Category: Timeline

Prison conditions in the 18^th century were incredibly brutal. Dirty and crowded prisons were the norm in early England due to large numbers of prisoners – in particular, debtors. After the Black Act in 1729, crime laws were significantly tightened, and many crimes became punishable by death. This meant these debtors along with other less severe offenders made up a large portion of the prison population. However, these conditions were especially bad for the poor. Prisoners, rather than receiving salaries or benefits, had to pay for their own food and bedding, and were sometimes required to pay a fee before their release. This meant that inmates were forced to live on very little, and often to stay much longer than their sentence.

John Howard was a prison reformer and philanthropist during this time. When he became high sheriff of Bedfordshire, England, in 1773, he was deeply disturbed by those appalling living conditions endured by the prisoners he would supervise. This prompted him to travel across the country observing the conditions of other prisons, where he found no improvement. Howard’s distress over the prison situation in England led him to become one of a handful of people responsible for the creation of the Penitentiary Act of 1779.

The act was put in place in hope of reforming prison conditions in England. Howard’s reform emphasized solitary confinement, hard labor and religious instruction, which were aimed not only at deterring the people from committing crimes that would lead to their imprisonment, but to reform those who did become imprisoned as well. This changed the entire ideology of the prison system in England, from a “relaxed and informal prison regime” to “one which was obsessively and excessively regulated.”

 

 

“Background – Prisons and Lockups.” London Lives 1690 to 1800, April 2012, www.londonlives.org/static/Prisons.jsp (21 January 2018)

Clark, Robert. “Penitentiary Act; Panopticon.” The Literary Encyclopedia, 28 October 2000,
https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=841 (21 January 2018)

“History – Historic Figures: John Howard (1726 – 1790).” BBC, 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/howard_john.shtml (21 January 2018)

 

Founded on July 27^th, 1694 by royal charter under William and Mary (two of its original stakeholders), one of the institution’s major duties was to keep ownership of the nation’s debt and to help manage finances for the war with France.[1]

The foundation of the bank represented a crucial milestone of the Commercial Revolution, which had begun in Europe as early as the 11^th century. In England, the Commercial Revolution would define the nature of the relationship between the state and the economy. As a tool of the monarchy, the bank was an attempt minimize the influence England’s creditors could exert on the crown. The bank was the beginning of the economic transition from agricultural goods and raw materials to an economy reliant on banking, stock exchange, and insurance. This new service economy was part of a symbiotic relationship with England’s growing mercantile fleet that generated the demand for the services. In fact, the Bank of England began as a joint-stock operation.[2]

The strength of England’s financial service sector caused ripple effects throughout English society. Well before the foundation of the bank, the new class of wealthy clerks and merchants laid the foundations of the British middle class. The most successful of these early financiers pushed their way into influential political positions, since they possessed the capital that the land-rich aristocracy lacked. An early example, Thomas Cromwell used his foothold in trade to become a successful lawyer and was one of the major players in the English Reformation.[3] His distant relative, Oliver Cromwell, would control England for five years as Lord Protector. The bank marked the institutionalization of whole sector of professions that had long been looked down upon and demonstrated the success of these professionals in securing their stake in the country as a whole.

[1] “Our History.” Bank of England, 5 Dec. 2017, www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/history.

[2] Henry Keyser, The law relating to transactions on the stock exchange, (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, 1850), 1.

[3] F. Donald Logan, “Thomas Cromwell and the Vicegerency in Spirituals: A Revisitation,” The English Historical Review, (July 1988): 103 (408): 658–67. JSTOR 572696

The late eighteenth century marked a period of intense demographic changes in Britain. Having remained relatively stable at 5.1 million through the seventeenth century, the British population reached eight million at the end of the following century. Mortality crises caused by widespread disease (plague) and agricultural dearth was notably less frequent by this time and contributed in its absence to the population boom. The rising prominence of the industrial sector in the economy, too, was linked to the demographic growth of the period. Many citizens participated in the mass transition from finding work in the agricultural, trades, and cottage industry to that in the large-scale mineral processing and consumer goods industry. Evidently, Britain’s ‘dual economy’ of the feudal-industrial order shifted from a 90-10 percentage split in 1760 to a remarkable 50-50 in 1830.

Of course, the hallmarks of progress did not come without their underlying currents of unease. As Britain began to undertake a heightened consumer revolution and unprecedented numbers in the wage labor force, government agencies, social scientists of a budding field, and everyday citizens alike internalized growing concerns about the exploding population. The wary wave of thought affected perspective on the sustainability of traditional parish-based welfare, structures of poverty, the inevitability of famine, and other issues.  In 1798, Thomas Malthus published his fears that spoke for a generation: An Essay on the Principle of Population. Following Malthus’s publication, the Parliament enacted the Census Act of 1800 to place matters of accounting for and regulating demographic changes in governing hands—in the form of a ten-year census collection cycle. 1801 saw the distribution of the first ever census in Britain.

Fideler, Paul. Social Welfare in Pre-Industrial England: The Old Poor Law Tradition. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. Print.

Office for National Statistics United Kingdom. Focus on People and Migration. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Accessed web version 21 Jan. 2018.

Timmins, Geoff. “Working Life and the First Modern Census.” BBC History. Last updated 18 Sept. 2014. Accessed 21 Jan. 2018. Web.

The County Asylums Act of 1808 established the foundations of a national institutional network of insane asylums. It authorized the founding of publicly funded, county asylums to accommodate more mentally ill people. These asylums particularly helped paupers, whose other choices were remaining in their potentially hostile communities or living in workhouses. This Act stemmed from a string of legislation in the 18^th century attempting to curb abuses in asylums, some of which were founded in the 14^th century with unchanging views on treatment. Bethlem hospital was the most important example of this medieval approach to mental illness. In Bethlem, patients were on display to the public. People came to visit as one in the 21^st century goes to visit a zoo: for entertainment and to gawk. This came to be the 18^th and 19^th century standard of what not to do in caring for the mentally ill.  However, at institutions like St. Luke’s (founded in 1751 to accommodate more people than could Bethlem), the desire to give patients privacy led to a lack of visitation by outside officials, leading to rampant abuse. From 1750-1850, provision for the insane through private, volunteer-based, and publicly-funded asylums attempted to improve the abusive conditions through establishing networks and more centralized systems of quality control through visitation. However, enforcement was inconsistent due to its local nature until the passing of the County Asylums Act. This Act and the national network it created were turning points in the push for asylum reform.

Sources:

Smith, Leonard. ‘“The Keeper Himself Must be Kept’: Visitation and the Lunatic Asylum in England 1750-1850,” Clio Medica, Vol. 86 (2010): 199-222.

In 1764, Cesare Beccaria published On Crime and Punishment, a work that advocated for reform in the European criminal justice system. Borrowing from the works of Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu, Beccaria advocated for a system in which penalties matched the severity of the crimes they punished and where the threat of the gallows wasn’t the main tool for keeping the citizenry in line. This idea of institutions being judged on what did the most good for the most people foreshadows the ideas of utilitarianism that would become better developed in the early 19th century.

The work was a hit across Europe, and as other philosophers read it, a new, more enlightened, way of looking at punishment emerged. The emphasis began to shift away from purely punitive measures and towards the idea of reforming criminals. Drawing from the Enlightenment idea of the perfectibility of humans, reformers believed they could devise institutions that would turn criminals into better people.

The Englishman Jeremy Bentham was one such reformer. Remembered as one of the pioneering philosophers in the development of utilitarianism, Bentham took the ideas that Beccaria alluded to and applied them to life as a whole rather than just criminal justice. He believed that the best way to manage society was through a broad network of institutions that confined people based on their category, such as pauper or orphan, and controlled every aspect of their inhabitants’ lives. While Bentham’s so-called panopticons never came to dominate Europe, the idea of a total institution being used to reform certain social groups formed the basic scaffold of what many workhouses aimed to do.

Allen, Francis A. “Cesare Beccaria.” Encyclopædia Britannica. June 20, 2017. Accessed January 17, 2018. www./britannica.com/biography/Cesare-Beccaria

Driver, Julia. “The History of Utilitarianism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. March 27, 2009. Accessed January 2, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/

Ignatieff, Michael. A Just Measure of Pain: Penitentiaries in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

In 18th-century Europe, smallpox, commonly known as the “speckled monster”, affected all levels of society: from the elite to the poor. Jenner’s vaccination against smallpox radically changed public health in England and laid the foundations of modern immunology.

At age 13, Edward Jenner was apprenticed to a country surgeon and apothecary near Bristol. There, he learned that dairymaids never had smallpox after suffering from cowpox. Ten years later, whilst practicing medicine, he pondered the phenomenon of smallpox-resistant dairymaids and concluded that exposure to cowpox protected the dairymaids against smallpox and that this immunity could be transmitted from one person to another. He decided to investigate further. In May 1796, Jenner inoculated cowpox lesions from a sick dairymaid, and placed it in an 8-year-old boy. The boy fell sick but recovered after 10 days. Then, Jenner inoculated the boy with smallpox lesions and no smallpox developed. The boy was immune to smallpox.

After this major discovery, Jenner encouraged all people to get vaccinated and even built a hut beside his house to vaccinate the poor for free. His vaccination program was so significant to the public health initiative that poor law officials almost immediately adopted Jenner’s method to vaccinate the poor. “Pest houses” were often erected adjacent to the workhouses to contain the poor that were either afflicted by smallpox or had just received the vaccination. By 1800, most European countries adopted vaccination practices. Ultimately, Jenner’s push to vaccinate all people emphasized the need for more public health and social welfare initiatives in England.

 

Sources:

Stefan Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination,” Proceedings (Baylor University Medical Center) 18 (January 2005): 21-25.

Higginbotham, Peter. “Loddon and Clavering, Norfolk.” Accessed January 21, 2018. http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Loddon/

For roughly 200 years, from the middle of the 17^th century to 1807, Britain was heavily involved in the trade of slaves from Africa to its colonies in the Caribbean and America. During this time, British slave traders transported approximately 3.1 million Africans to the Caribbean and Americas, 2.7 million of whom survived the gruesome middle passage. The 18^th century abolition movement in Britain, a popular response to atrocities of the slave trade, was based on the same Enlightenment and Protestant principles that informed discussion of reform of the English poor laws.

The movement emerged in the 18^th century with such early abolitionists as Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Josiah Wedgewood, and gained momentum towards the end of the century. Many of those who supported the movement at its height were white women, including Mary Birkett, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as many working and middle-class women. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who had bought his freedom, published an autobiography which described the horrors he had endured as a slave. This autobiography brought more attention to the abolitionist movement, as did the involvement and contributions of other Africans.

The Abolition of Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807 and officially banned involvement of any British ship in the trade of slaves. Scholars argue British Enlightenment thought and Protestant religious values, by inspiring widespread critiques of slavery, drove the abolitionist movement in Britain. Quakers, Evangelists, and Rational Dissenters are cited as the most vocal religious groups in the movement.

Page, Anthony. “Rational Dissent, Enlightenment, and Abolition of the British Slave Trade.” The Historical Journal 54, no. 3 (2011): 741-72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23017270.

“Abolition of Slavery.” The National Archives. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/slavery/. (Accessed January 20^th, 2018)

Ali, Linda, and Siblon, John. “Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Black Presence: Asian and Black History in Britian, 1500-1850. The National Archives. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/rights/abolition.htm. (Accessed January 20^th, 2018)

The English Interregnum lasted from 1649, when Charles I was executed for high treason, until 1660, when Charles II was put on the throne. A lasting affect of the Interregnum was the flourishing of religious dissenters such as Diggers, Ranters, and Quakers. Oliver Cromwell was a very religious man, but he made room for dissenters within England (as long as they weren’t Catholic. He had a particular hatred of Catholics). Some of the legislation passed during the Interregnum had clear religious overtones, such as the Adultery Act, an act that imposed the death penalty for adultery. However, Cromwell’s commitment to liberty of conscience stood in the way of his attempt to form a godly nation. During the Interregnum, the Toleration Act was also passed. This act abolished compulsory church attendance. Also during the Interregnum, Cromwell did not withdraw England from the world stage. Instead he went on the offensive, and conquered Scotland and Ireland. Ireland was dealt with very harshly, Scotland not so much because the Scotland was Protestant. A republic was established during the interregnum, but it did not last. The republic struggled from its early days, however, In fact, in 1657 Cromwell was offered the kingship, which he declined after three months. Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, and without him the republic did not last very long. After a decade of governmental changes, the monarchy was brought back.

In 1662 Parliament passed the Poor Relief Act 1662, otherwise known at the Settlement Acts, to deal with the question of where someone was considered “settled.” If a poor person was settled in a parish, that parish (defined as an area with its own priest, each parish collected taxes) was obligated to provide “Poor Relief.”

Here is a list from The Victorian Web which legally made people “settled”:

• be born into a parish where the parents had a settlement
• up to 1662, live in a parish for more than three years; after 1662 a person could be removed within 40 days of arrival…
• be hired continually by a settled resident for more than a year and a day…
• hold parish office
• rent property worth more than £10 p.a. OR pay taxes on a property worth more than £10 p.a.
• have married into the parish
• previously have received poor relief in that parish
• have served a full seven-year apprenticeship to a settled resident

After the Settlement Acts, folks only had to live somewhere for 40 days, but during that period they could be removed if any local complained. This encouraged poor folks to move to the areas with the best poor relief. The Poor Relief Act also stated that people could travel to another parish if they had a certificate from the minister of the parish. If they had this certificate and needed poor relief the home parish would pay for their return and poor relief. This Act encouraged poor folks to move, but limited the ability to do so.

Sources:

Bloy, Marjie. “The 1662 Settlement Act.” The Victorian Web. The Victorian Web, 12 Nov. 2002. Web. 11 Jan. 2016 <http://www.victorianweb.org/history/poorlaw/settle.html>.

‘Charles II, 1662: An Act for the better Releife of the Poore of this Kingdom.’ Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628-80. Ed. John Raithby. s.l: Great Britain Record Commission, 1819. 401-405. British History Online. Web. 11 January 2016. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp401-405.

“Poor Relief Act 1662.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 16 Jan. 2013. Web. 11 Jan. 2016.

An amendment to England’s poor laws was made in 1723 with the passage of Knatchbulls Workhouse Test Act. Knatchbull’s Act mandated that all able-bodied people requesting poor relief were required to enter a workhouse and perform a set amount of work. This piece of legislation was a reaction to a number of concerns surrounding the country’s impoverished population. From the monetary angle, this was seen as a solution to stop parishes from claiming inflated poor rates and to discourage people from requesting poor relief. Additionally, people believed that forcing the poor to work for aid and reside in controlled communities would help instill work ethics, better manners and renewed religious sentiments in them.

At first, the workhouses were received in a relatively positive light, but not everyone continued to support this system. The principal landowner within each parish was responsible for funding the workhouses through the mandatory “Parish Burden” poor relief tax. Although in theory the workhouses were supposed to be self-sustainable and even capable of making a profit, in reality this was not the case. Workhouses proved to be surprisingly expensive due to the high cost of feeding, clothing, and providing shelter for all of the workers, as well as because of the mismanagement and pilfering of funds by those in charge of the institutions. The landowner’s displeasure with these high costs eventually lead to modifications of this system through a new act in 1782, which dictated that the workhouses did not have to house the able-bodied.

Boulton, Jeremy. “Indoors or Outdoors?: Welfare Priorities and Pauper Choices in the Metropolis Under the Old Poor Law, 1718–1824”. Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain, 1290-1834. Ed. Chris Briggs, P. M. Kitson, and S. J. Thompson. NED – New edition. Boydell & Brewer, 2014. 153–188. Web.

Maudlin, Daniel. “Habitations of the Labourer: Improvement, Reform and the Neoclassical Cottage in Eighteenth-century Britain”. Journal of Design History 23.1 (2010): 7–20. Web.

“The Foul Disease and the Poor Law: Workhouse Medicine in the Eighteenth Centry.” Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor: London’s “Foul Wards,” 1600-1800. Boydell and Brewer, 2004. 135-80. Web.