Who cares? Mismanagement, neglect and suffering in the final decades of the Old Poor Laws

Poor Law historians have focused on the ‘welfare process’ under the Old Poor Law over recent decades, a phrase coined by Lynn Hollen Lees and taken up by Steve Hindle.4 This work has often focused on the ‘obligation and responsibility’, as Hindle puts it, negotiated between poor-relief claimants and those vested with powers to administer the Poor Laws.5 On one side of the negotiation, parish officers such as overseers and assistant overseers, who were regularly providing relief in money and in kind, as well as magistrates, who had a ‘supervisory’ role in overseeing the relief system and could overturn an overseer’s decision, have received the greatest attention in this literature.6 The concurrent focus on the micro-politics of the parish, the dynamics between those ‘who had a stake in the allocation of resources in the local community’ and poor relief claimants, has nuanced the dualism of ‘entitlement’ and ‘subordination’ of the relief recipient in Poor Law research.7 Unearthing these negotiations and complications also reveals where the power sat in the distribution of relief, as the chapters in this book attest.8 As Steven King re-emphasized, relief was ‘crucially dependent upon the respective personalities of official and pauper’.9 Yet, because of the emphasis on how poor relief was managed and negotiated on an everyday basis, the tendency has been to focus on the actions and inactions of those who had official responsibilities to administer and influence poor relief. The interests and roles of the wider community have been overlooked and, as a consequence, undervalued. This chapter aims to shed light on members of the community who were not responsible for the day-to-day provision of poor relief, but whose actions were, nevertheless, important in the administration and quality of poor relief.