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Notes on Sources
ing of the Act of 1662 involved the risk which that Act was designed to avoid,
namely the flooding of the "better" parishes by the poor. But for Speenhamland,
this might have actually happened. Contemporaries made but little mention of
this connection, which is hardly surprising once one remembers that even the Act
of 1662 itself was carried practically without public discussion. Yet the conviction
must have been present in the mind of Sir William Young, who twice sponsored
the two measures conjointly. In 1795 he advocated the amendment of the Act of
Settlement while he was also the mover of the 1796 bill by which the Speenham-
land principle was incorporated in law. Once before, in 1788, he had in vain spon-
sored the same measures. He moved the repeal of the Act of Settlement almost in
the same terms as in 1795, sponsoring at the same time a measure of relief of the
poor which proposed to establish a living wage, two-thirds of which were to be de-
frayed by the employer, one-third to be paid from the rates (NichoUs,
History of
the Poor Laws, Vol. II). However, it needed another bad failure of the crops plus the
French War to make these principles prevail.
3. Effects of high urban wages on the rural community.
The "pull" of the town caused a rise in rural wages and at the same time it
tended to drain the countryside of its agricultural labor reserve. Of these two
closely connected calamities, the latter was the more significant. The existence of
an adequate reserve of labor was vital to the agricultural industry which needed
many more hands in spring and October than during the slack winter months.
Now, in a traditional society of organic structure the availability of such a reserve
of labor is not simply a matter of the wage level, but rather of the institutional en-
vironment which determines the
status of the poorer part of the population. In
almost all known societies we find legal or customary arrangements which keep
the rural laborer at the disposal of the landowner for employment at times of peak
demand. Here lies the crux of the situation created in the rural community by the
rise in urban wages, once
status gave way to
contractus.
Before the Industrial Revolution there were important reserves of labor in the
countryside: there was domestic or cottage industry which kept a man busy in
winter while keeping him and his wife available for work in the fields in spring
and autumn. There was the Act of Settlement which held the poor practically in
serfdom to the parish and thereby dependent upon the local farmers. There were
the various other forms under which the Poor Law made the resident laborer a pli-
able worker such as the labor rate, billeting or the roundsmen system. Under the
charters of the various Houses of Industry a pauper could be punished cruelly not
only at discretion, but actually in secret; sometimes the person seeking relief
could be apprehended and taken to the House if the authorities who had the right
of forcibly entering his place of abode in day-time found that he "was in want, and
ought to be relieved" (31 Geo. III.
c. 78). The death rate at such houses was appall-
ing. Add to this the condition of the hind or borderer of the North, who was paid
in kind and was compelled to help at any time in the fields, as well as the manifold
dependencies that went with tied cottages and the precarious forms of land tenure