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The Poor of the Parish of Wiston

On 10th February in 1831 the vicar of Wiston, the Reverend George Wells, sat down in front of a committee of the House of Lords which had been brought together to collect evidence, even from such a small parish as Wiston, about the care of the poor.  It would lead, three years later, to the 1834 Act and the feared Victorian workhouses.

It must have been quite an ordeal for the vicar. By the time he was eventually released from this inquisition – several hours later – he had been asked and had answered more than two hundred separate questions.

He was asked, for instance, 'Has the Distress of the Poor increased or has it diminished during the last few years' to which he replied 'There has been, I think, no great increase of Distress in my parish; but there is the Residence of a very affluent family [the Gorings] which has distributed largely and employed the greater part of our poor.' He reported that 'the wages during the high prices occasioned by the War [the Napoleonic wars] were 15s. a week in the summer, and 12s. in the winter' but that now 'The price of labour has been 10s. a week till of late' – whilst rents remained high.

Then, rather at odds with his previous comment, the vicar added 'all I can speak to is that of observing the state of persons around me, that they have been in a worse condition during the depression of wages than they have been during high wages.' But, prompted by their lordships, he agreed that the 'the superabundance of the population – very much above the demand for it' was to blame.

Suggesting that population growth was responsible for underemployment was probably wrong in this case; censuses tell us that the population of Wiston parish had risen by just 7 people between 1811 and 1831. It is not surprising though that the question had been asked because it was only two or three months since outbreaks of the violent destruction of agricultural equipment by gangs of labourers, known as the ‘Swing’ Riots, had occurred in a number of Sussex parishes. The labourers took particular exception to the use of threshing machines which greatly reduced the opportunities for work during the winter.

The system of poor relief, which the Reverend Wells described to the Lords, had existed in Wiston for forty years. Those who could not survive by their own labour – children up to the age of 10, the sick and infirm and the elderly – were to be housed in the workhouse at Thakeham – though, when there, they did have to 'make cloth for horse collars, or coarse woollen manufactures or sacking.' The able-bodied poor were expected to work 'chiefly digging stone for road work or grubbing stems of trees' in return for some parish assistance in their own homes.

The Thakeham workhouse was also used by the poor of Washington, Ashington, Findon and Sullington. Wiston’s allocation of places in the workhouse was nine but these places were not always needed for the truly destitute and others – maybe parish undesirables – might be sent as well. So the vicar’s main complaint was 'the indiscriminate Admixture of Persons of all Descriptions – dissolute, depraved, hale and weak, old and young, thrown together there; and idle Habits being formed from the Want of sufficient Employ; and at one Time very improper Connections being formed between young Men and young Women' and he also felt that the contents of the 'slut’s dunghill' (the rubbish heap) should have been used to manure the fields.

Although the administration of the workhouse, which the vicar knew, was far from satisfactory and its costs were high, its central purpose was to provide some degree of welfare for the distressed poor.

The Victorian workhouses, on the other hand, were specifically intended to discourage claims on the rates and had little to do with welfare. What the Reverend George Wells thought about his interrogation and the changes which would follow is, sadly, not recorded.

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