Nothing is more apparently necessary to the common good, than that parochial charity should be given to some out-pensioners, by a weekly allowance, as well as to maintain the inhabitants of workhouses; but where the strictest enquiries are not made, it encourages some to be idle. I have seen such a pensioner begging in the streets; but upon enquiry found he was incapable of work, and that the allowances made him was not more than sufficient to pay his lodging: How then was he to live? It seems most reasonable that such persons should be received into the workhouse. Others there are who being aged and infirm, or having a number of young children to support, must be assisted in their own habitations, where they will live cheaper, and earn more by their labour, than being sure of their food and raiment, shut up within the wretched walls of a workhouse.

One of the most striking – and still not well understood – features of many eighteenth-century parish welfare systems is surely the survival of outdoor relief in parishes that built workhouses under the 1723 ‘Workhouse Test Act’. That act was designed to deter those in need from applying for poor relief by applying the workhouse test. Those refusing to enter the new workhouses could, quite legally, be denied poor relief. The new workhouses would instil much needed work discipline, reduce the overall costs of poor relief and perhaps improve the morals and manners of those incarcerated. Workhouses spread quite rapidly in the eighteenth century. Hindle reports that by mid century around 600 were in existence, housing some 30,000 inmates, and by 1777 there were almost 2,000 workhouses in the country. It has been estimated that by 1782 ‘a third of all parishes, and probably more, either had their own or had access to one through incorporation or contract’.

However, as Paul Slack pointed out some time ago, ‘it is questionable … whether deterrence worked in anything more than the shortest of short terms’.