Speenhamland is a suburb of
Newbury, Berkshire
Newbury is a market town in West Berkshire, England, in the valley of the River Kennet. It is south of Oxford, north of Winchester, southeast of Swindon and west of Reading, Berkshire, Reading. It is also where West Berkshire Council is hea ...
.
Name and location
Its name is probably derived from
Old English
Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...
''Spen-haema-land'', "land of the inhabitants of Speen", with "Speen" perhaps being formed on a
Brittonic root deriving from
Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
''spinis'', "thorns".
[Coates and Breeze (2000) ''Celtic voices, English places: studies of the Celtic impact on place-names in England'', p. 41.]
Speenhamland was a
tithing
A tithing or tything was a historic English legal, administrative or territorial unit, originally ten hides (and hence, one tenth of a hundred). Tithings later came to be seen as subdivisions of a manor or civil parish. The tithing's leader or ...
, or administrative subdivision, of the parish of
Speen, though even in the early 19th century it was contiguous with the suburbs of Newbury.
[Lysons & Lysons (eds., 1813: ''Magna Britannia'', vol I, part II, London: Cadell & Davies, p. 372.] It lies to the north of the
River Kennet
The Kennet is a tributary of the River Thames in Southern England. Most of the river is straddled by the North Wessex Downs AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). The lower reaches have been made navigable as the Kennet Navigation, which â ...
, between the centre of Newbury and Speen village to the north-west.
Poor relief
The
Speenhamland system
The Speenhamland system was a form of outdoor relief intended to mitigate rural poverty 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 A ...
of
poor relief
In English and British history, poor relief refers to government and ecclesiastical action to relieve poverty. Over the centuries, various authorities have needed to decide whose poverty deserves relief and also who should bear the cost of hel ...
was devised at a meeting in the area in 1795. It set poor-relief rates by the bread price and the number of household members, in or out of work.
[Walter Elder, "Speenhamland Revisited", ''Social Service Review'' 38.3 (1964), pp. 294–30]
online
References
External links
Berkshire record officeVision of BritainFrancisFrith
Newbury, Berkshire
{{Berkshire-geo-stub