The Irish in 19th Century Chester
and Poor Law Inequalities.
Dr Lorie Charlesworth
LJMU
Contents
• 1/. Introduction Poor Law and the Irish
• 2/. The Poor Law in Ireland: a comparative
legal analysis
• 3/. The Famine; initial stages and then the
British Government’s response
• 4/. The Great Hunger as genocide
• 5/. Conclusions
A Legal Right to Relief
The law of settlement and removals comprises that part
of English poor law that states poor people who possess
a settlement in a parish (the settled poor) have the right,
when destitute, to the poor relief provided by that parish.
The post-reformation origins of the poor law are
generally stated to be in An Act for the Better Relief of
the Poor 1601 which formalised and codified under
statute a system of poor relief based upon the parish
where a duty to relieve the poor combined with a funding
system raised by a local rate. The terms and purposes of
that Act remained the legal authority for the relief of
poverty in England and Wales until 1948.
Poor Law as Law
Possession of a settlement
was not simply a collection of rules concerning residence qualifications. In plain
language it consists of the fundamental state of belonging to a particular place.
Belonging so thoroughly that all the other residents of that place owed a financial duty
to Any settled person who had fallen into poverty. That duty, could involve payment of
rent, food, goods, and money for that individual and his family; this the parish decided.
However, that duty, exercised by parishioners via the poor rate, could not be shirked or
avoided. Failure to pay the poor rate could lead to the seizure of goods or
imprisonment. This belonging, if the legal proofs were present, constituted possessing
a settlement. Most importantly, settlement law granted the settled poor the legal right
to relief at common law, as a legal obligation enforceable by them in person against
the poor law officers of the settlement parish. Thus the parish had a legal duty to
relieve the pauper when destitute, enforceable by the pauper himself upon application
to the justices, this could take place wherever the justice happened to be, including in
the justice's home. Any Order to relieve issued by the justice had to be obeyed by
parish officials, on pain of fines.
Nolan, Treatise, vol. II, pp. 169-170 and 227-232.
No Starvation
However, more importantly, each settled person was legally entitled at
common law to poor relief from his parish when destitute. Eventually that
right to relief in emergency was extended to non-settled paupers in any
parish, but such paupers remained vulnerable to removal by that parish. After
1803 that right was confirmed as extending to destitute foreigners when Lord
when Lord Ellenborough stated:
“As to there being no obligation for maintaining poor foreigners before the
statutes ascertaining the different methods of acquiring settlements, the law
of humanity, which is anterior to all positive laws, obliges us to afford them
relief, to save them from starving” R v Eastbourne (Inhabitants) (1803) 4 East
103 at 107. 102 E.R., 769 at 770.
If a poor person died of want due to failure to relieve then the Overseer or
later Relieving Officer could be indicted for manslaughter.
Irish and the Poor Law
The Irish, the Scots and foreigners were ‘outside’
the poor law system as they possessed no
settlement in England and Wales; although as
casual migrants they could be designated as
vagrants. However, the terms of a 1662 Act
differentiated the Irish and the Scots from the
Welsh and English poor whilst powers contained
in the various vagrancy statutes were often used
to return them home.
Irish Poor in England pre 1819
Local administrative approaches were twofold, either the
Irish were bought off with casual payments, or they were
punished as ‘vagrants’ and returned home. The Irish
generally acquired no settlement within England and the
pressures that induced their patterns of migration remain
largely unchanged. They were stigmatised by the general
view of vagrants as respectability was understood to
include some intention to remain, Irish migrants rarely
had that intention. This was still true of the mid
eighteenth century. By 1796, the united parishes of St.
Giles and St. George. Bloomesbury paid £200 relief for
casual poor, comprising: ‘1,200 poor natives of Ireland’.
Irish in Chester 1847
On 14 February 1847 the Chronicle reports over
300 destitute Irish are relieved with soup, coal
and money from Father Carberry and his
Charity. The newspaper notes these:
‘unfortunate and starving creatures were
huddled up in large numbers in very confined
and filthy dwellings.’
Poor Law Act Ireland 1838
Unlike English poor law, whose legal authority
depended upon the originating terms of the 1601
Act subsequent statutes and a developed case law,
the Irish Act was imposed without the comparable
legal, administrative and protective elements that
had existed in England for centuries. Most notable:• No legal right to relief from destitution for a
settled pauper
• No administrative autonomy of civil parishes or
townships, which set and collected a poor rate
that was demand-led and uncapped .
Famine
• Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement
and Deprivation, by Amartya Sen, published in
1981.
Legality and Famine
Sen posits that relevant factors such as market
conditions can be seen operating through a
system of legal relations. He concludes: ‘the law
stands between food availability and food
entitlement. Starvation deaths can reflect
legality with a vengeance’.
Sen, Poverty, 166.
• Genocide Convention 1948
Genocide is defined as: … any of the following acts committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such:
Article II defines genocide as:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the
group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the
group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another
group.
Guilty?
• Article III: The following acts shall be
punishable:
• (a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit
genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.