'Begging for a burial': Form, function and conflict in nineteenth-century pauper burial

Social History

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 321-341

  Hurren, Elizabeth ^a   King, Steve ^a  

^a OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 24344478541     PISSN: 03071022     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03071020500185448     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. P. Ackroyd, Blake (London, 1999 edn), 18-19.
2. The historiographical literature generally uses 'labouring poor' and 'pauper' as interchangeable. This is inaccurate and we maintain a distinction between paupers and the labouring poor.
3. J. Litten, The English Way of Death. The Common Funeral since 1450 (London, 1991);
4. T. Laqueur, 'Cemeteries, religion and the culture of capitalism' in J. A. James and M. Thomas (eds), Capitalism in Context - Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honour of R. M. Hartwell (Chicago, 1994), 138-55;
5. L. Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948 (Cambridge, 1998);
6. R. Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London, 2000).
7. For selected historiography, see G. Rowell, Hell and the Victorians (Oxford, 1974);
8. T. Brown, The Fate of the Dead (London, 1979);
9. C. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London, 1984);
10. R. Houlbrooke, Death, Ritual and Bereavement (London, 1989);
11. N. Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500-1800 (London, 1999);
12. P. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford, 1996);
13. P. Jupp and G. Howarth (eds), The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal (Basingstoke, 1997);
14. N. Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2000);
15. J. Wolffe, Great Deaths. Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000);
16. B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds), The Place of the Dead. Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000).
17. D. Cannadine, 'War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain' in J. Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality (London, 1981), 241.
18. On the emergence and growth of a poor nineteenth-century underclass, see S. A. King, Poverty and Welfare 1700-1850: A Regional Perspective (Manchester, 2000).
19. Julie Marie Strange, '"She cried a very little": death, grief and mourning in working-class culture c. 1880-1914', Social History, XXVII, 2 (May 2002), 143-61 and 'Only a pauper who no-one owns: reassessing the pauper grave, c. 1880-1914', Past and Present, CLXXIX (2003), 148-78.
20. 'Only a pauper who no-one owns: reassessing the pauper grave, c. 1880-1914', Past and Present, CLXXIX (2003), 148-78.
21. T. Laqueur, 'Bodies, death and pauper funerals', Representations, 1 (1983), 109-31.
22. Richardson, Death, op. cit., 266-7.
23. For a history of the 'good' and 'respectable' funeral, see contributions to Gordon and Marshall, The Place, op. cit., 131-48.
24. Gittings, Death, op. cit., 98
25. Strange, 'She cried', op. cit., 143;
26. Strange, 'Only', op. cit., 178.
27. Laqueur, 'Bodies', op. cit.;
28. Richardson, Death, op. cit., 167-9.
29. Strange, 'She cried', op. cit., 156.
30. See Richardson, Death, op. cit., 60, where the experiences of the London urban poor have become generalized for all urban areas, the Old Poor Law and the New, and even for rural areas under both systems.
31. Strange, 'She cried', op. cit., 150.
32. Gittings, Death, op. cit., 66-8, 139-40.
33. Strange, 'Only', op. cit., 157, 161-2.
34. See, for example, E. Howlett, 'Burial customs', Westminster Review (1893), 166-74;
35. Hollen Lees, Solidarities, op. cit., relies on sources like the Poor Man's Friend.
36. Strange, 'Only', op. cit., 148-61.
37. Poor Law historiography tends to be divided into three administrative phases: the Old Poor Law, 1601-1834; the New Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834 and its initial impact to 1870; and the crusade against outdoor relief, 1870-1900. See King, Poverty, op. cit., 18-47.
38. Richardson, Death, op. cit., 266, argues that 'the Anatomy Act was an advance clause to the New Poor Law'.
39. On enforcement see P. W. J. Bartrip, The Home Office and Dangerous Trades in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (London, 2002).
40. E. T. Hurren, 'A Pauper Dead-House: the expansion of Cambridge Anatomical Teaching School under the late-Victorian Poor Law, 1870-1914', Medical History, XLVIII (2004), 69-95.
41. A. Digby, 'The rural poor in the nineteenth century' in D. Fraser (ed.), The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1976), 149-70.
42. King, Poverty, op. cit., 269.
43. See T. Sokoll (ed.), Essex Pauper Letters, 1731-1837 (Oxford, 2001).
44. S. A. King, '"It is impossible for our Vestry to judge his case into perfection from here": managing the distance dimensions of poor relief 1800-1840', Rural History (forthcoming, 2005).
45. Sokoll, Essex, op. cit.
46. See contributions to A. Gestrich, S. A. King and L. Raphael (eds), The Experience of Being Poor in Modern Europe (Bern, 2005).
47. Strange, 'Only', op. cit., 150, notes that we know little about the nature of pauper funerals.
48. S. King and A. Tomkins (eds), The Poor in England, 1700-1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester, 2003).
49. Manchester Central Library (hereafter MCL), M10/808/15, 'Letter'. The Hulme collection consists of five large volumes. The individual letters and pages are not numbered.
50. On the overlapping record-keeping of different agencies see B. Peay, Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England 1800-1930 (Cambridge, 1996).
51. R. Woods and N. Shelton, An Atlas of Victorian Mortality (Liverpool, 1997).
52. A. Brundage, 'The landed interest and the new Poor Law: a reappraisal of the revolution in government', Economic History Review, LXXXVII (1972), 27-38, recounts the early history of the union.
53. T. Mckay (ed.), The Reminiscences of Albert Pell Sometime MP for South Leicestershire (London, 1908), 8-28 gives an overview of the history of the union in the mid-Victorian period.
54. National Archives (hereafter PRO), MH12/1198.
55. Hurren, 'The Pauper', op. cit.
56. Strange, 'She cried', op. cit., 144, 147, suggests that we should not use notions of decency when talking about pauper death and burial, but since this notion appears in numerous pauper narratives we use it here.
57. The Hudswell letters are distributed in all of the letter books, but the letters used here can be found in MCL, M10/815.
58. MCL, M10/812/8, 42, 48 and 96, 'Letters'.
59. MCL, M10/815, loose letter.
60. Contrast this with Strange, 'Only', op. cit., 16, who suggests that parish authorities were hostile to joint activities of this sort by the later nineteenth century.
61. MCL, M10/815, loose letter.
62. MCL, M10/809/16, 'Letter'.
63. MCL, M10/808/126, 'Bill'.
64. MCL, M10/810/46, 'Letter'.
65. MCL, M10/808/137, 'Invoice'.
66. MCL, M10/813, 'Funeral bills'. It is clear that Hulme coffins were not (as Richardson, Death, op. cit. 63 has found elsewhere) 'cheap and flimsy'. Nor were parish coffins 'cheap and ineffectual' as Strange 'Only', op. cit., 1, maintains.
67. It is clear that Hulme coffins were not (as Richardson, Death, op. cit. 63 has found elsewhere) 'cheap and flimsy'.
68. Nor were parish coffins 'cheap and ineffectual' as Strange 'Only', op. cit., 1, maintains.
69. MCL, M10/808/102, 'Bill'.
70. K. M. D. Snell, 'The culture of local xenophobia', Social History, XXVIII, 1 (January 2003), 1-30.
71. Strange, 'Only', op. cit., 161.
72. Both pre- and post-1834, officials were empowered to bury those without other support but they were not compelled to do so. W. C. Maude, The Poor Law Handbook (Lodon, 1903), 88.
73. S. A. King, 'The sick poor in Northamptonshire, 1790-1850' in S. A. King and R. M. Smith (eds), From Monastic Charity to Modern Welfare (forthcoming, 2006).
74. MCL, M10/810, loose letter
75. MCL, M10. This letter was apparently never pasted into any book.
76. For evidence of elaborate pauper funerals in early nineteenth-century Cumbia, see R. Trickett, Dorothy Wordsworth's Illustrated Lakeland Journals (London, 1991 edn), 47-50.
77. See K. Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty (Manchester, 1981), 102;
78. D. Thomson, 'I am not my father's keeper: families and the elderly in nineteenth-century England', Law and History Review, 11 (1984), 265-86;
79. M. Mackinnon, 'Poor Law policy, unemployment and pauperism', Explorations in Economic History, XXIII (1986), 229-336;
80. M. Mackinnon, 'English Poor Law policy and the crusade against outdoor relief, Journal of Economic History, XLVII (1987), 603-25.
81. E. T. Hurren, Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Poor Relief and Politics in late Victorian England (forthcoming, 2005).
82. Williams, Pauperism, op. cit., 102.
83. The Medical Relief (Disqualification Removal) Act, 1885 was passed to remove the stigma of Poor Law medical treatment. Central government conceded that it was unfair to penalize the poor by withholding their voting rights if they received welfare funding on medical grounds only outside the workhouse. Hurren, 'The Pauper', op. cit., 81.
84. These cases are not detailed in date order but in the sequence that they were discussed in official records.
85. PRO MH 12/7805, 19. 7.1887;
86. Northamptonshire Record Office (hereafter NRO), LG 21/07, Brixworth Rural and District Council Records, Brixworth Union letter book (1886-9), entry 19.7.1887.
87. Lancet, 7 September 1889, noted that there was a teaching hospital in anatomy located next to the Northampton Infirmary.
88. The case and subsequent inquiry was reported in local newspapers throughout July 1889; see Northampton Mercury and Northampton Herald.
89. PRO, MH12/8705, 19.9.1890, Wilson [MOH] to LGB and replies 2.10.1890 and 27.09.1891. The burial controversy was also investigated by BPP, The Royal Commission on the Aged Poor (1893/4), evidence of Sidney Ward, q.15696, who claimed these funeral controversies were common. He did not give a total figure but cited the most controversial - see q.15696, q.15698, q.15702; NRO, LG 21/07, entries 23.6.1887, 16.5.1888.
90. Ward, The Aged, q.15696.
91. Laying out proved to the local community that Samuel was entitled to be buried in consecrated ground because his death was 'natural'. Howlett, 'Burial customs', op. cit., 166-74, discusses the history of pauper funeral rites. The basic conventions were very similar to cases in the Brixworth Union. They included a woollen shroud, laying out a body, tolling a bell and a wake.
92. Ward, The Aged, q.15696.
93. Ward, The Aged, q.15695-15704.
94. ibid., q.15696-7.
95. Strange, 'She cried', op. cit., 144.
96. ibid., 144.
97. PRO, MH 12/7805, 16.5.1888; NRO, LG21/07, 16.5.1888; Ward, The Aged, q.15701.
98. NRO, LG21/07, entry 16.5.1888.
99. NRO, PL2/22,23, Brixworth Union guardian minute books, May-June 1888; NRO. LG 21/07, 16.5.1888.
100. See, for instance, letter pages of the Northampton Guardian, May 1888.
101. Northampton Guardian, 18 May 1888.
102. The chairman was given an opportunity to defend his actions in an appendix to the The Aged (1894). Although he gave details of a number of general out-relief cases, the withdrawal of pauper funeral provision was not defended. His silence speaks volumes about just how controversial his actions were.
103. Hurren, Protesting, op. cit.
104. Strange, 'Only', op. cit., 158.
105. Strange, 'She cried', op. cit., 145.
106. Under both the Old and the New Poor Law guidance books for officers, vestries and guardians stressed the enabling nature of legislation on pauper funerals and their aftermath. Both pre-and post-1834, however, local practice comprises a complex and fluid patchwork of experience requiring more local and regional studies.
107. Ackroyd, Blake, op. cit., 390.