The problem of the poor

Down to 1536 we were a Roman Catholic nation. Charity to the poor had been dispensed by Christian institutions and through individual gifts by churches and church members, in life or at death. It was the monasteries, priories and abbeys who did the most for the poor, giving food and overnight accommodation to travellers and hospital care for the sick. Modern research has even found that medical operations were available in some of the larger monasteries. But, after King Henry VIII ‘dissolved’ all the monasteries and the smaller Roman Catholic charities, from 1536 to 1545, charitable provision for the poor collapsed. ‘Middle England’ began to feel itself engulfed by swarms of itinerant poor, throughout the nation, looking for work, begging and stealing. Something had to be done.

The solution found by the King and his successors was to give the old ecclesiastical parishes new powers of civil authority. All churches and parishes were now ‘Church of England’ and the King was its self-appointed head and, apart from a brief respite for Catholicism during Queen Mary’s reign (July 1553-July 1554), the nation’s monarch remains its head to this day. So, he was able to order the parishes of England to look after the poor in their parish. To fund the new scheme, they were enabled, or rather, ordered to raise rates from the local landowners. The old compulsory contributions to the vicar or rector, as a tithe, or a tenth of one’s annual produce – which went to the costs of running the church – was still in effect. So, generally speaking, local landholders were not at all keen on having to pay these new rates as well. They wanted them kept down as much as possible.

It was the first time in history that people were compelled to be charitable on a regular basis to their less-well-off or homeless neighbours.  It had been usual for the better off to make distributions of food and/or clothing, on one or other of the big religious festivals; or simply to leave a little something for the local poor in their wills.   If their tithes had formerly gone to a local monastery, they knew they were helping the poor and sick by that route.  But now, it was a double whammy, tithes and rates. What was more, now that none of the tithe money was going to any monasteries, the right to receive it could be purchased by nouveaux riches landowners, who could – and often did – pocket the money rather than redistribute it for the local good in the parish that had raised it. The ‘middle of the road’ farmers and land holders of a parish naturally then began to be very vigilant in making sure that ‘poor rate’ money only went to members of their own community and not to vagrants and incomers. The parish boundary took on all the significance of any international boundary today.

The King soon found himself compelled to do something about vagrancy and the ‘idle poor’ as did his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I who succeeded him. The first tentative acts of Parliament that were passed from 1536 to 1597 were then surpassed by Queen Elizabeth’s long-lasting Poor Law Act of 1601 which ra n right down to 1834, after which a new system was introduced. The whole subject has been dealt with comprehensively by W. E. Tate in The Parish Chest, (CUP and Phillimore, 1983). (See notes below)  He devotes 54 pages to all sorts of moving accounts from original parish records of how the poor were dealt with. Basically, the resident infirm poor were allowed parish relief of some sort, while all vagrants, and the ‘idle’, able-bodied poor were not, especially if they had come into the parish from elsewhere.  Many were sent to Lewes House of Correction, usually with a whipping, and put to work on the treadmill. Research by the archivists at West Sussex Record Office found that there was often no corn at all in the treadmill, but the inmates were still forced to tread the wheel as part of their ‘punishment’. Six months was a normal duration for their sentence.

The rates that were raised locally from all the land holders in the parish were then judiciously meted out to those judged to be ‘deserving’. A new body called the Parish Overseers, usually drawn from the better off local farmers, administered the funds. The most-heartrending cases generated by the system are those involving women, often pregnant women, and children, who were successively moved back and forth from one parish to another. People were only allowed poor relief in the parish of their birth. Having arrived somewhere, and not finding work, they would be transported back to their birth parish. But if they had no paperwork and no local relatives in the second parish to support their case, that parish could, and often did, refuse to take them. They would then be sent back to the first one. This could go on and on. The whole system of examinations, removal orders, paternity orders against putative fathers, and so on, has generated masses of ‘settlement papers’, from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries, now in Local Record Offices. They are an amazing resource for social history, but unfortunately, not much survives for Clayton and Keymer.

The low rates at which rural labourers’ wages were set by various governments meant than many settled families could not meet their essential outgoings. They might be awarded ‘out relief’, which would allow them to stay in their own homes and receive a small dole of food or occasional shoes, clothing or medical attendance. But the 1640 ratification of the 1601 Act also enabled the Overseers to build or to acquire cottages in their parish to house the ‘deserving’ poor, to give them both accommodation and a place to work. Where overseers’ accounts survive, we can see details of their daily lives – which generally don’t seem too bad.

These cottages would only house a modest number of people and vegetables could be grown in the garden. Spinning was the main occupation for the women. The diet was basic. The Wivelsfield History Study Group, in analysing the poor house accounts of that parish for their book published in 1994, pondered for ages as to why a ‘sheep’s bell’ was regularly delivered there. It turned out to be ‘sheep’s belly’ – all the loose innards that were left once the good cuts had been taken off. It was the only meat the paupers got, but at least it would have been nutritious. If able, the men might be sent daily to do labouring work on local farms. In Ditchling in the early 1800s the overseers used pauper labour to manage the Common as a general parish resource, selling its pasturage and other products to raise money to help ease the poor rates.

The first of the poor houses provided in Keymer parish was a cottage in what is now Worlds End (an area then known as ‘Valebridge’), on the corner plot between the Recreation Ground and Janes Lane. It has recently been re-developed, as Marne Court, where the sheltered flats, Manor Court, stood until recently. The cottage was erected in 1655 by a member of the (brickmaking) Marten family and the Parish Overseers turned it into a poor house in 1686.

Nearly 50 years after the World’s End poor house, presumably because of a local rise in paupers, a second poor house was built on a new plot enclosed out of St. John’s Common in 1734. Like the Manor Court site, it has left its stamp on the local scene. Its triangle of land is now occupied by the kiddies’ play area in St. John’s Park and its slanting western boundary can still be seen on the back wall of what used to be Dinnage’s car sales in London Road.  The size of this plot (which I have traced out on the ground) would easily have accommodated vegetable growing. A third poor house was erected in 1807, carved out of a pre-existing plot on the east side of Fair Place Hill just north of the old King’s Head Inn. In the same year yet another old cottage (put up before 1607) became a poor house. This lay in the north part of Valebridge Common, on the north side of the old Wivelsfield Mill Pond and since developed as the small housing development called Jesters. The site used to be known in the 1960s as ‘old Lucy’s’ but we do not know who Lucy was.

Clayton Parish met the growing need by adding, for the use of their poor, a cottage and four further dwellings on an existing house plot called (the) Gattons on St. John’s Common. Known as Cromwell Cottage and The Barracks, the new houses were built after 1830 by the owner of Gattons, brickmaker William Shaw and his son in law Thomas Daynes, a vintner. Once built, they were handed over to the parish overseers, for the use of the poor. A photo can be seen in the  “Industrial Edge” section of Earlier History.

The final poor house in St. John’s Common was an old cottage once involved in brickmaking, on a site now under part of the car park (due west of the back garden), of the Woolpack public house. In 1791 it had been ‘done up’ at the expense of the Overseers of Hurstpierpoint as an overflow for the existing accommodation for the poor in their village. Hurstpierpoint had no remaining commons of their own to use, so some sort of formal agreement with the Clayton overseers will have been negotiated. Proceedings will have been helped by the fact that the lord of Clayton manor by then was William John Campion of Danny House in Hurst.  One William Greenaway presented an account for bricks, tiles, mortar and other materials and the work of ‘my man and labourer’. Greenaway, a Hurst resident described as a bricklayer (builder) had recently owned our Dumbrells Farm brick yard at Freek’s Lane (off Leylands Road), which he sold in 1786.

The St. John’s and Valebridge Poor houses conformed to the custom of the day in being positioned well away from the village centres of their respective parishes. We have no idea, due to the lack of specific records, whether the residents of ‘our’ St. John’s and Valebridge commons poor houses were from the Burgess Hill locality or from the villages of Clayton, Keymer and Hurst, or a mixture of both. The latter is perhaps more likely.  Neither can we tell whether they were well run, or were like some described in a report of 1834 for the new Poor Law Act. This was the act which set up the huge ‘Dickensian’ Union workhouses of grim repute. The promoters of the new ‘union’ scheme, in which one large building housed the poor from a ‘union’ of several local parishes, had great faith in the project, so we might expect them to be negative about the old- style parish poor houses. For example, the thatched poor house in the parish of Shipley, West Sussex :‘…..housed up to 20 children, mostly orphans or illegitimate, verminous and half-starved, sleeping on straw….’.

But we should remember that it was usual then for seasonal farm labourers to sleep in barns and attics on straw.  And weren’t most people verminous at that time? We need to judge the system by the standards of its day, a time when most labouring families were themselves half-starved. Keeping the poor in their own parish was a humane solution in that they didn’t lose contact with any family member they might still have. One poignant legacy of the Union system was the splitting up of elderly marries couples to conform with their strict policy of segregation between the sexes.  It’s no wonder that most families dreaded the thought of the workhouse.

From the manorial records we do know that poor children were working in the local brickyards in the late 17th century, probably treading the clay, barefoot. Were they perhaps recruited from one or more of the local workhouses?  They were still working in the brickyards in the early 19th century when the Rector of Clayton, Archdeacon Garbett, campaigned for them to get schooling instead. You can read about that campaign, in Chapel and Church.

The photos below show: Modern housing at the Gattons, Royal George Road, built where cottages for the poor used to stand; The former council houses at Worlds End built on the site of the poor house built in 1655; The site of the 1734 Keymer parish poor house. Now replaced by play equipment in St. John’s Park, it was still in use at the 1829 Enclosure of the common and its plot is shown on the Enclosure map of that date, see: The extinction of St. John’s Common: The Keymer Enclosure.

Social tension increased at the end of the 18th century during the French Revolution as fear rose among the English landed classes of a copy-cat revolt. The idea of a universal vote for all households, by the logic of ‘no taxation without representation’ was already circulating in England. Pamphleteer, public debater and advocate for social change, Thomas Paine (1747-1809), lived just down the road in Lewes and in 1792 he had published ‘The Rights of Man’. A few years later he went to New York and helped draft the American Constitution. Not only because of this perceived ‘threat’ on their doorstep, the local JPs (Justices of the Peace) in Lewes took steps to fulfil their brief, which was literally to preserve the King’s ‘Peace’.  Lewes was our ‘County Town’ as our area was historically a part of the county of East Sussex (down to the 1974 local government reform act).

The movement which led to the French Revolution had begun with modest aims, calling for a constitutional monarchy, the abolition of slavery and greater independence for women. But by 1792 the leaders Marin and Robespierre had come to dominate the movement with hard-line ambitions and the ruthless solution of the guillotine. The English establishment took fright in case copycat ideas took root here and they summoned their Justices of the Peace to help in their own areas.  In East Sussex they decided to call meetings in every parish with the aim of getting everyone to declare loyalty to King and Constitution.  They first persuaded their leading local land owners in each parish to organise the meetings.  In Keymer it was Thomas Whiteman who held a substantial farm down in the south of the parish, under and on the Downs. The aim was to get as many residents as possible to attend their meeting and publicly support King and Constitution by signing their name to its aims.  Minutes of these local meetings, with signatures and the marks of the illiterate, have survived in the parish records of Keymer, Hurstpierpoint and Cuckfield.

Keymer’s meeting took place on 25 January 1793 at the inn known as The Blue Anchor on the hill of Burgess Hill.   The farm later called Anchor Farm took its name from the Inn, as it was the nearest dwelling, the farm buildings being where Tower House flats now stand, at the top of Junction Road. The inn itself is now the Top House, a building recorded on the parish Tithe map of 1842 and probably considerably older than that, judging from its low ceilings and different levels. A committee of land owners and tenants was formed, presumably to take the message, and the list of signatories, around the parish after the meeting itself. Two of the committee were the tenants of Burgess Hill Farm and another, Thomas Packham was the blacksmith on Fairplace Hill. The first page of the signatures taken at the Blue Anchor (Top House) can be seen on the Earlier History page.  Fifth down is the confident signature of brickmaker William Taylor, the then master at what came to be known as the Meeds brickyard. There were 19 further marks and signatures overleaf, including surnames later found in Burgess Hill, Wickings, Oram and Parsons.

The declaration was one of support for our Glorious Constitution for its fairness to high and low. But it was not just a case of signing and forgetting all about it. All those present agreed to speak out against and to seek out and suppress the seditious writings … and the mischievous opinions which were currently circulating. This was clearly a reference not only to the ideas of Thomas Paine but also to the many local people, many of them who attended the three local nonconformist chapels in the area, who tended to support Paine’s new ideas for democracy.

The 26 people from the parish who attended, each being a male head of household, all signed; or marked with a cross if they couldn’t read or write (the majority). They included several owners of the smaller farms and cottages in the Keymer part of modern Burgess Hill. It had been observed by the campaigner and writer William Cobbett, seeking remedies for rural distress in England at the time, that the mixed farming of the Weald had shielded people from the worst extremes of poverty.  And yet, in 1807, as described above, two new poor houses for Keymer were added on the north side of our area, making four in total in the parish.  Their occupants will not have been present at the meeting in 1793. The poorest often went through life without creating any written signs of their existence, apart from the note of their name in the parish burial register. Participation in democratic decision-making was still confined to those males who held land of a certain value. Nobody else had a say. It is worth noting that the majority of those who were present at this meeting in 1793, and who signed or marked this document, would not have had any democratic ‘say’ whatsoever in determining how they were governed, or by whom.

In the first two decades of the 19th century the position of the poor deteriorated.  The well-meaning measures that had been taken since 1795 to ensure a basic standard of living for labouring families had, perversely, capped wages below subsistence level. They were ensnared in a trap which had plunged them deeper into poverty. The situation was aggravated by a recession following the Napoleonic wars. By the 1830s a period of deep agricultural depression had taken hold in southern counties.

In Kent and Sussex it generated the violent unrest of the ‘Swing riots’ which spread westwards through southern England and provided the local magistrates with a goodly number of reluctant colonisers to dispatch to Australia. At the same time North America began to receive those who were being helped, by assisted passage, to start a new life on land of their own (see notes below).

The image shows page 2 of signatories in support of the Constitution, including marks of those unable to write; with signatures and one mark of non-attendees of the meeting, chased up later.

On our doorstep, one John Burgess, a leather craftsman of Ditchling and member of the Baptist congregation, sank into debt and emigrated to New York during the summer of 1794, a move which split his family but which protected his two elder sons from his worst fear, that of being taken from him and apprenticed to the parish. The diary he kept in Ditchling, and the letters he sent home to the other members of his family from America, provide a clear window into his life, his work and his chapel attendance. The tenor of these letters gives a hint, perhaps, that the timing of his departure was not unconnected with the new vigilantism of the day.  Once safely installed in New York, he was vocal in his appreciation of the social and political freedoms he found there.

All the above poor houses in St. John’s and Valebridge Commons had been sold off by 1844, and the new Union workhouse was opened in 1845. The Union system of Poor Law provision divided all 120 miles of Sussex, west to east, into just 20 Poor Law Unions (as opposed to over 500 individual parishes). Along with 14 other parishes, Burgess Hill (Clayton and Keymer parishes) came under the Cuckfield Union, an area comprising much of the Mid Sussex District of today. Workhouses were not abolished until 1929. In my working life as an archivist, I have helped people find details of their birth in workhouse records, often a painful process for them. I remember how pleased one old chap was when I mentioned that my own children were all born in the same place as he had been born.  The upper floors of the Cuckfield Union workhouse had become the maternity wards of Cuckfield Hospital and remained as such until the Princess Royal was built as our new general hospital. It had been one good feature of the Union system that there was usually in-house medical care for their residents, a factor which, after abolition, caused many of them to carry on as hospitals.

The following photos show: Front and rear views of  The Burgess Hill Inn where the constitutional meeting was held in 1793; The former wing of Cuckfield Hospital, now flats, that had been the Cuckfield Union Workhouse. When this photograph was taken, between the two World wars, it was an institution for the acute and chronic sick and the elderly infirm to find more information about the Cuckfield Workhouse – see notes below.

First published in 1946 but unsurpassed, the main source for Poor Law documents and the human stories behind them, is W. E. Tate, The Parish Chest (Phillimore, 1988). Churches were required to keep their registers and other documents in a large, locked chest. These have now been transferred to Local Authority record offices. Unfortunately, while there is abundant contemporary documentation for many parishes in the local Sussex Record Offices, the surviving poor law material for our local parishes, Clayton, Keymer and Ditchling, is rather sparse. Ditchling does have the superb record of Henry Hebbern who lived in the house called ‘Freckborough Manor, just off the Common (then just a tenant’s holding, not a ‘manor’). He managed the Common in the early 1800s as its reeve to raise money for the parish poor. His account book is now in East Sussex Record Office.

For a case study of a parish poor house near home, see H. Warne (ed.) Wivelsfield: the history of a Wealden parish (Wiv. Hist. Study Group, 1994). In chapter 7, Providing for the Poor 1600-1834, Ian Nelson gives details and discusses the issues, including ‘The immigration problem’.

Hugh Matthews covers some details, worth reading, of provision for the Clayton and Keymer poor in Chapter 5, Poverty and Affluence, in Burgess Hill , (Phillimore 1989).

The minutes of the Constitutional meeting at Burgess Hill in 1793 are in WSRO at Chichester, ref. PAR 407/43/1. For details of Thomas Paine’s time in Lewes, see Chapters 9 and 10 in C. Brent, Georgian Lewes (Brent Books, 1993). For the distribution of Union Workhouses in Sussex, see chapter 35 in K. Leslie and B. Short (eds.), An historical Atlas of Sussex (Phillimore, 1999). 

The rural poor in general:

Although J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer 1760-1832 (reprinted by Alan Sutton, 1987) is a major text for rural hardship and social unrest in the 18th – early 19th century, it is not relevant to our part of the Weald because there were no large-scale enclosures of common arable fields here. In this area, such common-field systems that had once existed were done away with by the Tudor period. Nonetheless, rural hardship did exist. It was ameliorated by its patchworks of small fields and woods, and its large unenclosed pasture commons but the latter did not benefit lowly cottagers because generally they had put up their cottage without asking and they had not been granted any rights of common.  The political campaigner William Cobbett aimed to encourage self-sufficiency in areas like the Weald when he published Cottage Economy in 1821-2 as a guide to cottagers to help them stay out of the Poor House. (Paperback edition, O.U.P. 1979).

Quaker William Allen at this time provided the poor with small cottages and plots of land on his Gravely estate in Lindfield. Modern roads William Allen Lane, Lindfield and America Lane Haywards Heath commemorate his philanthropy.  See, M. Nicolle, William Allen, Quaker Friend of Lindfield, 1770-1843. (Haywards Heath, 2001). 

The late historical geographer of Sussex, Dr. Peter Brandon, discusses Cobbett’s approach to self-sufficiency in, The Kent and Sussex Weald (Phillimore, 2003), pp.187-192 and related matters; and his following two chapters deal with the ‘Swing riots’ of the early 19thc., rural depression and the provision in Sussex of supported emigration to North America and Canada. For the emigration to and his experience of America, see No Continuing City, the diary and letters of John Burgess, a Sussex craftsman, 1785-1819 (private pubn. by descendent Donald Burgess,1989) A copy is hopefully available at Local Studies Libraries and the original document is at ESRO/ The Keep.

So many families of Dissenters and others went from Wivelsfield to America and Australia that, after the History Study Group published their book in 1994, several descendants got in touch, with the result that an ‘Associate Members Group’ was formed and they returned each year during the late 1990s for annual one-day reunions, all ably organised by the late Olive Morley and other group members, with the Wivelsfield W.I. providing refreshments.

In the western part of the Weald, the Earl of Egremont of Petworth House, organised a supported colonisation scheme to Canada for many of his rural labouring families, allocating each family a plot of land and the means to build a cabin, on condition that they wrote back about how they were getting on. This has created a wonderful, much researched archive in WSRO at Chichester.

You can find further information on the Cuckfield Union workhouse  Cuckfield Compendium website. This is run by Cuckfield Museum whom we thank for the photograph of the old workhouse.