The AI Journal

The instrument was a single sheet of parchment or paper, signed by the churchwardens and overseers of the poor of one parish, countersigned by a justice of the peace, and addressed to the parish where the bearer intended to work. It stated that the bearer was legally settled in the issuing parish and that, should he or she fall into need, that parish would accept them back and bear the cost of relief. Between 1697 and the reforms of 1834, hundreds of thousands of these documents passed through the hands of English agricultural labourers. The standard account, running from the Webbs through much of the twentieth-century literature, treats them as instruments of restraint: evidence that the Old Poor Law pinned labourers to their home parishes and strangled the mobility that a growing economy required. The argument I want to press is narrower and, I think, more surprising. In the arable counties, the certificate did not primarily restrain movement. It structured it, and in structuring it gave the certified labourer a small but real form of leverage that the uncertified stranger never possessed.

The 1662 Act of Settlement, 14 Charles II, c. 12, gave parish authorities the right to remove any newcomer likely to become chargeable within forty days of arrival. The effect, in practice, was to make any movement across a parish boundary a gamble. A labourer who walked into a new parish for the harvest had no legal claim to relief there; if he fell ill, was injured, or simply ran out of work, the receiving parish could ship him back at the first sign of need, and the home parish could refuse to receive him on the grounds that he had not been formally removed. The 1697 Act introduced the certificate as a remedy for this impasse. A certified labourer carried documentary proof that his home parish accepted fiscal responsibility for him. The receiving parish no longer bore the risk. The labourer could move without forfeiting his safety net.

Keith Snell’s Annals of the Labouring Poor remains the most sustained account of how settlement law bore on the lives of the rural poor, and Snell documents extensively the ways in which parish officers used the machinery of removal and settlement to discipline and control. But Snell’s evidence also shows something that sits uneasily with the pure-immobility reading: the certificate system was most heavily used in precisely those counties and seasons where labour demand was sharpest and most concentrated. In the harvest fields of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and the Lincolnshire Wolds, parishes needed extra hands for six to eight weeks in August and September, and they needed them from outside their own boundaries, because no single parish’s settled population was large enough to bring in its own crop. The certificate was the instrument that made this possible. Without it, the receiving parish would have refused the incomer; with it, the incomer became economically welcome and fiscally safe.

Peter Solar argued in 1995 that the Old Poor Law as a whole facilitated rather than obstructed English economic development, by providing a form of social insurance that made workers more willing to accept the risks of wage employment. The certificate system is a specific instance of this general mechanism, and I want to push the point further than Solar does. The certificate did not merely insure the labourer against destitution. It made the insurance legible to both parties. The receiving parish knew exactly what it was getting: a worker whose fallback cost was borne elsewhere. The labourer knew exactly what he was giving up: nothing, provided he returned. This bilateral legibility changed the terms of the harvest wage negotiation. A certified labourer arriving in a parish short of hands could refuse a low offer, because he could walk home without penalty. An uncertified stranger in the same position could not, because refusal meant vagrancy, and vagrancy meant the pass system and the house of correction. Ann Kussmaul’s work on servants in husbandry documents the annual hiring fairs at which much agricultural employment was negotiated, and the evidence she assembles is consistent with a world in which the settled labourer, carrying a certificate, had options that the genuinely rootless did not.

George Boyer’s economic history of the Poor Law after 1750 emphasises the ways in which outdoor relief to able-bodied labourers depressed wages in the arable south. This is right, and it complicates the argument in one respect: if the parish was topping up wages from the poor rate, the labourer’s bargaining position was not as clean as the certificate alone would suggest. But Boyer’s evidence also shows that the topping-up system was most extensive in precisely the parishes with the largest settled populations and the heaviest reliance on seasonal incomers. The certificate system and the Speenhamland-style allowances operated together, not in opposition. The certificate brought the labour in; the allowance kept him alive through the winter. Neither instrument, taken alone, explains the labour market of the arable counties.

The strongest objection to the argument I have been making is straightforward, and it is the one Snell presses most forcefully. The certificate was issued at the discretion of the parish officers, and in many parishes that discretion was exercised to withhold rather than to grant. A labourer who wished to move but whose home parish refused a certificate was, in effect, imprisoned. The administrative burden of obtaining one — the fees, the journey to the justice, the negotiation with sometimes hostile overseers — was itself a form of restriction. To say that the certificate facilitated movement is to describe the experience of those who received one and to pass over in silence those who did not. This objection has force, and I do not wish to dismiss it. But it can be narrowed without being conceded. The withholding of certificates was most common in parishes with surplus labour and few employment opportunities, where the officers’ interest was to export paupers rather than to licence their movement. In the arable counties during the harvest season, the economic logic ran the other way: the home parish had an interest in licensing its surplus labour to go and earn wages elsewhere, because a labourer earning a harvest wage in another parish was a labourer not drawing on the home parish’s poor rate. The certificate was, in this context, cheaper than the dole.

What the certificate system did, then, was not to free or to bind labour in the aggregate. It sorted it. It created a two-tier system in which the settled, certified worker moved within a structured framework of reciprocal parish obligations and the unsettled, uncertified worker moved, if at all, under the constant threat of removal and punishment. The first tier was not freedom, but it was a form of documented entitlement that the second tier lacked, and in the specific context of the arable harvest it shifted a small increment of bargaining power toward the labourer. The Old Poor Law was many things, and much of what it did was cruel and restrictive. But the certificate, read as an economic instrument rather than as a symbol of parochial control, was a mechanism for making movement safer, and making movement safer, in a world without a labour market in any modern sense, was a form of power.