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The Poet and The Paupers
XII.075

The undersigned will forfeit twenty pounds each if they become chargeable to the Parish of Chiddingly within the next five years.

All the adult emigrants signed this with a cross. Robert Reeve, John Weston and George Guy signed for the parish.

If this subsidized emigration was, in fact, the offer the Earl of Chichester had made to Chiddingly, then it cost him all told £116. 16s. 0d.; but even had the Earl not helped Chiddingly in this way, the Vestry might still have aided the emigrants, because the experience in Rye, for instance, was that the outlay involved in assisting such emigration was recouped from savings on the Poor Rate within two years. If the four male adult emigrants from Chiddingly had been paid for two years’ work at the rates laid down in the Vestry’s resolution of November 20th, 1830, then they would have received £216 between them. If, however, £116 represented a two years’ savings on the Poor Rate, then it is clear that the operative scales of Poor Law Relief were markedly less than the wage rates, assuming, that is, that the men had had nothing deducted for what they might have earned in temporary employment. (All employment of labourers was casual; they could be laid off at a moments notice.)

The subsidized emigration relieved Chiddingly of four pauperised bread winners, but it still had numerous others. At its Vestry meeting on May 7th, 1832, twenty-six different applications for Relief were made to it and during the next twelve months another two hundred and twenty. All these came from people who, at the time of applying, were not already in receipt of Relief – or at least of what they considered was adequate Relief – or in the parish’s employment on the roads or elsewhere or in the Poor House. The figures, considered in relation to the size of the parish which in 1831 had a population of nine hundred and two persons, give an indication of the extent of poverty prevailing in Chiddingly.

In February 1833 the Vestry authorised the Reverend Langdale to approach J. Fuller Esquire to ask if he would finance improvements considered necessary to the chancel of the parish church in order to provide better accommodation for children, the estimated cost of which would be £4. 15s. J. Fuller Esquire was the Lay Impropriator, who received from Chiddingly’s tithes around £550 a year and who might have been expected, therefore, to have had a concern for “the moral and religious improvement of the poor” (to quote the words of the November 1830 resolution.) The Chiddingly Vestry, however, was not certain that this was so, for it added to its resolution the words: “If refused, the Parish to pay.” At its meeting a month later it authorised a contract with Richard Soper, who was now the Poor House Governor, by which Soper would take all the poor sent to him for the next three months at 3s. 3d. per week. This works out to £8. 4s. 6d. as the cost of boarding a pauper for one year, from which has to be deducted the profit which Richard Soper would expect to make on the arrangement.


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