Richard Smith

In two previous blogs on older adults in the English past, we established that only a minority of older people enjoyed the luxury of a well-funded retirement, and that they rarely lived in extended households with married children to provide for them. So, who did look after the elderly when they were not able to work and had acquired few life-time savings?  

Family or community?

The Poor Law Act of 1601 stated that families were responsible for the care of their impoverished elderly relatives. However, there is limited evidence that this was enforced, and historians disagree regarding the extent to which older adults did in fact rely on their kin, or whether they were more likely to turn to the wider community for support.  

The historian Paul Slack suggested that ‘it was the community not the family which supported the elderly in early modern England’. Others have maintained that, by contrast, the family was overwhelmingly the principal source of support for those in old age. These scholars stress that only a minority of poor elderly persons received extra-familial relief, and those that did received amounts insufficient for their survival. Not until the establishment of the welfare state after World War II, they claim, did Britain possess a ‘cradle to grave’ form of welfare. 

Household formation

Because newly married couples usually formed a new household (a practice termed ‘neolocalism’), different generations had a high degree of residential independence. Nonetheless, support for the elderly might still be provided by neighbouring – or more geographically distant – married and unmarried children, evocatively termed ‘intimacy at a distance’. Neolocalism, along with relatively late ages at first marriage, caused many middle–aged couples to experience the double burden of dependent children at home while their elderly parents also sought assistance. 

The economic consequences for this ‘sandwich generation’ were particularly acute among the propertyless, whose incomes depended almost entirely on their own labour. How could young married labourers be expected to save for their own old age and simultaneously support an elderly parent?  

Charity

For centuries, the elderly were regarded as the category par excellence of the ‘deserving poor’, and charitable aid took a broad spectrum of forms. Begging, while not necessarily condoned, was often regarded as an acceptable and unthreatening pursuit when undertaken by the aged. 

One longstanding area of philanthropy specifically focused on the elderly were alms houses. These were funded by voluntary donations (rather than through the poor law) and usually offered separate private accommodation for older people. At most, 2-3 percent of those over 60 secured an alms house place. There was great geographical variability, but alms house inmates were disproportionately selected from the ‘respectable’ female and church-going elderly. 

Linking parish registers with poor law accounts 

Parish poor relief accounts detail the payments in cash and kind to named persons, who can then also be identified in parish registers. This allows investigation of the age and family circumstances of those receiving welfare.  

Although the elderly made up no more than 10 percent of the overall population across the 17^th and 18^th centuries, they constituted 50 to 80 percent of parish relief recipients. The proportions of over 60-year-olds receiving relief varied from as little as 15 to over 50 percent in any community. Among those aged over 70, a clear majority received parish support. Often, as they became older, this was their sole source of income. 

Housing and heating-fuel support, paid for from rate-based funds, was widespread. In addition, local officials attempted to combine a poor law ‘pension’ with some form of low paid and irregular employment, or access to grazing rights on the common, gleaning, and fuel gathering. Many elderly women were paid to undertake small tasks such as washing, cooking, sewing, weeding, childminding, or sitting with the sick, and in some cases, they might be employed by the parish to prepare and spin yarn.  

Finding work for ageing males presented different and more demanding challenges for the poor law authorities, since most elderly men worked at slower paces than men of prime working age. However, they might be provided with tools to repair parish roads and to ‘hedge and ditch’ in the winter. There was no consistent age at which a pension would be received, or standard amount awarded, since many payments were a supplement to family help or a boost to inadequate earnings.  

Men on average received their first poor law pension in their low to mid 70s, and women (a large majority of whom were widowed) in their low 60s. In fact, older women consistently outnumbered older men in terms of payments of all types from the overseers of the poor.  

Geographical variations  

There was notable geographical variation in poor relief provision in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In the north and west of England, fewer of the elderly were in receipt of a pension, and the average given (below 10d per week) was lower than the south and east (where the average was 15d to 24d per week). Irrespective of region, however, the pension was usually given as a supplement to earnings, and its value increased as the beneficiary aged, reflecting a growing incapacity to work. Late 18th and early 19th century letters from the aged poor to overseers in all regions also indicate a notable sense of entitlement to parish-based support.       

Workhouses

It is a striking feature of the English poor law that it strove to keep elderly people in their own homes for as long as possible, although the parish sometimes paid for them to be boarded out with a female carer, sometimes herself an elderly poor-relief receiving widow.  

Only a small minority of the elderly entered workhouses, and although they grew in number to become a prominent category of workhouse residents, few were recorded as working there, perhaps because they were not physically able to do so. So, although older women formed over half the inmates of 18th–century Norfolk workhouses, they were responsible for only a quarter of the wool spun in those institutions.  

The growth of agrarian capitalism  

The last decades of the 18th century were characterised by rapid population growth, rising prices, and burgeoning relief for the able bodied poor (largely non-elderly). Studies of individual parishes, such as the Essex village of Terling, provide insight into the position of the elderly during this period of deteriorating economic conditions. The rural capitalist economy in this area moved inexorably towards extensive grain farming on large farms, employing the labour principally of younger and middle-aged men. Women were squeezed out of seasonal agricultural tasks such as gleaning, and other local employment for older women, such as spinning, had also vanished.  

Despite these developments, a decreasing share of poor relief was provided as pensions for elderly women in their own homes, and the weekly amount stagnated. Although the proportion of older women receiving these outdoor pensions continued to grow, the number of older women ending up in workhouses grew faster. The proportion of older men receiving a pension also increased in many rural locations, as they were displaced from a tightening labour market.  

The New Poor Law  

The New Poor Law (1834) aimed to tighten the conditions for receiving relief, stating that it would be given only within ’the strict discipline of a well-regulated workhouse’. However, as more research into the period is completed, we find that three-quarters of New Poor Law relief continued to be given to beneficiaries in their own homes. 

Between 1870 and 1890, there were further changes which had implications for the elderly. A centrally orchestrated policy, known as ’the crusade against out-door relief,’ was a campaign to force children to support their elderly parents. It resulted in legal actions by poor-law guardians against increasingly resentful children who did not and could not aid their parents.  

The policy contributed to some growth in workhouse residence among the elderly which was more marked among males. This was due to their inability to work, and because poor law guardians regarded them as less respectable than elderly women, and hence less worthy of outdoor relief. Aged women had access to a wider range of jobs, as well as being more likely to live within the households of their children (a coresidential arrangement that was peaking in this period).  

Conclusion

There is overwhelming evidence that poor relief to persons in their old age was intricately intertwined with the availability of work and the physical and cognitive capacity of individuals to engage in it. Poor law pensions should therefore not be regarded as ‘retirement’ allowances given upon reaching one specific age.  

The Old Poor Law functioned fundamentally on a face-to-face, case–by–case basis, and the fact that overseers were members of the same local communities as those needing care ensured that information about the precise needs of the elderly person could be effectively elicited. This provided a safety net for the elderly, and it was its dependability and regularity rather than its generosity which was its most distinctive feature. Yet its effectiveness should not be dismissed: it redistributed resources on a major scale, and was therefore an important source of support for the aged.

However, the Old Poor Law’s variability from place to place and from recipient to recipient, as well as its susceptibility to phases of falling generosity, are proof that it was not a ‘welfare state in miniature’ for the elderly. What is clear from the evidence is that the families of the elderly poor could not maintain them without substantial community support.

Further reading

• Heritage, T., ‘Old age, regionalism and the ‘north-south’ divide in late Victorian and Edwardian England’, Romance, Revolution and Reform 1 (2019), 46-71. 
• Slack, P., Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (Longmans, London, 1988). 
• Smith, R., ‘Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare: Reflections from Demographic and Family History’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past: The Neale Colloquium in British History (UCL Press. London, 1996), pp. 23-50. 
• Smith, R., ‘Ageing and Well-Being in Early Modern England: Pension Trends and Gender Preferences under the English Old Poor Law’, in Paul Johnson and Pat Thane (eds.), Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity (Routledge, London, 1998), pp. 64-95. 
• Waddell, B., ‘The Rise in the Parish-Welfare State’, Past and Present 258 (2021), 152-194. 
• Williams, S., ‘Poverty, gender and Old Age in the Victorian and Edwardian Workhouse’, Continuity and Change 37 (2022), 389-421. 

Tags: households, old age, old people, poor laws, poverty

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