The was not an Act of Parliament, but an act (with a small “a”) of the Berkshire Justices meeting at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland, just outside Newbury, on May 6^th, 1795. They considered first a proposal to fix minimum wages, as they were empowered to do under the Status of Artificers of 1563. Land-owning members of the gentry to a man, they promptly and unanimously rejected this idea. In its place they drew up a scale shoring the basic income required by a breadwinner to support his or her family in relation to the size of that family and the current price of bread. This ranged from 2s. a week for a single woman without children when the price of a gallon loaf (weight 8lbs. 11oz.) was 1s., to 25s. a week for a man with a wife and seven children to support when the same loaf cost 2s. If any breadwinner’s income from wages did not reach the appropriate figure in the scale – or if he/she had no income at all, through being unemployed – the breadwinner’s parish was ordered to make a payment out of the Poor Rate sufficient to cover the difference.

At first everyone considered this an admirable arrangement. The large-scale farmers who employed hired labour could continue to pay low wages with consciences assured that no-one would starve to death as a consequence. The landowners could charge high rents and the clergy could collect their tithes with the same reassuring thought. The labourers, naturally, rejoiced, because no matter what happened now, they would be certain to obtain enough each week to support their families.

Someone, of course, had to foot the bill – the parish ratepayers. This body included the large-scale farmers who, however, gained more from keeping wages down than they lost through having to pay extra on the Poor Rate. The small-scale farmers and the freehold yeomen, who did not employ labour, gained nothing, however; nor did the artisans, shopkeepers and others such as schoolmasters. In effect they were compelled to subsidise the large-scale farmers, who were usually the richest people in the parish after any local landed gentry. The latter, since they usually rented out most of their estates, paid relatively little under the Poor Rate. However, even the “net losers” at first approved the Speenhamland system because they saw in it the only way of averting a general revolt of the poor, a terrifying thought at any time but particularly so when, just across the Channel, France was in the throes of Revolution.