Why was there no ‘Old Poor Law’ in Scotland and Ireland?

Abstract

This article will attempt to explain why England's system of poor relief was not replicated in Scotland and Ireland until well into the nineteenth century. The difference rests on the development of a nation of wage-labourers in England, the result of agrarian capitalism, a process that was complete by the 1790s, at a time when the population of other European countries was overwhelmingly dominated by peasants. The unique class structure in England led from the 1530s onward to the creation of a poor relief system, state-provided welfare funded from taxation, a type of social assistance that was absent elsewhere.

Notes

1 The relative worth of pensions grew in size in the first half of the eighteenth century but declined in the second half.

2 For instance, in 1840 one Session printed badges that read: ‘Permit ____ to beg through the parish of Grange. J.M. Innes, Heritor’[cited in McPherson, 1941: 207].

3 Ireland's last famine occurred in County Kerry in the early 1890s [O'Neill, 1974: 7].

4 This number would rise, during peak months, to 116,000 in 1847, 140,000 in 1848, 227,000 in 1849, 264,000 in 1850, and 265,000 in 1851, down to 55,000 by January 1857 [Burke, 1987: 128, 163].

5 Palmerston was writing to Lord John Russell in March 1848.

6 Ingram's work appeared in the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, Vol. 4, read 18 November 1863.