Poor Law

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As a rule, the legal provisions for the support of the poor in England are referred to as the Poor Law , the basis of which Elizabeth I laid in 1601 through the poor law she enacted . The law on the poor was in force in various forms and forms until the emergence of the welfare state at the beginning of the 20th century. Today it is considered to be one of the first socio-political interventions by the state and thus one of the starting points of today's support systems. After individual parishes established regulations for the treatment of the poor as early as the 16th century, the Poor Law was the basis for a nationally uniform system of support for the needy in England.

Principles (17th and 18th centuries)

The Poor Law guaranteed every poor person the right to community support. Everyone should be protected from extreme hardship. The Poor Law was aimed equally at people who were unable to work ( impotent poor ), people who could not find work ( able bodied ), and people who refused to work ( vagrants ).

This support ( poor relief ) was usually provided in the form of natural produce, in rare cases in the form of money. To encourage the poor to take up work, public support should be kept to a minimum and well below the income of the poorest worker. In order to finance the aid, the municipalities were allowed to levy taxes on the poor.

At the same time, the law on the poor was based on massive deterrent effects in order to discourage people from applying for poor relief and to encourage them to take up work. The application of those seeking help was in open session before the volunteer guardians ( guardians negotiated). Recognized poor people were listed in public registers, their names were posted on community walls, and since 1697 they had to wear a P (for pauper = poor) embroidered on their clothing . Recognized needy people were deprived of their right to vote.

A new law ( settlement act ) introduced the principle of origin into the poor law in 1662. It only provided support for those who were born, married or trained in the community.

With the beginning of the 18th century the poor were to be spreading workhouses ( workhouses admitted) to test their willingness to work. In 1776 there were workhouses in England and Wales in 1912 with about 100,000 people living in them. The workhouses also became a reservoir for people with physical or mental illnesses, with mental or physical disabilities, and for the elderly and orphans.

The New Poor Law (1834)

The Elizabethan Poor Law did not withstand the developments of the 19th century. The onset of industrialization , the onset of population growth and the influx into the cities increased the cost of poor relief and made the system ineffective. The origin principle was also criticized because it made the labor market less flexible.

In 1834, the new poor law was passed, which essentially aimed at reducing costs. The new poor law provided for mandatory induction in workhouses and at the same time made conditions there significantly worse. The workhouses became places that resembled prisons. Critics like Friedrich Engels judged the conditions in these workhouses to be so devastating that they assumed that their only purpose was to prevent poor people from seeking government support.

Joint criticism from workers, trade unions, politicians and the church led to changes in the new law on the poor, which in part eased the harsh conditions in the workhouses and improved controls.

The end of the poor law

With the development of new social policy , such as the establishment of pension and accident insurance in the years 1906–1914, the Poor Law became less important. Even between the world wars, systems were introduced in England that provided for support independently of the Poor Law and its stigmatizing provisions. The English workhouses were officially banned in 1929. The last vestiges of the Poor Law were abolished in 1948.

Effects of the Poor Law

England was the first country to develop comprehensive and uniform national poor legislation. English settlers brought the ideas of the Poor Law to the New World, albeit in an even stricter form influenced by Calvinism . Immigrants seeking poor relief were not only publicly named, but in some cases also exposed, whipped or auctioned off to interested parties ( auction system ). After the increasing number of immigrants in the middle of the 19th century, workhouses were also built in the eastern United States.

The idea of ​​deterrence in providing poor relief quickly spread to continental Europe as well. The first workhouses in Germany were built at the beginning of the 17th century. In the newly founded German Reich , too, support for the poor was linked to the condition that one made one's labor available.

literature

  • Karl Polanyi: The great transformation. Political and economic origins of societies and economic systems. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2007.
  • EM Hampson: The Treatment of Poverty in Cambridgeshire, 1597-1834 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1934, ( Cambridge Studies in Economic History ), (Reissued by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2009, ISBN 978-1-108-00234-9 ).
  • Walter Lorenz: Social Work in a Changing Europe . Routledge, London 1994, ISBN 0-415-07807-5 .
  • Wolfgang C. Müller: How helping became a job . Revised new edition. Beltz, Weinheim et al. 1999, ISBN 3-407-22020-0 , ( Beltz-Taschenbuch 20 Sozialarbeit ).
  • Sir George Nicholls (1781-1865) : A History of the English Poor Law . 3 volumes. J. Murray, London 1854-1899.
  • Dominik Nagl: No Part of the Mother Country, but Distinct Dominions Legal Transfer, State Building and Governance in England, Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1630–1769. LIT, Berlin 2013, pp. 149–159, 556–587. ISBN 978-3-643-11817-2 . [1]
  • Sidney Webb , Beatrice Webb : English Poor Law History . Part I: The Old Poor Law . Longmans, London 1927.

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