From Parish Relief to the Workhouse

For centuries the parish had tried to help struggling families within the community. As the earlier articles in this section show, support took many forms. Money, food, clothing and rent might be provided, children could be apprenticed to learn a trade, and families without a legal settlement might be removed to the parish responsible for supporting them.

In 1834 that system changed dramatically. The Poor Law Amendment Act, better known as the New Poor Law, aimed to reduce the cost of poor relief by making the workhouse the centre of the system. Relief was no longer intended to be given to able-bodied people in their own homes. Instead, those unable to support themselves were expected to enter a workhouse, where conditions were deliberately made less attractive than those outside. The intention was simple: only those with no other option would seek parish assistance.

The new arrangements took time to organise. The Lichfield Poor Law Union was not established until 21 December 1836, bringing together more than twenty parishes under an elected Board of Guardians. Armitage did not initially elect its own Guardian, although Thomas J. Birch was chosen in 1842. One of the Guardians’ first responsibilities was to build a new workhouse, which opened in May 1840.

A Christmas snapshot

One surviving parish document, dated 25 December 1841, provides a rare glimpse of how the new system affected people from Armitage. It records those parish residents who were then in the Lichfield Workhouse.

The most striking entry is Hannah Lunn, aged just twenty-eight. She had entered the workhouse only a fortnight before Christmas together with her four young children: Henry (6), Emma (4), Harriet (3) and John (2).

The parish registers reveal only fragments of the family’s earlier story. Henry had been baptised at Armitage in 1836 with only Hannah recorded as his parent. Three years later Harriet was baptised at Colwich as Hannah’s illegitimate daughter, the family’s address given simply as “Canal Side”. No father is named in either baptism, while no baptism has yet been found for Emma or John. Beyond their admission to the workhouse in December 1841, no further records of the family have yet been identified.

Also living in the workhouse were:

• Martha Waltho, aged 61
• Hannah Waltho, aged 38
• Mary Waltho, aged 9
• Mary Mathers, aged 21
• Charles Mathers, aged 1
• William Warren, aged 49

The appearance of members of the Waltho family is particularly striking. Earlier articles have shown how the parish had supported Richard Waltho’s family half a century earlier, paying for food, rent, clothing, funeral expenses and eventually apprenticing two of his children. Their presence in the workhouse records illustrates how the same village families could experience hardship across several generations, even though the way relief was provided had fundamentally changed.

The old system did not disappear overnight

The same document also records seventeen parish residents who were still receiving outdoor relief rather than living in the workhouse. Almost all are described simply as suffering from “infirmity”, including elderly members of well-known local families such as Alldritt, Greatorex, Lunn, Robinson, Waltho and Wood.

This shows that the New Poor Law was not introduced overnight in practice. Although Parliament intended the workhouse to replace outdoor relief, many elderly and infirm people continued to receive assistance in their own homes. The old parish system lingered on, particularly for those who were least able to look after themselves.

Life inside the workhouse

For those who did enter the workhouse, life was deliberately austere. New arrivals surrendered their own clothes and were issued with workhouse clothing. Families could be separated, daily life was tightly regulated and meals were plain and repetitive. The workhouse was not designed to be comfortable; it was intended to discourage all but the most desperate from seeking relief.

Despite this, for many people it became their only refuge.

Burial records from the Lichfield Union Workhouse show that, in later decades, a number of Armitage residents ended their lives there. The workhouse, originally intended as a deterrent, gradually became the final home for many elderly labourers and widows who could no longer support themselves.

The end of an era

The New Poor Law marked the end of a system that had shaped parish life for centuries. The Overseers of the Poor no longer decided whether to pay a family’s rent, apprentice an orphaned child or remove a newcomer to another parish. Those responsibilities increasingly passed to the Board of Guardians and the workhouse.