Shropshire Routes to Roots

5. Welfare records (Background)

Local Government

For people in nineteenth-century Shropshire, national government must have seemed distant. A number of Acts of Parliament were passed in the period 1750 to 1850. They often had grand sounding names, and you will find a timeline of the Acts which were passed at The Victorian Web (Opens in a new window). However, the intentions of these Acts were not always the same as their effects in the countryside and towns of Shropshire. To find out what life was like in Shropshire, it is not enough to look at what was happening in national government.

Often the most common forms of contact people had with bureaucracy and government was when they needed assistance because of poverty. In Victorian times, welfare was organised locally by the Overseers of each Parish, under a general law known as the Poor Law. To understand the effect of Industrialisation, we need to look at what welfare was like on a local, as well as a national level.

Read the background information here, before looking at some sample letters and documents to and from the organisers of welfare in the Wrockwardine parish on the next page.

The Poor Law before 1834

The assistance given to people under the Poor Law was known as Poor Relief. Poor Relief was paid for by the Poor Rate, a kind of tax levied on the wealthier people in a Parish. At first, Poor Relief took the form of giving money directly to those in need, until the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. After the Act, people were often sent to the workhouse instead of being given aid directly. The letters and documents on the next page are taken from the 1820s, before the Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced. Read the documents to get an idea of what life was like under the old system, then compare these with the system after 1834, as explained in the Victorian crime and detection: The Workhouse theme.

Notice to say that the Poor Rate has been collected Larger image, in a new window [49kb] [Shropshire Archive reference: P316/L/2/31]

Disputes

There were strict rules of Settlement (opens in a new window) to determine which Parish a person could claim Poor Relief from, and there were many disputes about which Parish should foot the bill. Because of these arguments and their associated bureaucracy, many Poor Law records and letters describing hardship have survived. Applications for Poor Relief would usually enclose a note from a Doctor or the local parish officer to support the claim. The letters, sometimes written by the parishioner, but more often by a letter-writer and often hardly literate, give a remarkable picture of the difficulties of life when accidents and illness stopped people from working.

The Settlement rules led to many problems in the Wrockwardine Wood area. From about 1750, the population grew rapidly as the coal and ironstone mines were exploited for the growing iron making industry. Many houses were built in communities such as Pains Lane (now called St. Georges) which straddled the parishes of Wrockwardine, Shifnal and Lilleshall. Families could move from one house to another 50 yards away and be in a different parish.

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