The Speenhamland system was a form of

outdoor relief Outdoor relief, an obsolete term originating with the Elizabethan Poor Law (1601) The Poor Relief Act 1601 (43 Eliz 1 c 2) was an Act of the Parliament of England. The Act for the Relief of the Poor 1601, popularly known as the Elizabethan P ...

intended to mitigate

rural poverty Rural poverty refers to poverty in rural areas, including factors of rural society, rural economy, and political systems that give rise to the poverty found there.Janvry, A. de, E. Sadoulet, and R. Murgai. 2002“Rural Development and Rural Pol ...

in England and Wales at the end of the 18th century and during the early 19th century. The law was an amendment to the

Elizabethan Poor Law The Poor Relief Act 1601 (43 Eliz 1 c 2) was an Act of the Parliament of England. The Act for the Relief of the Poor 1601, popularly known as the Elizabethan Poor Law, "43rd Elizabeth" or the Old Poor Law was passed in 1601 and created a poor la ...

. It was created as an indirect result of Britain's involvements in the French Revolutionary and

Napoleonic Wars The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European states formed into various coalitions. It produced a period of Fre ...

(1793–1815).

Operation

The system was named after a 1795 meeting in Speenhamland, Berkshire, where local magistrates devised the system as a means to alleviate the distress caused by high grain prices. The increase in the price of grain may have occurred as a result of a poor harvest in the years 1795–96, though at the time this was subject to great debate. Many blamed middlemen and hoarders as the ultimate architects of the shortage. The Speehamland scale read, "When a gallon loaf of bread cost one shilling:... every Poor and Industrious Man should have for his own Support 3s weekly, either produced by his Family's Labour, or an Allowance from the Poor rates, and for the support of wife and every other of his Family 1s 6d.... When the Gallon loaf shall cost 1s 4d then every Poor and Industrious Man shall have 4s Weekly for his own, and 1s and 10d for the Support of every other of his Family. And so on in proportion as the price of bread rises and falls." The authorities at Speenhamland approved a means-tested sliding-scale of wage supplements in order to mitigate the worst effects of rural poverty. Families were paid extra to top up wages to a set level according to a table. This level varied according to the number of children and the price of bread. For example, if bread was 1s 2d (14 pence) a loaf, the wages of a family with two children were topped up to 8s 6d (102 pence). The first formula was set at a time of high prices and possible over-charging, minimum wage inflation was deliberately muted compared to price rises. If bread rose to 1s 8d (20 pence) the wages were topped up to 11s 0d (132 pence). In this quoted example in percentage terms, a 43% price rise led to a 30% wage rise (wages fell from 7.3 to 6.6 loaves). The immediate impact of paying the poor rate fell on the landowners of the parish concerned. They then sought other means of dealing with the poor, such as the

workhouse In Britain, a workhouse () was an institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment. (In Scotland, they were usually known as poorhouses.) The earliest known use of the term ''workhouse' ...

funded through parish unions. Eventually pressure due to structural poverty caused the introduction of the new Poor Law (1834). The Speenhamland system appears to have reached its height during the

, when it was a means of allaying dangerous discontent among growing numbers of rural poor faced by soaring

food prices Food prices refer to the average price level for food across countries, regions and on a global scale. Food prices have an impact on producers and consumers of food. Price levels depend on the food production process, including food marketing ...

, and to have died out in the post-war period, except in a few parishes. The system was popular in the south of England.

William Pitt the Younger William Pitt the Younger (28 May 175923 January 1806) was a British statesman, the youngest and last prime minister of Great Britain (before the Acts of Union 1800) and then first prime minister of the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ir ...

attempted to get the idea passed into legislation but failed. The system was not adopted nationally but was popular in the counties which experienced the Swing Riots during the 1830s.

Criticisms

In 1834, the Report of the Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws 1832 called the Speenhamland System a "universal system of pauperism". The system allowed employers, including farmers and the nascent industrialists of the town, to pay below subsistence wages, because the parish would make up the difference and keep their workers alive. So the workers' low income was unchanged and the poor rate contributors subsidised the farmers.

Thomas Malthus Thomas Robert Malthus (; 13/14 February 1766 – 29 December 1834) was an English cleric, scholar and influential economist in the fields of political economy and demography. In his 1798 book ''An Essay on the Principle of Population'', Mal ...

believed a system of supporting the poor would lead to increased population growth rates because the Poor Laws encouraged early marriage and prolific procreation, which would be a problem due to the

Malthusian catastrophe Malthusianism is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off. This event, c ...

(where population growth would exceed food production). Recent scholarly analysis of census data by E. A. Wrigley, and Richard Smith shows that Malthus was mistaken. Historian Rutger Bregman argues that food production actually grew steadily by a third between 1790 and 1830, though with a smaller section of the populace able to access it due to mechanization, and the population growth that actually happened was due to growing demand for

child labour Child labour refers to the exploitation of children through any form of work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and is mentally, physically, socially and morally harmful. Such e ...

and not Speenhamland.

David Ricardo David Ricardo (18 April 1772 – 11 September 1823) was a British political economist. He was one of the most influential of the classical economists along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith and James Mill. Ricardo was also a politician, and a ...

believed that Speenhamland would create a poverty trap, where the poor would work less, which would make food production fall, in its turn creating the space for a revolution;. However, Bregman argues the poverty that existed back then was not caused by a supposed Speenhamland "poverty trap", as "wage earners were permitted to keep at least part of their allowances when their earnings increased", but instead was the result of price hikes resulting from England returning to the

gold standard A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to the early 1920s, and from th ...

, a policy Ricardo himself had recommended. While some scholars believe that social unrest resulted from the system, others believe it was due to the adoption of the gold standard and industrialization, which equally affected all the populace in areas with or without Speenhamland. This system of poor relief, and others like it, lasted until the passing of the

Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 The ''Poor Law Amendment Act 1834'' (PLAA) known widely as the New Poor Law, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed by the Whig government of Earl Grey. It completely replaced earlier legislation based on the ''Poor Relie ...

, which prohibited boards of guardians supplementing the wages of full-time workers. This was not always implemented locally as guardians did not want to separate families in workhouses, and it was often cheaper to supplement wages than operate larger workhouses. Evidence in the last 30 years shows that the bread scale devised during the Speenhamland meeting in 1795 was by no means universal, and that even the system of outdoor relief which found one of its earliest, though not its first, expressions in Speenhamland was not completely widespread. Allowances or supplements to wages were used generally as a temporary measure and the way they operated differed between regions. Mark Blaug's 1960 essay ''The Myth of the Old Poor Law'' charged the commissioners of 1834 with largely using the Speenhamland system to vilify the old poor law and create a will for the passage of a new one. However, historians such as

Eric Hobsbawm Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (; 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work. ...

have argued that the old poor law was still damaging by subsidising employers, and heightening dependency of workers' incomes on local aristocrats. Daniel A. Baugh argues that relief costs did not greatly increase. After the Napoleonic Wars the conditions of employment and subsistence in south-east England underwent a fundamental change. The Speenhamland System did not differ much in consequences from the older system; what mattered was the shape of the poverty problem.Daniel A. Baugh, "The cost of poor relief in south-east England, 1790-1834." ''Economic History Review'' 28.1 (1975): 50-6
online
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Operation

Criticisms

See also

Notes

Further reading