Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

the mid-nineteenth century. 6
Possible economic reasons behind its demographic
development are discussed later in this chapter.
For the large, populous parish of Inkberrow two sources give information about
the poor in the eighteenth century. Bradbrook emphasises that in Inkberrow ‘paupers
evidently increased rapidly in number about the commencement of the eighteenth
century, and some difficulty was found in dealing with them’. 7
Although a parish
workhouse was discussed in 1700, it was opposed in case it increased the rates. In 1711 a
large meeting reinforced measures to badge Inkberrow’s paupers with IP (for Inkberrow
Parish) or withhold their pay. From this year we find evidence of farmers being paid to
find work for parish paupers. The 1728 epidemic also ‘much increased pauperism and
the rates’. 8
Times were obviously hard for the poorest members of the community and
this caused problems for the rate-payers too. 9
Eden’s ‘State of the Poor’, published in 1797, contains a lengthy account of
labour and the poor in Inkberrow parish, furnished by the vicar, William Heath. 10
He
comments upon the recent rapid increase in population. ‘Many of the natives, however,
from deficiency of employment at home quit the parish, and return only when poverty
and infirmities of age oblige them to have recourse to their friends.’
From 1787 Inkberrow’s poor were relieved in a new parish workhouse, which had
proved cost-efficient, partly because, to avoid the workhouse, many poor ‘exert the
6 See Tables 3.8, 3.10 and 3.14 in Chapter 3.
7 Bradbrook, History of the Parish of Inkberrow and Local Government, p. 49.
8 Bradbrook, History of the Parish of Inkberrow and Local Government, p. 50.
9 WoRO, Inkberrow burials 1747 records the burial of Elizabeth Poole, whose abode was the workhouse, so
the earlier decision not to have a workhouse had obviously been overturned. R. Hunt and R. Jackson,
Inkberrow Folk and Farms, (Inkberrow, Jackson, 1978), p. 70, also states that the old workhouse is marked
on the Inkberrow enclosure award 1817.
10 Bradbrook, History of the Parish of Inkberrow and Local Government, pp. 6, 36. Bradbrook includes
some paragraphs which were omitted in the published State of the Poor.
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