‘I Do Belong to Mattishall’: Obtaining Poor Relief from Mattishall, Norfolk c1750-1834

The essential gaps in our knowledge of the Old Poor Law in Norfolk are; a lack of detailed work on the mechanics of poor relief in Eastern England in general after the first flush of enthusiasm with Christine Hampson and Tim Wales; a still relatively thin understanding of the migration stories of the dependent poor; a chronic lack of work on the nature of pauper life cycles and the place of the Old Poor Law in those life cycles; a surprising lack of work on the final decades of the Old Poor Law leading to the perpetuation of models such as the crisis of the Old Poor Law; little has been written about the way in which the poor understood and experienced the Old Poor Law; in addition to this, although there have been a number of studies analysing the rhetoric and agency used by pauper letter-writers in their attempts to obtain relief, the reciprocal attitude of the parish officers has largely escaped attention. The study of Norfolk, an area that is itself neglected, is a vehicle to address these gaps.

Using a range of poor relief material produced by the overseers and other parish officials, records from the parish registers and letters written by or on behalf of pauper claimants, this thesis set out to examine these neglected aspects by undertaking a microhistory of the parish of Mattishall, Norfolk. The parish is important as it has a reasonably good set of poor law records that have survived. Watton is the only other parish in Norfolk to have a similar range of poor law records, though a lesser quantity. The thesis compares the nature, experience and meaning of poor relief in Mattishall, not only with other Norfolk parishes, but also with parishes in Huntingdonshire as well as with a wider suite of parishes in other parts of the country. In doing this, the unusual way its officials made decisions over to whom to grant relief and who not, is discovered.

The parish administration of relief was compared with that of other parishes in different part of England and established that Mattishall, unlike most other ‘lowland’ parishes as identified by Steven King, kept the payment of poor relief under very strict control. Patterns of migration were analysed to assess if the settlement hindered the movement of paupers. The categories of migrants were also examined to establish whether any particular group were prevented from migrating. Letters written for and on behalf of migrant paupers in their attempts to gain poor relief were analyses, not only for the agency and rhetoric used to persuade the poor relief officials to look favourably on their requests, but also to establish the reason for the overseers’ decisions. The creation of pauper biographies has illuminated the policies behind the decisions of the officials in a way that was not apparent without such detailed information of the paupers’ lives.

Analysis of the overseers’ accounts and the outcome of requests for assistance in the pauper letters received by the parish reveal a very unusual attitude of the parish officials. In order to receive a favourable response to the request for relief, the overseers of the parish of Mattishall required the claimant to not only be ‘deserving’ but also to ‘belong’ to the parish. The notion of ‘belonging’ established by this thesis goes beyond that suggested by Snell who stressed how important parochial belonging once was in terms of its effect upon people's local attachments. This thesis found a marked difference in the granting of poor relief to those who truly belonged because they were born in the parish and those who only belonged in so far as the parish was their last place of settlement.