Life-cycle vulnerability: pauper life histories in 18th and 19th century Westminster

"Historians' knowledge of life-cycle poverty in England before the later nineteenth century is at a fairly rudimentary stage. Nevertheless, we are increasingly aware of the importance of the poor relief system to welfare, to migration patterns, certainly to countless individuals and perhaps also to family structures in general. This paper reports some of the early results of a three-year ESRC-funded project on pauper life histories in eighteenth and nineteenth century Westminster, begun in January 2004. The study uses the extensive poor law records of the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields (population c.42,000 in 1725) to construct life histories of as large a proportion as possible of the thousands of men, women and children who came into contact with the parish authorities between the 1720s and 1860s. In some cases such contact was a brief, once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, but many individuals had lengthy and varied pauper ‘careers’ in and around St Martin’s. We use relational database methods to draw together pieces of information about such individuals from a variety of sources: overseers’ and churchwardens’ accounts and minutes, workhouse registers and accounts and, crucially, settlement examination reports. These narratives provide a wealth of information about past and present employment experiences and family circumstances of the paupers who claimed support from St Martin’s; they stand alongside the sources usually used for demographic reconstitutions and are complementary to them. When complete we expect to have the largest collection of life histories in existence for England before the twentieth century. This paper focuses on the parish workhouse and its inmates. Constructed in 1725, it quickly became the main locus of relief, with over 700 admissions in that year and over 1,000 per annum by the 1740s. As expected, the very young and very old were most likely to be admitted into the house, but whole families and young bastard-bearing women also darkened its doors on a fairly frequent basis. Using the results of preliminary record linkage and life history construction, the paper illustrates a variety of pauper career paths, examined by age and sex, that led both into and out of the workhouse; this is linked with the age of the inmates, which can in turn be compared with the age structure of the population. By these means it is possible to calculate the proportion of population of various ages at risk of entering the workhouse. In addition the paper shall explore the seasonality of workhouse entry and exit, comparing this with what is known about seasonal employment and mortality in Westminster. When examined by age and sex for the second quarter of the eighteenth century the peak months of entry saw double or more than double the number of entrants than the trough months. This is compared with later periods, when seasonal fluctuations appear to have become less marked. The seasonality of hardship (as measured by workhouse entry) was not necessarily the same as the seasonality of employment in Westminster; an attempt will be made to relate the two. In sum, the extraordinarily rich material that survives for the metropolitan parishes enables us to shed detailed light on the lives of the poor during the age of industrialisation."