology, injured its own breast and drew its own blood to feed its offspring. In a sense, this is what the authorities had decided to do. It could never solve the problem of poverty, only mitigate the consequences, and they arguably made things worse by providing taxpayer-funded subsidies to employers.
The Speenhamland system was the main example of outdoor relief – payments to the poor in money or goods. It was cash payments to the able-bodied that caused most resentment. The fact that the Poor Law officials tried to stop such payments, and they continued nevertheless, shows the scale of the emergency of this period. It was still a cheaper option than admitting people into the workhouse.
When the economy collapsed in 1815, the cost of the poor law spiralled out of control. It was not only expensive, but in the eyes of the rich, dangerously demoralising for the poor themselves. The Speenhamland system paid allowances for children and therefore encouraged the poor to marry earlier and produce too many children.
It was widely believed that the system was exploited by malingerers. This item syndicated in lots of newspapers:
An itinerant dealer in toys died last week at Lincoln at the age of 70. By perpetually pleading poverty, he had obtained for some time parochial assistance for his own support, and his wife and family were occasionally admitted into the work-house. On his death he bequeathed property to the amount of £1000 to a person no way related to him.
‘Name and shame’ became popular. At its root was the belief that much poverty was voluntary. In 1817, 200 rate payers in Great Yarmouth petitioned the local magistrates to allow the names of all of those claiming outdoor relief (cash and offers of work) to be published: ‘The list…was printed as expeditiously as possible, and the outdoor relief has since been reduced from about £120 per week to little more than £60, and the rate [has fallen] to six shillings in the pound.’
This small article was published in newspapers in Stamford, Carlisle, Cambridge, Northampton, Bristol, and almost every major area in the country. In 1818 the Portsea Workhouse near Portsmouth printed a list of 900 families in receipt of outdoor relief with the stated aim of flushing out those who were cheating the system. It also announced that there were 900 people in the Workhouse, being a total of 8,000 people being supported by the poor rate. Shame became a form of rationing, and more stigma was attached to being poor, and much of it stuck.
Workhouses would often give money to the poor to get them back to work. In January 1819, the workhouse of St Saviour in Southwark gave money to George Adams to redeem his glazier’s diamond – a glass cutting implement that would have been indispensible. He had clearly pawned it to feed his family. Clothes were sometimes provided – Theodosia Brown received shoes from St George the Martyr workhouse nearly every August between the years 1815-1820. Sometimes she received money as well, yet she was always back in the workhouse in October. She had been given the grant to go hop picking in Kent, presumably wearing out her shoes. Theodosia was a good example of an ‘In and Out’, who left and entered the workhouse according to need; it was this ability which made the workhouse slightly different from prison. She died aged 80 on 14 January 1824 at the same workhouse; she did not need to go hopping any more.
Shoes, breeches, gowns, stockings, petticoats, shirts, waistcoats, smocks, greatcoats and bed gowns were distributed. They were hardwearing and plain, so that the poor did not come to expect finery, and would be connected with the needs of employment and respectability – John Agar was a workhouse apprentice who was given a shirt, stockings and pair of shoes t
o start his apprenticeship with Mr Deane in Southwark in 1816. Critics complained about the able-bodied poor receiving clothes; they believed the paupers should join a clothing club – saving from their wages in the same way as they did for their funerals.
Help was limited in another important way. Paupers could only be helped in one place in the country – their place of settlement, which could be gained by birth, marriage or work in a particular parish. This law of settlement worked well in a rural economy, but was not working in the more industrialised 1800s. It now distorted the labour market, reduced workers’ rights and created an inefficient economy. The poor were stopped from moving to a place where they had the best chance of good wages, and wages were being controlled at the same time that it was agreed that bread prices could not be regulated. Farmers and manufacturers could send their goods away for the higher price while workers were constrained by the place of their birth like medieval peasants; it was capitalism for the rich and feudalism for the poor.
One example can stand for thousands; at the Michaelmas hiring fair at Kimbolton, Huntingdonshire in September 1815, Thomas Lewin hired Sarah Swales as a domestic servant. She was a pauper from the neighbouring parish of Great Staughton. The overseers of the poor in Great Staughton would have been very pleased with this arrangement. Overseers were responsible for payments to the local poor and the administration of the workhouse, and Sarah would be off their books for a year. A year would be long enough for Sarah to gain settlement rights in Swineshead, her new place of residence, meaning she would no longer be a burden on Staughton.
For the sake of propriety, Mrs Lewin supervised the 16-year-old and she was paid £3 per year in arrears plus her food and lodgings. However, with eight days of her year to go, she was dismissed by the Lewins for oversleeping. Mr Lewin, giving evidence at the local Quarter Sessions, which dealt with disputes between Poor Law parishes, said that he had to make his own breakfast at times and had warned Sarah a dozen times:
