'For what I say I mean': the criminal resistance of Praxell Alford Hinwood in the early years of the New Poor Law workhouse system

After 1834, most of the parishes in England and Wales were formed into New Poor Law Unions, each with a workhouse for indoor relief. This caused distress amongst women, whose relief changed from payments to supplement an independent living, to institutionalisation within a workhouse. In the 1840s, Praxell Alford Hinwood, a single woman with an infant child from Wiltshire, strongly disliked the workhouse system. She made this clear in a series of criminal acts of resistance in the Warminster Union, details of which are reconstructed using rare solicitors’ papers. Using a microhistory influenced biographical approach this paper expands our understanding of womens’ agency and resistance in the New Poor Law workhouse and how it was dealt with by the authorities. Rather than accept the treatment she received from the workhouse staff and the Board of Guardians, Hinwood broke workhouse windows and wrote a series of threatening letters. The workhouse system was one where women inmates could negotiate for better conditions and shed light on the immorality of the regime, as recent literature attests. But the workhouse system had a significant imbalance of power towards the authorities who, with money and legal clout, were able to remove women from the workhouse system altogether.