This paper assesses the role of overseers’ vested interests in shaping local poor relief provision under the Old Poor Law. The Relief Order Books of the 1820s are examined for the industrial town of Bolton. These reveal an unusual emphasis upon the payment of paupers’ rent by the parish. It is argued that this policy is a result of self-interest. Many members of the Relief Committee owned substantial quantities of residential property. Such rent payments ensured that these landlords would receive a subsidy from other ratepayers. It is also suggested that a desire to preserve this type of relief, frowned upon by the 1834 Report, may be a contributory factor in the Board of Guardian’s later resistance to the Poor Law Amendment Act.

/pdf/discussion-papers-in-economic-and-social-history-3ma0k2au92.pdf

Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History

This article scrutinises the claim that the residual claimant in English agriculture was the fixed-rent tenant farmer rather than the landlord. Examination of methods of agricultural insurance and risk management indicates that the income risks of farming were sizeable, not straightforward to manage, and largely borne by the tenant. Thus the farmer’s profit appears to have fluctuated by more over time and space than did the rent paid to the landlord. Attempts are made to assess changes over time in the nature and size of the production and price risks that farmers were exposed to.

Risk and Risk Management in English Agriculture c. 1750-1850

n the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the greater part of agricultural land in England was owned by landowners who leased it out to tenant farmers for a fixed annual rent. Only about 17 per cent of the income from British agriculture in 1808 came from owner-occupiers, and in the late 1880s the English and Welsh owner-occupancy sector comprised just 18 per cent of the total number of farmers and 15 per cent of the overall cultivated acreage.2 Although the pre-existing tenurial system of copyhold and lifeleasehold lingered on, sometimes to a substantial extent, a widely recognized stylized fact is that by the third or fourth quarter of the eighteenth century most tenanted English farmland was occupied under fixed rent leases. As for sharecroppers, Adam Smith wrote: 'They have been so long in disuse in England that at present I know no English name for them.' A farmer signing a fixed rent lease contracted to bear the entire income risks of farming. The fixed rent tenant agreed to pay a certain money rent to the landlord irrespective of the profitability of the harvest, ensuring that the landowner's income, at least in contract, was insulated from the risks of an unprofitable year. England's tenurial system, Offer has argued, therefore contradicted the Ricardian conception of agricultural rent, where the landlord's rent was supposed to form the fluctuating residual of agrarian income. English landowners were able to convert 'rent from a residual surplus into a fixed overhead ... making the farmer absorb residual fluctuations'. He was also sceptical of claims that there was significant landlord/tenant sharing of risk outside the formal tenancy agreement by the landowner granting remissions of rent or allowing rent arrears in bad years.4

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3698610.pdf

Risk and risk management in English agriculture, c. 1750–1850

GDP per head is not only an economic indicator, but is widely used as a welfare indicator. This use not well founded in economic theory. The paper compares income per head with a three groups of alternative indicators: extended national accounts, social indicators, and indicators of subjective well-being. All of these methods indicate a decline in the welfare productivity of GDP goods over time.

Economic Welfare Measurements and Human Well-Being, [revised version, March 2000]

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