Parochial Administration

Parochial institutions evolved over a considerable period. The parish vestry had been established as early as the fourteenth century for the management of ecclesiastical affairs but was a later creation than many parochial offices.^[33] Sidney and Beatrice Webb argued that the parish, as a unit of local obligation imposed by the central authorities, symbolized the triumph of national government over regional diversity.^[34] As they also pointed out, however, this triumph remained incomplete, since local society itself acted as its instrument. Parochial officials, elected at vestry meetings, were rate-paying freeholders required by law to assume the burdens of office. They were strictly subordinate, however, to the Crown's Justices of the Peace, who met at Quarter Sessions to dispense justice Countywide. The Justices belonged to the locally resident gentry and exercised their legal authority on an individual basis as well as within their respective communities.^[35]

The gradual accretion of secular power in the parish vestry and the emergence of Justices of the Peace restricted the traditional prerogatives of manor courts while acting as complementary structures of authority. Minchinhampton's vestry minutes for 1805, for instance, noted that the manor court had appointed a perambulator to inspect Minchinhampton Common. The vestry expressed its approval and then proceeded to assign the new appointee his first task. Similarly, although the tithingman was appointed by the manor, he was supervised by the churchwarden in the latter's capacity as a parochial official.^[36] The vestry meeting brought together the rate-paying inhabitants of the parish to consent to the levying of poor rates and taxes for the repair of roads or the maintenance of the church fabric. It also elected the churchwardens, tithingmen (when not appointed by a Court Baron), the surveyor of highways, and the overseers of the poor, who were responsible for daily administration. Vestry minutes and accounts also recorded a wide variety of expenditures, which show clearly how parochial government supplanted the manor in structuring the reciprocal attitudes of paternalism and deference.

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Such attitudes were revealed especially in the treatment of the poor.^[37] Before the Whig reform of 1834 created new "poor law unions," each parish maintained its own workhouse and dispensed a considerable proportion of monies appropriated for the poor on outdoor relief. At Minchinhampton, circa 1800, 250 persons received relief, of whom seventy, or 28.0 percent, resided in the workhouse.^[38] The inmates included the infirm, children of large families, or the illegitimate whose parents were unable or unwilling to provide for them, the aged and dependent women.^[39] The variety of outdoor relief offered at Minchinhampton can be only conjectured since its vestry minutes failed to offer a detailed accounting. Monies were certainly spent for the apprenticeship of poor children, on which a £3 limit was placed in June 1818, "excepting under peculiar circumstances."^[40] Horsley's vestry minutes give a clearer picture for the period in which they are available, 1802 to 1822. Table 22 gives the frequency distribution by type of expenditure, and figure 6 illustrates the annual fluctuations for the three most important items.^[41]

The periodic division in table 22 follows the division of the minute books themselves. There is no difference in the amount of yarn distributed and hardly any in the number of apprenticeships paid for. A great disparity appears between the two periods, however, with respect to the other four items, which can be explained by the French wars.^[42] Expenditure on clothing was high from 1803 and declined sharply from 1813; rents and cash grants

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Fig. 6.
Series of Items Granted through Outdoor Relief, Horsley Parish, 1802-1822.
Key: Solid Line = Clothes
Small Broken Line = Rent
Large Broken Line = Cash

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peaked between 1805 and 1810, although both declined sharply thereafter. Expenditures on all three items were virtually nonexistent between 1814 and 1816 but made a gradual recovery thereafter, probably because of the postwar stagnation in the cloth trade. Sometimes cash grants were made to enable a family or an individual to migrate, often in compliance with the settlement laws. Generally, however, such grants were not specified for any item and must be assumed to have been supplements to wages.

Such expenditures were clearly paternalistic. From 1800, however, gentry paternalism was directed increasingly toward promoting the "independence" of the laboring classes, ostensibly for their social betterment. This interest in working-class independence combined with a self-serving but by no means hypocritical concern regarding the great weight of taxation and the need to maintain social order. A plan for the better regulation of the poor, adopted by the Minchinhampton vestry in 1800, aimed "to lighten the heavy burden of the parochial taxes but also [to] contribute to the health and comfort of those [for] whose benefit the tax is imposed."^[43] Implementation of such a goal required the creation of a special board of directors, consisting of twenty-five gentlemen, who would make regular visits to the workhouse as well as to recipients of outdoor relief and in this manner supervise the work of the overseers of the poor.

The board also considered the feasibility of reducing the number of families receiving outdoor relief by taking some of their children into the workhouse and granting a weekly stipend to the friends or relations of workhouse inmates "for maintaining them in preference to keeping them in the House."^[44] It would cost less to maintain a child in the workhouse than to support an entire family out of doors and to lodge an adult pauper with a household than to keep him at public expense, where the administrative costs of maintenance would have to be included.

Such economies, it was believed, would effect the moral and material betterment of the poor. The head of a household who sent his child to the workhouse could become self-reliant, an issue of great moment to contemporaries;^[45] and the child, removed from a condition of squalor, would benefit from his new environment, particularly if the regime of the workhouse were reformed.^[46] Thus, economy in local government, normally associated with

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Whig reformism, was compatible in the minds of contemporaries with the humaneness of traditional paternalism. Indeed, the proposal to create a gentleman-board of directors aimed at institutionalizing this tradition, however much it foreshadowed a later and much stricter version in the boards of guardians created by the New Poor Law.

Many were convinced, furthermore, that paternalism, by promoting independence of character, would ensure a deferential working class and thereby the stability of the social order; the example of George Hodges, a Horsley laborer, is an especially apt case.^[47] In 1811 Hodges lost all of his possessions in a fire. They were valued at the considerable sum of £100 and included "his cottage, outhouse, pig-stye, furniture, husbandry utensils, clothes and the clothes of his wife and children." He and his family had been industrious, which made their loss especially tragic. As a reward for thriftiness, the local gentry raised a subscription to assist them.

Such voluntarist display was not unusual; the meeting of the parish vestry served often as a community forum for organizing special relief efforts on behalf of the "deserving poor." At Minchinhampton in December 1816, the vestry minutes mention a meeting organized by the parish's "principal inhabitants," the purpose of which was "to take into consideration and adopt measures as may be deemed necessary for the temporary relief of the worthy poor . . . now out of employ by reason of the stagnation of trade."^[48] Those in authority clearly understood that economic conditions and not "immorality" could easily create unemployment. The resolution adopted by the meeting called for "a subscription [to] be immediately entered into for the purpose of employing the manufacturing and laboring poor . . . who through want of employment stand in need of some temporary and immediate relief."

It is especially noteworthy that the initiators of the scheme should have funded this activity through voluntary subscription rather than from the rates. The employment of labor, on a scale required to offset the effect of a trade depression, was, in principle, too great for any government to undertake. Besides, the local gentry were eager to avoid tax increases, which would have fallen on small holders as well. In true paternalist style, they willingly assumed the entire burden themselves and succeeded in raising

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over £60. They were concerned, moreover, to avoid the demoralizing impact of parochial relief. The men to be employed under their scheme were accustomed to receiving regular wages, even if sometimes supplemented by outdoor relief. To have thrown them entirely on the mercy of the parish could only have encouraged habits of dependence.

Thus, the rules governing employment under the scheme were drafted with a particular rigor. The rules were designed not only to ensure the performance of the work undertaken but also to sustain habits of work discipline. "Men who absent themselves from their [road repairing] work in part of any day in the ensuing week in case of wet weather," the subscribers resolved," [then] in such case it is ordered that their pay be reduced

and if the foremen . . . do not attend the whole of each day they are to be paid nothing."^[49] The scheme was conceived partly by the pragmatic need to prevent outbreaks of violence, which mass unemployment might induce. It remained, nonetheless, an act of paternalism, since no contradiction existed, in the subscribers' view, between pragmatic and moral goals. Paternalism aimed at preventing disorder, restraining taxation, and creating a self-reliant working class. Realization of the first two goals could lead to fulfillment of the third.

This synthesis of paternalism, deference, and individualism embodied a liberal outlook. It embraced an ideal of autonomy and mobility within a hierarchical setting, which served as an alternative to the conservative vision of an "organic society."^[50] Whigs, Peelite Tories, and the laboring classes of the region embraced it overwhelmingly. Such broad acceptance, moreover, resulted from cooperative relations between Dissenters and the Establishment and from the social character of lordship. Leading middle-class Dissenters mediated relations between their followers and the authorities, while leaders of the Establishment belonged either to older Whig families, which had maintained a cosmopolitan outlook, or to the more socially mobile elements of the middle class.