Vestry

Abstract: Social welfare, increasingly extensive during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was by the first third of the nineteenth under considerable, and growing, pressure, during a "crisis" period when levels of poverty soared. This book examines the poor and their families during these final decades of the old Poor Law. It takes as a case study the lived experience of poor families in two Bedfordshire communities, Campton and Shefford, and contrasts it with the perspectives of other participants in parish politics, from the magistracy to the vestry, and from overseers to village ratepayers. It explores the problem of rising unemployment, the provision of parish make-work schemes, charitable provision and the wider makeshift economy, together with the attitudes of the ratepayers. That gender and life-cycle were crucial features of poverty is demonstrated: the lone mother and her dependent children and the elderly dominated the relief rolls. Poor relief might have been relatively generous but it was not pervasive - child allowances, in particular, were restricted in duration and value - and it by no means approximated to the income of other labouring families. Poor families must either have had access to additional resources, or led meagre lives. Samantha Williams is a university lecturer in local and regional history at the Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge, and a Bye-Fellow in History, Girton College, Cambridge.

Abstract: Tll SHE persistence of the allowance system in the industrial north of England after I834 has been established but it has been assumed that the Poor Law Amendment Act was comparatively effective in the rural south.2 Although the administrative framework of the New Poor Law was implemented swiftly in the south, and new unions and workhouses created, this institutional success concealed a failure of relief policy because outdoor allowances to the able-bodied poor continued to be given. The administration of poor relief as a response to underemployment in the rural labour market produced very similar social policies before and after i834: allowances in aid of wages continued but were ostensibly in aid of sickness; the parish vestry was replaced by the union workhouse as the local labour exchange; and parish roundsmen and labour-rate schemes were superseded by a ticket system as a means of apportioning labourers among employers. The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of i832-4 had stated that the "great source of abuse is out-door relief afforded to the able-bodied"and had particularly condemned both allowances in aid of wages, and the employment of the poor in roundsmen and labour-rate schemes.3 The i834 Act had embodied the economic analysis and recommendations of the Royal Commission's Report but had failed to end these practices which blurred the distinction between the pauper and the independent labourer. This failure was the outcome of a misconception in the Poor Law Report of i834 which saw rural underemployment as a result rather than a cause of poor-relief practices before i 834.4 The ideological preconceptions of its authors blinded them to the work of theorists and reformers who had since the seventeenth century been studying the problem of underemployment in English agriculture. These had proposed a variety of make-work schemes to alleviate the social consequences of the periodicity of work in arable farming where seasonal unemployment succeeded a tight labour market during haytime and harvest.5 Although the develop

Abstract: Part 1 Patterns of authority: images of authority - ideologies of power structures of authority - the parish and the vestry structures of authority - the county and the sessions men of authority - the magistrates and their system. Part 2 The politics of poverty: local government, Parliament and the problem of poverty 1795-1819 a life of expedients - the old Poor Law at work independent nations - the parochial administration of the Poor Law and beyond. Part 3 The peace of the county: crime, justice and the challenge to order police, punishment and the maintenance of order.

Abstract: In Northern Virginia, south of Alexandria, at a point equidistant from George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, and George Mason's home, Gunston Hall, stands the beautiful red brick Pohick Episcopal Church. From the founding period to the present it has remained an active church, keeping alive by oral tradition and church record the worship habits of two famous neighbors, the Washingtons and the Masons. It identifies Washington, the founder of the Republic, and Mason, the father of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, as members of an Anglican vestry responsible for oversight of church properties and the physical care of needy communicants. Pohick Church was built as a result of Washington and Mason's joint collaboration, combining Washington's surveying skills to select the site convenient to both families with the work of Mason's British architect. According to the oral tradition that has preserved the memory of Washington's religious practices, the first President attended church faithfully when he was at home, giving attendance at worship precedence over his domestic duty of offering hospitality to visiting dignitaries. Washington and Mason were sometime political allies, as when Washington carried the Fairfax Resolves, authored by Mason, to Williamsburg in 1774. Yet they profoundly disagreed on the propriety of state ratification of the federal Constitution absent a Bill of Rights. But Pohick Church is still a reminder that these two political stalwarts shared religious duties and exercised their religion together, reflecting what it meant to be orthodox Anglican churchmen in the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, but being neither enlightenment deists nor evangelical enthusiasts. Perceptions of the religious character of historical figures are often preserved by the memory of the community of which a person was a member, rather than in written records or other materials that historians typically consult. Washington is an important example of