limitations of charitable finance are in the nature of a safeguard. At most economic trouble can only be assuaged by relief, and it can only be met or prevented by economic and social reforms. If a compulsory rate be not enforced, as in Scotland and formerly in some parishes in England, a voluntary rate may be made in supplementation of the local charities. In Scotland, where the compulsory clauses of the Poor Relief Act of James I. were not put in force, the country weathered the storm without them, and the compulsory rate, which was extended throughout the country by the Poor Act of 1844, came in very slowly in the 18th and 19th centuries. In France (1566) a similar act was passed and set aside. If a compulsory rate be enforced, it is inevitable that the resources of charity, unless kept apart from the poor-law and administered on different lines from it, will diminish, and at the same time, as has happened often in the case of endowed charities, the interest in charitable administration will lapse, while the charges for poor-law relief, drawn without much scruple from the taxation of the community, will mount to millions either to meet increasing demands or to provide more elaborate institutional accommodation. The principle once adopted, it was enacted (1572–1573) that the aged and infirm should be cared for by the overseers of the poor, a new authority; and in 1601 the duplicate acts were passed, that for the relief of the poor (43 Eliz. 2), and that for the furtherance and protection of endowed charities. Thus the poor were brought into the dependence of a legally recognized class, endowed with a claim for relief, on the fulfilment of which, after a time, they could without difficulty insist if they were so minded. The civic authority had indeed taken over the alms of the parish, and an eleemosyna civica had taken the place of the annona civica. It was a similar system under a different name.
A phrase of Robert Cecil’s (1st earl of Salisbury) indicates the minute domestic character of the Elizabethan legislation (D’Ewes, 674). The question (1601) was the repeal of a statute of tillage. Cecil says: “If in Edward I.’s time a law was made for the maintenancePoor Relief Acts and statutory serfdom. of the fry of fish, and in Henry VII.’s for the preservation of the eggs of wild fowl, shall we now throw away a law of more consequence and import? If we debar tillage, we give scope to the depopulating. And then, if the poor being thrust out of their houses go to dwell with others, straight we catch them with the statute of inmates; if they wander abroad, they are within the danger of the statute of the poor to be whipt. So by this undo this statute, and you endanger many thousands.” A strong central government, a local authority appointed directly by the government, and a network of legislation controlled the whole movement of economic life. On this reliance was placed to meet economic difficulties. The local authorities were the justices of the peace; and they had to carry out the statutes for this purpose, to assess the wages of artisans and labourers, and to enforce the payment of the wages they had fixed; to ensure that suitable provision was made for the relief of the poor at the expense of rates which they also fixed; and to suppress vagabondage. Since 23 Edw. III. there had been labour statutes, and in 1563 a new statute was passed, an “Act containing divers orders for Artificers, Labourers, Servants of Husbandry and Apprentices” (5 Eliz. c. 4). It recognized and upheld a social classification. On the one hand there was the gentleman or owner of property to which the act was not to apply; and on the other the artisan and labouring class. This class in turn was subdivided, and the justices were to assess their wages annually according to “the plenty and scarcity of the time and other circumstances.” Persons between the ages of twelve and sixty, who were not apprentices or engaged in certain specified employments, were compelled to serve in husbandry by the year “with any person that keepeth husbandry.” The length of the day’s work and the conditions of apprenticeship were fixed. The assessed rate of wages was enforceable by fine and imprisonment, and refusal to be apprenticed by imprisonment. Thus there was created a life control over labour with an industrial settlement and a wage fixed by the justices annually. There are differences of opinion in regard to the extent to which this act was enforced; and the evidence on the point is comparatively scanty. It was enforced throughout the century in which it was passed, and it probably continued in force generally until the Restoration, while subsequently it was put in operation to meet special emergencies, such as times of distress when some settlement of wages seemed desirable (cf. Rogers, v. 611; Hewins, English Trade and Finance, p. 82; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce: Modern Times, i. 168). It was not repealed till 1814.
From 1585 to 1622 there was, it is said, a slight increase in labourers’ wages, which fluctuated from 5s. 38d. to 5s. 8 14d. a week, with a declining standard of comfort and at times great distress. Then there was a marked increase of wage till 1662 and “a very marked improvement; the rate of increase being very nearly double that of the earlier periods,” and reaching 9s., “as the highest weekly rate for the whole period.” Then from 1662 to 1702 there was “a slight improvement” (Hewins, p. 89). It would seem indeed that the stir of the times between 1622 and 1662 may have caused a great demand for labour. But with the Restoration, when the assessment system was falling into desuetude, came the Poor Relief Act of 1662 (13 & 14 Car. II. cap. 62), which brought in the law of settlement, and a settlement for relief of a very strict nature was added to the industrial settlement of the Artificers and Labourers Act. Thus, if the influence of that act, which had so long controlled labour, was waning, its place was now taken by an act which, though it had nothing to do with the assessment of wage, yet so settled the labourer within the bounds of his parish that he had practically to rely, if not upon a wage fixed by the justices, yet upon a customary wage limited and restricted as a result of the law of settlement. And the assessment by the justices, in so far as it may have continued, would therefore be of little or no consequence. Settlement also, like the Artificers and Labourers Act, would prevent the country labourer from passing to the towns, or the townsmen passing to other towns. At least they would do so at the risk of forfeiting their right to relief if they lost their settlement without acquiring a new one. Hence the industrial control, though under another name and other conditions, remained in force to a large extent in practice.
By the Artificers and Labourers Act then, in conjunction with other measures, the labouring classes were finally committed to a new bondage, when they had freed themselves from the serfdom of feudalism, and when the control exercised over them by the gild and municipality was relaxed. The statute was so enforced that to earn a year’s livelihood would have taken a labourer not 52 weeks, but sometimes two years, or 58 weeks, or 80 weeks, or 72 weeks; sometimes, however, less—48 or 35. It followed that on such a system the country could only with the utmost good fortune free itself from the economic difficulties of the century, and that the need of a poor-law was felt the more as these difficulties persisted. A voluntary or a municipal system could not suffice, even as a palliative, while such statutes as these were in force to render labour immobile and unprogressive. Also, while wages were fixed by statute or order, whether chiefly in the interest of the employers or not, obviously any shortage on the wages had to be made good by the community. The community, by fixing the wages to be earned in a livelihood, made itself responsible for their sufficiency. And it is suggestive to find that in the year in which the Artificers and Labourers Act (1563) was passed, the act for the enforcement of assessments of poor-rate (5 Eliz. cap. 3) was also enacted. The Law of Settlement, to which we have referred, passed in the reign of Charles II., was due, it is said, to a migration of labourers southward from counties where less favourable statutory wages prevailed; but it was, in fact, only a corollary of the Artificers and Labourers Act of 1563 and the Poor Relief Act of 1601. These laws, it may be said, were the means of making the English labourer, until the poor-law reform of 1834, a settled but landless serf, supported by a fixed wage and a state bounty. By the poor-law it was possible to continue this state of things till, in consequence of an absolute economic breakdown, there was no alternative but reform.
The philanthropic nature of the poor-law is indicated by its antecedents: once enacted, its bounties became a right; its philanthropy disappeared in a quasi-legal claim. Its object was to relieve the poor by home industries, apprentice children, and provide necessary relief to the poor unable to work. The act was commonly interpreted so as to include the whole of that indefinite class, the “poor”; by a better and more rigid interpretation it
