18th century Key Dates

[petal]

Eighteenth Century


England at the start of the century was still mainly a land of hamlets and villages with the majority of the population living in the south. The population probably numbered about five and a half million.

In the towns, houses, including the cellars, were desperately overcrowded; there were no sanitary systems, and streets were unpaved and filthy. In the early part of the century) only about one child in four, born in London, survived.
During the century transport between towns improved, mills and factories were built; and, as towns developed, dispensaries, general hospitals, hospitals for special groups of patients, and charity schools were founded in London and in provincial towns. By the end of the century ideas of state intervention in public health matters were emerging, and concern was expressed about the conduct of asylums (madhouses) and the treatment of prisoners.

1722 Settlement, Employment and Relief of the Poor Act urged parishes to make greater use of workhouses, and provided for parishes to combine in whatever way they chose to share workhouses or to contract out the care of paupers.
1729 Poor Law Act tightened up the regulations as to the issue of settlement certificates and the orders that costs of removal shall be paid by the parish of settlement.
1738-9 Special rates amalgamated with the poor rate.
1744 Rogues, Vagabonds, and other Idle and Disorderly Persons Act prescribed punishment of up to one month in the “House of Correction” for those who abandoned their wives and children to the support of the Parish, lived idly and refused work or begged alms. A reward of five shillings could be paid to any person apprehending an offender. The Act also prescribed punishments for confidence tricksters and other deceivers. The justices were empowered to impress incorrigible rogues into naval or military service.
Poor Relief Act to remedy “some defects” in previous acts (especially that of 1601) mainly appertaining to overseers and their accounts. Parish officers were enforced to keep proper “poor relief” accounts.

1753 A Bill proposing “taking and registering an annual Account of the total Number of People, and of the total Number of Marriages, Births and Deaths; and also of the total Number of Poor receiving Aims from every Parish and extra-parochial Place in Great Britain” was passed by the House of Commons on the 8th May with 57 members in favour and 17 against. Mr Thornton, MP for York (a “teller” for the "Noes”), did not believe “that there was any set of men, or indeed, any individual of the human species so presumptuous and so abandoned as to make the proposal we have just heard ... I hold this project to be totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty”. After the second reading in the Lords the Bill was referred to a committee, but the session ended before it was considered and so the Bill lapsed.
1769 Dispensary for sick children of the poor opened in Red Lion Square by George Armstrong (1719-1789, physician and author of “An Essay on the Diseases Most Fatal to Infants, 1767); later moved to Soho Square, closed in 1781.
1773 An Act for the better Regulation of Lying-in Hospitals, and other Places appropriated for the charitable Reception of pregnant Women; and also to provide for the Settlement of ******* Children, born in such Hospitals and Places.
1774 Act for Regulating Private Madhouses followed the report of a Select Committee of the House of Commons (1763) and introduced licensing, in London by Commissioners elected by the Royal College of Physicians, and elsewhere by justices at Quarter Sessions. The Act had many weaknesses, not least that the Commissioners had no power to revoke licences on the grounds of ill-treatment or neglect of patients.
Westminster General Dispensary opened in Gerrard Street, Soho, and provided medical, surgical and midwifery services to the local poor for the next 182 years - until 1956.
John Howard (1726-90, philanthropist and prison reformer) described to the House of Commons the appalling conditions in British prisons. His name and work are perpetuated by the Howard League for Penal Reform.
1775-8 Series of Select Committees investigated poor relief and vagrancy.
1782 Act for the Amendment of the Laws relating to the Settlement, Employment, and Relief of the Poor (Gilbert’s Act) encouraged parish unions to build larger workhouses with better management. Thomas Gilbert (1720-98, barrister and Poor Law reformer) edited “Collection of Pamphlets concerning the Poor”, 1787. However as R Porter (English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Pelican, 1982) has commented “Bigger workhouses just ran at bigger losses. Only a few hundred were founded. Their main ‘success’ was custodial - they shunted paupers out of sight (for this reason locking people up was a solution which went from strength to strength). Parishes floundered from expedient to expedient. Supplementary relief would be tried and then abandoned for a spell in favour of a house of correction or an experimental workhouse, followed by contracting out to entrepreneurs, and then back to botched-up outdoor relief.”
1790 Justices of the peace empowered to inspect and report on workhouses
1792 Acts dealt with abuses in the removal of vagrants and forbade the whipping of females; and another act introduced punishment of overseers for neglect of duty.
1793 Registration of Friendly Societies. Many of the Societies provided medical attention to their subscribing members.
1795 Poor Law Act authorised overseers, with the approval of the vestry, to give “out-relief” to the poor (i.e. in their own homes) without imposing the ‘workhouse test.
“Speenhamland System”. The local justices and clergymen meeting in May at the Pelican Inn, Speen, near Newbury, to consider the conditions arising from poor harvests and the rise in the price of grain, decided to introduce a subsistence level pegged to the price of bread and to use the poor rate to supplement the wages of labourers to that level. Although not the first to take that decision, they were widely copied and this use of outdoor relief became known as the Speenhamland System. Although such relief was better than nothing, it resulted in lowering wages, increasing the poor rate, and removing the distinction between pauperism and independence.