The effects of the Old Poor Law

This case study is concerned with two cross-sectional models formulated to investigate the operation of the Old Poor Law in the south of England in the early nineteenth century. As noted in the brief introduction of this subject in §A.1 in appendix A, the rapid increase in the cost of relief during and after the Napoleonic Wars provoked fierce criticism of the system adopted to assist the poor in these decades. In his 1990 book Boyer explored several aspects of this topic, and we review two of these. The first is his analysis of the effect of the system of poor relief on the working of the agricultural labour market; specifically, the relationship between relief payments, the wages paid to farm labourers, and the rate of unemployment (pp. 122–49). Details of the data set that he created for this purpose are set out in table A.1 in appendix A.

The second theme is Boyer's investigation of the proposition advanced – most famously – by Malthus, that relief payments related to the number of children in the labourer's family were a major cause of a high birth rate and a rapid growth of population (pp. 150–72). The data set used for the investigation of this topic is listed in table A.2.

The institutional framework for this debate is, of course, specific to the conditions in the south of England in the early nineteenth century, but the underlying issues are of enduring relevance.